When news of its demise reached the men who will enforce it, nobody mourned. The ol’ fake-to-third, throw-to-first pickoff move, a pitcher’s trick that fooled only the most gullible base runners, will now be a balk.
“It’s funny,” umpire Ted Barrett said. “When they presented it to us at our meetings, nobody even said, ‘Why?”’
Under a rule change imposed by Major League Baseball for this season, pitchers can no longer fake a pickoff throw to third base. Pitchers who did this would almost always follow by wheeling and firing to first – or to second, if a duped runner had taken off in that direction. No more.
The play is now part of baseball’s graveyard, like the bullpen cart, the Montreal Expos, pullover jerseys and World Series games in the sunshine. It simply did not work often enough to be worth the wasted time.
“The managers say it’s all about speeding up the game,” said former reliever Jeff Nelson, now a contributor to MLB.com. “I think now, the runner at first might get a little bit of an advantage. All it’s used for is to keep the runner at first close. I might have done it 100 times and gotten two guys on it.”
Nelson explained that he often made the move as a kind of reset, if he was not comfortable with the pitch the catcher had called, or with his grip on the ball. He tended to try it with a full count, when the runner might be itching to go. It worked once in Baltimore against the Orioles’ Manny Alexander, when Nelson was pitching for the Yankees.
Joe Torre was the Yankees’ manager then. Now an executive vice president in the commissioner’s office, he said there was widespread support to change the rule.
“A large majority of the managers, I mean really a good amount, wanted to eliminate it,” Torre said. “So we presented it.
“To me, it’s been inconsistent because sometimes it’s called a balk and sometimes it isn’t. Obviously, it gets a little disjointed that way. Just my experience, added to what they want, I made a case for it. The feeling was, you’re deceiving the runner or the hitter.”
When baseball proposed the rule change to the players association last year, the union rejected it. Baseball then used its power under the labor agreement to enact the change unilaterally after approving it at the owners’ meetings this month.
“It’s not a huge deal, but our guys would prefer it not be eliminated,” said Michael Weiner, executive director of the union, adding that he was surprised the players resisted.
http://www.thestar.com/sports/baseball/ ... ule-change
