Category: Sports

I fulfilled an adult dream of getting season tickets to the San Francisco Giants in 2021. I became familiar with this new team and their players, and something about Donovan Solano—Donnie Barrels to his friends—rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t know if it was how he carried himself at second base, or his inconsistent hitting on a team that won 107 games, but I was pretty down on him all year.

After spending 2022 with the Cincinnati Reds, he signed with the Twins in February this year. I wasn’t bullish on this acquisition, but with the season nearing its end I’m all in on Donnie. He’s playing a good-enough first base and seems like he’s always the one with clutch hits. However, I didn’t want to rely on the eye test. I have the tools to determine whether my baseball opinions are correct.

I went to the 2023 OTB Open this weekend, and had a blast. However, it’s late on a Sunday and I don’t have the time or energy to dive into that right now. Instead, I encourage you to go read the Top 10 Storylines series from “Owl P. Jackson, Esq.” at Ultiworld. They’re a quick, humorous, and insightful set of recaps for each stop on the Disc Golf Pro Tour. It’s probably the best way into the sport of professional disc golf.

Last year, I wrote a long post on scorekeeping in baseball. An hour before I headed to my first MLB game of 2023 with my scorebook in hand, I realized there was a new element to track: pitch clock violations that end a plate appearance. If a batter takes too long, they are assessed a strike. If a pitcher takes too long, the count gets an additional ball. It’s totally possible that a pitch clock violation would result in either third strike, or fourth ball, of a count and directly cause a strikeout or walk without a final pitch being thrown.

That’s such an odd scenario that I want a way to denote it. I did a little research and found this excellent article with quotes from various official MLB scorekeepers. It’ll take time to decide on a standard, but I opted for circling either the K or BB on my scorecard to mean that the result was due to a final pitch clock violation.

By sheer dumb luck, this happened on my second game of the season. In the image below, you can see two consecutive walks. The first was standard, the second had the 4th ball occur on a pitcher’s clock violation.

It’s interesting to have new wrinkles to deal with. Last year it was the Manfred runner for me. We’ll see what comes next.

Each time I sit down to establish my feelings about the new MLB rules going into the 2023 season, I flounder. I have a hard time separating the baseball I know and love from the inevitable future version it must become if it’s to survive and hopefully thrive. I can only imagine what the players faced with learning these new rules must feel, because some of the changes are rather drastic.

Consider this post a snapshot of my mind right now. It’s not clean or concise, and my feelings will change once I get a few games under my belt this year and see the practical ways these rules affect gameplay. But here’s where my heart and my head lie for now.