A lot of people think it would be easy to hit position players' pitches. But when you're up there and you're used to 90-100 mph pitches, and suddenly you're facing a guy throwing 60-80 mph, it can be a very difficult adjustment.
It’s not that they’re necessarily hard to “hit”. Seeing and hitting 80 is much easier than seeing and hitting a 99 MPH breaking 2-Seam. The problem is that when they hit it, they can’t do much with it. I could go on for hours about why that is (wooden bats, exit velocities, etc) The REAL reason why they do this is simply to save the Bullpen. They either didn’t have any pitchers OR they have a much more important game coming up and they wanted to save their arms for that. They can just throw a position player out there, who can essentially just force them to fly/ground out and not be subjected to Pitchers Rest (they are subjected, but since he won’t pitch again probably ever, it doesn’t matter).
@@jpsned Another big thing with position players pitching is accuracy. Pitchers spend insane hours on the mound just to work on getting their pitches to fly exactly where they want them to. Position players on the mound are going to be throwing all around the strike zone without trying.
That one where Andrew Romine pitched, that was the game where he became the 5th player to play all 9 positions within a single game. That was a fun game to watch.
@@calebeurich9896 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-mJU5ptLOotI.html There's other videos of him throwing further but this is a showcase of his warmups. During them, he will do long toss and usually it ends with him throwing all the way from the left fowl pole to the right fowl pole.
It’s now more likely that we will see this in a postseason game than a regular season game. It would be pretty hard for a team to run out of pitchers now with the runner on second starting the tenth inning, it’s going to be pretty rare for a team to hav to throw more than 12 innings. With the three batter minimum we won’t see as any pitchers coming in to face one batter. All of these games went14-18 innings
I was at that Indians vs Blue Jays game where Barney and Goins pitched. Probably the most boring game in my life XD. Sadly the Jays lost and I’m a Jays fan.
I'm quite knew to baseball so I'm just wondering. Is this a tactical choice or forced by a lack of available pitchers (due to injuries, length of the game ect.)
There are usually only two reasons a team would do this: either the game's very deep into extra innings and they've used up their set of "normal" pitchers for the game, OR the team in question is down by so many runs that it's not worth using a "normal" pitcher.
This just proves what I have always believed. What we often call good pitching is really good defense, and it is often harmful to a ballclub to forgo defense in lieu of offense.
I feel starting pitchers are overrated They need to limit the number of pitches per player or per innings The game should shift towards high scoring batting game
I am going to go out on a limb that at least 99 out of 100 games with position players pitching are "close" games. Due to them being marathon games that use up the entire bullpen.
The last one - Brent Mayne did get the win. I actually emailed Brent about adding a chapter to his Website and he answered me. I still have the email and that was from over 10 years ago.