Baseball from the Dead Sea – BallNine

It used to be that if you allowed a hit, you got a penalty. That’s not the case anymore. All you have to do is look at the strikeout total and batting average.

There’s also the “giving up” of pitchers and catchers on baserunners. So often now there’s no throw to second or third base on the DoorDash stolen base. And if there are runners on first and third base, forget it, the runner on first base can dance to second base.

“I had an eight-game streak and in the eight games, no runner was thrown out,” the scout said in disbelief, noting that the catchers didn’t have the arm strength to get the ball to second base. No extra work was done between games to fix the problem.

“Oh, for the series, I couldn’t believe it,” said the scout.

Believe it.

The risk-averse POBOs don’t want their catchers to throw, and their nodding lackeys go along with the nonsense. Another scout who was at a recent minor league game gave me this firsthand account.

“1st and 3 in minor league games, they just let the guy steal 2nd. Happens all the time now. My son’s 9U team has 3 plays for this scenario. And they execute them.”

Not in professional sports anymore. It’s simply PitchCom or bust. Steal at will.

Tell me how that makes sense.

But that’s exactly what’s happening in Dead Sea Baseball, and I could have predicted it many years ago.

They don’t know anything about baseball and don’t want to learn.

I caught another scout on a bad day. “I just saw a hitter batting .180 walk a borderline 3-2 pitch – and he throws the bat like he’s saying, ‘Challenge me,'” the scout said in disbelief.

“I’ve seen four different situations, two outs, runners on base, fly balls hit and the runners didn’t run. Two outs. It happened twice on both teams. The players don’t even know how many outs there are, even though the base coach says, ‘Hey, two outs, you move on everything.’ They don’t listen. They don’t go back to the bases. The outfielders can’t throw. It’s a joke.”

And nobody says anything.