Astros pitcher Lance McCullers rips new pace of play rules
Houston Astros pitcher Lance McCullers doesn't hold back on Twitter, whether it's posting Vince Carter GIFs about trades or burning a Dodgers counterpart.
This time, with Major League Baseball and the Players' Association agreeing to limit the number of mound visits per game, he aimed some ire at ESPN, which was apparently showing World Series Game 7 highlights and noting the amount of visits to the mound (the tweet has since been deleted):
Then, in another since-deleted tweet, McCullers made a point about these new rules and what they were combating:
The shot at ESPN aside, there's a larger point here: Sign-stealing is a problem for pitchers and catchers, and those secretive mound visits made a huge difference in switching up signs.
There are so many questions, now - if there's a runner at second who can see the signs thrown down by the catcher and a team is out of mound visits, will those teams have extra signs in place to express how pitching signs will now changing? Will they have to prepare more before games for a variety of scenarios? Did they already have all that in place to begin with and catchers were just making sure everyone was on the same page with no limit on mound visits?
Baseball knows it has a pace of play problem that might make the game less appealing to younger fans, and the solutions unfortunately might alter what pitchers like McCullers are used to.
The conclusion? There's no good answer to make everyone happy. Pitchers and catchers will have to find a way to communicate without a stop at the rubber unless it's absolutely necessary, and MLB hopes speedier games - although we can debate how many more minutes we're really getting here - draws more of an audience.
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