Here’s a quick look at the rule changes that MLB and the Players Association have agreed to for this season and 2020, pending (expected) approval from the 30 clubs.
Starting in the 2019 Season:
A HARD July 31 trade deadline. No trades will be permitted after this date. Teams can still waive players, but trade waivers will be eliminated.
A reduction from six mound visits to five per game.
An All-Star “election day,” to complement the existing round of All-Star voting: the three leaders in each category, at the end of the traditional voting period, will have a one-day runoff during which fans can choose their favorite of those still in the race.
A $1 MILLION pot for the HR Derby winner to “attract” the most talented players to participate. Another $1.5 million will be divided amongst the runners-up.
If the ASG goes past nine innings, all extra innings will start with a runner on second.
Shortened breaks, and less commercials. Breaks during innings (ie, while a team changes pitchers) will be dropped down to 2 minutes (down from 2:05 in local broadcasts and 2:20 in national ones).
Less fun. Position players will not be allowed to take the mound unless a game is in extra innings or a team has an 8+ run lead.
The DL is being remained the “injured list.”
No official word, but it appears that the pitch clock experiment was a failure and will not be implemented. Update: this is official!
Starting in 2020:
A three-batter minimum for all pitchers.
The roster will expand from 25 players to 26, with a 13 pitcher maximum.
The 40-man roster will be eliminated. Every team will be mandated to add two players in September, bringing the fall roster size to 28, with a 14 pitcher maximum.
Minimum time on the injured list will be raised back up to 15 games from 10.
Possible, Unconfirmed Changes for 2020 and beyond:
A further reduction to mound visits, with only four permitted per game.
A renegotiation and extension of the current collective bargaining agreement beyond 2021, hopefully averting a strike.
Dramatic changes to back-end policies, including attempts to energize the free agent market and actions to prevent teams from manipulating service time delays by holding back top prospects.
Though not exhaustive, this list should give you an idea of the biggest changes to expect this season and beyond! If it helped clarify the news for you, give it a boost to help others understand, too.
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Anthony Rendon was ejected from Saturday’s game for … not contesting the strike zone. He flipped his bat down, faced away from the umpire, and did not visibly open his mouth. He was tossed by Marty Foster, for, what crew chief Joe West described incorrectly as ‘throwing equipment.’
Book Review of Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, by Martha Ackmann
Happy National Girls and Women in Sports Day! In addition to that, we're midway through the first week of Black History Month! These two things together make today a perfect day for a review of a book I read recently, which I would wholeheartedly recommend to you all. Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League, by Martha Ackmann, is an excellent biography of Toni Stone and a fascinating view into the history of Negro League baseball in the mid-1940s through 1950s.
The book starts in Ms. Stone's young childhood and follows her closely through her retirement from baseball in 1954. It also describes some details of her later life. However, the main focus of the book is on her playing career, both amateur and professional. The overarching theme throughout is Ms. Stone's love for the game. From her childhood playing on a church team, to her semi-pro years with the St. Paul Giants, to her experiences on Negro League teams including the San Francisco Sea Lions, the Indianapolis Clowns, and the Kansas City Monarchs, Ms. Stone endured constant discouragement and mistreatment as a Black woman who wanted to play baseball. But she never gave up on the game she loved. Even after her retirement, the book describes her coaching and playing with amateur teams in local parks near her home.
In spite of her passion and talent for baseball, Ms. Stone had to fight for playing time and fair compensation every step of her career. One of the most poignant details of the book was the disconnect between the way the teams advertised her, and her actual experiences. The owners told local newspapers that they were paying her thousands of dollars to play, when in reality she was getting a fraction of what they reported. They also billed her as a star of the diamond, when the way they treated her as an employee did not reflect any kind of star status. It was often difficult for the men on the Negro League teams to find road accommodations given the status of segregation; for Ms. Stone, it was even harder, since the male players often found places to sleep that would accept Black men but not a woman. Eventually Ms. Stone discovered that she could find lodging in brothels in the cities her team traveled to, making friends with the women working there and becoming able to depend on their hospitality. Having to scrounge for a place to sleep may be sadly typical at times for some of today's underpaid minor leaguers, but it would be unheard of today for an MLB player receiving top billing and bringing in big crowds to have to deal with these types of living conditions.
The uncertainty and instability she faced on the road, as well as within the organizations that employed her, cannot have been easy for Ms. Stone to bear. But even at the end of her career, as the integration of the MLB threatened the future of the Negro Leagues, and as the introduction of other female players such as Mamie "Peanut" Johnson and Connie Morgan threatened Ms. Stone's place on her own team (due to the owners' view of female players mainly as gimmicks to bring in audiences, rather than individual players with value), Ms. Stone always pushed for fair opportunities to play as she deserved. When she ultimately retired in 1954, it had more to do with the lack of playing time her manager was giving her than with any desire to quit the game of baseball.
The text is clearly non-fiction/history rather than novelization, which I preferred for this type of topic. In particular, when white women write about Black women, a novelization style provides far too much leeway to veer into sensationalization and/or exploitation (see: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks). Martha Ackmann is an excellent journalist-historian known for her earlier book on a group of female astronauts, The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight. But Ackmann, though she is white, depicts Ms. Stone and the figures in her life with consistent respect, without falling into stereotypes or tropes about African-Americans. The author/narrator's voice is minimal to nonexistent throughout, rightly allowing the facts about Ms. Stone's life to speak for themselves.
One adaptation of Ackmann's book is already in the works, a play by Lydia R. Diamond, an award-winning Black playwright and professor known for previous works including The Bluest Eye and Smart People. The Ackmann biography is a fascinating read on its own, but it is even more encouraging to know that it is providing others with source material to create different types of media based on Toni Stone's story, and to ensure that Ms. Stone's commitment to the game of baseball against all odds is not forgotten.
You can find Curveball on Amazon here, or at your favorite independent bookstore or local library!
Read it? Have an opinion? Email us at [email protected] or @restinpitchface on Twitter to share your thoughts!
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Resting Pitchface is back and on brand. This time around? Sociolinguistic discussions, can MLB change its traditionalist spots for a player like Ohtani Shohei, and is the final form of all baseball players Adam Dunn. There's player pants, sleeveless jerseys, and junk balaclava here. PSA: don't vomit in dorm rooms.
Episode 27: #thirststove
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A rare RPFP extra about the lack of women’s jerseys for Players’ Weekend
I’m sitting on my couch watching the first Nats game of Players’ Weekend. Anthony Rendon has his hair, which is similar in texture to mine, combed out, and he’s wearing two different color high socks. I am delighted. The fact that we’re losing 1-0 at the moment of this writing to the (LOL) Mets is less delightful, but that’s baseball, and if it weren’t an emotional sine wave between the peak of delight and the trough of disappointment … well, it’d be a different sport altogether.
Players’ Weekend is fun, the kind of officially endorsed fun rarely seen in a sport that seems to sometimes have a fun deficiency. Bright colors and goofy nicknames, all meant to harken back to Little League games. Players get paid millions to play a kids’ game, as they’re fond of saying, and it’s nice that the sport, for once, seems to agree.
But the weekend is meant to evoke a very specific type of memory for a fairly specific type of kid - and adult. Namely, male ones. I get MLBShop emails to about three different email addresses, so I was pretty excited to open this one to buy a player’s jersey.
The thing is: I have a lot of merch. I have, conservatively, a shirsey problem. I use shirseys the way that geologists use stratigraphic layers, a means of reconstructing Nats’ history done in red and blue layers on top of my dresser. (Excepting the framed signed-by-Drew-Storen Tyler Clippard shirsey that’s hanging, no joke, next to my wedding picture.) With few exceptions, these shirseys are Youth cuts, because my desire to spend my money outpaces the Nats slim-but-growing assortment of shirts in a Women’s cut. It’s fine. Ish.
But I was legitimately waiting to buy a player’s Player’s Weekend jersey. I had visions of Koda Glover’s ‘Bear’ jersey, or Michael A. Taylor’s ‘Mikey T’ jersey, or any of a dozen possible jersey options. I assumed there would be some fraction of the men’s offerings, but at the very least I could get a Rendon jersey because, like Trea, Anthony Is My Favorite Player.
But there weren’t any in Women’s. None. Zero. Which the MLB promised to have by the time the jerseys rolled out.
As problems go, the MLB’s tenuous relationship with offering women’s merch is about the level of realizing you have dental floss stuck between your back teeth during a job interview. Not the end of the world, but pretty freaking annoying and, once you realize it’s there, you can’t un-realize it.
For the Nationals, there are only two women’s shirseys - Harper and Scherzer - but two kids’ jerseys (Harper, who is, fittingly, ‘Big Kid;’ and Trea, who sources tell me can legally drink), as well as a kid’s Scherzer T-shirt.
Women get told that we’re not a market, that merch beyond a limited selection won’t sell … and yet we’re not marketed to. We have to get our jerseys customed because we can’t get jerseys with our favorite players on them that fit. I have a women’s blue patriotic series Rendon jersey that was obtained through mumble mumble mumble, because it is literally not a thing I could get otherwise.
And yeah, the fact that there are zero women’s offerings for either Rendon (who has the third best WAR in baseball among position players, because I do go to Fangraphs, bro), or Gio, who’s in the Cy Young conversation, is basically the Nats saying they don’t want my money. Also, it’s not like they’re unmarketable players, or terrible face-wise. Surely, let us have the pleasure of a women’s jersey that says ‘Ant’ on the back because, as I drunkenly shouted at the Ant-Man movie: The useful ants are female.
Moreover, there are only white players as options for women’s T-shirts and kids’ jerseys. Trea’s been out with his wrist for a while, but he and Michael A. haven’t put up dissimilar numbers this season. Trea’s hitting .279 with a 91 OPS+, and Mikey is at .263 with a 97 OPS+. They both tend to make spectacular, gif-worthy plays; they’re both young, likeable guys who the team should be invested in marketing. But one has a shirt and one doesn’t. This is a team in DC that decided that only adult men can buy a non-white players’ merch. Considering their fanbase, that is, at the very least, a gross marketing oversight.
We had the opportunity to talk with members of the DC Force, which is the DC girls’ baseball team, on the last podcast: These are girls who love the game, who should be the future of the game, who should get to rep their favorite players just as much as their male counterparts. But all the nostalgia that Players’ weekend is meant to evoke is not for them - or for me, it seems.
MLB is clearly trying to grow the game among young women. It has to: The fanbase is old and getting older. The League hyped the Trailblazer series. It worked with Pitch (even if the show itself erred on the side of explaining the Show to Ginny, who would, you know, understand the trade deadline). They want young women’s eyes on the game - and the dollars that accompany those eyes. So give us something to spend it on.
Also read at: https://www.restingpitchface.com/podcast/2017/8/25/to-the-mlb-on-the-event-of-this-players-weekend
We finally have a topical reason to talk baseball nicknames! Dubiously topical? Cat jerseys may not be customizable, our outfield is a cornucopia of ups despite our current MASH unit status, and Scotchguarding bases is an... interesting concept. Resting Pitchface is joined this episode with
Check out our most recent episode & more on our new website!
Just how many players are Dorian Gray-ing their way through MLB? Who are all these new Nationals? Did Bryce Harper make a pact with a sea witch? "Answers" to these questions in the latest episode of Resting Pitchface, as well as what's up with the Cardinal's Christian Night, is there
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Anthony Rendon has a BFF! And they both have the shirts to prove it! Also, the Nats have a Trea Turner cloning factory or at least are starting an impressive collection. Joe Ross keeps trying to do it all, Resting Pitchface has a family, Darren Baker may be a basket full of kittens, and Bianca the dog has a Saga in this episode, featuring special guest host Jenn Rubenstein! We did try not to discuss the bullpen but they keep coming up. At the moment our bullpen is the worst penny. Episode 19 - Trea Turner Clone Factory **In this episode we discuss Child Sexual Assault. If you would like to skip this section, it comes up with warning around minute 42 and ends around minute 50. **
Guess what guys! It’s Resting Pitchface’s official one year show-nniversary today!!
It’s been 1 year of nicknames, ASG ideas, Max <3_<3, high socks appreciation, stats nerdery, topical issues, bullpen tears, spleen venting, and of course, #swearjar, #defensesquad, #dontgoogle, & #zachdukeupdate...
Come celebrate with us, here or on our twitter! And be sure to keep an eye on said twitter for details about our upcoming anniversary giveaway!!
the most recent episode reminded me of the time i cast all the nats players as characters from gilmore girls at 3am a few years back. just thought y'all should know that post is floating around on tumblr somewhere
This is definitely relevant to our interests... 😂😂😂 We still have to do that Harry Potter house segment we promised ages ago! Remind us, would you? 😜
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Intergalactic baseball is sadly still not a thing, sigh. But we here at Resting Pitchface can still find ways to bring space into Earth-based baseball, especially when the NL East is a collection of black holes stacked on top of each other; Organic Farmer Jayson Werth may revive farming at the first Jedi temple; and Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Koda Glover are lighting it up with some out of this world Ks. Oh, and the concept of the Closer should definitely be shot into space!
It's been a year of us talking about relievers, things you shouldn't google, and, apparently, space. Listen in and help us celebrate our show-ni-versary!
There's so much positive to talk about! De Nile is just a river near the Potomac! The Ryanaissance is real (and we all can spell it), Jayson Werth is himself but stronger, and Max Scherzer continues to exemplify our starting pitching. Couple that with some strong feelings about playing through injury and some Things Observed at Fenway and you've got yourselves the making of a #classic Resting Pitchface episode.
Let's just not look at that bullpen behind the curtain.....
