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Giants in the Super Bowl
From now on, when pitchers fake a throw to third only to throw to first, it's a balk.
When news of its demise reached the men who will enforce it, nobody mourned. The ol’ fake-to-third, throw-to-first pickoff move, a pitcher’s trick that fooled only the most gullible base runners, will now be a balk.
“It’s funny,” the umpire Ted Barrett said. “When they presented it to us at our meetings, nobody even said, ‘Why?’ ”
Under a rule change imposed by Major League Baseball for this season, pitchers can no longer fake a pickoff throw to third base. Pitchers who did this would almost always follow by wheeling and firing to first — or to second, if a duped runner had taken off in that direction. No more.
The play is now part of baseball’s graveyard, like the bullpen cart, the Montreal Expos, pullover jerseys and World Series games in the sunshine. It simply did not work often enough to be worth the wasted time.
“The managers say it’s all about speeding up the game,” said the former reliever Jeff Nelson, now a contributor to MLB.com. “I think now, the runner at first might get a little bit of an advantage. All it’s used for is to keep the runner at first close. I might have done it 100 times and gotten two guys on it.”
Nelson explained that he often made the move as a kind of reset, if he was not comfortable with the pitch the catcher had called, or with his grip on the ball. He tended to try it with a full count, when the runner might be itching to go. It worked once in Baltimore against the Orioles’ Manny Alexander, when Nelson was pitching for the Yankees.
Joe Torre was the Yankees’ manager then. Now an executive vice president in the commissioner’s office, he said there was widespread support to change the rule.
“A large majority of the managers, I mean really a good amount, wanted to eliminate it,” Torre said. “So we presented it.
“To me, it’s been inconsistent because sometimes it’s called a balk and sometimes it isn’t. Obviously, it gets a little disjointed that way. Just my experience, added to what they want, I made a case for it. The feeling was, you’re deceiving the runner or the hitter.”
When baseball proposed the rule change to the players association last year, the union rejected it. Baseball then used its power under the labor agreement to enact the change unilaterally after approving it at the owners’ meetings this month.
“It’s not a huge deal, but our guys would prefer it not be eliminated,” said Michael Weiner, the executive director of the union, adding that he was surprised the players resisted.
“Some guys said: ‘Look, it’s part of the game. Does it work a lot? No. Does it work sometimes? Yes.’ There are more traditionalists among the players than a lot of people assume. In their view, they said, ‘What’s the point in getting rid of it?’ ”
Barrett, a major league umpire since 1994, said he could remember the move working only once in a major league game. Barrett said the runner, whom he could not recall, turned to him after he was caught and said, sheepishly, “Have you ever seen that work on anybody — except me?”
The success rate is usually highest in spring training, Barrett said, when minor leaguers fill out rosters and can get too aggressive on the bases. But on at least one recent occasion, a game actually ended with the play.
On Aug. 9, 2011, the Angels led, 6-4, with two Yankee runners at the corners and two outs in the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium. Mark Teixeira, then the Yankees’ leading home run hitter, stood at the plate. A homer would win the game, but Jordan Walden, the Angels’ closer, had another idea.
Walden wanted desperately to keep Curtis Granderson tethered to first base and out of scoring position, since he was the tying run. After Walden faked to third a couple of times, Angels first baseman Mark Trumbo yelled, “No! No! No!” — meaning that Granderson was not attempting a steal.
Granderson, however, assumed Trumbo was telling Walden to stop bluffing and deliver the pitch. So when Walden lifted his leg, Granderson took off for second. As it turned out, though, Walden was merely making believe again. He faked to third, looked to first, saw Trumbo pointing to second and threw there for the game-ending out.
After the game, somebody mentioned to Walden that the play he had executed almost never worked. But Walden knew better.
“That’s what everybody thinks,” he said, smiling.
The new rule does not prohibit pitchers from faking a throw to second if a runner is there. And, of course, pitchers can still do whatever they please if they step off the back of the rubber. But the fake-to-third move was always perfectly legal until now, no matter what people believed.
“I’d watch ‘Sunday Night Baseball,’ and Joe Morgan would say, ‘That should be a balk; he’s deceiving the runner,’ ” Barrett said. “But there’s nothing in the rule book that says a balk is deceiving the runner. There are 13 ways to balk — either the pitcher did one of those 13 things or he didn’t.”
Now there is another way to balk, and Nelson, for one, is chagrined that the fans who grumbled about his move will finally be right.
“You’d always hear it from the crowd, yelling, ‘Balk! Balk! Balk!,’” Nelson said. “I guess the league’s now playing into it.”
