In 2021, Spring Training rules allowed pitchers to re-enter and innings to be terminated early when pitch counts got too high. The former rule remained for 2022 (and was utilized by Texas as Kohei Arihara was relieved in the third but returned to pitch the fourth. The latter rule was not, which was a good thing or else this game would not have reached the epic levels of ridiculousness that it did, a 25-12 shootout that saw Texas score in every inning except the first.
This was the first game of the young Cactus League season in which Cleveland (playing their fourth game) deployed any major league pitchers, but they might have been better off sticking to the minor leaguers. Logan Allen started and after a scoreless first allowed four runs without recording an out in the second. Sam Hentges followed in the third and coughed up five runs while getting just a single out. The other big leaguers (albeit non-roster invitees) to pitch for the Guardians were Justin Garza (allowed two runs in the fourth) and Alex Young (allowed one run in the sixth).
The Rangers sent fourteen men to the plate in the third, and when six men batted in the fourth this pushed the fourth inning into the fifth inning column as well. I find batting around to be a minor nuisance in most cases, certainly not a reason for having a scoresheet with space wasted on extra innings that you then cross out an re-number as some scorekeepers do. I can deal with a little overflow into the next column on occasion. In cases like this, were multiple innings are impacted, it does get much harder to read, but I still prefer to deal with that rather than waste a lot of space on starting each inning in a new column (which introduces its own readability problems, like offsetting the innings of the two clubs).
No comments:
Post a Comment