Those are balls

As you are no doubt aware, there has been an epidemic of passed balls in this year's postseason. When John Smoltz was saying on the television that he's never seen anything like it, I instantly thought of one possible explanation: catchers are trying too hard to frame pitches. There's another obvious explanation why there would be more passed balls this year: this is the first year of the six-trip limit on visits to the mound, so catchers can't keep going out to the mound to make sure the pitcher's got the signs straight. Anyway, just now I went looking and found that for the regular season this year, the per-game passed ball rate was 0.08, which is basically normal. Also I found that Yasmani Grandal, the Dodgers catcher who managed to do in one game this year something that no catcher had ever done in an entire postseason before, namely have two passed balls and two errors (one passed ball and two errors of which came in one inning), has led his league in passed balls three times, so there's definitely a sample problem there. So it looks like there's maybe nothing actually to see here, except that I also noticed that the years with the five highest wild-pitch rates in the modern history of baseball are, in order, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2013. 2014 is seventh, after, for some reason, 1994. I'm guessing the reason for that is that everyone has finally caught on over this decade that everyone has always been throwing too many fastballs. Which, come to think of it, may be related to the drastic decline in innings thrown by starting pitchers--you're going to destroy your arm fast if you throw eighty breaking balls every five days. (Which reminds me of a quote I read from Pat Borders once about calling a game for Dave Stieb, which went something like: "slider, slider, fastball nope, curve, slider, fastball nope, slider, curve, fastball nope ... " ... which is also kind of funny because, apart from the sidearmer Mark Eichhorn, Dave Stieb had the screwballiest four-seamer I've ever seen.)

In other news, I definitively identified a couple of white-winged scoters on the lake the other day for the first time (although I suspect I've seen them on the lake in the fall before), the afternoon after the first night this fall I was up hourly through the night to keep the pipes from freezing. So that's pretty decent for the first couple of fall migrants on the lake this year.

Currently at the back of my shed: 10.7. High today at Peterborough airport: 11.3. Headed back up to run the water tonight.