JohnF,
Very thoughtful post that makes some very good points.
Although I’m guessing your question about the rule book was tongue-in-cheek, it does go right to the center of the discussion. The controversy started way back when 6-1-6 was put into the rule book. There wasn’t much research on the subject, but people knew something needed to be done. With so little science to work with, NFHS just foisted the problem off on the state assns and didn’t bother worrying about it. It was so ignored, until over 5 years ago when I spend weeks searching through every state assns’ governing documents to get the restriction for each state, there was no place anyone could go to in order to see what the state restrictions were.
Because there was nothing in the rule book other than 6-1-6, few states had any real mechanism in place to track what was going on or give coaches a way to check to see what had taken place. If a coach had a question about another team’s pitcher, all it could do was ask to see the scorebook and hope the game was in there. The whole thing was such a PITA, it was seldom used outside of the playoffs where everyone could see what took place by looking in the local paper. Also, it’s rare for coaches to accuse other coaches of something like that for what’s seen as a meaningless game.
But times have changed big time! There’s been a lot of studies done and with MLB backing the pitch count idea with PitchSmart. Because of that, even most diehard old farts have come to understand it’s about trying to mitigate health and safety issues for pitchers and nothing more. But there’s still no NFHS guidelines in place to put all the information to use, so everyone’s trying to twist a pitch count system to fit into the old IP system that never really worked. It’s like trying to play darts blindfolded after being spun around 4 or 5 times.
The whole thing relies on accurate information about the pitchers being made available to any policing function whether it be a formal one where automatic reports are sent to coaches with the information about the pitchers for both teams, or the coaches have the ability to check for themselves. The problem is figuring out the most efficient way to get that information from the scorebook to wherever it’s going to be stored for access.
As far as who has or can make the time, let’s face it, anyone who has to can do it. so the issue isn’t who can do it but rather who would do it in the most timely fashion and be most likely to do it correctly. As far as worrying about who would check up to make sure his team wasn’t being screwed, what difference does it make as long as the record can be easily corrected?
For a few years now, the umpires through Arbiter have been posting scores for most teams in our area, and they’ve done a great job. There’s no reason to believe they would do an equally great job of making sure the pitching data is captured. Sure the coaches could do it and that could be insured by an enforcing policy with “teeth”, but would that be the most efficient way of getting the job done?
Personally I think it would be much more beneficial to everyone to stop any problem before it started, and that would be relatively easy by making sure everyone has every pitcher’s eligibility beforehand. But to each his/her own.
In the end it’s in everyone’s best interest to make sure the system works and that would be made much easier by having accurate data. Could numbers be “fudged”? They sure can now because there’s absolutely nothing in place to police it.
Having both teams agree to the data after every inning or pitching change is how some already do it and that’s a system that makes the most sense to me. But all those things you point out about coaches screwing with each other would be reduced to almost nothing if the umpires did it.
You’re correct, there’s no easy answer, but there is a “best” available answer and it takes a lot of hard work to find it. 