What is a Swing?
The San Francisco Giants won 107 games this season. That was the most in baseball. This was impressive…and a massive surprise. Nearly every projection had them with a losing record going into the season.
You can call it a Cinderella story. That makes it even more difficult that it ended in such an abrupt and controversial fashion. It wasn’t due to the clock striking midnight. The season ended on a swing. At least by one person’s judgement. There are many Giants fans that would say otherwise. I think if you look closely at Wilmer Flores’s swing, especially using replay, you’d say he held up. Heck, you might be able to look at it at double-speed or from space and tell it wasn’t a swing.
Perhaps if it was ruled a ball, things would be different. Flores would’ve stepped in with a 1–2 count against Scherzer and had another chance. The chance of the Giants winning would’ve been fairly minimal, likely under 1%. You could replay that moment 100 times, and the Dodgers would’ve prevailed 99+ times.
That isn’t really the point here. The point is check swings are hard. They are hard because neither the swing nor the check swing is defined in the Major League rules.
What?
It is the truth. Instead, you will hear people say different things like “He broke his wrists” or “the bat crossed home plate.” You can’t really use the plate because some hitters stand at different places in the batter’s box. Some might say “it went past 90 degrees.” None of that matters. It is really just the opinion of the umpire whether the batter tried to strike the ball.
The natural reaction to something like this is to want to make it perfect. Add a one page definition of a swing to the rulebook. Then use replay and slow motion video to determine if a swing happened. Slow the game down even more. The NFL did this with catches probably a decade ago and it has been a complete mess ever since. Actually, MLB did it for catches for a bit and that was a complete mess as well. It will be a mess for swings as well. There are a lot of check swings. Can you imagine if we had to wait 30 seconds for every check swing to be reviewed by the team’s replay coach. Then another 2 minutes of watching frame by frame of the bat.
Another problem is it will never be clear. Let’s take the example of a player that turns to avoid a pitch and the bat comes through the zone as a result. Will that be ruled a swing? There are so many versions of checked swings that it is very hard to define, and that is why you won’t find it in the rulebook.
If Flores would’ve checked his swing like this on strike one in his first at bat, nobody would be raising a stink. Let’s not overreact. “Fixing” this will just add frequent replays to an already long game. Let’s be fine with the human element. Let’s be fine with slightly imperfect.
