[Post 41] Any one click through to this:

Might be worse than the original article.

I was gonna mention this. Freddy Sherman just seems to be a kind of dim guy, but this guy who wrote the Martin thing clearly wants to be a Mariotti-style intentional jerk sportswriter. The homophobia is staggering, and by homophobia I mean actual "gay panic", not just bigotry. What a tool.

I'm surprised he didn't make some tired crack about Martin being fluent in French, but it's probably just because he didn't know that.

The really stunning part of all this is that Yahoo! allows articles this bad to be published with its name anywhere near them. These are literally the worst, dumbest, most horribly written articles in the world. As a Yahoo! fantasy player, its eternally frustrating to go to a player page and have all the articles be "Fan's Take" articles, because they are infuriating and useless and I can't help but click them anyway every so often.

There are literally thousands of better baseball writers out there dying to be read, and Yahoo publishes this. Amazing.

OK, so can an outfielder catch an infield fly ball?

I would guess that he can, since a ball becomes an infield fly when the ump calls it one. After that point I wouldn't think it could un-become an infield fly based on who catches it.

EDIT: Actually I don't know...does an infield fly have to be announced by an umpire for it to take effect? If there's an obvious infield fly but the ump in a Joyce-ian moment just neglects to call it, is the fielder free to flub it intentionally and pick up a double play? I would guess that there are infield flies at the margins where the umpire has some discretion as to whether it is or isn't one.

EDIT: Actually I don't know...does an infield fly have to be announced by an umpire for it to take effect? If there's an obvious infield fly but the ump in a Joyce-ian moment just neglects to call it, is the fielder free to flub it intentionally and pick up a double play? I would guess that there are infield flies at the margins where the umpire has some discretion as to whether it is or isn't one.

Yeah, as I understand it, the umpire should bellow, right away, "Infield fly, if fair!" Then everybody knows what's up.

Ray's question got me wondering, because one of my softball teams is a co-ed group, 5 each of men/women on the field - 2 each infield, 2 each outfield, 1 as pitcher and the other as catcher.* It's very common to see guys on other teams cut in front of a female fielder to take a throw or fly ball. I just wondered if a guy could come in all the way from the outfield to do it, and now I realize, yeah, I guess they could.

Also, when I played catcher, I'd sometimes wear nail polish. Not to help with the signals or anything, but because I just liked the chipped-black-nails look.
So to heck with Freddy Sherman.

* I know, I know.

Jerry Grote painted the edges/boarders of his mitt in bright orange. I think he may have only used it when Seaver was pitching, but maybe he used it all the time for a few years. I don't remember anyone else trying it.

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The black catcher's mitt with bright orange lining on the inside was a thing in the 80s. It's one of the things I most remember about Lance Parrish with the Tigers.

*****

As with most catching innovations of the 1970s, I associate that orange outline with Steve Yeager of Sherman's beloved Dodgers. And, according to a SABR piece on the evolution of catcher equipment, the orange stripe was in fact introduced by Al Campanis.

Well, at least I know I wasn't imagining it.