**NOTE: I haven't posted in a while, and if anyone does read this I apologize. Been a rough week at work...I'll try to get back to it regularly in the coming days.**
Let's start with a confession: I've never been a catcher on a baseball field. I never liked the idea of people that didn't know what they were doing on the mound throwing as hard as they could at me...which is where I imagine the nickname "tools of ignorance" came into being. I need a reasonable assurance that the pitcher is going to hit my glove with some accuracy, otherwise no thanks. I was never worried about a runner bowling me over - I'm a pretty big dude and was reasonably sure that I was the immovable object compared to most of my friends. This was before I had a basic understanding of the physics involved with collisions.
Buster Posey had surgery on his leg this week after a collision with Scott Cousins last week to repair ankle ligaments torn in that collision along with a broken leg. The Giants put Posey on the DL and have stated he will be out for the year - no real shock there. Posey is a young player and a championship-caliber catcher and there's no sense rushing him back for the end of the season, playoffs or not. Let him heal right and rehab the injury - the investment in time will be well worth the wait, I'm sure.
As for the play itself, the commentosphere and blogosphere has been a mixed bag. Posey and the Giants management said there was nothing dirty about the play - that Cousins made a clean hit on Posey in the name of scoring the winning run. Bochy even said he understood the the play was "a part of baseball."
I'm going to have to disagree with both viewpoints in some fashion. First off, the Giants saying there was nothing dirty about the play does not make it a clean play - Cousins had the option to slide around Posey and still hit the plate.* I've always been taught that baseball is not a contact sport and only under the rarest of circumstances should there be contact between opposing players, and that includes both sides of the play at the plate. A catcher responsibility is to tag the guy out, not necessarily block the plate.
*It didn't help that Schierholtz misplayed the ball slightly, not getting a run up to the ball and shuffling his feet before the throw which made the throw a bit slower and made the play closer. Not to blame Schierholtz - his throw was pretty darned good - but that was the first part of the chain of events.
Second, delivering a shoulder block is not "a part of baseball." Posey probably didn't see Cousins coming - he might have heard him, but by then it was too late to get out of the way - and it's wrong to think that hitting a defenseless player is "a part of baseball." The idea is to score runs, not points with your teammates by trying to put an exclamation point on the game. If the catcher is giving you a part of the plate, there's no reason to clear the other side of the plate too. It's (usually) far easier to score by going around a catcher than going through him.
On the flipside, Posey doesn't get off scott free here. His technique was horrible...he was squatting on his knees to receive the ball instead of being on his feet as well as not securing the ball before trying to tag Cousins. By being on his knees, instead of being knocked on his butt by Cousins he had his leg folded under him when his cleat planted in the ground and wouldn't give way while his foot nearly ripped from his ankle. He needs to know when to block the plate and when to swipe the tag.
As for rules changes, it's a bad idea for a few reasons. First off, legislating the game too much simply takes whatever fun is in the game out of it. There's already a ton of rules on the MLB books, some specifically involving catchers blocking the plate...enforce those better before you think about adding more lines to an already bloated volume. Second, umpires already have enough to worry about...subjective enforcement of the rules is already a problem (hello, HBP's) and giving fans and teams another reason to hate umpires just isn't worth it. I also don't think it would stop home plate collisions - the temptation for a catcher to not give a runner a lane is too great and too instinctual. Suspending players for a collision would lead to too many subjective questions: who instigated? /did the catcher leave an opening to the plate? /did the throw cause the catcher to move into the baseline? That's just too much second guessing in my opinion.
I don't want to get into the physics of the runner/catcher collision...I'm sure Mythbusters has done something with a collision between two similarly massed objects, one at rest and one in motion. The Cliff's Notes: The object at rest receives all of the force of the collision while giving little back in return. People want to talk about Posey wearing "armor" - that armor protects the catcher from batted balls and wild pitches, not baserunners. Catcher's equipment is not football pads and is not designed to take that kind of force.
This has the chance to be a great teaching moment for Buster Posey if the Giants allow it. Find a catching instructor that can drill this into Posey while he's rehabbing his leg and maybe they'll be able to save themselves from dealing with this sort of injury again.
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