Published: May 18, 2008 10:41 pm      

BASEPATHS: Speed up the game? Limit pickoffs

As UB’s next-to-last baseball game headed into the 10th inning Friday after the Bulls had untypically tied it with four in the ninth, a visiting Ohio University fan rationalized “OK, so we get some free baseball.”

Nonetheless, it’s one of life’s little contradictions that for most dedicated baseball fans, the quicker the game, the better.

To further this end, the New York-Pennsylvania League has instituted some speed-up rules for the 2008 season that begins in Batavia on June 18. The advisory reads like the tax code, but basically, umpires will crack down on those long caucuses on the mound in which most of the players discuss where they’re going after the game, or reference “that babe in section 102.”

With strong young arms and short pitch counts, the NY-P already ranks among the minor-league leaders in game pace, so this seems an unusual place to start, and Base Paths can’t see this providing much improvement.

Want to really speed up the games?

Limit the number of pickoff throws. Three per runner ought to do it, and Kenny Rogers is pretty close to retirement anyway.



UNFINISHED: In winning that Friday semi-finale 5-4, UB showed a lot of spunk for a team that had lost its last 11 — seven of which it had led going into the ninth. Worst of all: A 14-13 loss at Ohio State after leading the Buckeyes 11-2, and then 13-5 going into the seventh, before 3,500 fans.

With UB meekly trailing 4-0, most Bull boosters had left, but the team stayed to play, attacking OU’s closer with five hits capped by Adam Skonieczki’s two-RBI single. When Brian Randazzo singled home the winning run in the 10th, off the hook came pitcher Chaz Mye of North Tonawanda, who was looking at an “L” despite a fine one-mistake (two-run moon shot in the fourth) performance.

But the Bulls closed with a reprise of the late-inning blues the following day, yielding 10 runs in the eighth and ninth to lose, 15-13.



MEMORIES OF MIRANTO: Three things Base Paths will never forget about North Tonawanda’s Katie Miranto, now that her Canisius career is over:

1. She’d played three games as an underage Lady Jack before he spelled her name right, and neither she nor anyone in her family ever complained.

2. North Tonawanda Coach T. K. Murphy saying, “Really, I had nothing left to teach her, and she still kept coming, ready to learn.”

3. That a wild warm-up throw cracked Base Paths’ windshield in the first game he saw her play, as an eighth-grader in a cold driving rain on a nearly-abandoned field.

We figure we’ll see her name on these pages at least one more time, when Canisius tabs her for its Hall of Fame. She’s righter than Ripken.

Signal back to Base Paths via pollyndoug@hotmail.com.