MLB is doing everything they can to speed up the game, but some new ideas might be going a touch too far.
MLB is grading batboys and batgirls on speed, and will fire them if they’re too slow
It’s about time children got performance reviews.
Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images
James Dator has been covering a wide range of sports for SB Nation for over a decade, with a special focus on the NFL.
On Wednesday MLB and the MLBPA distributed new guidelines to players concerning some clarifications they’ve made to pitch clock rules, and inside of that document was a very curious note about baseball’s plans for batboys and batgirls.
“New standards will be enforced for bat boys and bat girls, whose ability to quickly retrieve equipment will help efforts to speed up the game, according to the memo. The league will evaluate the performances of bat boys and bat girls and could ask teams to replace them if their performance is considered substandard.”
Yes, in the very strictest sense of the word we could see kids who are earning minimum wage for retrieving bats get fired if they’re too slow off the mark. We’re getting bat kid performance reviews now before they even hit the workforce — and if little Timmy or Tammy can’t cut it, they’re out!
Up to this point I thought the only bad bat boy was the one on the cover of “Weekly World News” at the grocery store, but MLB has me thinking otherwise now.
It will be interesting to see if this bleeds down into the minors. As it stands my local Single-A team, the Greensboro Grasshoppers use an adorable family of Labradors as the team’s “Bat Dogs.” If these rules were to make it down to my ballpark, there is a very real chance a dog could get a performance review and be fired for being too slow.
What a time to be alive.
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