Quote:
Originally Posted by greymule
In one particular league, I permitted bat-skipping several times. It was a business league in which one company's team was loaded with serious players and usually won by big scores. On some evenings, after the second or third inning they would simply field and not bat.
What kind of satisfaction they got from constantly beating up on teams several levels below them, I can't imagine.
I guess skipping a turn at bat is preferable to what I used to see in a nearby township when I lived in New Jersey. Again, one team was so strong that they invariably went beyond the mercy rule limit early, so before the required number of innings, they would switch their infield and outfield and otherwise do what they had to in order to let the other team back in the game. Just to keep the game going, they always kept the opposition within the mercy limit.
As an indication of how things had deteriorated in that once-balanced and strong rec league, the team that crushed everybody contained guys I had played with and against 25 years earlier, some of them now ridiculously beefed up and barely recognizable. So a team of guys in their 50s spent the season crushing all comers, to what end, again I can't imagine.
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Most of these teams are just there to get batting practice to break in their Freak 98s and Mayhems.
A number of years ago, we had a local coed league that had one team full of travel players playing against your typical local husband/wife boyfriend/girlfriend teams. A new run-ahead rule had to be instituted: 20 after 3, and 12 after 5 (WELL before ASA changed their run-ahead rule). We very frequently hit 20 after 3.
That team was the "beginning of the end." The coed league no longer exists.