Snyder’s Soapbox: MLB’s most rant-worthy topics of 2024, including oven-mitt gloves and real meaning of ‘BP’

Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate weekly on topics related to Major League Baseball. Some of the topics will be urgent matters, some may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this site is that it is free and you can click to leave. If you stay, you will become smarter. This is a money back guarantee. Let’s go.

Have you ever had a short rant that doesn’t need more than a sentence or two? Clear. It may not even necessarily be a “rant” but a general observation about which you have a little resistance or sincere support. Or maybe just something tongue-in-cheek that’s fun?

Here are some of mine collected throughout the 2024 season.

• “O MLB.” Some of the other three-letter sports have ruined us here. Think about “the NFL” and “National Football League”. Both work. The same goes for NBA or NHL. Major League Baseball doesn’t work. If you don’t say “Major League Baseball,” you can’t say “the MLB.” Stop it. I’m not even asking nicely, because this is so stupid it doesn’t deserve kindness.
• You cannot use “BP” as an abbreviation for bullpen. Baseball already has a “BP” and has for a long time. That’s it batting practice. Anyone who has played any level has heard “BP” and knows it. “What time is PA?” is an incredibly common phrase among players of various levels. This isn’t “what time are we going to throw bullpens?” Stop using “BP” as an abbreviation on social media. Yes, I am aware that sometimes there are character restrictions which means you can use “RP”. This means that the relief pitcher(s) can easily replace the relief pitching corps, which is the bullpen. If you want to say “the bullpen is bad,” you can type “the PR is bad” and every baseball fan everywhere will know what you mean. Stop using “the BP” as a bullpen.
• I long to hear “that was a good hit” over a prodigious home run. Isn’t that an exceptional hit? We love to say “good hit” when a hitter hits the ball into the opposite field and it falls just short of hitting, but a better hit is totally destroying an error for a three-run bomb. In all seriousness, I understand the sentiment behind the common usage of “good hit,” meaning it’s a good hitter’s adjustment to get a hit on a well-played pitch. I’m just having fun with the concept. Let’s make a deal to try this one sometime: Aaron Judge destroys a baseball at 500 feet and we all say, “man, that’s a good hit!”
• Oven mitts on the base paths, especially for base-stealing types, just don’t hold up. I understand if a player wants to slide head first and has issues with stuck or even broken fingers; You have to guard against these things in baseball, where every finger is extremely important. Having a glove that adds extra centimeters starts to be unfair. We already got bigger bases, now can the player add another six inches with a glove? Why not make them about two feet long? Get out of here. In fact, until there’s a specific rule in place, I’m requiring a specialist like White Sox rookie Duke Ellis to wear a glove that goes past his knee while he’s standing still.
• Does the entire infield really need to visit the mound every time a pitching coach comes out to talk to the pitcher? When I was a kid — oh no, that’s dangerously close to “back in my day,” and it used to drive me crazy — mound conferences involved the catcher, the pitcher, and a coach. Sometimes they would call up an infielder. If it were a large part of the game where, for example, the infield would be brought in to tackle a runner at home plate, the conference on the mound could involve the entire infield. At some point, I think, around the turn of the millennium, a group of middle infielders decided they needed to attend all the mound meetings. Why? Sometimes a pitcher is wild and just needs a second to calm down and the pitching coach just says some talking points or even mentions non-baseball related things to take his mind off the pressure. Does the third baseman really need to hear every word? Just remain in your positions unless specifically called upon by the catcher or coach, folks.
• Fidgeting with your helmet while running hard around the bases is probably a tic that players don’t think about, but it is something that slows them down. Earlier this season, I swear I saw Nick Madrigal grab the edge of his helmet while trying to hit a throw to first. What in the world? If your helmet is going to fall off your head while you’re running around the bases, gentlemen, let it happen. Anything else will slow you down. Or you can always pull a Gary Matthews Sr. (shout out to the Sergeant!) and purposely take your helmet quickly out of the box to avoid hassles with it during the race. That ruled when he did it.
• Why does statistical “sacrifice” ignore groundouts? It’s easy to understand the concept of purposely fielding a ball to sacrifice yourself, but how does a fly serve separate itself from batting average while driving a runner home via grounder, right? Has anyone considered this? Sometimes you need to hit the ball into the outfield to score the runner, whether it’s a hit or a sac fly, but other times just putting the ball in play scores a run. Somehow we determined that flying out to score a run is inherently more valuable or more controllable by the player than hitting a grounder in a spot that will score a run.
• Enough of this “ghost corridor” crap. Oh my. Didn’t you use “ghost runners” when you were a kid playing ball in the sand with your friends? This means that there is an imaginary corridor that does not actually exist as a human. The extra inning rule puts real players at second base. If they were ghost runners, there wouldn’t be a body there and we would just imagine where the runner would be when the balls were put into play. Come on man. This is elementary. I should point out that I have complained about this several times before, but the problem seems to be spreading rather than diminishing. Please join me in trying to eradicate this abomination.
• When watching it on TV and trying to listen, when possible, in person, it seems like MLB players yell “Got it!” instead of “mine!” in flying balls/pop-ups. All through high school and college, my teams always used “my,” and I thought it was much better. It’s a syllable and much easier to repeat over and over when chasing a fly ball between two players, desperately hoping that their nearby teammate(s) will hear you and avoid a collision. As an added layer on specialties, teaching someone who doesn’t know English very well one syllable instead of three feels like a piece of cake. So why is “Got it” MLB’s preferred call? I asked a former player and he said he thinks it’s mostly a personal preference. So let’s fix this, guys. “My” is much more efficient!