ADOPTING COLLEGE RULES ON BASEBALL COLLISIONS. I have argued in several posts, including here, that, in order to reduce collisions at home plate, catchers should not be allowed to block the plate. Rob Neyer takes the same position in this article, which features a video of a play from the same American League Championship Series that was mentioned in yesterday’s post. As is discussed in Neyer’s article, collisions lead to concussions. They also lead to other injuries, such as the knee injury that resulted from the collision in the video. Neyer says: “There are rules at virtually every level of baseball and softball, except for the professional game [in] our hemisphere, that essentially preclude violent collisions at the plate.” It would be nice if the major league rules committee, while they are adopting a better college rule to prevent collision injuries at second base, would also adopt the better college rule to prevent collision injuries at home plate.
Here is a four-minute video of home plate collisions (“set to terrible music”), which shows what we would be missing if the rules were changed.