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Message: [QUOTE="Bigboote, post: 4315745, member: 7631"] One of the reasons I watch almost no baseball any more is that there's such stress put on NOT hitting the ball where a play can be made on it. The relevance to the previous posts is that pitchers are being taught earlier and earlier to throw hard and to throw pitches that put stress on the elbow. It seems at every level that pitchers are being taught to strike out hitters. Gone are the pitchers in the vein of Greg Maddux, Jim Palmer, and Juan Marichal who threw pretty hard but relied on finesse and location to get hitters to hit the ball where the defense wanted it. On the offensive side, there's inordinate stress put on home runs, walks, and getting pitch counts up. There are hitters who put the ball in play in fewer than half their plate appearances now. That was unheard of 30 or so years ago. [/QUOTE]