Japanese high schooler dubbed "the most annoying batter of all time"

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Originally published at: Japanese high schooler dubbed "the most annoying batter of all time" | Boing Boing

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Looks like a good way to get a fastball to the earhole.

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Man, I wish this guy was around when I was doing Little League. Everybody made fun of my super compact crouch stance, but it gave me a great on base average! I got walked all the time, even if I couldn’t hit for shit.

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The switch hitter changing sides mid-at bat is one thing (and kind of awesome). Anything to make baseball weirder is good with me.

TRUE chaos erupted, however, when a switch hitter faced a pitcher was ambidextrous.

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not surprised the at-bat ended with him getting plunked. i bet it happens quite often.

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He looked thrilled to be hit, so I imagine it was one of the desired outcomes.

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That’s not fair, we didn’t have advanced annoyance statistics when I was playing high school ball.

See, he’s got all these annoying little tricks and gimmicks. Back in my day we focused on the annoying fundamentals.

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Considering he was also visibly attempting for bunts instead of outright hits, it seems like that’s very likely the case.

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I can’ t judge until I see his stats, could be just a gimmick unless he actually has a good on base percentage.

And if the pitcher finally just aims for the helmet out of frustration you can draw a lot of walks.

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The part of this at bat that wouldn’t fly in MLB is that Ko makes no effort to evade the pitch and in fact leans into it. His hands and shoulder were bouncing in and out of the strike zone and he essentially moved to “catch” the ball with his shoulder. It’s tough call and IANAU, but I’d call this Ball 3.

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With viewership down and MLB considering rule changes to force more action into the game, seems this is one dimension worth exploring. More psychological warfare might also translate to more action.

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Bob Gibson or Don Drysdale would’ve put a quick stop to this silliness.

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The crouching is hardly “brilliant” or original, but this isn’t a baseball site, so that’s unsurprising. As I’m not too familiar w/ Japanese baseball culture, I can’t speak to how acceptable this guys act is, but it wouldn’t fly in the US for the reasons already noted, but, practically, when you try to obviously manipulate the zone to the point of farce (and probably way before that) you’re not going to get any calls from umps… plus, Ricky Henderson aside, it’s extremely hard to hit out of such an exaggerated stance.

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Gath Iorg, 3B Toronto Blue Jays, used to do a compact stance in the 1980s

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I liked Moneyball a lot. This guy really reminds me of that.

“He gets on base.”

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Man, that guy was annoying.

Good job!

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It doesn’t look like that to me at all. The ball hits him in the waist area, and he hops back a bit to avoid being hit, but not quite fast enough.

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“the most annoying batter of all time”
Absolutely.
I would find terribly annoying if I had to dip my cod fillets or zucchini flowers in him before frying.

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MLB umpires are (correctly I think) very unwilling to call that unless a batter is really really egregious about it. It’s part of the struggle between the pitcher and the batter. The pitcher wants to jam the batter up with high inside stuff, the batter wants to make that risky. And since it is often less dangerous to a batter to turn into a pitch so that it hits a shoulder rather than leap away to avoid getting beaned, they don’t want to disincentivize that.

Where I think this kid’s schtick wouldn’t fly is the crouch. The operative word in the MLB rule is “stance,” and I think umpires would gauge that from how he’d have to be standing if/when he actually tried to hit the ball.

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