Last weekend I took a break from watching Phillies baseball to travel to New York, where old friend Ranger Suarez was pitching against the Yankees. Sadly, Ranger did not have one of his better days; the result was that the BoSox found themselves putting a position player, Andruw Monasterio, on the mound to finish off their series against their arch-rival. It went about as well as you’d expect, with Monasterio surrendering five runs on three hits (two of them homers) and a pair of walks. The main source of entertainment in the ninth inning was the stunning slowness of Monasterio’s pitches; they were officially classified as sliders, but at 40-5o MPH, they bore little resemblance to the more familiar versions of that pitch. The sight of a major leaguer offering up pitches as slow as 38.7 MPH on the vaunted mound of the House that Ruth Built was hilarious to me, and the shared disbelief between myself and those sitting around me made for a great memory. But people don’t come to Yankee Stadium for laughs, they come for the drama of great baseball, even more so if it’s the Yankees-Sox rivalry, and a position pitcher playing is very much not that.
Of course, there was a very good reason that Monasterio was offering up snail-speed sliders: the Red Sox knew the game was out of reach, and they didn’t want to tax their bullpen. That’s fine and good from a strategic perspective, but perhaps less so from a fan perspective. Some fans would rather not see a game descend into the farce of position players pitching, while others are unperturbed by it. So today’s question is: what do you think of position players pitching?
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