In Friday’s opener between the Atlanta Braves and San Francisco Giants , there was an air of wildness emanating from the mound. Baseballs were skidding across opposite batter’s boxes, digging craters in front of home plate, skipping past catchers to the back stop.

Some of this is by design of course. With count leverage, he doesn’t need to be refined. This game is about hitting a rock with a stick. A crude offering has been known to elicit a crude hack, so why not push those boundaries? Sometimes a pitcher needs to bury a curveball and aims to bounce it off the plate. The gamble is that a ball in the dirt becomes more of a liability, a little less predictable. There are expectations of performance to mitigate these risks: when the pitcher intentionally spikes his throw, it needs to be

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