The World's Most Annoying Batter?

Baseball has a lot of rules because otherwise there would be chaos. Players do their best to exploit existing rules whenever they can, and flagrantly pushing the envelope will eventually lead to new rules. Observe Japanese high school batter Ko Yamaguchi playing in their national tournament. He makes no effort to swing at the ball, but does everything possible to draw a pitching violation. He crouches to shrink the strike zone, he moves back and forth to destabilize the zone, and he changes hands for each pitch. Yamaguchi eventually gets on base by being hit by pitch, which we suspect was his goal all along. You have to wonder what his batting average is. These shenanigans led sportswriter Larry Brown to dub Yamaguchi "the most annoying batter of all time." If someone else can beat this performance, I'd like to see it. -via Boing Boing


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The world's "most annoying batter" is day old pancake batter. It's stronger than glue and not safe to eat without lots of liquids to wash it down...
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Agree with Cluck, I don't think you can manipulate the strike zone. Or if I'm wrong, they should change that cuz that's just ridiculous. I don't see anything wrong with changing from left to right hitter though. In Boxing and MMA you can change stances depending on your style, so..
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He crouches to shrink the strike zone, he moves back and forth to destabilize the zone

If the ump is doing their job correctly this wouldn't make a difference. The strike zone is defined as based on the batter standing not in some goofy squat. The depth of the zone is always the location of the plate and not where the batter is in the box.
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