Beware the Law of Unintended Consequences. Now, always and forever. There’s a reason why it’s not the Theory of Unintended Consequences. That’s because it’s a law, proven, immutable and inescapable.
The law doesn’t have to come with negative consequences. When I dropped out of college at the age of 21, I moved home and met my future wife. “Let that be a lesson to you: The only reason that you’re alive is that I dropped out of college, racked up tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and broke your grandparents’ hearts,” I’ll tell my daughters as I’m tucking them in. “And don’t you forget it.”
But there will always be unintended consequences that come with every decision, every change. So it goes with the pitch clock, which is the talk of baseball right now. Before the weekend, I considered myself an expert on what would happen after the pitch clock was implemented. After the weekend, I’m lighting votive candles and apologizing to the Gods of Unintended Consequences for my arrogance. For there was something that I completely forgot to consider, and I hate it.
First, my credentials: Back in 2017, I found two eerily similar games that happened two decades apart, and I watched each one of them with a stopwatch and a notebook. I wanted to figure…
