New Bat Drop Just Dropped

It's all there. And I'm telling it straight, I swear.

Day 63 Of The 2025 MLB Season
One of the most satisfying things a storyteller can do is slip some innocuous device into the front of a story and pay it off big as a twist at the end. That’s probably why I’m so obsessed with where hitters leave their bats after they make contact. It’s (literally!) a throwaway detail, but it has the potential to intercept the whole plot if a throw eventually comes home.

The longer the gap between the Slip In and the Pay Off, the tougher this trick is to pull off. It’s much easier to contain it to a single scene: A gun is pulled, the gun is kicked from a hand, the gun skitters under a kitchenette, several minutes of punching, grappling and body slamming ensue, but eventually the gun will come back to settle the scene, a little Chekhov nugget.

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I’m going to show you four examples of bat drops this year that were intended to have a more immediate payoff, that didn’t depend on a million-to-one sequence of events to draw a ball back into them.

The first was on a swinging bunt by Yandy Díaz:

With a little flick of the wrist, Díaz spun the bat cruising in the ball’s wake. It nearly reconnected with the loose ball for a delayed second hit; had it done so, Díaz would have certainly beaten any throw to first. Short of that, he at least managed to fan the lumber across the catcher’s path, nearly but not quite enough to interrupt the play.

Did Díaz do this intentionally? The fact that we can debate it the key to the whole drama. Here’s how the league described the ambiguous bat-hitting-ball rules to me a few years ago, when I started covering this beat:

1. Unless the batter intentionally interferes with his bat, the bat is considered as part of the playing field.

2. It would be very difficult for the batter to "place" his bat intentionally and thereby interfere with play.

You can envision a batter chucking his bat right on top of a rolling baseball. If it looks obviously intentional, the umpire would presumably use their discretion to rule it an out. But Díaz didn’t do that. He didn’t even toss his bat toward the ball! He tossed it off to the side, in foul ground no less, but with enough english to roll it back into the story. Could you call this intentional? You could, but it would take an awfully confident cynicism to do so.

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The second was a swinging bunt by Junior Caminero, Díaz’ teammate. He’s slightly more obvious with his toss:

He holds the bat an extra split second before leaving it right in front of the catcher. Because he’s already taken off running, his bat has the same momentum he has, and when it lands it keeps rolling up the line toward the ball. The catcher picks the ball up just before the bat would have hit it. This is a bat that hit nothing but was loudly in the way.

It’s a super move. The play at home was decided by… oh, 1/200th of a second. I’m comfortable concluding that this obstacle slowed the catcher by at least 1/100th of a second, enough to swing this play and produce a go-ahead run.

On these slow rollers with a runner on third, the space around home plate becomes very crowded. You’ve got a catcher crossing the plate to get the ball, a pitcher running in to cover home, a runner coming in to try to score, an umpire trying to get as close as possible without quite being in the way. The are three different surfaces (grass, dirt, plate), there are two different modes of ball conveyance (carry or toss), there are at least three ways for a runner to touch home (standing, sliding, diving), there are at least two choices for the fielder (go home or throw to first). Even though the ball has traveled only five feet or so, it’s impossible to foresee how the play is going to develop, and into this chaos the bat is a chaos multiplier, especially when it’s rolling along. It might hit the ball, might hit the catcher, might block the catcher—

Or it might just change a catcher’s decision:

That’s Nathan Lukes, dropping a bunt down and laying his bat directly in front of the plate. The catcher hops over it capably, but when he turns around to think about making a diving tag he no doubt sees 34 inches of wood lying in his way, right where a catcher would try to land on a diving tag attempt. We don’t know if this bat affected this play, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis from the looks of it.

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Finally, we get to the problem of the lot, from May 28, the 63rd day of the season. Christian Koss struck out. The ball bounced away from the catcher Jake Rogers, and Koss actually decided to run it out. Our two principals briefly made eye contact; the race was on, with Koss trailing. He had only one move left to play: Discard some trash in the catcher’s path. Some Christian K-oss.

The problem with slipping a plot device into a scene this late is that it always risks looking too obvious. And, in fact, Koss had found the one situation where this play, however clever and well-intentioned it may be, can’t work.

When I originally asked the league about bats getting in the way, it actually addressed this exact scenario in a postscript:

There is one exception to all this. On a dropped third strike, if the batter (or his bat) hinders the catcher from fielding the ball, interference is called. But this is the only case (other than the batter intentionally doing something with the bat) that is specifically covered under the rules regarding a bat and interfering with play. (Example: Dropped third strike, ball starts to roll up the first base line. The ball rolls into the batter's bat, which was dropped (unintentionally) on the ground as the batter started to run to first base. The ball is deflected away from the catcher, who is trying to field the ball. Ruling: Interference, and the batter is declared out.

So Koss’s plan went too far. His toss didn’t need to be intentional; it didn’t need to hit the ball; it didn’t necessarily even need to hit the catcher. Any hindrance would have been held against him. Had Jake Rogers tripped over the bat and splayed face first, Koss likely would have been called out.

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Day 64 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Dud.

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Day 65 Of The 2025 MLB Season
There is a lot going on in this play: