Coaches want longer season explored

Could the high school baseball season get a bit longer?

It hasn’t been ruled out, according to Ohio High School Athletic Association Commissioner Dr. Dan Ross.

Speaking at the annual Ohio Prep Sportswriters Association meeting at the OHSAA offices in Columbus on April 19, Ross said that an unintended side effect of the newly instituted pitch count regulations in baseball has caused coaches to reach out to see if an extended season is possible.

“All of the bad weather Ohio gets early in the season makes it so that games get backlogged and piled up,” Ross said.

“The pitch count mandates that pitchers get rest based on the number of pitches throws, so when there’s teams playing 6-7 games a week, teams are having to use a fourth or fifth pitcher at times just to make it through the week.”

Under the new mandate, a pitcher cannot throw more than 125 pitches in one day, and there is now a mandatory amount of rest days depending on number of pitches thrown.

For 31-50 pitches, one day rest is needed. For 5175, it’s two days, and for 76 or more, three days.

Ross said that he has received proposals that would keep the number of games played in a baseball season the same, but push the season back so that it would end in mid-June rather than the first weekend of June as it currently does.

“They really believe that we are finally starting to hit the good weather right when the sectional tournament begins,” Ross said. “The problem, though, is that the bad weather leading up to the sectional tournament forces postponments of league games to that week, so coaches now have to decide if they want to have their best pitcher throw at the tournament came or the conference game.

“The coaches want to play more of their season in better weather, and you can’t really blame them for that.”

Ross said that the biggest roadblock to an extended season at this point would be the venue: Huntington Park, home of the Triple-A Columbus Clippers.

“Ken Schnacke (Clippers President and General Manager) goes to the International League and requests ahead of time to have that weekend for high school baseball reserved for us when their schedule comes out,” Ross said. “He does that for us, and who knows if the International League would let him request another weekend for us.”

Should an extension become reality — and Ross stressed that there have not been any formal discussions about the possibility yet — he said that it would be a sports rule change, meaning that a season extension would not be subject to a membership vote.