Matt Strahm made some waves last week with his strong opinions on some teams’ hypocritical beer policies now that the pace of play is picking up.
With games now shorter, some teams extended alcohol sales into the eighth inning rather than the seventh, which is the opposite of what Strahm thinks should be happening.
Actress, MLB analyst, and Phillies superfan Ellen Adair joined WEEI’s Rob Bradford on the Audacy Original Podcast “Baseball Isn’t Boring” and agreed with Strahm’s take on both the alcohol sales as well as the injury concerns of the pitch clock.
“I agree with him about the hypocrisy in the alcohol service. I have feelings about that from 12 years of working in restaurants. It is part of the responsibility of whoever is serving the alcohol to make sure that the person who is receiving it is safe and is not going to do anything to anybody else,” Adair said (25:45 in player above).
“People can argue about whether or not that is the responsibility of the vendor, and just like, it is. It’s a fact that we don’t want to think about in our country all the time but it is actually our responsibility to take care of each other. That’s just my opinion.”
While some teams may be trying to capitalize on the opportunity to sell alcohol later into games, there are some safety concerns that go along with that.
Another safety concern is one that may impact another one of MLB’s greatest products: pitchers.
Strahm said that he’s worried about the injury risk of the pitch clock due to the need for recovery time and Adair echoed that sentiment.
“I kind of feel like with the number of pitcher injuries that we’ve seen, it is very volatile, pitchers are a class of human beings because they’re doing a completely unnatural thing with their body, who are very likely to get hurt in any year,” she said. “I do feel like – and this is anecdotal, right, so I can’t cite numbers – but it feels like it’s slightly more than average…
“I think that it’s hard to not wonder how the pitch clock is affecting them mentally and they might occasionally need a moment to take a pause mentally or they might need a moment to take a pause physically. I think he said the phrase ‘This is a max-effort sport.’ Yes. When they have to work at maximum effort then they need recovery time… The people at the very bottom of their pace are often relief pitchers and that makes sense because relief pitchers are more max-effort kind of guys.”
Strahm has worked as both a starting pitcher and reliever both in his career and this year. He’s a max-effort type of pitcher no matter how many innings he’s asked to pitch.
In fact, Adair was worried about the injury risk before the pitch clock was ever instituted.
“There was a moment [in 2018 or 2019] when I was on MLB Network and somebody asked me my opinion about what if we had a pitch clock,” she said. “And I said I understand what it would do for pace of play but the main thing I would be concerned about is for more pitcher injuries.
“Everybody kind of chuckled at me like ‘Look at this girl. Look at this cute little opinion that she has.’ And I was like, I don’t know, I’m just thinking about my friends the pitchers, honestly.”
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