Seventeen swings. Every single at-bat. He knows it looks strange. He has tried cutting it to sixteen. Something about that specific number, he insists, genuinely feels wrong.
A rookie third baseman reportedly cannot bring himself to break a deeply specific pre-at-bat ritual requiring exactly seventeen practice swings before he will step into the batter’s box, a habit that has become visible and, according to at least one frustrated umpire, “genuinely, measurably” slowing down the pace of play, even after a coach directly and gently suggested he consider trimming the number down.
“I tried sixteen once, during a spring training game, low stakes, figured nobody would notice,” the rookie said. “It felt genuinely wrong. Off. I do not have a better way to explain it. Something about seventeen specifically feels correct in a way that sixteen or eighteen simply does not. I know how that sounds. I have heard how that sounds, repeatedly, from multiple people in this clubhouse.”
The team’s hitting coach, who first raised the pace-of-play concern directly with the player, described a genuinely difficult balancing act between respecting a young player’s individual routine and addressing legitimate, measurable game-flow concerns that have begun drawing attention from league officials monitoring pace-of-play metrics across the organization’s farm system. “I get it,” the coach said. “Routines matter. Confidence matters. But we are also being asked, at the organizational level, to actually address pace of play, and seventeen practice swings, every single at-bat, adds up to real, measurable extra minutes across a full game.”
League officials, reviewing pace-of-play data across the rookie’s recent appearances, confirmed his individual at-bats now run measurably longer than the organizational average, a gap officials describe as “not enormous in any single instance, but genuinely additive across a full nine innings,” prompting at least one formal, if gently worded, conversation between league representatives and the team about potential adjustments.
The rookie says he has attempted several alternative approaches to address the concern without abandoning the ritual entirely, including performing some of the seventeen swings in the on-deck circle before actually stepping toward the batter’s box, a compromise he says “helps a little, genuinely, though it does not fully solve the underlying pace problem everyone keeps bringing up to me.”
Teammates report a mixture of genuine amusement and mild, good-natured exasperation with the ritual. “We have all tried to talk him down from it,” said one veteran teammate. “He has explained the seventeen thing to me probably four separate times now, in genuine detail, and I still do not fully understand the specific logic. But he is hitting well right now, genuinely well, and none of us want to be the reason a rookie having a good stretch suddenly starts overthinking his entire routine.”
The rookie says he remains committed to the number seventeen for the foreseeable future, adding only that he has “genuinely tried to negotiate with myself internally about maybe eventually working toward something a little more pace-friendly,” a negotiation he acknowledges, with visible self-awareness, “has not produced any actual results yet, and I am not making any confident promises about when, or if, it eventually will.”
League pace-of-play officials say they will continue monitoring the situation but have, for now, declined to impose any formal penalty, citing the rookie’s otherwise strong recent performance and a general organizational preference for “coaching and gentle encouragement over direct disciplinary intervention” whenever a genuinely promising young player’s idiosyncratic habit remains within a reasonable, if noticeably longer than average, range.
The rookie’s father, a former amateur player himself, reportedly offered his own theory on the origin of the number seventeen during a recent phone call, suggesting it may trace back to a childhood little league jersey number the rookie wore for several formative seasons, a connection the rookie says he “had honestly never consciously considered before, but which does feel, now that it has been pointed out, uncomfortably plausible.”
The rookie says he intends to call his father back this week specifically to dig further into that theory, adding that he is “genuinely curious now, in a way I was not before, about whether this whole thing traces back further than I ever realized, to some jersey I have not actually thought about in probably fifteen years.”
For now, the seventeen practice swings continue, every at-bat, pace-of-play concerns and all, a small, stubborn ritual the rookie says he suspects will follow him for as long as he keeps playing this game, jersey number origins fully resolved or not.
His coach, watching from the dugout during a recent game, was overheard simply counting along under his breath, a quiet, resigned acknowledgment that seventeen, for now at least, remains exactly seventeen.
The rookie’s next scheduled at-bat, whenever it arrives, will almost certainly begin exactly the same way it always has, seventeen swings, no more, no fewer, whatever the pace-of-play data eventually decides to say about it.
League officials, for their part, say they will keep watching, patiently, for now.
Seventeen remains seventeen.
For now, that is simply how the game is played.
For related commentary on deeply personal superstition colliding directly with genuinely reasonable institutional pace concerns, see Satire And Politics and Satire Examples, plus further reading at News Satire Sites.
Additional coverage at What Is Satire?. More satire at The Onion.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/