Well, if it's always been that way in Philly does that mean it's even more that way now or has the rest of the league caught up. Regardless, it's more interesting/complex than that sounds like. Related to new technology, new rules, and a desire for more uniformity that is not unrelated to gambling (because gamblers need to feel like their bet didn't turn on the scorer, not to mention the potential for corruption).
I also recall several prominent times this year where we've called it out - but most of them actually were changed to errors.
“Everything’s a hit,” Angels pitcher Patrick Sandoval said. “I have a little conspiracy about it: That they are telling the scorers to be more lenient with the hits so they can be like, ‘Oh, the new rules work. You have more hits.’”
Chris Marinak, MLB’s chief operations and strategy officer, described these developments as a potential unintended consequence of the new rules, rather than part of a campaign designed to promote them. “I can tell you very clearly there has been no directive from MLB to score more hits versus errors this year, as it relates to the new rules or anything else, frankly,” Marinak said. A better explanation, Marinak insisted, is two-fold: Scorers are under pressure to make quicker judgments thanks to the pitch clock, and viewers are looking at a slightly different game and different types of action due to the reduction in shifts. What qualified as a routine play in 2022, Marinak said, was no longer routine in 2023, and under heightened time pressure, scorers may default to leniency.
In recent years, though, Major League Baseball has altered its oversight of official scorers in hopes of standardizing their decisions across the sport. Since the pandemic-altered season of 2020, when scorers were not permitted inside ballparks, the league has provided an increased array of “different video resources to help them make decisions,” in addition to Statcast data related to exit velocity and hit probability, Marinak said. The league strove for consistent rulings, similar to its approach with umpiring and instant replay. But it also provided some input, making the once solitary decisions of the official scorer into more of a group effort at times: The league created a Slack channel so scorers could communicate with each other during games, in addition to “a two-way communication vehicle” that connected scorers to the central office to discuss close calls, Marinak said.
The new tools are all geared toward uniformity, according to some scorers, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely about the situation.
