Major League Baseball’s rules committee has voted to ban home plate collisions, MLB Rules Committee Chairman and New York Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson announced Wednesday.
Alderson said the rule change came about over concern for players’ safety as well as “general concern about concussions that exists not only in baseball but throughout professional sports and amateur sports today.”
The specifics of how the rule will be enforced and which home plate collisions will be banned has not been decided. “The actual detail, frankly the kinds of plays that we’re trying to eliminate, we haven’t finely determined,” Alderson said. ”I would expect to put together 100 of these plays and identify which ones we want to continue to allow and others that we want to prohibit, and draft a rule accordingly.”
If the MLB Players Union agrees to the change, it will go into effect in 2014, the Associated Press reports. Without players’ approval, the MLB can unilaterally implement the change for the 2015 season.
[AP]