It's become a common sight now in other sports: Player absorbs a blow to the head, player's taken off for concussion protocol, player's not seen for a few minutes ... and the player either returns or doesn't.
In baseball, of course, no one returns. Because the way Abner Doubleday drew it up. Once a player is lifted, that's it.
Neal Huntington evidently would like that to expand.
The Pirates' general manager, in referencing Francisco Cervelli being placed on the seven-day concussion list Sunday, made known that he and others on the team have had "internal dialogue" about approaching Major League Baseball to "assess a rule change" that would allow potentially concussed players to be tested in a quiet space -- as they are in the NFL, NHL and NBA -- then be allowed to return if they're cleared.
It'd happen in cases, Huntington elaborated, "where any player who's had a concussion-risk incident should be allowed to be removed from the game, taken off the field, taken into the locker room, assessed by a doctor, assessed by a trainer, for an extended period of time ... and then be allowed to re-enter the game."
The primary reason, he added, is that players will almost invariably push to stay in the same brief period that an athletic trainer is afforded to overrule him.
"Right now, all of this has to happen on the field. Sometimes the symptoms are evident, and it's an easy removal. Sometimes they take time, as they did last night with Cervelli on the field."
Cervelli was hit in the back of his catching helmet in the fourth inning Saturday night by the broken-bat backswing of the Dodgers' Joc Pederson. He was visited by Hurdle and athletic trainer Bryan Housand and stayed. But when it was Cervelli's turn to bat in the bottom half, he stepped out of the box, looked back to the dugout and waved himself out.
"The player has to feel pressure to stay in there, with 30,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 eyes on him," Huntington continued. "He has to feel pressure to make a decision, 'Am I in or out of this game?' And he knows, if he takes himself out ... he's the catcher, and there's only one other catcher, and then the game becomes a fiasco if that other catcher gets hurt."
I joked that he was in for no small challenge undoing a century and a half of hard precedent for the national pastime.
"Absolutely," he came back. "But things change. You used to get your bell rung and stay in. You shouldn't be doing that anymore. You should be understanding what this means."
Smiling, he then acknowledged that by broaching such a subject through the media: "I'm sure I'm going to get some phone calls."
I have much from Huntington on Cervelli's injury, as well as the Pirates' pitching status, including this video with my questions on the latter:
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