When the Chicago Cubs hit a franchise-record nine home runs in a 17-3 drubbing of the Milwaukee Brewers a few weeks ago, the outburst came with a giant asterisk. A third of those homers came against a pitcher whose job in baseball is to do everything but pitch.
Trailing by eight in the seventh, the Brewers had sent first baseman Andrew Vaughn to the mound to mop up. He lobbed the ball plateward at an average of 43 miles an hour, mixing high-arcing eephus pitches with something meant to approximate a knuckleball. He faced 18 batters over two innings, yielded seven runs, and surrendered three home runs that traveled more than 1,200 feet combined.
“It was a humiliation ritual for everyone involved,” Jared Diamond writes in Friday’s Journal.
How it got to 142
Non-pitchers have made a record 142 pitching appearances this season, entering Wednesday — a 446% increase from a decade ago, when it happened 26 times. Twenty years ago a position player didn’t pitch at all in a season. There have been more instances this year than from 1969 through 2001 combined, excluding Shohei Ohtani, who is officially classified as a two-way player.
And not one person decided this should happen. Every step was locally rational.
Starters work fewer innings than at any point in the history of the game, so bullpens carry more of the load, so relievers appear with shocking regularity. That makes teams reluctant to use actual pitchers in games they have little chance of winning, since it burns arms they may need tomorrow. New rules limiting how often pitchers can be optioned to the minors stopped teams from cycling through fresh bodies. So the remaining move is to have a spare player float the ball toward the plate and hope the defense gets it over with.
“It does stink when pitchers come in and they are throwing 30 miles an hour,” said Colorado Rockies catcher Brett Sullivan. “It is almost a farce.” Sullivan would know: he has pitched seven times in 2026 despite never having pitched in high school. Athletics outfielder Carlos Cortes has done it nine times.
The rules of the farce
There are conventions. Position players are actively instructed not to exert themselves, lest they get hurt — plenty have been reminded that slugger José Canseco needed Tommy John surgery after an ill-fated relief appearance in 1993. Rockies outfielder Troy Johnston learned the lesson last month, admonished from the plate for trying sliders and curveballs while down 11-2. He returned a week later with a new approach: “It already sucks. Don’t make it suck more.”
Sullivan warns his infielders: “Hey, be ready. One’s coming in hot at you.” And there have already been 666 pitches thrown under 45 mph this season — more than the total from 2015 through 2023 combined.
MLB officials are now wondering whether to intervene. Currently a position player may pitch when his team is losing by eight or more, or leading by at least ten in the ninth. The league is considering widening the permissible spread. This is regulation arriving after the behavior, which is the normal order.
Our read
This is the cleanest illustration of drift you will read this month, and drift is what actually ruins financial plans — not crashes.
Every decision in the chain was defensible. Protect the arm. Save the reliever for tomorrow. Don’t waste a pitcher on a lost game. Sum them and you get 666 pitches under 45 miles an hour and a league debating whether to write a rule.
The household version is identical and much quieter. A portfolio nobody rebalanced for four years is now 80% equity because the winners grew; nobody chose that allocation, it simply accumulated. A cash balance that was meant to be three months of expenses is now eighteen, because moving it never got urgent. A subscription stack that grew one reasonable $12 decision at a time. An insurance policy sized for a household that no longer exists. Not one of those is a mistake. Together they are a different plan than the one that was written down.
Which is the entire argument for a scheduled review rather than a triggered one. You do not notice drift by looking harder; you notice it by comparing the position to the plan on a date you set in advance, when nothing in particular is happening. Fifteen minutes, twice a year, bring the statement. Nobody’s coming in hot at you — that is rather the point.