Just curious what you think about those angles.

As soon as I saw the post about the 5-game balk by one pitcher, I just knew it had to come from that season.

Regarding the Verlander balk of the other day - I've expressed here before that I don't think a balk should be called if the pitcher falls down, trips, gets blown over by the wind (Stu Miller in an All Star game in Candlestick Park during my childhood), etc. It should just be a "no pitch". I remember watching a Braves game on TBS, probably in the early or mid-1990s, and seeing a pitcher accidentally lose the ball just before he threw it. It was called a balk, and I was outraged! (What would the call have been if the bases had been empty.) I remember that it was the Braves' opponents' pitcher, and I thought I had remembered that it was Mark Portugal, probably with the Astros at the time. But when I looked up Portugal's games against the Braves hoping to verify this, I didn't find such a play against the Braves. That was a while back.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS199806060.shtml

And no, I didn't do some elaborate search; I found out about it the old-fashioned way -- I attended the game.

The balk is a subjective call, so subject to umpire's judgement that small differences in balk totals are probably mostly meaningless.

@19
David, your post is really relevant, I think. Pickoffs are the reward for skirting the rulebook with respect to move to the plate. There is a risk/reward ratio for balks that is difficult to evaluate without pickoff data.

But then pickoffs can't be separated from CS where the runner was hung out to dry so badly that he went for second.

"Shaw briefly earned the nickname "Balk Shaw" in 1963. That year the umpires had a directive to enforce the balk rule of coming to a full one second stop in the stretch. Since this rule had not been enforced to the letter previously, a few guys had trouble adjusting most notably Shaw. It became farcical on May 4, 1963 in a game against the Cubs, when umpire Al Barlick called 5 balks on Shaw in one game bringing his total for the season to date to 8. ... The uproar that ensued resulted in a directive to the umps to return to their previous rule interpretation and Shaw did not record another balk the rest of the year."
http://brewersfandemonium.yuku.com/topic/23497

I hadn't known that there had been a balk-enforcement directive in 1963 like the one in 1988. But the evidence is there in the NL balk totals by year:
1962, 48
1963, 147
1964, 36

The AL balk totals suggest that the directive went to NL umps only -- which would not be surprising, since each league handled its own umpires independently. The AL balk totals for those 3 years were 44, 47 and 29.

thanks for covering for me Raphy