In its ongoing but probably futile effort to speed up the game, the league has made illegal the infrequent and largely impotent time-waster in which a pitcher fakes a throw to third base and then spins around and throws to first in the hope of picking off a confused base runner who has strayed too far from the bag.
Perhaps we are also reminded that - even in these desperate and impotent times - human agency and freedom still have some space, however beleaguered, in which to manoeuvre, even when they allow themselves no false luxuries of innocence or hope.
For all that work, Bono added, he felt artistically "impotent" at times and did not love the show until a preview performance late last month.
Instead, the troops were served with a dogged defence of the coalition's failing economic policy, lightened only by a sprinkling of words about aspiration and opportunity, language which has been ubiquitous as it has been impotent since the time of Tony Blair.
In their worst performance since... well, two weeks ago, the Tigers were utterly impotent after half-time as they scored just one goal in an hour of play and the Demons piled on six in the tumbling rain.
Now as the Brexit vote is quickly swallowed by the news cycle (and will probably be remembered as a polarizing but ultimately impotent squib), it's time for Continental Europe to step it up.
The latter were at times rendered impotent by the stylish work of some of the Sri Lankan tradition's most distinguished present-day inheritors, Atapattu and Jayawardene, but overall stuck to their work.
I felt pained at being away from home – cut off in rural Cambodia – at a time like this, impotent and powerless.
Aaliyah's relationship with her mother, her years spent at a bookshop, her brief time with an impotent husband and her friendship with a young Palestinian boy are punctuated by the bombs dropped on the city over the years, the establishment of Israel and the greatest literature made in the past millenium.
Sammy drove Bresnan back down the ground with elbow high for the most aesthetic boundary of the day, and as the total passed 200 and the shadows began to lengthen after tea England looked, for the first time, a little impotent.
Do you have time for an impotent rant about how scared I am?" This bedraggled suburban lady is terribly aggrieved at the way the Obama administration briefly wanted to try terrorists in (the vastly more effective) civilian courts.
