THE EXTRAORDINARY PECULIARITY OF A WHIFF

By Richard Rosen

I’m here to talk this week about what has recently occurred to me is a statistical oddity in major league baseball, and that’s the strike out.  Now I hear you all out there saying: The strike out?  What’s odd about that?  Three strikes and you’re out, the rule’s been in place since Creation (actually 1889), what could be simpler than that?  As you know there are three different kinds of strikes in baseball:

1) the called strike: a pitch that passes through the strike zone unscathed by the hitter, then judged to have done so, usually incorrectly according to the hitter, by the umpire;. 

2) the swinging strike: a pitch, whether in or out of the strike zone, at which the hitter swings and misses.  

(Where the called strike depends on the umpire to make the proper determination, the swinging strike is based entirely on the hitter’s performance—or non-performance as the case may be—and relieves the umpire of anything but the most perfunctory, almost redundant call.) 

3) the foul strike, a pitch swung on and hit or tipped into foul territory. 

But think for the nonce about the strike out.  It is, after all, an out, but apparently a very special kind of out.  Why?  Ask yourself: What other kinds of outs typically show up on the pitcher’s stats sheet?  Take for example a routine grounder to short or a lazy pop fly to center. The players involved with those batted balls invariably transform them into an out, the shortstop with a slick pick-up-and-in-one-fluid-motion throws to first (for which he’s awarded an assist, not an out; the first baseman gets all the kudos for that), the center fielder with a snappy one-handed catch (doing that in Little League got you benched immediately; we were under strict orders to always catch with two hands, but that’s another story).  What then, I ask you, fair reader, is the ultimate difference between the strike out and the ground or fly out?  They’re both outs, nicht wahr?  And yet the first gets its own column on the pitcher’s stats sheet (abbreviated SO), and the latter two—both just as out as a strike out—get, as my grandmother used to say, bubkis. Why isn’t there a GO (ground outs) or FO (fly outs) column on the pitcher’s sheet?  Or even more egregiously, a strike out is only ONE out, but a double play is TWO, which is by all standards TWICE as good as an SO.  Where’s the DPI (double plays induced) column I ask you? Who led the league last year in this important category, huh, and who holds the career record for DPIs?  Exactly, no one knows, but we all know about Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax and Roger - uh, never mind him.  People, pitchers have just two responsibilities: get 27 outs while at the same time allowing the fewest runs possible, preferably zero.  Runs allowed are listed on the stats sheet, so why not the other side of the equation: Outs?

Thus the question arises: Why is there such a fascination with what is, in essence, an out?  One suggestion is that most strike out pitchers, except for that knuckleballer Dickey with the Mets, are flame throwers, and Americans like speed.  Tell me, and be honest: is there anything more spine-tingling than 97 mph fastball?  Why else does the typical baseball broadcast nowadays include a speed gun reading (frequently engulfed in cartoony flames) in the little box on the screen that marks the inning and score?  Speed gun readings are also routinely posted on the stadium score board in oversized numbers.  But I think there’s a flip, darker side to the strike out: the hitter often appears foolish or incompetent, swinging futilely and ridiculously late as the baseball roars unhittably past.  This provides the typical beer-sotted fan with a brief though glorious moment of superiority (but only if the hitter belongs to the visiting team), during which time he can look down his nose at the struck out Gomer skulking back to the dugout, bat held in one hand like a baguette, which it might as well have been for all the chance he had of even fouling off a Nolan Ryan Express.  Of course the average fan conveniently overlooks the fact that, put in the same situation as the hitter, standing in against Justin Verlander or, God forbid, Aroldis Chapman, the result would be the same (that is, if he didn’t duck for cover after the first pitch).  So there you have a few thoughts on the strike out; be sure to send your cards and letters to BD and let us know what you think too. 

Note: Be sure to check in next time when I report on the progress of my campaign to clean up baseball terminology.  You might remember I decided to give up the attempt to push for correction of the somewhat misleading phrase "home run," to change it to the more accurate "home trot".  I’ve run into stiff opposition on this one from baseball traditionalists, especially those who spent any time playing in the old Mexican League, but I’m pleased to note they at least acknowledge there’s a problem with "four bagger"; still they are balking, so to speak, at the more precise "three bagger and one irregular plastic pentagon" or the more concise "quadruple".  I’ve also received a number of encouraging signs from the California legislature regarding my proposed bill that would require team managements to muzzle broadcasters who repeatedly refer to a homer as a "big fly".  This is especially strong among Southland representatives, who tell me that the Angel broadcasters, the worst offenders of my proposed law, have taken to calling a single a "little fly," a double a "middle sized fly," and (surely as a joke) a triple a "big fly minus one."  I’ll also report on my colleague Merv Throneberry’s progress in getting a baseball diamond called what it actually is, a square.

STRONG ADVICE #2

With the Flyin' Hawaiian

Tom Gibson strongly advises you to go here and here.


 

 

 

THE TEN MOST DISTURBING RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, PART 2

by Richard Rosen

5. Overly exuberant walk offs.  But chest thumping (#6)  takes a back seat to modern day walk offs.  OK, if you’re Dusty Rhodes or Bill Mazeroski or Joe Carter, then yes, let’s get really excited.  But a single that drives in the winning run in June for a team going nowhere deserves at most a pat on the ass, not a wild celebration during which the offending player is pummeled by his teammates, then hit with whipped cream pie as he’s being interviewed by the team’s token female reporter. 

4. High-fiving everything.  But wait, it gets worse.  Moving  along a runner from second to third with a ground out nowadays seems one celebratory step down from a five-run homer.  EVERYTHING a player does today gets a high-five from teammates; I wouldn’t be surprised if most pro players walk around all day with sore palms. 

3. Noise and/or fireworks.  There’s more.  Nowadays many, if not most, stadiums are equipped with what I can only describe as noise machines and fireworks cannons.  Let a home player hit a home run and all hell breaks loose.  But friends, is all this whoop-de-do really needed?  Isn’t the sound of the stadium’s OOOOOOOO as the ball sails majestically into the fifth row of the bleachers, and the maniacal cheering of the assembled multitudes, what really should be heard and nothing more?  If you need something to pump you up for a home player’s four bagger, you probably shouldn’t be at the game in the first place. 

2. More wild cards.  Oh yeah, this is just what we need, another "wild card" in the mix, if only for one game.  The game is already cheapened by wild card World Series winners, teams that didn’t win their division after 162 games.  How many more games do you need to play to prove who’s top dog, who then can lose a 5- or 7-game series to a team that finished SECOND TO YOU?  Where’s the justice in that?  Pretty soon we’ll have the same set up as basketball, where just about every crappy team makes the playoffs, which then drag on forever in order to boost television revenues. 

1. Ticket prices.  Won’t say much about this except: Been to a game lately?  Where’d you sit? In the "party area" 6000 feet from home plate, or right behind home plate where you could hear the ball thumping the catcher’s mitt?  What’d you pay for the "party," and what for the sound of thumping?  Did you feel like you got your money’s worth?  I went to an A’s game at the Oakland Coliseum recently, and after all the lousy music played at 11 over the PA system, the expensive seats behind home plate (which because the place is really set up for football might as well be bleacher seats), the distracting vendors parading by constantly with their cotton candy and faux lemonaid, the stupid mascot, and all the other bad-taste intrusions supposed to make the game more "family friendly", I sure didn’t.  I remember Edmonds Field in old Sacramento in the late 50s, you could go to a game and watch the Solons get crushed without all the fol-de-rol.  Ah, the good old days. 

0. Pointing toward the sky.  There’s just one more disturbing thing that for me is off the chart, and that’s pointing at the sky after a hit.  The player IS SEEMINGLY THANKING GOD FOR LETTING HIM GET A HIT.  If this is not the most ridiculous thing in the world, then it's very close to it. Does that same player point at the Earth after striking out and blame the Devil?  The absolute worst offender is Nick Swisher, with his smug, self-satisfied little grin.  He’s in his walk year, and he’s the one guy (after AJ Burnett, who of course has now won 100 games for Pittsburgh) I really hope the Yankees dump.  God doesn’t care if you hit .233 or .600, Nick, he/she/it might not even like baseball, though of course he/she/it devised the game in the first place. 

THE TEN MOST DISTURBING RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

by Richard Rosen

 

I don’t go to many baseball games anymore.  I’ll explain the reason for that below, but I’m a customer of MLB.com, which means I can watch almost every baseball game every day.   (Local teams the Giants and the A’s are totally blacked out, whether at home or on the road, and ESPN and Fox games are also blacked out).  Most days I plan my schedule around the Yankee game, which much of the time starts in the Eastern time zone, which means 4:00 pm on week nights and 10:00 am on week ends.  Whether or not I catch the Bombers, I ALWAYS watch the day’s highlights, which,  depending on my mood and the quality of the games, usually takes between 45 minutes and an hour.  What should you watch when time is limited?  In ascending order: shortstop throws from deep in the hole; home runs, especially hit by Prince Fielder, Michael Morse, and Giancarlo Stanton; any triple; right fielder throws to third or home; any argument leading to an ejection, preferably of the manager; no hitters.  

But in recent years I’ve noticed some disturbing developments in America’s former pastime. I’m not exactly sure what I mean by "recent years", some of these developments are quite recent, others have been around for much longer and have been nagging at me like an ache that won’t go away.  Of course the absolute most disturbing development in my lifetime has been the institution of the Designated Hitter, which has largely spoiled the purity of the American League for me.  Now that Houston (what a joke) is heading over to the AL, it’s very likely that the NL will soon cave into pressure to add the DH, which will desecrate the game entirely for generations to come, until (as I predict) some time in the future there will be an irresistible movement to restore the game to its original God given plan, and the pitchers will once again be hitting .133 in the ninth spot in the order. 

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about the hated DH, no, I have other fish to saute (I’m on a diet and fried food is fattening).  Here are my most disturbing recent developments in the world’s greatest game: 

10. The disappearance of sanitary socks.  Most players wear their pants down to their shoes, like regular street pants, ruining the sleek lines of the traditional uni. Thank God for Hunter Pence and players like him who know how to properly attire themselves on the diamond.

9. Flat hat brims.  The pants are bad enough, but now many younger players don’t properly curve their hat brims, they leave them flat.  I always imagined that it was an innate tendency in humans to, upon getting a new cap, immediately curve just so.  But apparently I was mistaken. It’s an ugly look, have a gander at Joba Chamberlain the next time he gets in a game if you don’t believe me. 

8. Football numbers.  One of the most important decisions you could make as a young player was: what number do I want on my uni?  I always hankered after 7, the Mick’s number, but thought it too sacrosanct.  Eventually I hit on the perfect solution, I took 13, a number back in the early 60s when I was playing organized ball NOBODY would touch with a 10-foot bat.  I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, and 13 fit that identity well.  But everyone knows that proper baseball numbers range between 1 and 44, sometimes slipping into the high 40s or low to mid 50s on extraordinary occasions, like Don Drysdale (53) or Jim Bouton (55, but only because he wrote Ball Four).  Numbers began creeping into the high 50s and God forbid 60s over the last 25 years or so, but they were usually temporary, given to rooks in spring training, who then changed to proper baseball numbers if they made the team.  And in the last few years these essentially football numbers are becoming more and more permanent. As one example, I watched Dustin Pedroia get kicked out of a game the other night, and as his replacement trotted out to second I got a whiff of his number: 77.  Now this is particularly egregious, everyone knows second basemen have low or single digit numbers like Bobby Richardson or Nellie Fox. Who wants a defensive lineman making the pivot on a double play, or a linebacker hitting lead off? 

7. Pitchers’ facial hair.  I certainly have nothing against hair. It was my generation of the 60s that made long hair on men perfectly acceptable. I still let my hair grow pretty long sometimes, but it’s all white and scraggly nowadays where it used to be black and wavy. Anyway, this whole fad I believe was popularized by Brian Wilson after the Giants lucked into a World Championship a couple years back. Everyone started emulating that ridiculous black beard he grew, the worst offender I’ve seen recently is that relief pitcher for Pittsburgh, Hanrahan I think his name is. That look is fine on a pro wrestler or a tow truck driver, but not on a pro baseball player. 

6. Chest thumping.  There’s no crying in baseball, you don’t show emotion unless it’s because the ump screws up or you’re reading your acceptance speech to the Hall of Fame (or you’re Billy Martin getting fired for the umpteenth time, you remember Billy Bawl, don’t you?). But nowadays the displays of emotion are getting out of hand, starting with chest thumping. That’s OK for a football player after a sack or a shooting guard who just drained a 3, but that’s football and basketball, clearly inferior contests where that kind of showing off is part of the "scene." 

TO BE CONTINUED

THE BASEBALL DIARY REVIEW OF BOOKS #1: THE BASEBALL CODES by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca

Review by Richard Rosen

For the past couple weeks I’ve been slowly working my way through The Baseball Codes: Beanball, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca (as you probably already realize, baseball is no longer "America’s pastime"—that title belongs nowadays to greed and violence—these guys are either living in the past, maybe 1940 or so, or hoping to pull some nostalgic wool over our eyes to sell more units).  I wouldn’t say it’s a great book, but it’s quite enjoyable in its own way IF you’re a baseball nerd or geek, which I sort of am (example: working on a recent New York Times Crossword Puzzle, the clue is "First name of outfielder Roush"; if you can immediately come up with the three letter answer, as I did, consider yourself a nerd or geek). The book has 23 chapters on such "unwritten rules" as sign stealing, running into the catcher (Buster Posey and Ray Fosse beware), and mound conference etiquette.  After reading about half the book, you get the impression that most baseball players are slightly more sensitive than 13-year-old girls (excuse me, ladies, for using this analogy, but I lived with a 13-year-old female for a year and I can say with authority it was far more challenging than the Terrible Twos, the Thankless Threes, the Frustrating Fours, the Fitful Fives, right on through to today, to the Know-it-All Nineteens).  With a baseball player or team, step one inch over the line, which is quite invisible to the average fan, and a retribution reminiscent of the Yahweh depicted in the oldest strata of the Torah (which the Christians mistakenly call the Old Testament) will rain down on the offender(s).  Sometimes it’ll happen later in the same game, sometimes in the next game the two teams play, but sometimes it takes months or years for the score to be settled. It seems that baseball players have elephant-like memories, which is to say they NEVER forget. 

Anyway, I have mlb.com on my iPad—for $115 you can watch EVERY game EVERY day through the playoffs.  (The only restriction is a black out of my local teams, the Giants and A’s.  I can understand blacking out home games, after all, decent seats at the Giants’ AT&T Park are only $75 a pop, so Giants games are quite affordable; you only need to fast for a week to save up.  But why do they black out away games?  Do they think I won’t go to, oh, Cincinnati or God forbid HOUSTON to catch the game if it’s on the iPad?)  My evening routine invariably includes reviewing the day’s action through the highlights posted for each game.  I always start out with the Yankees IF THEY WIN, losses are suppressed deep down where I keep relationship issues with my parents, embarrassing junior high school mishaps, which were legion, and of course Yankee World Series defeats going back to 1955, the first one I remember, and the painful loss to the Pirates in 1960, where obviously the better team lost.  I mean the only decent player on that team with the funny-looking uni tops was Roberto Clemente and ... oh, never mind, it might be time to let that one go after 52 years.  But 1960 was back in when the Series WAS PLAYED DURING THE DAY WHILE EVERYONE WAS IN SCHOOL. How cruel was that? If the teacher was cool he/she let the class listen on the radio, but if not, desperate measures were called for. Remember those little transistor radios, about the outside dimensions of an iPod but about 20 times thicker?  What you did was stick it in your pants waist and covered it up with a tucked-in shirt, then ran the earplug line up through your sleeve, and spent the class resting the side of your head in your palm to cover up the earplug.  Sometimes it worked.  Sometimes it didn’t.

But I digress. A couple of nights ago I was witness to a remarkable example of one of the unwritten codes during a crucial game between the first place Reds and the second place Pirates.  (Of course now that MLB has about 80 teams and 30 divisions, first and second place are pretty meaningless.  What’s needed is a system like the English soccer league: there would be two leagues with eight teams in each, as God intended, AND NO DH. No inter-league play, no "playoffs," leave that to that awful game called "basketball".  The first place team in each league then meets in the World Series.  Period.  All this comes right from the Burning Bush. BUT, the WORST two teams in each league get their butts RELEGATED, that’s what the Brits call it, down they go to lower leagues and the two BEST teams in each lower league get promoted for the next season.  Thus a World Series victory actually means something, and we don’t have the farce of a "wildcard," usually a mediocre team that gets hot and/or lucky near the end of the season, backing into the Fall "Classic" and cheapening the hallowed Series.  Course it’ll never happen.  Why?  Simple, the teams getting relegated will lose a ton of revenue, and the owners would never stand for that).

But I digress again.  Here’s the set up.  It’s the top of the ninth, Cincy leading 3-zip, and naturally they bring in their lights out reliever, Aroldis Chapman.  Ever seen this guy pitch?  His fast ball, which he throws almost exclusively—and why not?—tops out sometimes at 102 MILES PER HOUR.  Think about this for a moment.  Do the math.  A mile equals 5280 feet, so if you were driving in a car at a steady rate of 102 miles per, in one hour you’d travel 538,560 feet.  Now there are 60 minutes in an hour, and 3600 seconds. So in one second at 102 mph you’d travel about 150 feet.  The pitcher’s rubber is 60 feet, 6 inches from home, so at 102 mph it takes the baseball .4 second to go from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt.  That’s POINT 4 SECOND, just to be clear.  That’s literally as fast as the blink of an eye.  That’s how much time a hitter has to decide whether or not to swing, WHEN IT’S A FAST BALL, which he doesn’t know if one’s coming or not, it could be a 95 mph, sharp-breaking curve that looks for all the world LIKE a fastball—the arm slot and speed have a fast ball throw appearance—but at the last minute the ball drops off the edge of a table and the hitter swings futilely, looking like a complete fool, which he technically is, at a pitch WAY out of the strike zone, missing by a country mile. Grab some wood, meat, as Mike Krukow likes to say.

Anyway first batter up for the Bucs is Andrew McCutcheon, leading the NL in hitting.  Aroldis, this big lanky Cuban defector, winds up and unleashes an off-speed pitch, only 100 mph, AND IT HITS ANDREW IN THE LEFT SHOULDER.  Now friends, I ask you—and of course I realize that most of you have never batted against someone like Aroldis—but think about it.  What’s the first thing you’d do if you were drilled like that?  Collapse in a heap?  Start crying?  Die of shock?  It’s really hard to say, but one thing I GUARANTEE you’d do, and that’s rub.  Ouchy, ouchy, ouchy, you’d use your left hand to rub and try and soothe the throbbing spot, which likely has an impression of the seams of the offending ball.  But ah, if you did this you’d be breaking one of the most honored unwritten rules in all of baseball, and that is: DON’T RUB. Don’t give the pitcher the satisfaction of knowing he put a hurt on you, even if he wasn’t throwing at you. And true to this code, ANDREW DIDN’T RUB!  He bent over, removed his hitter’s shin guard, fired it toward the Pirates’ bench, glared at Chapman for about 5 seconds, and trotted to first. The camera followed him down the baseline, all the way to first, and he DIDN’T RUB!  The camera even lingered on him as he took his lead, and still he DIDN’T RUB.  It was one of the most amazing exhibitions of the hidden game of baseball I’ve ever had the pleasure to witness.

I leave you with a song I was immediately reminded of, by Michael Martin Murphy, called Cowboy Logic:

That's cowboy logic, every cowboy's got it

It's in the way he lives his life and the songs he sings

That's cowboy logic, every cowboy's got it

He's got a simple solution to just about anything

If it's a job, do it. Put your back in to it.

'Cause a little bit of dirt's gonna wash off in the rain

If it's a horse, ride it. If it hurts, hide it.

Dust yourself off and get back on again.