by Bob Gibson
But if it’s somebody you haven’t seen before, it sure can’t hurt to watch some tape on him. The best scout in the game is the video camera. You no longer have to depend on what somebody thinks he saw. Video gets it right. It enables you to actually visualize yourself standing in the batter’s box against Josh Beckett.
Now, with MLB’s live satellite feed, you can sit at home in an overstuffed chair, or in the clubhouse eating Raisin Bran, and watch virtually any game that’s being played. Each one of them comes with a former player or manager or expert of some sort who breaks down practically every pitcher and hitter. It’s all right there for you.
This is not your father’s scouting report.
Bob Gibson
It beats word of mouth and a few scribbles on a piece of paper. I’m glad the Yankees didn’t have digital technology before the ’64 World Series, or the Red Sox in ’67 or the Tigers in ’68.
Reggie Jackson
Still, the biggest difference to me is not the electronics involved. It’s the fact that hitting is now viewed as a science.
Guys like Ted Williams and Rogers Hornsby may have looked at it that way, but there wasn’t much hitting instruction when I was a young player. The dynamics of how, technically, to swing the bat, or how to hit a particular pitcher, just weren’t thought about like they are now. A lot of players read Williams’s book (The Science of Hitting) after it came out in 1971, but in general we didn’t yet have the knowledge of how to dissect and decipher the mechanics of the game. It was more a case of whether you could hit or not.
Bob Gibson
On top of that, there’s all the analysis now by numbers. The statistics available for every player these days are mind-boggling. You can just flip around on your computer a little bit and come up with something like a guy’s batting average for the balls he actually puts in play, or the percentage of line drives he hits. I’m not sure what all that tells you, but it’s right there on your screen. You can get a pitcher’s ERA adjusted for the ballpark he pitches in. You can find out what your won-loss record would have been if some of the stuff you couldn’t control—like run support, relief pitching, that sort of thing—had turned out exactly average. I saw somewhere that, in 1968, I should have been 28–4 instead of 22–9.
But there were no instructions on how to apply for the back pay.
Reggie Jackson
It’s ironic: Now that we can see more baseball than we ever could, it seems like fewer and fewer people—outsiders, anyway—are actually using their eyes to evaluate players.
Bob Gibson
There’s another effect of all the games on TV. A lot more players these days have started thinking of themselves as stars.
In my day, guys didn’t do that much strutting or showboating. They knew better. Really, the only one was Willie Montañez. He’d hit a home run and he’d veer all the way over in front of the other dugout when he was circling the bases.
Reggie took being a star to a different level—he was known for that famous quote, “the magnitude of me”—and he sort of refined the home-run trot; but that was just Reggie. He was an original. The guys today are poor imitations. Every other second baseman has his own trot.
And the hell of it is, if you try to spot a fastball to put a guy in his place, he wants to fight you and the umpire wants to throw you out.
Reggie Jackson
Plus, the batter’s standing in there wearing armor up and down his body.
Bob Gibson
That doesn’t bother me. I think I could break some of it.
Reggie Jackson
I just don’t like the look of it. I think the game should be played the way it was meant to be played.
When I watched Mantle, when I watched Aaron and Mays, the dream was to wear the major-league uniform and look like one of the great players. They weren’t up there with battle armor and two gloves on. I wouldn’t do it if I played today. If they made me wear an ear flap, I’d get used to the rules and wear it; but I really don’t like all the gingerbread that goes with the armor and the gloves.
Bob Gibson
The extra padding, to me, is just another little thing that chips away at the basic nature of baseball. But I’m not concerned that it gives the hitter an advantage. If a pitcher makes good pitches, he’ll get most guys out. The protection might make a batter feel a little more comfortable at the plate, which goes against my grain, but it doesn’t matter that much. There are bigger issues than that.
Reggie Jackson
I just never like it when they mess with what I consider to be the natural order of the game—the war between the batter and the pitcher. Retaliation is a part of that. When you allow a guy to go up to the plate in a suit of armor, you’re interfering with the natural process of retaliation.
Bob Gibson
We old guys tend to think that the natural order of the game is the way it was when we played it. Maybe we shouldn’t get too caught up in thinking that our time is the standard for everything.
I could grumble, for example, that they’ve messed with the baseball itself. I was playing in a fantasy camp in Arizona once, and a guy gave me a sixty-mile-an-hour fastball that I hit over a twenty-foot-high fence more than four hundred feet away in dead center field. I was in my fifties. I couldn’t hit a ball that far in my twenties. I was using an aluminum bat, and I’m sure that accounted for some of it, but there was no doubt in my mind that the ball was a whole lot livelier than the one we played with.
Who’s to say, though, that ours was superior to the one they use today?
Reggie Jackson
Better the ball be juiced than the players.
Bob Gibson
There are two separate areas in all of this. There’s the spirit of the game and there’s the integrity of the game. If you sit on the back porch of the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, shooting the bull with Hall of Famers, you’ll hear some guys who are concerned about one and some guys who are concerned about the other and some guys who are concerned about both. You won’t hear many old-timers who aren’t concerned about either.
Steroids undermine the integrity of the game. I’d just as soon leave that one for other people to negotiate, because integrity, to me, is a briar patch.
It’s the spirit of the game that I’m worried about.
Reggie Jackson
Put me down for both.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to acknowledge David Black, for pulling it all together; Bill Thomas, for his vision; Reggie’s associate, Frank Perry; Reggie’s boss, The Boss, George Steinbrenner; and Dennis Tuttle, Lonnie’s sounding board. Reggie would also like to thank the individual who recruited him for this project, “arguably the greatest right-handed pitcher of all time, and the one I most admire.” All agree that it has been an honor.
Copyright © 2009 by Robert Gibson and Reginald Martinez Jackson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gibson, Bob, 1935–
Sixty feet, six inches : a Hall of Fame pitcher & a Hall of Fame hitter talk about
how the game is played / by Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson, with Lonnie
Wheeler.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Batting (Baseball)—Anecdotes. 2. Pitching (Baseball)—Anecdotes.
3. Gibson, Bob, 1935—Anecdotes. 4. Jackson, Reggie—Anecdotes. I. Jackson,
Reggie. II. Wheeler, Lonnie. III. Title.
GV869.G53 2006
796.357—dc22 2009010573
eISBN: 978-0-385-53216-7
v3.0
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