During the winter of 1987–88 Gwynn decided to leave superb alone. He would settle for being the best Tony Gwynn in baseball. He knew that hitting home runs was not his natural bent. In 1984 only 36 of his 213 hits were for extra bases. (Only 11 players in history have had 36 or fewer extra-base hits in a 200-hit season.) And he knew that hitting a dozen, maybe even two dozen more home runs might not help him much in his quest for recognition. In 1987 Wade Boggs won his fourth batting title in five years, batted .363 with 24 home runs, and he finished ninth in the MVP voting. Gwynn also knew that home runs in quantity are not necessary for his team to do what he hungers to do—win. When the Padres won their only pennant, in 1984, they had fewer home runs than the last-place Giants. And in 1987 all of baseball had seen how far a team could go powered by players who were not power hitters. The 1987 Cardinals came within one game (game seven of the World Series) of proving themselves to be baseball’s best team. Yet they were last—yes, twenty-sixth—in home runs. They hit only 94, and one man—Jack Clark—hit 35 of them.
A hitter’s job is to contribute to run creation. Hitting safely does that, so batting average is a good measurement of a hitter’s value. It is a good measurement but it is insufficient, for two reasons. First, not all hits are equal. Second, not all failures to hit are equal. Not all hits are equal, for two reasons. Some hits carry the hitter to more bases, closer to a run. And not all hits occur when they would be most productive—particularly, when runners are in scoring position. Baltimore’s Jim Gentile was hardly a household word in his day and today his name certainly does not spring to mind when thoughts turn to remarkable hitting records. But in 1961, when better hitters were making bigger headlines, Gentile set an interesting record—the best ratio of RBIs to hits, an astonishing .959. He drove in 141 runs while getting just 147 hits.
Not all “failures” are really failures. Some of them contribute to run creation. Official scoring reflects this by not charging an at bat when the hitter delivers a sacrifice or sacrifice fly. But a hitter who, with no outs and a runner on second, gives himself up by grounding to the right side of the infield, thereby enabling the runner to advance to third, has “failed” to get a hit but has succeeded at the team project of advancing the process of run creation. One night in 1989 in a 5–1 Padres win over the Reds Gwynn had this batting line: 4 at bats, 0 hits, 0 runs, 3 RBIs. He drove in runs with two infield groundouts and a sacrifice fly. That batting line shows why the only certain failure for a batter is the failure to put the ball in play. By the way, the night before Gwynn’s 4–0–0–3 night, Darren Daulton of the Phillies went 5-for-5 but neither drove in nor scored a run.
Gwynn became one of the National League’s premier players in 1984 at age 24. In the six seasons 1984–89 he hit just 43 home runs, 7 per season. He had 362 RBIs, an average of about 60 a season, a respectable total. He scored 550 runs, or 91 per season, an excellent total.
Batters who, like Gwynn, bat near the top of the order, want to combine power and speed and a discriminating eye that enables them to receive a lot of walks, thereby further fattening their on-base percentage. Davey Johnson remembers playing in Atlanta with Ralph Garr, a leadoff hitter, who in 1974 hit .353. But Garr was not as good a leadoff man as he should have been that year because he walked only 28 times and he struck out 52 times. He should have been batting lower in the order, a better place for someone who can not resist hacking at anything thrown near him. The best leadoff man Johnson ever saw was the Giants’ Bobby Bonds in 1973, the season Bonds almost became what Canseco became 15 years later, baseball’s first 40–40 (home runs and stolen bases) man. Bonds hit .283 but that is only part of the story. Pitchers did not want to pitch to him because he had enough power to hit 39 home runs that year. So they walked him 87 times. But they hated doing that because he had enough speed to steal 43 bases that year.
Any batter would like to make pitchers as anxious as power hitters do. Hear Hershiser on that subject: “Power hitters, in general, if you make your pitch, you get them out. If you make a mistake it will hurt you bad. When I make a mistake to a singles hitter, he hits it for a single. When I make a good pitch to the next singles hitter, he hits it on the ground and I get a double play and it erases the hit. I make a mistake to a power hitter, he hits it out of the park or for a double and I have no way of getting a double play to erase the hit. With singles hitters the odds are in my favor. If they keep hitting the ball on the ground, sooner or later they are going to hit one at somebody for a double play. Or I’ll get the lead runner. But as soon as power hitters hit the ball in the air and they get a double or triple, there is no force play anymore, they can advance with an out and score a run.” Ah, but what if that singles hitter steals second, turning that single into a two-stage, delayed-action double? Then there goes the force play, there goes the double play.
Gwynn has what is called “gap power,” the power to drive hits between outfielders. It is often less spectacular but is almost always more productive than mere “warning-track power,” the power to make noisy outs. Through 1989 Gwynn had 192 doubles and 51 triples. Harmon Killebrew, who hit more home runs than anyone else in the 1960s, is a suitable symbol of big bang baseball: 8,147 at bats, zero sacrifices. Gwynn, with his high average and large number of stolen bases, is a suitable symbol of the direction in which baseball has moved.
Eight decades ago (or so the story is) an extremely fat baseball fan, finding his seat at the park confining, heaved himself to his feet to stretch. It was the seventh inning. Because the 300-pound fellow was the President of the United States, everyone around him stood up respectfully. William Howard Taft thereby started a useful tradition, which is more than can be said for many presidents.
One should not tamper with traditions, but it has been suggested that the seventh-inning stretch should be moved to the fifth inning because games today are, on average, about 45 minutes longer than they were in Taft’s time. Games have been becoming longer partly because fewer hitters are swinging at first and second pitches. Information is one reason more batters are waiting longer before they start swinging. They know, or think they know, pitchers’ patterns, so they sometimes think they gain an advantage on the pitcher by going deeper into the count. Because batters are going deeper into the count, there are more walks and strikeouts, both of which take time. And the increased emphasis on base stealing has pitchers throwing over to first more frequently to hold runners on. Furthermore, Keith Hernandez says that because of advance scouts “the first game of a series becomes a feeling-out process. You might take more pitches to see what they’re thinking.”
The man standing behind the batter and facing the pitcher—the umpire—may be thinking, or at least acting, in a way that both the batter and the pitcher need to be aware of.
“Baseball,” said Bill Veeck, team owner (Indians, Browns, White Sox) and innovator, “is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.” Yes, but like the law, the rules of baseball are not as neat in practice as they are on paper. And the rules, like the law, are not, alas, the same for all people. The mighty have things better. As we have seen already, the history of the strike zone is another episode in the struggle to use written law to define and confine elusive reality. But law can be shaped by the discretion of judges (umpires, in this case). The formal definition of the strike zone has not meant much. When the de jure zone extended from the top of the batter’s shoulders to the bottom of his knees it was nearly twice the size of today’s de facto strike zone. One way umpires have contracted the zone is by using the elasticity inherent in the need to define where the shoulders are relative to the knees when the batter is in his natural stance, or the stance as it is when the batter is in the act of swinging.
Culture follows the law and so today most pitchers are low-ball pitchers. The great pitch of the 1980s was the split-finger fastball, which sinks. Most hitters are low-ball hitters. Otherwise they would not be in the major
leagues. To see how much has changed in a short time, look at Ted Williams’s book The Science of Hitting, published in 1970. In it Williams produced a famous picture of the strike zone filled with baseballs. The zone was divided into different colored sections to show the various percentages he would hit if he swung at pitches delivered there. His strike zone is 11 rows high. The top four rows, filled with balls marked with averages from .300 to .400, are out of the strike zone as umpires call it today, just two decades after Williams wrote that book. Williams had to cope with a larger strike zone than exists today but that was not a handicap because he liked to hit high pitches. The strike zone, he wrote, “is approximately the width of seven baseballs, allowing for pitches on ‘the black’ being called strikes. When a batter starts swinging at pitches just two inches out of that zone, he has increased the pitcher’s target from approximately 4.2 square feet to about 5.8 square feet—an increase of 38 percent. Allow a pitcher that much of an advantage and you will be a .250 hitter.”
There is evidence that umpires give the best batters a smaller strike zone than other batters must cope with, and give the best pitchers bigger strike zones to throw to. Once a flustered rookie pitcher was facing Rogers Hornsby and threw three consecutive pitches that were close to the plate but were called balls. The rookie complained and the umpire responded, “Young man, when you pitch a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know.” Fine pitchers, too, get some deference from umpires. The Tigers’ Jack Morris says he gets, in general, a bigger strike zone as an established veteran than he had as a rookie “and it should be that way.” He says, “Early in the game you establish yourself. I’ll throw two balls right on the corner. They might be balls. But I throw a third one there, it might become a strike because I have shown the umpire that I can put the same pitch in the same location three times.” Morris, therefore, does not complain when the practice of umpires deferring to established stars works to the advantage of some hitters. “My first two years,” Morris remembers, “when Carl Yastrzemski was up, if Carl didn’t swing, it was not a strike. And I mean to tell you I threw balls right down the middle of the plate, belt-high, and you could not doubt it, but if Carl didn’t swing, it was not a strike.”
There once was a judge who liked to say, “In my youth, when matched against a more experienced attorney, I lost many cases I should have won. But later, when I became an experienced attorney and was matched against attorneys fresh from law school, I won many cases I should have lost. Thus justice was served.” Over a long career, things even out.
Strike zones vary, over time and with different umpires. Batting conditions vary in other ways, too. Referring to differences between batting conditions in ballparks, Bill James says what Ping Bodie said when Walter Johnson struck him out: “You can’t hit what you can’t see.” Visibility varies significantly from the best parks (Royals Stadium) to the worst (Shea Stadium). The huge foul territory in Oakland’s Coliseum probably knocks 5 to 7 points off batting averages because of pop fouls that would land in the seats in many other parks. The narrow foul territory in Fenway Park probably adds as much. Since World War II the Red Sox have had 18 batting champions (through 1989), although Ted Williams and Wade Boggs would have prospered anywhere. Five to 7 points are a lot, given that there may be only a 15- or 20-point spread between a good hitting team and a poor hitting team.
The ball carries better at higher altitudes (Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium is baseball’s highest, 1,000 feet above sea level). Yankee Stadium’s deep power alleys clearly hurt Joe DiMaggio, who hit 213 home runs on the road and only 148 at home. Bill James notes that when Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams played in neutral parks (that is, excluding Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium), DiMaggio outhit Williams .333 to .328. With Fenway as his home park, DiMaggio might have hit more than 600 home runs. A tragic automobile accident may have prevented the most freakish playing field of modern times from making a mockery of one of baseball’s most revered records, the record for most home runs in a season. The year the Dodgers moved from Ebbets Field to the Los Angeles Coliseum, with its ludicrous 250-foot left-field line, Don Drysdale’s ERA soared to 4.17 from 2.69 the previous year. If Roy Campanella, master of high-arc home runs, had not been paralyzed in an automobile accident the winter before that first Coliseum season, he might well have beaten Roger Maris in the race to break Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record.
The era of exotic park effects is over. Fenway is the last park with a dominating peculiarity—The Wall, 315 feet down the left-field line—that influences batters and pitchers and managers in many ways. All parks built after 1958 have been required to have foul lines at least 325 feet long and a center-field fence at least 400 feet from home plate. Today the most important variable is the playing surface: grass or plastic. In the National League the player who hits the most doubles is almost always someone who plays his home games on artificial turf. In fact, since 1970 only Bill Buckner with the 1981 and 1983 Cubs has been an exception to that rule. The parks with artificial turf are generally more spacious than those with grass, so the running game is apt to be emphasized on offense. And turf teams need speed to cover the large outfields. Thus turf teams are generally quicker, so their hitters get from home to second quickly while batted balls are rattling around on the large carpeted outfields.
Such parks may offend purists, but they may also be conducive to virtue. Bill James, who is a ballpark determinist, believes that parks can even shape the souls of players, and hence the morales of teams:
I have speculated before that the historical tendency of the Boston Red Sox to split into civil camps of stars and scrubs might be related to the park in which they play. Whereas the Houston Astros play in a park in which an offense consists by necessity of one man who gets on base, one who moves him along, and one who brings him around, Fenway Park rewards and thus encourages players who act as individuals, since they can create runs by their individual acts.
That may be, but Gwynn’s preference for particular parks is less esoteric. His favorite parks away from home are Atlanta and Cincinnati. “They have big gaps and I’m a gap hitter. Any park that has a 385-foot alley, you’ve got to love.” The crucial variable is not the playing surface—Atlanta is grass, Cincinnati is plastic—but the configuration of the park. That matters most in turning singles into doubles and doubles into triples. Regarding Gwynn’s bread and butter, the humble but useful single, he is one of those batters who is amazingly indifferent to the differences between batting conditions in his home park and all the rest. Stan Musial may have been baseball’s most consistent hitter, at least as measured by this stunning statistic: He had 3,630 hits, 1,815 at home and 1,815 on the road. Pete Rose’s 4,256 hits were divided between 2,123 at home and 2,133 on the road. Al Kaline’s 3,007 included 1,508 at home, 1,499 away. Through 1989 Gwynn’s hits were distributed 674 at home and 680 away.
A batter’s experience at the plate can be unpleasant. The first chapter of Leonard Koppett’s A Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball, published in 1967, opens with a one-word paragraph: “Fear.” Koppett continues, “Fear is the fundamental factor in hitting.” The fear is instinctive and reasonable. A baseball is hard and is thrown hard. If it hits you it always hurts, it sometimes injures and it can kill. Tony Kubek says that although almost all players deny it, the “fear factor” is large in baseball. It is more important in baseball than in any other sport. Kubek says, “I remember, years and years ago, when I was first breaking in, Mantle telling me that at least once a year and maybe more ‘I wake up screaming in the middle of the night, sweating a cold sweat, with the ball coming right at my head.’”
Even the most gentlemanly pitchers can be provoked to use fear. Kubek says that Sandy Koufax, “who could throw a baseball maybe better than anybody in history,” once threatened Lou Brock just because Brock stole a base in a crucial situation. As Brock was dusting himself off at second, Koufax turned to him and, according to Kubek, said, “Next time you do that I’m going to hit you right in the head.” Brock s
tole another base against Koufax. He then became the only man Koufax ever hit in the head. Brock stole no more bases off Koufax.
Of course it is batting, not baserunning, that usually brings what used to be called “bean balls” and now is referred to as “chin music.” As was mentioned earlier, there is a particular style of batting that pitchers find especially problematic, and provoking. It is that Charlie Lau style, in which batters dive in over the plate to enhance bat coverage of the outside corner. A batter diving in causes a pitcher to come inside to drive the batter back. Close observers of the game detected a pattern: Teams coached by Lau had an unusual number of hit batters and bench-clearing dust-ups. Andre Dawson of the Cubs is a “diving” batter. It was in a game against the Padres at Wrigley Field that Dawson, diving in against the pitches of Eric Show, was hit in the face by a slider. Gwynn remembers that day clearly because the Cubs’ pitcher, Scott Sanderson, tried to retaliate. Sanderson’s principle of proportionality identified Gwynn as the Padre of Dawson’s stature. “Sanderson was taking potshots at me the day Dawson got hit. He was buzzing me. I got in my same stance. I was still diving over the plate. I took a couple of fastballs running in right at my chin. I got out of the way. If I get hit, I’m not going to get it in the head.”
Men at Work Page 25
