Is there ever a trace of fear in Gwynn when he goes to bat? “Not at all,” he says with a firmness convincingly free of bravado. “I just feel I’m quick enough to get out of the way.” The most he will concede is this small caveat: There is a certain, well, not fear but perhaps anxiety “when you go up to the plate against a left-hander you’ve never seen before and he’s got a funky delivery and you see a curveball coming right at you and you flinch and it comes over for a strike.” But flinching is not fear.
A batter’s experience at the plate can be considerably influenced by who bats before him and who bats immediately after him. As Tony La Russa says, the ideal place to hit is behind Rickey Henderson and in front of Don Mattingly: Henderson gets on base and bothers the pitchers, who have trouble concentrating on the hitter and are reluctant to throw breaking balls lest Henderson steal second standing up. So they are going to throw the next batter a lot of fastballs and will throw them in the strike zone lest they walk the batter and bring up Mattingly with two runners on. In the second half of the 1989 season, after Henderson was traded from the Yankees to the Athletics and after the injured Canseco returned to the lineup, the happiest man in America was Carney Lansford, who found himself batting just behind Henderson and just in front of Canseco. Lansford finished three points behind Puckett in the batting race; just two more hits in the same number of at bats and he would have won.
Baseball often is subject to a domino effect, for better or for worse. This was demonstrated, at the Cardinals’ expense, in the 1985 World Series. During the League Championship Series Vince Coleman collided with a tarpaulin (or it with him) and he was injured. When the tarpaulin ate Coleman, it also ate Willie McGee. Batting without Coleman on base, McGee saw fewer of the fastballs he had devoured during that MVP season. And because Coleman was not on first with a first baseman holding him, McGee did not have a hole to hit through on the right side. And the pitcher was not a nervous wreck. The “tarpaulin effect” trickled down to the third (Tommy Herr) and fourth (Jack Clark) hitters. The Royals should have voted the tarpaulin a share of the Series take.
For Gwynn the ideal situation is to bat right after someone who has a high on-base percentage and is a base-stealing threat—someone like Alan Wiggins in 1984. In that pennant-winning season Wiggins stole 70 bases and scored 106 runs. The effect of someone like Wiggins batting in front of Gwynn is reinforced by having a power hitter batting behind him, someone like Jack Clark, if Clark is having a good year. (Whether Clark has a good year depends in part on whether the man batting behind him is enough of a threat to cause pitchers to throw strikes to Clark rather than walk him.) Having a power hitter behind Gwynn would make pitchers more wary of walking Gwynn, even if Wiggins, by stealing second, had opened up first base. (In 1961 Roger Maris hit 61 home runs but never received an intentional walk. That is one advantage of batting with Mickey Mantle leaning on one knee in the on-deck circle.)
If there is a runner on first when Gwynn comes to the plate, the pitcher has a problem. “Usually with a runner on first and no outs, or one out, they’re going to pitch to a left-hander away,” Gwynn says. “They want him to hit the other way.” Away, that is, from the hole created by the first baseman holding the runner on first. But that puts the pitcher in the position of serving up Gwynn’s preference—the outside pitch he can drive to left with his inside-out swing. The pitcher’s position is made worse if the runner on base is a base-stealing threat of the sort Alan Wiggins was in 1984. “We haven’t had a guy like Wiggy since he left. Having a guy like that in front of you can open up some things for a hitter.” That is putting it mildly. If the runner on first is as fast as Wiggins was, the pitcher’s problem is compounded because Gwynn can guess—actually, he is not guessing, he knows—what array of pitches will be coming his way. He is going to see a high ratio of fastballs to breaking balls. (Unless, of course, the pitcher has an exceptionally quick release time to the plate and can stay with breaking pitches.)
Having Wiggins on base was, on balance, very good for Gwynn, but it was not an unmixed blessing. Gwynn’s first thought when he came to the plate with Wiggins on base was to take at least one pitch so Wiggins could have a chance to steal. Pitchers—they are not dummies—knew this. They would put the first pitch over the plate so he often found himself batting behind in the count before he buckled down to the main business of putting the ball in play. “At times in 1984 I’d see out of the corner of my eye that Wiggins had got a great jump, so I’d take the pitch even if I already had a strike on me.” Then, with the runner on second and no one out, Gwynn’s job was to get the runner over to third. Gwynn would have two strikes on him, but felt that in such a situation hitting with two strikes was not much different than hitting with no strikes because “all you had to do was put your bat on the ball. Wiggins was so fast, no one was going to throw him out at third.”
When Wiggins went from the Padres to the Orioles in the middle of the 1985 season, Gwynn had to become a better hitter. Suddenly, hitting was a more complicated business because he no longer got the steady diet of fastballs that pitchers threw to him when Wiggins was on base. How soon did he notice the difference that Wiggins’s departure was going to make? Gwynn snaps his fingers by way of saying: instantly. “As soon as he was gone, the fastballs ceased coming. When he was here I knew I could go up there with him on base, take a fastball, take another fastball, 2-and-0, take another one, 2-and-l, and know I was still going to get another fastball. Knowing that I’d get all fastballs outweighed the disadvantage of not being able to swing early in the count. I’d take until I had a strike on me. If I never got a strike, I’d walk on four pitches because I wasn’t going to hack until I gave him a chance to steal or I had got a strike. If Wiggins stole second and I didn’t have a strike on me, I’d take another pitch so he could steal third.”
Gwynn’s control of the bat makes him a good hit-and-run player. The most important thing in a hit-and-run situation is not what you do but what you avoid doing. You avoid swinging and missing and you avoid hitting the ball hard in the air to the infield. A swing and a miss or a line drive to the infield is trouble for a runner in motion. The Padres experimented briefly with having Gwynn give his own hit-and-run sign to a runner on first. But the first time he tried it, the runner missed the sign—fortunately, as it turned out. Gwynn hit a ball through the middle. If the runner had got the sign and started for second with the pitch, the second baseman would have been moving toward the middle to cover second base and would have fielded Gwynn’s ground ball, perhaps for a double play. But the runner was not moving, so neither was the second baseman, and the ball went through for a hit.
Gwynn reads the other team’s pitching intentions toward him by watching the middle infielders. “If they play me up the middle they are planning to start me inside and get me out away. If they are playing me in the holes they will pitch me inside, thinking that if I pull it, it will go into the hole on the right side, and if I go inside-out I’ll hit it in the hole on the other side.” When Gwynn comes up with a man on first in a running situation, the other team’s shortstop usually doesn’t plan to cover second. “Usually they’re going to pitch me away and have the second baseman cover.” Often Gwynn will try to go to right field, through the hole created by the first baseman holding the runner on first and the second baseman breaking over to cover second. Often Gwynn will take a few pitches to give the runner a chance to steal. “But once I get a strike on me I can’t do that anymore”—at least, not with Alan Wiggins gone. Then he has to see several things, almost simultaneously, that are not in a single field of vision. “Out of the corner of my eye I can see the runner going and I can shift my vision quickly to the pitcher again, and try to see who is moving, who is covering [second]. Sometimes, like in 1984,1 guessed right and hit to the hole. But since Wiggy has been gone, I haven’t done that too much.”
La Russa in the dugout: A modern manager’s paperwork is never done. (Michael Zagaris)
Above: The man and the man-child:
La Russa talks, Jose Canseco listens. (V. J. hovero/Sports Illustrated)
Right: La Russa: With his ample dark hair and thick eyebrows, and the bill of his cap pulled low, keeping his eyes in perpetual shadow, his watchfulness has an aspect of brooding. (Courtesy of the Oakland Athletics)
Top: Rene Lachemann, coach, and Terry Steinbach, catcher, prepare for a game. (Michael Zagaris)
Right: “You know how you pitch Mike Schmidt?” asks Jim Lefebvre rhetorically. “Hard fastballs inside, sliders down and away. You know how you pitch Henry Aaron? Willie Mays? Hard stuff inside, soft away. You know how you pitch Willie Stargell? Hard stuff inside, soft away. You know how you pitch God? Hard stuff inside, then down and away, and if you get it there you’ll get Him out. Even though He’ll know it’s coming. Or at least they say He knows.” (Courtesy of the Oakland Athletics)
Bottom: Dave Duncan, the Athletics’ pitching coach, with his best pupil, Dave Stewart, the 1989 World Series MVP. (John McDonough/Sports Illustrated)
Above: Coach, catcher and pupil: Ron Perranoski and Rick Dempsey with pitcher William Brennan. “You’ve got to concentrate on each play, each hitter, each pitch,” says Dempsey. “All this makes the game much slower and much clearer. It breaks it down to its smallest part. If you take the game like that—one pitch, one hitter, one inning at a time, and then one game at a time—the next thing you know, you look up and you’ve won.” (Tom DiPace)
Right: Hershiser pitching: Pitching, like politics and marriage and other difficult undertakings, illustrates the axiom that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Which means: In the real world, be ready to settle for something short of everything. But Hershiser is reluctant to settle. Does he go to the mound in the first inning planning to pitch a complete game? “A perfect game,” Hershiser replies. “If they get a hit, then I am throwing a one-hitter. If they get a walk, it’s my last walk. I deal with perfection to the point that it’s logical to conceive it. History is history, the future is perfect.” (Paul Richards/UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos)
Top: Davey Johnson, the Mets’ manager, and Dwight Gooden, a pitcher to whom Johnson does not need to recommend the theory of unfavorable chance deviation. (Adam J. Stoltman/Duomo)
Bottom: Roger Craig is manager of the Giants and Edison of the pitchers’ guild. He was pioneer and proselyte of the split-finger fastball. (Robert Beck/All sport USA)
Top: Swindell knows that high velocity is nice but it is no substitute for pitching. (Charles Bernhardt/Allsport USA)
Bottom: “We’re little kids playing a little kid’s game,” says Jim Gott, relief pitcher. “Why shouldn’t we show emotion?” There is an answer to that question. Showing emotion is just not done because baseball is such a humbling game. Gott earned 34 saves in 1988. In 1989 he pitched two-thirds of an inning. After the 1989 season he became a Dodger. (Peter Diana)
Top: Tony Gwynn is congratulated by Will Clark after beating Clark for the 1989 National League batting title in his last at bat of the season. The first-base coach is Greg Riddoch. An opposing catcher says of Tony Gwynn: “Out of 650 at bats in a season you will fool him maybe ten times.” Ten times is less than twice a month. (Kirk Schlea/Allsport USA)
Bottom: Tony Gwynn at work on the base paths. Baseball connoisseurs consider baserunning the purest baseball achievement because it is the facet of the game in which luck matters least. (Walt Frerck/UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos)
Tony Gwynn awaiting his two-tenths of a second: A 90-mile-per-hour fastball that leaves a pitcher’s hand 55 feet from the plate is traveling 132 feet per second and will reach the plate in .4167 second. A change-up or slow breaking ball loitering along at 80 miles per hour travels 117.3 feet per second and will arrive in .4688 second. The difference is .052 of a second and is crucial. Having decided to hit the pitch, the batter has about two-tenths of a second to make his body do it. The ball can be touched by the bat in about 2 feet of the pitch’s path, or for about fifteen-thousandths of a second. (Robert Beck/Allsport USA)
Top: Cal lunges to his right: His is a deceptively bland countenance. The blandness is actually a quiet force, a kind of confidence that comes only to athletes and other performers, and only to a few of them. It is confidence in being able to do it. (Jerry Wachter/Baltimore Orioles)
Bottom: Two Ripkens (Bill left, Cal right), two outs. (Jerry Wachter/Baltimore Orioles)
Assuming an average of 130 pitches per game over a 162-game season, Ripken tenses, rocks forward on the balls of his feet and begins to lean or move in toward the infield grass, or to one side or the other, 21,000 times each season. Ripken has rocked forward on the balls of his feet more often than any other player since May 30, 1982—the day his consecutive-game streak began. (Tom DiPace)
Top: Ray Miller, a.k.a. The Rabbit, is a philosopher, scientist, social scientist, education theorist and pitching coach. “I don’t understand how anyone hits a baseball,” says Miller. “You play golf and the damn thing is sitting there and all you’ve got to do is hit it and that’s hard enough.” (Peter Diana)
Right: Milwaukee’s manager Tom Trebelhorn. Before the Brewers there was Boise, and teaching Rickey Henderson the takeoff sign. “Baseball has got to be fun, because if it is not fun, it’s a long time to be in agony.” (Tom DiPace)
Bottom: Cal Ripken, Sr., is a former minor league catcher who looks like something whittled from an old fungo bat. When tanned, his skin is the color of a new baseball glove, but it has the wrinkles and creases of one that’s seen a lot of hard use. Any reader of John Tunis’s boys’ books knows that a short, scrappy former catcher should be “bandy-legged.” Cal, Sr., is. (Jerry Wachter/Sports Illustrated)
Tony Kubek: “The game lends itself to sitting around.” (Courtesy of NBC Sports)
Is there much guessing? Doesn’t the second baseman generally cover, because of Gwynn’s preference for going to left? “Usually—unless they’re going to throw me a breaking ball, especially one inside. Then the shortstop is going to cover.” Gwynn has time to change his plan because his plan includes anticipating the need to adjust. “I’m going to go up there and look for a fastball and adjust on anything else. If I can pick it up early enough, then I can adjust and try to hit the hole of whoever is covering.” But usually he does not recognize the rotation of the ball. And he insists that the pitcher’s arm speed is not the clue. What tells him? “The ball. Not his arm, not his motion, just the ball. You see it out there when he lets it go. You see something that tips you off.” He can not say what it is or what he then does. “I see it and I react. You recognize what it is and your hands and body take over.” He has then entered the realm of muscle memory. “I’m going to take my stride and my hands are going to go up, and then I recognize the pitch, then I’m just going to stay there until it’s time to swing the bat.” He is talking about staying there poised to swing, letting time pass, for a fraction of a tenth of a second.
Suppose Gwynn is on first and a left-hander is pitching to a fastball hitter with power, and the count is 0–2. The chances are the pitcher will not throw a fastball. He might go to a breaking ball, changing his release time from 1.3 to 1.32 seconds. Even that minute difference makes that a better pitch to run on. Except—there is always a complication—the situation as described is a good one for the other team to pitch out because the pitcher, being ahead in the count, can afford to waste a pitch.
In the Official Baseball Rules, section 2.00 deals with definitions of terms, including these two:
A BATTER is an offensive player who takes his position in the batter’s box.
BATTER-RUNNER is a term that identifies the offensive player who has just finished his time at bat until he is put out or until the play on which he became a runner ends.
A good batter spends a good deal of time as a batter-runner. Baserunning is as much a Gwynn speciality as getting on base. It has been said that baseball connoisseurs consider baserunning the purest baseball achievement because it is the facet of the game in which luck matters least. Leonard Koppett is correct: Maury W
ills breaking Ty Cobb’s record by stealing 104 bases in 1962 was a more spectacular achievement than Maris breaking Ruth’s record the year before. Today baserunning, and especially base stealing, is a more important part of baseball than ever. This is so for several reasons, the first of which is the increased emphasis on speed generally.
Two tennis terms can usefully be applied to baseball—“forced errors” and “unforced errors.” Speed on offense, at bat and on the bases, can force errors on the defense by spreading general anxiety and forcing defenders to make perfect executions in particular cases. Reggie Jackson, who can not be accused of underemphasizing the importance of power, is mightily impressed by the sort of speed possessed by Vince Coleman. Jackson notes that in 1988, 34 of Coleman’s 160 hits never left the infield—they were infield hits and hits on bunts. Take those away and Coleman would have hit .205 instead of .260. “So he ran .55 points. He’s got to hit .200 and run .100 to bat .300.”
Houston’s Mike Scott says, “Coleman can outrun the ball.” In 1987 Coleman stole successfully 19 consecutive times on pitchouts. Coleman has led the league in stolen bases every year he has been in the league. He reached 400 stolen bases (407, actually) in four seasons. In 1988 he would have been the leading base stealer on two major league teams just with his 24 steals of third. And he wasted no time in April, 1989, picking up where he had left off six months earlier. In the first inning of the first game of the 1989 season he stole second and third. It was the fiftieth time in his short career (he was just beginning his fifth season) he had done that. As he dusted himself off at third his career record against the Mets was 40 steals in 41 attempts. By midway in the 1989 season he was breaking a record—his own record—every time he stole a base. It was the record for consecutive successful steals. On July 28 the streak ended at 50. A player like Coleman (Rickey Henderson of the Athletics is another, Tim Raines of the Expos is a third, Gerald Young of the Astros is a fourth, and there are others) is a physical phenomenon new to baseball. He is a player so fast, and so technically accomplished at getting a jump, that he changes—shatters, almost—the magical balance struck by Alexander Cartwright when he put the bases 90 feet apart.
Men at Work Page 26
