“I learned the day after I was signed, in Walla Walla,” Gwynn says. “The first hack I took in batting practice I got jammed, tried to fight it off, shattered my bat, stung my hands. I took that one swing and that was it. You realize you’re not going to make a living swinging a bat like that. You’ve got to get the barrel of the bat on the ball. In college I hit the ball the other way but didn’t get to use the barrel of the bat often. With aluminum you can get jammed and fight it off and still loop one over the third baseman’s ear. The pitcher makes a great pitch and you get a hit.”
Greg Swindell had the same sort of startling experience, but from the pitcher’s point of view, so it was a pleasant surprise. Before he became a professional, Swindell had pitched against wooden bats only in University of Texas alumni games. In his first game at Waterloo, Iowa, he hummed a fastball in on the fist of the first batter he faced as a professional. A fragment of the man’s bat flew over Swindell’s head. “I got four or five bats that day,” he says, savoring the memory. And he is still at it, and still counting. In one 1988 game in Minnesota he counted 12 bats he cracked or shattered. Ben McDonald, the 6-foot-7 pitcher from Louisiana State University, the first pick in the 1989 draft (the Orioles picked him), said he frequently talks with his friend Andy Benes, the first pick in the 1988 draft (the Padres picked him). “When I talk to Andy, that’s all he talks about. He says he’s breaking four or five bats every time out. I want to throw to some wood, saw some off in somebody’s hands.”
There are people—let us hope they are not prophets—who say pitchers had better hurry up and have the pleasure while it is here to be had.
In July, 1989, civilization was rocked by Peter Gammons’s report in Sports Illustrated that aluminum bats are advancing on the gates of professional baseball. Gammons said that some minor leagues are flirting with the idea of abandoning wood bats in favor of aluminum, and that within a generation the major leagues may ring with the ping of metal on horsehide (so to speak: remember balls have been wrapped in cowhide for years). Aluminum bats are used everywhere outside of professional baseball, from Little League through college. Hillerich & Bradsby, makers of the Louisville Sluggers (which, by the way, are no longer made in Louisville but across the Ohio River in Indiana), used to make 7 million wood bats a year. Now it makes 1.5 million, of which 185,000 go to the major leagues. The company makes aluminum bats by the millions but makes them far from the American heartland, in Southern California, land of novelties and regrets. The reason for the popularity of aluminum bats is that they do not break, and so they cut costs. But a switch in professional baseball from wood to aluminum would make a bad and deteriorating situation worse. It would sacrifice much on the altar of parsimony—and at a time when baseball is rolling in money.
Allowing aluminum bats into the major leagues would constitute a serious degradation of the game, and not just for aesthetic reasons. But let us begin with them. Aesthetic reasons are not trivial. Baseball’s ambiance is a complex, subtle and fragile creation. Baseball’s sounds are important aspects of the game, and no sound is more evocative than that of the thwack of wood on a ball. It is particularly so when it is heard against the background sizzle of crowd noise on a radio broadcast, radio being the basic and arguably the best way to experience baseball if you can not be at the park. To a person of refined sensibilities, aluminum hitting a ball makes a sound as distressing as that of fingernails scraping a blackboard.
The other reasons for resisting any attempt to introduce metallurgy into the major leagues concern the safety of the players and the artistry of the game. An aluminum bat is lighter than a wood bat of the same length by two to four ounces. That makes for greater bat speed, which is the key to power. Also, the “sweet spot”—the impact point for maximum power—is larger on aluminum than on wood bats. You might think that major league batters would welcome the change. But hear them.
Scott Bradley of the Mariners, who played baseball at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Gammons, “If you hit a ball right with a wood bat, it’ll go about the same distance as a ball hit with aluminum. But with wood you have to hit it right. You have to use your hands to get the bat head out and hit it on the sweet spot…. With aluminum, you can make contact almost anywhere on the bat and get the ball through or over the infield. Watch a college game and see how many hitters get jammed and still hit flares into the opposite field.” Watch a college game? Better cancel some appointments. College games are, not surprisingly, longer than major league games. However, aluminum bats might speed up the games in one way: There would be fewer walks. Why walk when the metal bat raises the odds that merely making contact will result in a hit?
Bradley is dead right: With a wood bat you have to do things right. Aluminum bats reduce the importance of craftsmanship. Tom Grieve, general manager of the Rangers, told Gammons that an aluminum bat’s sweet spot is so big, “with an aluminum bat most kids can take the same swing at every pitch. When they see that they have to hit the ball on a certain spot on a wood bat, they find out they have to swing differently, according to the pitch.” The Yankees’ Don Mattingly, one of the game’s artists, said simply, “It takes all the art out of the game.” The difference between hitting with wood and aluminum is comparable to the difference between a real pitcher and a mere thrower. You say Pete Incaviglia breaks nearly 40 dozen bats in a season? That will not break any bank and should not break any hearts. A glance at his strikeout totals shows the way he breaks bats: He is an undisciplined hitter who never properly learned his craft in the minor leagues. He went straight from Oklahoma State University and aluminum bats to the big leagues.
Put aluminum bats in the hands of major league hitters and you may have many tragedies of the sort that felled Herb Score. The pitcher’s rubber is still 60 feet 6 inches from home plate, but batters are bigger and stronger than ever. Ken Griffey, Jr., of the Mariners says, “You’d better move the mound back 10 feet. And give everybody life insurance because somebody will get killed.” Joe Carter of the Indians, who the week Gammons’s article appeared hit 5 home runs in 6 at bats, says, “You’d have a lot of dead pitchers and third basemen. Imagine Bo Jackson with an aluminum bat. You’re talking 600-foot home runs.” Dave Parker, now with the Milwaukee Brewers, remembers taking batting practice in Pittsburgh with aluminum bats. In 20 swings he hit 13 balls into the seats, 7 of them into the third tier at Three Rivers Stadium. “If they let them in,” he says, “I’d have notches in my bat. I’d kill someone.” (“But,” said Merv Rettenmund, the Athletics’ hitting coach, “it’s [the victim’s] a pitcher. They deserve it.”) Tim Flannery, a Padres third baseman who thinks that the hot corner is hot enough, thank you, says, “They better get softer baseballs.” Greg Minton, an Angels relief pitcher who thinks he already has enough to repent of, says, “I’ve already killed enough first and third basemen with hanging sinkers. I don’t want to see my infielders playing short left and short right.”
We already see what aluminum bats do to pitching. They produce pitchers with inferior fastballs and arms often prematurely worn out from the torque of throwing too many breaking balls. We already know what this, combined with variants of the Charlie Lau style of hitting, produces: batters diving in to hit pitches in the outside part of the strike zone, and diving batters getting hit by inside pitches that are not much out of the strike zone, and brawls and warnings from umpires, and the migration of the strike zone. Mike Boddicker of the Red Sox says the strike zone has moved horizontally as well as vertically. Not only is the top of the zone at the belt, the inside edge of the zone is, for most umpires, at least two inches out over the plate. “A majority of umpires won’t call strikes on the inner few inches of the plate.” Hershiser’s opinion about umpires’ practices is more tempered. “My theory on the inside-outside corner is that on the inside part of the plate you need to have the whole ball on the plate. On the outside corner the ball only needs to touch the plate.” Still, Hershiser, like Boddicker, believes that even some inside pitch
es that are strikes are now problematic. One source of this problem, starting a long way below the big leagues, is the aluminum bat, which prevents too many pitchers from learning how to shade the inside slice of the plate. Playing college baseball, Incaviglia remembers fondly, “You never had to worry about getting jammed. You never worried because it never happened.” It never happened because of what he held in his hand.
Baseball is like a mobile: Jiggle something here and things move over there. Everything is related to everything else. So, naturally, aluminum bats change fielding as well as batting and pitching. Infielders facing aluminum bats rarely need to charge balls because balls get to them so quickly. Major league infielders on artificial turf already play deeper than on grass. Add aluminum bats and you will, in effect, subtract a couple of infielders and add a couple of outfielders.
Aluminum bats have made it difficult for major league scouts to evaluate high school and college talent. In fact, major league baseball subsidizes the Cape Cod League and seven other leagues where outstanding prospects can play in the summer without losing their college eligibility. Those leagues use wood bats. Now that major league baseball is feeling flush (and if it isn’t, it should be) it should work out some way to subsidize a comeback by wood bats. Surely major league baseball could help colleges put the aluminum bats back into the bat racks for good.
Why is anyone even considering the cockamamie idea of aluminum bats in professional baseball, all the way up to the major leagues? The reasons given are remarkably unconvincing.
It is said that the world is running out of suitable wood for bats. But wood is a renewable resource. Need more trees? Plant some, for goodness’ sake. If the price is right for a product (we are not talking about platinum, we are talking about wood), people will produce it. Hillerich & Bradsby says it could continue making wood bats for the major leagues if it charged $40 rather than just $16.50. So? Charge it. Millionaire utility infielders playing for franchises that have sextupled in value in one decade can come up with the extra $23.50. A major college baseball program that includes a fall and spring schedule (most colleges do not play in the fall) might go through 50 dozen $14 bats (college bats are cheaper than the ones the major leagues use) for an annual cost of $8,400. But that cost is small beer for a major college athletic department. And what is big-time football for if not to subsidize more civilized sports? USA Today reported that the California Angels, for example, expected to use 172 dozen bats during the 1989 season, at a cost of about $35,000, but would need only a few dozen $60 aluminum bats and would save $33,500. Big deal. The sum that would be saved is a lot less than is earned in one season by the hot cinnamon bun concession stand (or the baked potato stand) at Anaheim Stadium. America’s real (adjusted for inflation) GNP has doubled in the last 30 years, leisure dollars flowing toward sports have increased even more than that, major league baseball’s attendance has increased for four consecutive seasons, revenues from licensing of major league products are soaring, television revenues will double between 1989 and 1990 (we are talking about numbers with three commas—billions) and yet baseball can not afford proper bats? Be serious.
There is a consensus that in the late 1970s aluminum bats were made significantly more lively than they had been. (Can a bat be “juiced”? What is the world coming to when we have to wonder about that?) Manufacturers of aluminum bats, who have an incentive to say soothing things, say they can make bats with a wide variety of characteristics, including those of wooden bats. But would batters in pursuit of their own interests (and offense-crazed owners in pursuit of even higher attendance) want anything less than the maximum potency from bats? Would major league baseball really do with bats what it has done with the ball—write narrow tolerances for what is permissible? And in the unlikely event that major league baseball was inclined to do that, how exactly would it work? Players come in different sizes and strengths and tendencies and inclinations. Therefore, bats must come in a wide variety of lengths and weights and handle widths.
Do we want major league teams that have, as some college teams do these days, team batting averages above .340? (In 1979 the Wichita State Shockers had a team average of .384.) Aluminum bats would rewrite the record books and, more important, would make records less interesting because they would be less instructive. Advocates of aluminum bats say that differences in the parks—say, between Fenway and the Astrodome—already make comparisons of records difficult. True, but that has always been so. Mel Ott hit 511 home runs playing half his games in the Polo Grounds with its short foul lines. Across the Harlem River, Joe DiMaggio had hundreds of potential home runs swallowed up as fly outs in the vast power alleys of Yankee Stadium. But at least Ott and DiMaggio used essentially the same equipment. And although parks have changed a lot over the years, they have changed gradually. There was not a stark demarcation between one era of parks and another. Only once since 1900 has there been an abrupt change in conditions, a change that divided all that happened before from all that has happened since: the introduction of the lively ball. So modern baseball has had just two eras. Aluminum bats would be another radical rupture. They would add a third disorienting disjunction to baseball’s story. They would dilute baseball’s intensely satisfying continuity and thereby would render much less interesting the comparison of players’ performances. Those comparisons nourish interest in the game as it passes down from generation to generation and they sustain fans in the fallow months of the off-season.
So where are we headed? To a future of batters diving across the plate toward the outer edge of a moving strike zone, taking long looping swings and spraying hits—ping! ping! ping!—off a series of weak-armed breaking-ball pitchers? Wade Boggs believes that if aluminum bats come to the big leagues “there will be another .400 hitter.” Sure, but will anybody really care?
What is Gwynn’s weakness? He says that through his first five years the hardest pitcher for him to hit—hardest to hit for reasons other than velocity (meaning the hardest for him to hit other than Nolan Ryan)—was John Tudor. Speaking in 1988, Gwynn said: “He’s the only pitcher who has a pitch I can not hit. It’s his curveball. I have fouled it off but I don’t think I have ever put it in play.” Fortunately for Gwynn, Tudor does not seem to have taken proper notice. “The last time we faced him in St. Louis [shortly before Tudor was traded to the Dodgers] we had runners on second and third with two outs and he threw me the curveball for a strike, then a fastball that ran in on my hands. I tried unsuccessfully to bunt it and was 0-and-2. So I was looking breaking ball because I have never hit it. Instead, he threw me a fastball in on my hands, I fought it off, it went in the hole, off Ozzie’s [Smith] glove, and we got two runs.” Gwynn’s complete recall is tinged with disbelief and disapproval of Tudor’s failure to remember Gwynn’s weakness. “Any pitcher who has pitched that long and been that successful, you would think has got to realize I can’t hit that breaking ball.”
Is there a Gwynn strength? “Anything hanging,” he says laughing. Well, yes, of course: a pitcher’s mistake. But what else? He likes fastballs up in the strike zone. “I hit the other way best. It’s easy for me to take that fastball that’s thigh-high and fight it off and go to left field.”
A basic pitching strategy is to use off-speed curveballs and change-ups to get a batter shifted onto his front foot to slow his bat down. The batter wants to stay back as long as possible so his bat will be accelerating on contact. For every good hitter, batting is a matter of patience. It is especially so for Gwynn. Every good hitter must wait as long as possible for his pitch, or for the pitcher to make a mistake. He must wait for particular counts or circumstances that shift, however slightly, the balance of the competition toward the hitter. But Gwynn must be patient in another sense. Even after he has locked his eyes on a pitch that he has decided he wants to hit, he still must wait longer than most batters before swinging. In Ted Williams’s four-word formulation, one key to hitting is: hips ahead of hands. But when a left-handed hitter is “going the other way,” to
left field, he prefers an outside pitch, and Gwynn says, “On an outside pitch you want your hands to lead and the barrel of the bat to trail.” The barrel of Gwynn’s bat trails his hands by about ten inches. When trying to hit to left, Gwynn is, in effect, pushing back the pitching rubber, perhaps half a foot farther from the plate. He is using his quick bat—those basketball dribbler’s wrists again—to allow him to wait on a pitch and hit it when it has passed over most of the plate.
The late Charlie Lau would take a .250 right-handed pull hitter and teach him to hit to right. Lau would tell the right-hander that every time he does that with a runner on first the result will be first-and-third, whereas if he pulled the ball through the infield on the left side, the result would be just first-and-second because of the short throw from left field to third. And in the process of learning to “go the other way” the .250 hitter becomes a .280 hitter. A pitcher who knows he is facing such a hitter will throw him sliders breaking down and in. Perhaps the hitter can “inside-out” a fastball to right, but not a slider that is down and in.
Gwynn says, “I stand in the middle of the batter’s box. You see a lot of guys dig that white line out and stand in the back to give them more time. I thought about doing that, but I’m so used to hitting up closer that if I change it’s going to throw my timing off. I would have to wait that much longer and as you can see from some of these tapes I have a tough enough time waiting. Also, I’ve got a little bat, so I’ve got to be able to cover both sides of the plate.” When his swing is mechanically sound, his front leg is stiff, or solid, and he’s deriving power from the drive of his back leg. Furthermore, the barrel of the bat is behind his hands. The instinct in hitting is “hurry up because the ball is hurrying.” Every fiber of a hitter’s being urges him not to hesitate. In this regard Gwynn’s batting style is true to Ted Williams’s formula: “Wait-wait-wait and then quick-quick-quick.” Gwynn will “turn” on a ball inside—that is, he will try to pull it. But he prefers to get his hands out and “go the other way,” to left. He has so much power, even going to the opposite field, that opponents play him deep. And most of the hits he gets are line drives, over the infield or through the hole between short and third. So if the other team plays the outfield shallow on him, he can hit over their heads for at least a double. Late in a close game, especially, Gwynn must be played deep. So he has three different tendencies: Pitch him inside and he can pull; down the middle and he can go up the middle; pitch him away and he will go the other way. Three tendencies almost amount to no tendency. So a team can pitch him away and play him away, letting him do what he wants and counting on defensive positioning to contain him.
Men at Work Page 29
