Men at Work

by George F. Will

  The 1962 pennant race may have been decided by a grounds-keeper. In August the Dodgers, leading the league and the Giants by 5 Vi games, were coming to Candlestick Park for a three-game series. That was the year Maury Wills stole 104 bases and won the MVP Award. Alvin Dark, the Giants’ manager, directed his grounds-keeper, Matty Schwab, to do something about Wills and other Dodgers base runners. Schwab did, with a vengeance. Many years later Noel Hynd, author of The Giants of the Polo Grounds, told, in Sports Illustrated, the story of the creation of “Lake Candlestick.” At dawn on the day of the first game of the series Schwab was at work building what he jovially called a “speed trap.” He and his partners in crime dug up topsoil from an area 5 feet by 15 feet that covered the area where Wills would stand when poised to spring toward second. Where the topsoil had been, Schwab put a spongy mixture of peat moss and sand, and watered it well. Then he covered it—barely—with an inch of topsoil. Umpire Tom Gorman, noticing Dodgers first baseman Ron Fairly building a sand castle near the bag, ordered the grounds crew to correct the mess. The crew saluted smartly and went to work. They carted away wheelbarrows full of Schwab’s concoction. Then they replaced it with wheelbarrows full of the same stuff. The Dodgers lost the first game, 11–2, stealing no bases. They lost the next two, 5–4 and 5–1. The season ended with the Giants and Dodgers tied for first. The first game of the three-game play-off was at Candlestick. Umpire Jocko Conlan dashed to San Francisco to prevent any secret mischief, so Schwab did it openly, sanding and watering the base paths into a swampy mess and blaming the mess on a mistake by “a new man.” The Giants won game one, 8–0. Down in Los Angeles the Dodgers won the second game, 8–7, thanks in part to Wills’s four stolen bases. The wildness of the Dodgers’ pitchers cost them the third game and the pennant, 6–4. The Giants lost the World Series to the Yankees in seven games but they did not lose their sense of justice. They voted Schwab a full Series share.

  Maury Wills did not forget that groundskeepers can be lethal weapons. In April, 1981, Wills, then the Seattle Mariners’ manager, had his groundskeeper lengthen the batter’s box, extending the front a foot toward the mound to allow Seattle hitters to move up and swing at the curveballs of Oakland’s Rick Langford before they curved. Alas, the Oakland manager, Billy Martin, was no fool—and he was just the sort to try such a thing himself. He demanded that the umpires measure the box.

  Most of what a good groundskeeper can do to serve the home team is well within the range of permissible modifications. The most common ploy—one obviously not available to a team playing on artificial turf—is to let the grass grow high. “It slows the ball down,” says Ripken. “With the faster hitters you know the ball is not going to get to you so fast. Consequently you have to move in a little bit.” He prefers to play back in order to get a better angle for cutting off a wider range of ground balls. That is one reason why he likes playing on artificial turf. “Turf is quick but the ball bounces high enough that more of the ball’s quick movement is up and down rather than toward the outfield.” On the other hand, hitters run faster on turf because the traction is better. “You don’t slip as much getting out of the batter’s box, you don’t have uneven baselines.” However, a hard surface in front of home plate means that many batted balls will head toward, and perhaps past, infielders more quickly. It also means that they will bounce higher, consuming more fractions of a second getting to infielders and perhaps enabling fast hitters to beat the ball to first.

  The beauty of a ballpark is in the eye of the beholder, and a future Hall of Fame pitcher and a future Hall of Fame shortstop may see the same park quite differently. Musing about the people who made Tiger Stadium, Jim Palmer says, “It is almost as though they asked themselves, ‘What can we do to make it as hard as possible on pitchers?’” It is, Ripken says, the kind of park “where good pitches are hit for home runs.

  “In Detroit,” says Ripken, “you know Sparky is going to make the infield as slow as he can, for pitching and defense. If you have a club of singles hitters, a club suited to artificial turf, you will emphasize speed. You want your infield hard and the ground in front of home plate like corduroy so your hitters can chop down and make the ball bounce in odd directions. But if you’ve built your team like our team [Ripken was speaking in 1988, before the transformation of the Orioles] or Earl’s [Earl Weaver’s] teams of the past—pitching, defense and three-run homers—you don’t have a high-average-hitting ball club. You hit home runs. Sparky’s teams have always been that way. When the Kansas City Royals, a team tailored to a spacious park with artificial turf, come to Baltimore they have to play Orioles baseball. In Detroit they make sure they dig a quicksand pit in front of home plate. If you hit it right down it doesn’t bounce at all. And they have great infielders [shortstop Alan Trammell, second baseman Lou Whitaker] with a lot of range, and good pitching. Is Walt Terrell’s record better at home than on the road? He’s a good sinker-ball pitcher, keeps the ball down and away. If you hit the ball on the ground in Detroit, you have little chance for a hit. In Texas they made the infield extremely fast. The grass is about this fast”—he holds two fingers about half an inch apart—“like a putting green. And it’s very true and always hard because the weather is so hot.” The infield at Arlington Stadium has peculiar properties, and not just because the sun bakes the ground so hard and the grass is cut so short. There is something about the way the grass is mowed, according to many baseball people. They say it causes ground balls to “snake” across the infield. Jim Lefebvre says he has seen some infielders, who are not used to the Texas grass, shift their gaze to check a runner and look back just in time to see the ball weave through their legs. Ripken says Anaheim Stadium’s grass is similar. Ryne Sandberg says the way the grass is mowed in San Diego and San Francisco causes grounders to snake. Sandberg says the Shea Stadium infield is cut shallow (that is, the outfield grass is closer to the infield grass than in most other parks) so he can not play as deep as he prefers. If he did, the “lip” of the outfield grass would be in front of him, a potential cause of bad bounces.

  Clearly there is some home-field advantage in baseball. In only five seasons in this century has a league recorded more road wins than home wins. The norm is for the home team to win between .535 and .555, which means more than 5 out of 10 but fewer than 6 out of 10. And when the pressure is on, the advantage does not change. Through 1989 home teams won only 54 percent of all World Series games and 47 percent of all Series have been clinched on the road. Only once—in 1987, when four games were played in Minnesota’s high-decibel Metrodome—has there been a Series in which every game was won by the home team. The home-field advantage is remarkably small considering that the home team is enjoying home cooking and other comforts, has the services of a compliant groundskeeper, is used to the hitting background, and knows how to play the fences and the caroms in the corners and foul territory.

  Such details about different parks are known to watchful players on visiting teams. “I watch different shortstops in their home ballparks,” Ripken says. “For example, Tony Fernandez in Toronto because their turf [Ripken was referring to Toronto’s old stadium] is bad. They have an underground drainage system. Water got in it during the off-season, froze and pushed the concrete up. They never corrected it. They laid the carpet right over the bumps. If you are walking normally you can trip over them. So Tony, who likes to play deep, played shallower at home, to play in front of the bumps. His angles on his backhands were a lot different. He would be going straight across instead of back. So I played in and gave up some range but didn’t have to worry about the bumps as a variable.” Ripken pauses, then adds, “I talked to Tony and he said he does play deeper with a runner on second if the run means a lot.” This sharing of information is the socialism of shortstops.

  Perhaps middle infielders feel—they certainly should feel—class solidarity. They have a unifying grievance. Their speciality is not properly appreciated. One reason for this is, of course, that the prevention of offense is not usua
lly considered glamorous. Until Ozzie Smith began earning a salary with two commas in the number —$2 million—defense was not well remunerated. To paraphrase Ralph Kiner’s celebrated aphorism, defense is not where the Cadillacs are. (Today Kiner would say Mercedes. Much has changed in America since the late 1940s.) Another reason defense is not properly appreciated is that defensive excellence is difficult to express in the language baseball aficionados like to speak: statistics.

  Baseball may be in some ways a product of nineteenth-century sensibilities, but baseball’s fascination with quantification makes it very much attuned to the twentieth century. The development of certain familiar technologies (adding machines, calculators, computers), and the related development of research skills and data-gathering agencies and bureaucracies, have produced in this century a surge in the quantity of social information available. This has led, in turn, to the growth of the social sciences, and to the growth of hubris, even intellectual triumphalism. The ability to measure and quantify patterns of behavior has produced misplaced confidence in the diagnostic, predictive, evaluative and therapeutic capabilities of the “behavioral” sciences. Baseball analysts (players, managers, writers, fans) often have a similarly misplaced confidence in their ability to reduce reality to numerical expression.

  Baseball has many statistics, all of which can be interesting. However, one category matters more than all the rest: runs. Every other statistic is subordinate. All other statistics, from walks to assists, concern categories of actions that are important as contributions to the creation or prevention of runs. The art, and increasingly the science, of run-prevention is elusive in a way that is frustrating to typical baseball fans. They want achievements quantified in ways that will enable a cool appraisal to result in definitive discriminations between players.

  Baseball is a game of visible, discrete actions. Much can be seen and counted. Much, but not everything. Because baseball lends itself to quantification, it is an amazingly, relentlessly, even obsessively and oppressively self-conscious activity. And baseball breeds its own kinds of statistical confusions. Statistics must be read with an eye out for factors that skew numbers.

  Many such factors are obvious. A pitcher who wins 20 games for a good team might be pressed to win 12 for a weak team. Indeed, a different bull pen can make almost that much difference. A hitter batting .300 in Wrigley Field might hit .270 in Montreal’s poor visibility. A batter who hits 15 home runs in St. Louis might hit 30 in Tiger Stadium. A player who steals 40 bases on the kind of teams Whitey Herzog has built for the Kansas City and St. Louis stadiums might steal just 15 for a team playing the stand-around-and-wait-for-a-three-run-home-run style of baseball. Any pitcher’s ERA is subject to four “biases” (Bill James’s word): the caliber of the league he is in, the park in which he pitches half his games, the bull pen that tries to stop whatever trouble he gets into, and the defense arrayed around him. Some of the influences that must be inferred behind the statistics are less obvious, and this is especially true with fielding statistics. Consider the matter of double plays.

  The more double plays a team makes, the better its middle infielders, right? Not necessarily. A high number of double plays may be mostly evidence of a shaky pitching staff that is putting too many runners on base. In 1948 the Browns had a miserable 59–94 season but turned a major league record number of double plays. The reason was suggested by their team ERA: a horrendous 5.01. So many runners were getting on that there were abundant opportunities for double plays. In 1949 the Athletics had a mediocre 81–73 year but broke the Browns’ short-lived double-play record. Again, shaky pitching (a 4.23 ERA) provided the prerequisite for double plays: base runners. In dismal 1988 Cal and brother Bill at second base led all other American League combinations in double plays and total chances. Only 17 middle-infield combinations in American League history have made more double plays in a season than Ripken and Ripken made in 1988, an achievement that testifies about equally to the good gloves of the Ripkens and the bad pitching that put so many runners on base. Only seven teams in the last 40 years have led the league in ERA and double plays.

  When a player goes through a nine-inning game and gets no assists, his defensive statistics change, if only slightly, in a way that might at first blush suggest that he is not doing his job on defense as well as he should. His ratio of assists to innings played goes down. But that may not mean anything important. Consider how an entire team can have its defensive statistics shifted slightly in that direction by a quite successful evening. On June 25, 1989, for only the second time in history, a team played a nine-inning game and got no assists. Here is a list of the putouts by the Mets as they beat the Phillies, 5–1, at Shea Stadium:

  HOW PUTOUTS WERE ACHIEVED

  METS VS. PHILLIES

  June 25, 1989

  at Shea Stadium

  Left fielder Kevin McReynolds 1 Fly out

  Right fielder Mark Carreon 3 Fly outs

  Center fielder Mookie Wilson 2 Fly outs

  First baseman Dave Magadan 2 Grounders

  Second baseman Gregg Jefferies 1 Pop-up

  Shortstop Kevin Elster 2 Pop-ups

  Third baseman Howard Johnson 0

  Catcher Barry Lyons 13 Strikeouts

  3 Pop-ups

  Pitcher Sid Fernandez 0

  Pitcher Rick Aguilera 0

  Some formulas for measuring a defensive player’s “range factor” are attempts to put an artificial precision into a subject that will not hold still for such precision. It is an attempt to attach a numerical value to an activity in which the explanatory value of the number is largely vitiated by the number of variables involved. Determining range factor involves measuring a player’s chances (putouts plus assists plus errors) per game. But an infielder playing behind, say, a sinker-ball pitcher such as Hershiser, may field many more ground balls than a better infielder playing behind a pitcher who throws a lot of fly outs. A staff full of ground-ball pitchers could produce a pretty nifty range factor for an infielder not much more mobile than a stump. An infielder playing behind a power pitcher like Roger Clemens or Nolan Ryan may have the range of a cheetah but that virtue will not be statistically apparent because the catcher will be getting so many putouts from the pitcher’s strikeouts. A second baseman on a team loaded with left-handed pitchers is apt to generate statistics that “prove” that he has less range than a second baseman on a team that relies on right-handed pitchers and therefore is a team that fields more balls off the bats of left-handed hitters. There are kinds of preoccupations with defensive statistics that can produce bad baseball as well as bogus achievements. Kubek says there are outfielders who, in order to run up their number of assists, will play 30 feet too shallow early in games. Playing that way allows some unnecessary doubles and triples to go over their heads but at the end of the year they do have a lot of assists and a lot of people are saying they must have great arms, and they may even win Gold Gloves.

  “Because of salary structures and incentive clauses,” Kubek says, “we are so locked in on offensive statistics. That is what arbitration is about—offensive statistics. Defense is hard to measure.” Hard, indeed. That is one reason why defense does not get its due from the people who parcel out baseball’s laurels.

  In 1987 Ozzie Smith batted .303, scored 104 runs and drove in 75, an astonishing total considering he did not hit a single home run. He did hit 40 doubles and 4 triples. He walked 89 times and, to pass the time while waiting to get back to shortstop, he stole 43 bases. At shortstop he did about what you would expect from the most elegant shortstop of his era, and perhaps the finest fielder ever. He led the league in assists and fielding average. So he prevented no one knows how many runs that would have been scored if a lesser shortstop had been out there. His team won the pennant. And who was the National League MVP? Andre Dawson of the last-place Cubs. Why? Power. Dawson hit 49 home runs. The Cardinals could not have finished first without Smith. The Cubs could have finished last without Dawson. Defense got slighted yet again. />
  Defense, says Tom Boswell, is “the cognoscenti corner of baseball, the poorly lighted room in the gallery.” It is that, and it is also the virtually vacant room at the Hall of Fame. Now, in a sense a Hall of Famer is any player of the type elected to the Hall of Fame. But the correct question is: Does the composition of the Hall of Fame reflect reasonable criteria? The answer is: Not yet. Defensive skills have not yet been given their due recognition. This is apparent in the under-representation of middle infielders. Of the 157 persons elected to the Hall of Fame through 1989 (counting those elected primarily for their playing as opposed to managerial, umpiring or other abilities, and not counting players whose careers were in the Negro leagues), only 10 were second basemen, and they included hitting giants such as Napoleon Lajoie and Rogers Hornsby. Joe Morgan is the 11th second baseman voted into the Hall. He, too, was an offensive star with 2,518 hits, 268 home runs and 689 stolen bases. Only 6 short-stops who entered the major leagues since the 1920s are in the Hall of Fame (Luis Aparicio, Luke Appling, Ernie Banks, Lou Boudreau, Pee Wee Reese, Arky Vaughan).

  Respect for defense got a boost in 1982 with the election of Aparicio. He had a career batting average of only .262 and hit only 83 home runs in 18 seasons. But he holds the major league record for the most games played at the most demanding defensive position. Aparicio also holds the major league record for career assists (8,016), consecutive years leading a league in assists (6), most chances accepted (12,564), most years leading a league in chances accepted (7), most double plays (1,553). He holds the American League record for career putouts (4,548). He shares the major league record for most years leading a league in fielding (8) and the American League record for most years leading the league in putouts (4). While the election of Aparicio was welcome, it hardly balanced the books. Consider the case of two men who have not yet been admitted. Their cases indicate the continuing underestimation of the importance of defense.