(I never played even high school baseball, let alone professionally. Could I hit a 100 mph fastball? An 87 mph slider? Even a major league change-up? It is to laugh. Most professional athletes agree that hitting major league pitching is the hardest thing to do in sports. The only right I have to criticize major league hitters derives from seventy-some years of watching them go about their impossible business. The same goes for pitchers. Greg Maddux makes Rembrandt look like a weekend dauber.)
In a mid-May game at Busch Stadium this year, the Chicago Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals by a final score of 12 – 3. Joc Pederson, leading off for the Cubs, hit the first pitch he saw into the outfield seats. The other 11 runs were produced by 6 walks and 11 base hits, 4 of them doubles, the rest singles.
Ryan Herrera, recently employed by MLB.com, summarized the game thus: “Pederson’s first-pitch shot, however — the first for any Cubs batter at Busch Stadium since Junior Lake hit one off Adam Wainwright on April 12, 2014 — provided the ultimate highlight in Chicago’s return to St. Louis.”
Reading that led me to ponder why one run out of twelve could be considered “the ultimate highlight” of the game, particularly since the Cardinals ultimately scored three runs of their own, which would have rendered that solo homer nugatory. I also briefly wondered how Junior Lake’s achievement related to the game under discussion. (Had Lake also hit lefty? Was the weather cloudy both days? Did someone launch a rocket to the moon both days? Did the writer have Cheerios for breakfast both days? And the one question Herrera failed to address: So What? The fact that data exists in profusion doesn’t make it useful. Using it to answer useful questions does. Discerning in it meaningless coincidences does not.) I didn’t ponder long. I’d been thinking about the home run fetish promoted by MLB and most television announcers and commentators for some years.
In 1987, Mark McGwire came up for his rookie year with the Oakland A’s. He stood 6′,5″ tall but weighed only 220 pounds. He hit 49 home runs that year. And he got to know Jose Canseco, who introduced him to steroids. The media soon dubbed the two “The Bash Brothers,” and they supplied the power to several successive World Series Oakland teams. According to Canseco, his and McGwire’s steroid use – in no way prohibited at the time – was widely discussed throughout major league baseball locker rooms and management suites. According to Canseco, numerous other players began experimenting with various steroid combinations during the late 1980s.
In 1994, the MLB owners and the players’ union came to an impasse, the players went out on strike, and MLB ultimately cancelled the rest of the season, the post-season, and the World Series. Attendance during the following season dropped by 20%, television viewership declined significantly. Many fans – the vocal ones, anyhow – assigned blame for the Series cancellation to both owners and players. It began to look as if Major League Baseball might have finally succeeded in fatally wounding its own golden goose.
When Mark McGwire obliterated Roger Maris’ home run record in 1998, he had grown to 270 pounds. He looked something like L’il Abner’s big brother. So did Sammy Sosa (65 home runs that year). But their season-long contest to break the old record became a national obsession, and the two sluggers played it for all it was worth, holding joint press conferences, jollying each other and the reporters. As Babe Ruth had restored fans’ devotion to a game tainted by the Black Sox Series of 1919, Mark and Sammy made the game compelling again and washed away the bad taste of the cancelled 1994 season. Home Run Power once again saved the day.
By 1998, only the willfully blind could ignore the bulging muscles throughout the major leagues. More and more ballplayers were assuming superhuman dimensions. But the profit motive offers a great incentive to willful blindness, and the Home Run was proving highly profitable – for players, for the owners, for the Baseball Tonight pundits. Evidently the fans – or most of them – loved The Big Fly as well. By 1999, attendance had returned to its 1993, pre-strike level, and all was well in MLB land. Nike produced a virally popular commercial whose theme was “Chicks Dig the Long Ball,” featuring McGwire being fawned over by the eponymous chicks, who gave short shrift to the two Hall of Fame pitchers on the scene. There was a good deal of truth in this ostensibly satiric commercial message. Sluggers were commanding ever more absurd contracts.
In the last full season before the strike-shortened 1994, a combined total of 4,030 home runs had been hit. The next full season, 1995, saw that total rise to 4,081. By 1998, it reached 5,064 and remained above 5,000 home runs per year through 2006.
None of this, naturally, set real well with the pitchers, and many of them were not beyond getting a little help from their chemical friends, although their choices didn’t become nearly so outwardly apparent as the hitters’ did. Even the dedicated juicers could still fit in their uniforms. Average fastball velocity began increasing, leading to more and more strikeouts. Major league batters struck out 26,310 times (1993), 25, 325 times (1995) and 31, 898 times (1998).
MLB, after promoting the “A’hm gonna knock yo’ head cleeeeaan off” shenanigans of the steroid users for years, was finally forced to confront them by one of the players who introduced steroids into the game – Jose Canseco, whose first two books shamelessly celebrated the power of various chemical enhancements and named a great many stars who’d joined him in using them – and by the work of a couple of reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, in their book Game of Shadows. Then MLB was (or should have been) further embarrassed by the blatantly perjured testimony of many major league stars before a Congressional committee investigating “performance enhancing drugs” to see if they could help with re-election campaigns. The stench that rose when Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001 was hard to ignore. Bonds had become a cartoon-like figure during the off season, his arms, torso and head inflated to revolting caricatures. MLB set out on a fantastically hypocritical PR campaign to warn The Youth of America against using these new devil drugs. It also instituted a fairly serious testing programs that fairly seriously penalized PED use.
But the new technologies of the digital age and Big Data came along, and were of course pressed into the service of Power. Suddenly “launch angle” became the new watchword for worshippers of the Long Ball. Sad to say, the term and the habit of extreme uppercut swinging were introduced by the Cubs’ Kris Bryant, and pretty soon the fashion spread throughout the game. I became irate when I found it being accepted uncritically by a writer in the Cubs in-house magazine Vineline. I wrote to him:
In the May issue of Vineline, you write, ‘While previous generations may have blanched at the strikeout totals these new swings are producing, modern hitters are reaping the benefits [of the new fad for uppercut swings] and propelling balls out of big league parks in unprecedented quantities. Home runs, after all, are far more valuable than singles, and even doubles into the gap, which is what line-drive swings are attempting to create.’
In the most literal sense, home runs are indeed more valuable than singles or doubles, in that they produce instant runs, while singles and doubles may or may not produce any runs. Strikeouts – empty at-bats – are a very high price to pay for any hitting approach, since each strikeout contributes nothing to scoring runs, while all other base hits or even balls put in play contribute to the possibility of scoring runs. If baseball is a team game, and the object of the team is to win the World Series, then the value of home runs becomes considerably lower.
With the help of Rylan Edwards at Bill James’ website, I’ve produced a study showing that, in the 96 seasons since 1920, 27 clubs that led their league in home runs appeared in that year’s World Series, and 17 of those clubs won that year’s Series. That is, 28% of teams that led their league in home runs appeared in the World Series in the years they did so, and 18% of those clubs won those World Series. (I enclose the full study.) This does not suggest to me that “home runs are indeed more valuable than singles [or] doubles.” It suggest to me that many factors aside from home runs contribute to winning baseball games. I took this trouble because I have no interest in revisiting the steroid era, with or without steroids, whether or not chicks dig the long ball. Earl Weaver’s famous formula for winning, “pitching, defense, and the three-run homer,” requires the presence on a team of not just long-ball-or-strikeout specialists, but a number of people who can get on base consistently. Otherwise, you have a team with a bunch of solo homers and no ability to score other than via home runs. The Cubs (and others) have fielded a number of such teams during my lifetime. They have been extremely depressing to watch, and they haven’t won jack shit. The game of baseball is infinitely subtler, more interesting, and more exciting than any number of Home Run Derbies.
ESPN’s now-almost-invisible baseball coverage has been a leading culprit (along with MLB itself) in promoting this thoughtless obsession with home runs. I’d hate to see Vineline join in supporting it, or failing to view it with a critical eye.
But the sluggers kept trying to hit moon shots, and as more and more succeeded, pitchers, mostly deprived of help from chemical enhancements, nevertheless began throwing harder and faster, since “faster” equated statistically with “more strikeouts,” more strikeouts equated statistically with “fewer runs,” and also with “higher salaries.” The pitchers also began to notice that the uppercut swing made it even harder for hitters to catch up to high strikes. The age old pitching coaches’ mantra, “Keep the ball down,” was quickly supplanted by a new one: “Throw high strikes.” As home run totals rose year after year, so did strikeouts. The number of strikeouts in 2019 – the last full season for which complete records exist – was 42,823. GM’s continued to be obsessed with these numbers, seeking out and rewarding new big boppers and new flamethrowers. Sportscasters chattered of little else: Pitcher X tops 100 mph! Bopper Y hit 50 dingers in Triple A last year! Situational hitting, defense, base running – minor afterthoughts at best.
But in spite of my complaints and my frequent disgust with the brainlessness of so many television commentators, baseball has been and remains an unending source of joy and fascination for me. I can say, as have many others, that I’ve never gone out to a ball park and failed to see something happen I’d never seen before. The great baseball writer Roger Angell wrote of such surprises, reminding us that they’re to be treasured: “It is true that the smallest flutter of a spontaneous incident – in sports, or anywhere else in public life in this country – is now seized upon and transformed at once into a mass-produced imitation or a slogan or an advertising gimmick . . . . It is dispiriting, but we can’t let ourselves miss the moment of humor and exultation when it does come along, or deny its pleasure . . . .”
During another game in May of this year, this one in Pittsburgh, the Cubs had their catcher Wilson Contreras on second base with two outs. Shortstop Javier Baez grounded sharply to the third baseman, whose throw pulled the first baseman a yard or so off the bag toward home plate, from which Baez was running hard in his direction. All he’d have had to do was step back on first base and the inning would have been over. But Baez suddenly stopped, fleered toward the first baseman, and doubled back toward home. The first baseman, discombobulated, took the bait and chased after Baez, trying to tag him out. Baez ducked under the attempted tag.
Contreras, watching this goofy maneuver, had taken off for the plate. By the time the first baseman looked up, registered his own idiocy, and threw the ball to the catcher, it was too late – Contreras had scored. While everyone’s attention was on the plate, Baez dodged around the first baseman, standing there with his mouth open, and tore to first. The catcher realized that the play was still live and tried to throw to the second baseman, who was now covering first, but his throw sailed past him into right field and Baez tore around first and slid safely into second, where he stood dusting himself off and grinning broadly.
It was the kind of play you might see on a grade school diamond, completely unprofessional and fun as hell. It gave me hope that the players, who still love the game despite the corruptions of money and mindless statistics worship, will find a way to bring it back to itself, to make it a game again, not, as Sports Illustrated once described it, “a pharmacological trade show,” and not a factory for the production of meaningless data and insignificant records.
