The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

by Ben Lindbergh

  A pitcher aims to deliver the ball in about 1.2 to 1.3 seconds. This turns out to be one skill where Pacific Association pitchers can more or less match their big league role models. Some skills are like this. We’ve observed, for instance, that pitchers in our league often have MLB-quality pickoff moves—even better than MLB-quality, in some cases, because they can balk with near impunity. (We have only two umpires on the field, restricting their view of illegal moves, and umps at this level seem hesitant to make any unusual call.) There are other examples: Hitters tend to be skilled at leaning in and getting hit by pitches; pitchers are about as capable as big leaguers when they have to throw a strike—on 3-0, for instance. But in nearly all other facets of the game, our guys are just worse. It’s like exceptionalism doesn’t just manifest in certain areas of major leaguers’ bodies, but also in every atom in every cell of their bodies, to the degree that one wonders whether major leaguers are also more resistant to headaches and have more acute taste buds and know when a sneeze is coming before the rest of us do.

  So they run faster—a lot faster. This shocked us. There are, of course, plenty of fast major league players, but there are also plenty of other athletes who are fast, and because being fast isn’t enough to get a player to the majors all on its own, we figured there must be loads of superspeed guys with the sort of mediocre baseball skills that would banish them to indy ball. In fact, there was exactly one superfast guy in the league, a Vallejo Admiral named Darian Sandford, who would sometimes steal home on the catcher’s throw back to the pitcher. He played a fourth of the Pacific Association season before he got a job in a higher league, and he still ends up second in our league in steals. He can make it from home to first (from the right side) in 4.0 seconds, which is elite even at the major league level. But nobody else in the league is close to that. Our fastest guy, Matt Hibbert, who leads the league in steals, is 4.3 to first, which is major league average. I’ve clocked just about every player in the league running to first, and that is pretty much the high end: average. Meanwhile, guys who are considered fairly fast in our league are 4.5 to first, which is about the third percentile of major league runners. “Slow” players in our league will chase 5.0, which is unheard of in the majors—even the famously slow Molina brothers can beat that.

  This mediocrity, as I said, surprised me, but I came to understand it better. One day, Gered Mochizuki was tutoring Mark Hurley in our dugout before the game, and out of the fog of Moch-speech came the most insightful—and depressing—explanation of the gap between indy ballers and minor leaguers. Hurley was inside the dugout; Moch was outside it, leaning over the rail, and he stepped back and pointed at the fishnet, a series of small squares that protected all our shins from foul balls. “You think that you’re this whole big screen, like a big rectangle,” he said. “But you’re actually a collection of all these little squares in here. And each one is a part of the game that you have to learn and polish. In affiliated ball, they start with the first square and they polish it until it’s perfect. Then they go on to the next square, and they polish that one. Eventually you’ve polished every spot and you’re a complete ballplayer, you know how to play the game. But nobody does that for you here. If you don’t do it yourself, you never learn all these little ways that you should be better.”

  This is profoundly sad if you’re the guy who is signing twenty-two-year-old ballplayers who dream of reaching the big leagues, because it means that just by being here they’re falling behind their peers. Mark Hurley and some dude who was drafted in the thirty-ninth round last year might have started this season at the same talent level, more or less. But that other guy, by luck of having been seen by a scout, or having a slightly more promising frame or repertoire or profile, or a dad who played minor league ball, gets the benefit of dozens of the world’s best coaches, who are dedicated to spending sixty hours a week training him, teaching him, polishing him, and compelling him to spend sixty hours a week on the same. But Mark was here. For most of the season Mark essentially had one coach, and that one coach had no experience coaching, and a full-time job on the side playing center field. Every day that Mark spends here, impressing the hell out of us, blowing our minds at how much better he is than we expected, maybe even catching a scout’s eye or producing stats good enough to move up to the Association, is a day that he’s falling further behind Mr. Thirty-Ninth-Round Pick. Nothing he can do at this level can overwhelm the toxic fact that he is at this level.

  So, yes, the players here don’t hit as well. They don’t throw as hard. They don’t catch as many balls. But their flaws are smaller and pervasive: If a slow-hit grounder forces the shortstop to move in and to his right, it’s probably going to be a hit (despite the slow-ass runners), because shortstops at this level don’t have the quick transfers and the strong arms to throw across their bodies. It’s an infield-hits league, really. And if a left-handed pitcher with a camouflaged balk move picks a runner off, and that runner can run even a little bit, and if instead of diving back or freezing in his tracks that runner just turns and sprints to second, he’s quite often going to be safe because the first basemen are so slow to get the ball out of their gloves, so clumsy stepping over to get a clear throwing lane, and so unable to throw a good, crisp strike to a target that (if the shortstop is still moving over to cover) isn’t even there yet. And if the backup catcher is starting that day, and you want to steal a bunch of bases against him, you probably can.

  So we do. Remember our math: Pitcher Time + Catcher Time > Runner Time = Stolen Base. This pitcher, a big lefty with a high leg kick, usually comes in at 1.4 seconds. Catchers aim for 1.8; most in the pros are 1.9 to 2.0; most here are 2.0 to 2.1. (Ours, Isaac and Parker, are 1.9, which might be the most undermentioned reason that our team is so good.) This kid for San Rafael is 2.3. Which puts the Pacifics’ pitcher-catcher combo at 3.7 seconds, not counting the few microseconds it takes for the fielder to lay the tag on. At 3.7 seconds, the only reason not to go is if you’re worried about the other team’s feelings. By Matt Hibbert’s fourth steal of the game—and our team’s ninth—I’m starting to be.

  This gives us a nice cushion, as we go ahead 4-0 in the first three innings. Walker is pitching … better. He normally throws about 80 mph, with a weird habit of throwing in the high-70s early in games and building up, as though he’s pacing himself for the ninth inning. But today he comes out throwing harder, 82, 83, the fastest we’ve clocked him at in at least a month, if still the slowest of any of our starters. I’m actually relieved when he allows a bases-empty double in the second, because I feared Yoshi wouldn’t stick to our plan if Walker were throwing a no-hitter.

  In the fourth, though, Walker’s second time through the order, he’s not throwing as hard and he puts the first two men on. He gets the next two outs, but throws his one inarguably awful pitch of the night—a hanging curveball to the Pacifics’ massive new third baseman, Jake Taylor—and nineteen seconds later, Taylor touches home plate with the lead cut to 4-3. We answer back, and as Walker takes the hill in the fifth, he has a 7-3 lead and is facing the bottom of the Pacifics’ order for the second time. The no. 8 hitter singles. The no. 9 hitter singles. The top of the order is coming up. We don’t lose often, but when we do it is almost always right here. This spot, over and over and over again.

  But this time the mouse is going to turn left.

  Of all the pitchers who’ve been left out to face lineups for a third time, Walker’s extended outings have been the most galling. For one thing, he’s been our worst starter overall—maybe our worst pitcher overall, going by our metrics—so trying to squeeze extra innings out of him makes the least sense of all. For another, he’s been by far our worst starter the third time through the order. Entering this game, he had a 4.55 FIP the first time through the order; 4.94 the second time; and 6.80 the third time. The league as a whole had hit about as well against him the third time through as Hank Aaron hit in his best season.

  But perhaps most annoying is that our managers have jus
tified leaving him out there by noting that he is our no. 1 starter. Because he started Opening Day. Which, you’ll recall, he did only because he’d asked. In his second start of the season, Walker was removed when he was one out away from a win. Even though he left with a lead, he was livid when he got back to the dugout. But this time, Yoshi told Walker before the game that exiting early was the plan, and Yoshi follows through. Walker calmly hands the ball to his manager and walks to the dugout as Sean Conroy trots in. “The ol’ bring-in-the-closer-for-the-five-inning-save,” Eric Schwieger deadpans in the dugout, and hearing that reminds me that this is going to be our game: Everybody on the team knows that Yoshi would never have made this move on his own, that he’s now following our lead. Ben and I are going to wear this one like a crown or like skunk, depending. When Sean’s first pitch to Zack Pace is a line drive just foul down the first-base line, I feel, for the first time since our first shift against Nick Oddo, that everything rides on this. That’s the downside to taking action: results matter. We’ve finally quit hiding, and now we’re going to be judged. Walker, especially, will want to kill us if this doesn’t work.

  Ahead 0-1, Sean gets Pace to pop out to second base. Then he gets ahead of Danny Gonzalez and induces a pop-up to shallow center field. Now Sean can get out of this without allowing a run. Naturally, he’ll have to get past Matt Chavez.

  Chavez reminds me most of all of Albert Pujols. He has a sort of stiff-necked posture that makes it look like he’s built out of Legos, but that hides a fairly easy athleticism. He enters this game hitting .371/.444/.743 with 18 home runs in forty-three games, but against us he is batting .481 and slugging 1.077. He has played thirteen games against us and homered in nine of them. At twenty-six, he’s too old to be a big prospect; the Giants signed him after a tryout in 2014, but they cut him when he failed to tear up A ball in his first ten games. After that setback, he flitted through the Frontier League and the United League before landing in San Rafael, where he became a beast right away. On his bio page at the University of San Francisco, Chavez wrote that he “would like to be Superman for a day.” Now he’s getting to be Superman for a season.

  Our catchers have figured out that he’s unpitchable, but our pitchers all continue to insist that they can get him out. Even those who have allowed homers (which includes most of them) insist everybody else is just being stupid, or gutless, or reckless, or they just suck; we’re told anytime we give a scouting report on Chavez that somebody just needs to bean him (yet only twice all year has he been hit by a pitch) or throw him breaking balls away or fastballs inside or pitches down and in. Meanwhile, everybody else on the team gets pissed off and asks why we’re still trying to pitch to him at all—just intentionally walk the dude. (Oddly, he hasn’t been walked intentionally all year; his overall walk rate is lower than our team’s as a whole.)

  I’d been promoting the idea that, with every team in the league obsessed with getting an inside fastball past him, he is sitting on that pitch. I tell everybody about the time I saw him get a fastball right at his hands and hit it about 450 feet, just foul down the left-field line. But because he’s looking for that pitch, he is occasionally made to look silly on breaking stuff. At least it was a plan. I talk up this plan. He goes 5-for-11 with a homer in the first two games of this series.

  So this is who is coming up to face Sean now. “Come on, Sleepy,” a fan calls as Chavez comes to the plate, and the Pacifics’ dugout gets noticeably more alert for the matchup. The two have never faced each other. Sean and I have talked about how he’ll get Chavez out when they meet, but Sean’s plan is no different than against any other hitter: Throw him what he’s not expecting and keep the ball down. I recommend he finally break out the knuckleball.

  Sean’s first pitch is a slider, up and in—and Wenrich frames it beautifully, for a strike. “Here we go, be smart here, kid!” Walker calls to Sean, and then, to himself, “Bottom of the zone.” Conroy fires another slider and it is in the bottom of the zone, but Chavez gets good wood on it and sends a fly ball to right field. We’ve seen the Pacifics’ strong right-handers homer on cheap fly balls down the 310-foot line, and for a moment I’m sure this is another one; I groan loudly, losing for the moment my disciplined, dugout-approved nonchalance. But Brennan Metzger moves back and stops under it for an easy third out. Walker is the first one out of the dugout. “Attaboy, Sean, good job!” He approves. We all, for the moment, approve.

  Sean leans against the railing next to me. “I just ruined my ground-ball rate,” he says.

  “Keeping Chavez in the park counts as a ground ball,” I answer.

  It’s not easy, this game. Sean gets through the sixth smoothly and strikes out the first two in the seventh. Then he gets squeezed by the umpire and walks a pair, and Chavez is up again. Our infield shifts way over to the pull side, almost begging him to cut down his swing and poke a single the other way. But he won’t: After a slider for a strike, Sean throws him another slider, and Chavez hits one into the first row of the left-field bleachers, cutting the Stompers’ lead to 7-6. (The home run ties the league’s all-time home run record, and we’re only a week past the halfway point in the season.) Then Sean gets through the eighth easily, and as Yoshi jogs out to the third-base coach’s box for the bottom of the eighth, I flag him down.

  “Do you want Gonzo to get ready?” I ask.

  “Ready, yeah,” Yoshi says. But only in case Sean gets in trouble. Otherwise, our closer is going to close this.

  The math is obnoxious: The Stompers go into the ninth with a two-run lead, having tacked on a run in the eighth. Chavez is the fifth batter due up. If two guys get on base, he’ll bat as the go-ahead run.

  Of course, two guys get on base, with two men out. Tyger Pederson, a left-handed hitter, singles on a ground ball to right field. Then Pace, another lefty, nubs a grounder down the third-base line; T. J. Gavlik fields it but has no play. Gonsalves is warm in the bullpen.

  “What do you do here?” I ask Matt Walker.

  “He’s leaving him in,” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Sean’s our best guy. He’s our closer. This is why you’ve got him.”

  Yoshi does leave him in, for what Tim Livingston tells his listeners is “the most high-leverage situation in a ball game at Arnold Field this year.” Sean throws a fastball at Chavez’s shins for a called strike one. He throws a slider low and away and gets a pop-up into our bullpen, just out of Joel Carranza’s leaping reach. Chavez still hasn’t seen Sean’s overhand pitch, so on 0-2 Sean tries it—a fastball at the letters freezes Chavez, but it’s just inside for a ball. Then, on 1-2, he throws a fastball at the knees, inside corner, for a called strike three. Game over. I’m almost crying. I’m almost crying right now, months later. It’s the most I’ve ever felt at a baseball game, because it worked. It’s a hell of a thing to care.

  The team goes through its own high-five line, as with any other victory, but when they wheel around to return to the dugout I’m no longer just the leftover equipment.

  “Good job, guys,” Matt Hibbert tells Ben and me and gives us high fives.

  “Samwise—well done,” Tommy Lyons says.

  Yoshi comes to shake my hand, pats my shoulder, and says, “Good game.”

  “How fucking tight was your butthole?” Isaac asks Ben. “I look over and I see Sam and Ben—” and here he mimes a puckered butthole.

  There’s much laughter. Sean’s host family hugs him. I hug him. Then I go find Matt Walker and tell him he pitched a helluva game, and I couldn’t be prouder of him.

  * * *

  After that, there’s a thaw between the statheads and the manager. Three days later, Sean again comes into the game in the fifth against San Rafael, this time to relieve Paul Hvozdovic. His first pitch—to Matt Chavez—is a slider down the middle, and Chavez homers. But Sean allows only one more hit the rest of the way. In the ninth, he walks the leadoff man, but with Chavez on deck in a one-run game, Matt Kavanaugh makes the unthinkable decision to have
Danny Gonzalez bunt the runner over. It works, opening up first base, and Sean issues the first intentional walk of Chavez all year. He then gets Pacifics cleanup man Maikel Jova to fly out and strikes out Jeremy Williams on nine pitches. After the game I tweet: “Another huge performance from Sean Conroy, professional baseball’s only openly five-inning closer.”

  Yoshi starts coming to us, asking for information—often information we consider less than useful, like how a certain pitcher has done against a certain hitter (usually too small a sample to be helpful), or how each of the day’s lineup options has done against lefties (it takes hundreds or thousands of at-bats before a player’s “true” platoon split emerges; safer to assume all batters will have typical platoon advantages), or how that day’s starting pitcher does the third time through the order (when the default should be to remove all but the very best pitchers the third time through if the bullpen is rested enough to handle it). We’re happy to help. We drill ever deeper into Matt Chavez’s numbers and realize that he has hit every fastball Gregory Paulino has thrown him this year, but whiffed on, fouled off, or made weak contact with every slider; all we have to do is throw sliders. Yoshi is impressed: “Evidences,” he says, encouraging Andrew Parker to listen to us. We give Yoshi guidelines on when it would make sense to intentionally walk Chavez, using research done during Barry Bonds’s PED heyday. Now that Sean has broken the seal, we’re all less scared to do it again. At one point our pitchers walk Chavez six times in a row, as the Pacifics and their fans taunt us.

  And we really start to shift. Not once in a while; not timidly; but constantly, every game, for multiple batters in each lineup. We keep waiting for it to backfire, for some hitter to take what we give him and single the other way. But it never happens. We put on scores of shifts, maybe hundreds, and though they don’t always work—sometimes a guy hits one right through the teeth of it, or is late on a fastball and pokes one through the undefended part, or bombs a towering homer over the top of it—they never look “beatable.” We’ve been so worried that the other teams would just flip a switch and start trying to beat it, would successfully beat it, and would reveal the vulnerabilities in our plan. They don’t; they can’t; we’re invincible. There are only four obstacles to shifting even more at this point.