by Bob Gibson
Those guys trust their stuff. They’re not afraid to give you a ball to hit. When they do, be ready. Go to work.
Bob Gibson
At the very least, the hitter has to let you know that he might swing at the first pitch, or probably will if you throw the ball out over the plate. Most hitters have a pattern, just like most pitchers have a pattern.
Reggie Jackson
There are statistics now about how many pitches a batter sees each particular time at the plate. And there are players who are hell-bent on going deep into the count. Bobby Abreu sees more pitches than any player in baseball, about four and a half per time at bat. Well, I don’t understand that statistic.
You go to home plate to swing the bat. Obviously, early in the count you don’t want to swing at pitches out of the strike zone that you can’t do anything with, or pitches in the strike zone that you can’t do anything with. That only plays into the pitcher’s hands and gets you into trouble with the count. And yes, it’s a good thing to make the pitcher work hard. Maybe you can get him out of the game earlier. But to me, the best way to get him out of the game is to knock him out of the game. Swing the bat. If you see a good pitch to hit from a good pitcher, it may be the only one you’ll see. It may be the first inning, but if that guy gets in a groove, you’re in for a long day. So bear down. Don’t let opportunity pass you by. Swing the bat.
If it’s a bad pitcher, or even a good pitcher on a bad day, you’ve got a chance to get him out of there quickly if you swing the bat. And it doesn’t take long to tell if a pitcher doesn’t have it. Sometimes, in the first inning, I’d look at Bucky Dent, who was hitting ninth, and say, “Man, you ain’t gonna see this guy. I’ve got a chance to get fat today. And I’m gonna get something early, because he may not be there the next time I come up.” Sometimes you say that and screw around, and before you know it it’s the seventh inning and you’re losing. You’ve got to take care of your business when you have the chance. Swing the bat.
I always had a plan in mind when I came up to bat, and it always involved hitting the ball before the pitcher got two strikes on me. With two strikes, I had to chuck the plan and fight for my life. At that point, you’ve got to resort to staying alive and getting the bat on the ball, trying to become a baserunner any way you can. That’s why the count makes such a profound difference.
I’d get all messed up if I didn’t keep the count in my head. It was sort of my bookmark to tell me where I was in this at-bat. If I didn’t keep track of the balls and strikes, I’d lose my place and my purpose. One-and-two is so, so far from two-and-one. Two-and-two and one-and-two are very similar for me. It’s still two strikes, do or die. But if I’m one-and-oh, two-and-oh, two-and-one, three-and-one … now I’ve got a count I can work with.
It might sound strange, but I’d actually rather be two-and-one than three-and-one. I’d rather be two-and-oh than three-and-oh. I just like it better. I’m more apt to get something to hit, because the pitcher thinks he’s still in the at-bat. There’s still a contest going on. Three-and-oh, I’m not going to get a ball to hit. That’s too much of a freebie, and he’s not going to give me that. He might give that to a singles hitter, but not to someone who can really hurt him.
Bob Gibson
On three-and-oh or three-and-one, depending on the situation, I might be looking over Reggie’s shoulder and not caring whether he gets a strike or not. Who’s the next hitter?
Bob Gibson
Unfortunately, as much as I hated to do it—believe me, there’s not much that I hated more—there were situations when I’d have to give the batter a pitch to hit because I couldn’t afford another ball. But at the same time, I’d know who was capable of swinging at a bad pitch when he should be holding out for a good one. Thankfully, there are guys who will swing at a ball in the dirt at two-and-oh. You need to know who’s capable of doing that and who’s not capable of doing it.
Fortunately for me, when you throw hard, a lot of guys are capable of swinging at bad pitches. They’re too eager. They over-commit.
Reggie Jackson
One of Ted Williams’s principles of hitting was that an average hitter swinging at a good pitch to hit is better than a great hitter swinging at a bad pitch to hit. I go along with that. And I honestly felt that when I went to home plate, eighty-five to ninety percent of the time I was going to get a ball to put in play hard. Even facing a guy like Gibson, or any of the great ones. It may not be exactly what you want, and it may be tougher to handle than you hoped for, but you’re going to get something hittable.
Bob Gibson
That’s true, but there are degrees of hittable. I might give a batter something over the plate on the first pitch, and that would be hittable. It would be ninety-five miles an hour and it would be moving one way or another, but comparatively speaking it would be hittable. If the count is three-and-something and it’s late in a close game and there’s no place to put you, you’re going to get something hittable.
All of that is in the flow of the game, me against you and let’s see what you can do. But then there’s another level. Those are the mistakes. That’s when I hang a curveball or leave a fastball out over the plate when I’m ahead in the count and don’t have to.
Even the good pitchers make bad pitches, and plenty of them. I couldn’t count how many bad pitches I’d make in the course of a game. I’d guess maybe twenty, twenty-five a game, and that’s not counting the ones that are so wild and far out of the strike zone that nobody can get the bat on them anyway.
Now, of those twenty-five, it’s really hard to say how many will actually get hit hard. Some you get away with, some you don’t. It depends on who you’re missing to. The bad hitters, the guys who hit .250, are the ones who come in and say, “Aw, man, I just missed that!” It was a bad pitch and he missed it. He was given a better chance than he had any reason to believe he’d get, and he comes in complaining that he missed it, like he almost had me. He’ll get a ball that he’s supposed to hit 400 feet and he’ll hit it 320, nice and easy, right to the left fielder, and come back to the dugout and make a little scene and swear he just missed it. He’ll do that a lot.
Reggie Jackson
Most of the time, home runs come on balls that were not in good spots. They were out over the plate. But there are occasions when the pitcher might throw a pitch that he considers to be a mistake—a breaking ball that doesn’t break or a fastball that doesn’t go where he wants it to—and it’s actually a good pitch if the hitter happens to be looking for something else.
And sometimes, a hitter puts the bat on plain good pitches. I’ve hit home runs, gone back to the dugout, and somebody has asked me what I hit, and I’ve said, “I don’t know. I just saw the ball and hit it.” That usually comes from hitting a good pitch. I’d bet I had fifty home runs like that, where I didn’t know what I hit.
There are very few games when you simply don’t ever get a pitch to hit. Chances are decent that you’ll get one every time you come to the plate, even against the best pitchers on their best days.
In my career, one memorable exception was when I was with the A’s, 1973 World Series, Tom Seaver. It was about thirty-eight degrees, and he was sweating and had a big ol’ mud spot where he dragged that right knee. After he finished his motion, it was like he jumped forward. I never got a ball to hit that day. I got balls that were in the strike zone, but I never got a ball that I could handle. It was so unusual that, in my twenty-one-year career, it stands out.
The other thing that stands out was that we won the game anyway, 3–2 in eleven innings. Sometimes it just works out like that.
Bob Gibson
It’s rare that a pitcher can make it through a game without mistakes. Even on the days when you’ve got really, really good stuff, you’re going to make some bad pitches. When I was on a roll in 1968, even when I threw forty-seven straight scoreless innings and had like an 0.19 ERA over a stretch of close to a hundred innings—when it seemed like every pitch went exactly where I w
anted it to go—there were mistakes. I probably got away with more mistakes than usual, because I was making more good pitches and getting ahead in the count and keeping the hitters on their heels. But there were bad pitches, and most of the time good hitters don’t miss bad pitches. Those other guys go “Damn it!” and foul it back. Those good hitters go “Whack!” and they’ve got you saying “Damn it!”
Guys like Mays don’t miss mistakes. On the whole, Mays didn’t hurt me as much as Aaron, and I found him easier to pitch to, but Willie was an example of a guy who just did not miss a mistake. If you threw him a breaking ball and missed with it, home run. At the best, a double. Willie didn’t hit singles off hanging breaking balls.
Reggie Jackson
The counterpart for that is a pitcher who refuses to make a mistake. I didn’t see Seaver enough to know if that was his standard operating procedure—I suspect it was—but I can say from experience that Ferguson Jenkins was that way.
Fergie Jenkins was a big guy who threw hard and didn’t look like it. He had an effortless motion. Fergie threw a changeup and his back foot never left the rubber. He kept the ball away from me, which I should have liked because it played into my style of hitting, but he would never quite put it where I could get to it. In that respect, Jenkins was very similar to Jim Palmer. He didn’t throw as hard as Palmer, but he was always in command of the situation. He was an easygoing guy who had a way of looking at you and laughing, like he was saying, “You ain’t gonna beat me because I ain’t gonna pitch to you. I’m gonna give you a ball and you’re gonna maybe hit it to the second baseman or sky one in the air. You’re gonna have a good swing on me. You’re never gonna look bad. But you ain’t gonna beat me.”
That’s how Fergie treated me, anyway. He just went away from the barrel and got me out. I was very comfortable facing him. I couldn’t wait to get to the plate. But I never got the barrel square on the ball. Ferguson Jenkins could control you with his control. He was a great and very underrated pitcher. The man was a twenty-game winner seven times.
Bob Gibson
For a pitcher, it’s not just avoiding mistakes. More important is that you avoid mistakes at the wrong time.
When the game is on the line, you don’t want to leave it up to chance. I was in a hotel lounge watching a game the other night when the Cardinals’ closer, a young pitcher named Chris Perez, gave up a home run in the ninth inning that tied the game. After the inning, a guy who was sitting there said, “Too bad, he made one mistake.” In the paper the next morning, Perez was saying, “I made one mistake.” That’s not true. He threw two or three pitches right where they should have been driven, but he throws hard enough that he gets away with it most of the time. Not all mistakes get clobbered. But some do, and a really, really good pitcher won’t make mistakes when they can beat him that way.
When Hank Aaron comes up in the ninth inning, you don’t make a mistake. If you walk him, you walk him, but if there’s any way around it you don’t make a mistake to Hank Aaron in a situation where he can beat you. Period. That’s how you lose a ballgame.
Bob Gibson
I swear, I really don’t know what hitters think—especially after I see them swing sometimes.
If they think that pitchers are a superior breed, I’m not going to argue; but I have to say that a lot of times they give us too much credit and make it too hard on themselves by overthinking. Or not thinking, whichever way you want to look at it. I’ve seen where a pitcher might throw ten fastballs in a row and the hitter will still be looking for a breaking ball. He’s just guessing, and guessing against the percentages. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
It works the other way, too. A while back I was watching somebody pitch to one of the Cardinals’ outfielders, and he threw two straight breaking balls that the guy missed by a foot both times. Then he threw a fastball and the batter hit a double. Had two guys in scoring position. I don’t know why you’d do that. I don’t have a clue.
It could be, I suppose, that they’re plotting out the whole sequence before the batter even steps in. I never did that, and I would never recommend it. You can’t plan three or four pitches ahead, because it seldom goes exactly the way you script it. You have to pay attention and respond to what’s happening, how it’s developing. I always based the next pitch on the last pitch.
There really wasn’t much reason for hitters to be up there guessing against me. They pretty much knew what I was going to throw. Fastball, slider. Hard stuff. Hard.
Reggie Jackson
There are some guys who just go up there trying to outguess the pitcher. They’re not good hitters. But there are times when you can say, yeah, I’m looking for a high fastball away against Bob Gibson because he likes to throw the ball out there. Sooner or later, I’m going to cut my strike zone in half and just wait for that fastball up and away. If he throws me a ball down and in, I’m not going to hit it. It’s going to be strike three. But I want to make sure I get on the high fastball away because I’m pretty sure it’s coming—it always does—and I want to tie this game up. I’m going to look for that fastball, and I know he’s going to throw me two of them. If I get it, I’m going to get the barrel on it. I might not hit it out, but I’m going to hit it hard.
Am I guessing? I suppose you could say that. But if I’ve become familiar with a pitcher over the years, I think I know—I think I ought to know—what I’m going to get from him. I call it “calculated anticipation.”
Bob Gibson
Guessing.
Reggie Jackson
Okay, maybe it’s guessing, if you want to call it that; but there’s a reason for it. That’s why I don’t consider it guessing.
If you don’t have a history with a pitcher and haven’t studied his stuff and his tendencies, you’re probably up there looking for a certain pitch in a certain situation. That’s what I’d call guessing. And that’s not what I mean when I talk about calculated anticipation. I’m talking about tapping into your precedents, utilizing the knowledge you’ve acquired over a period of time, and using all of that to inform you and set your strategy.
Joe Garagiola made fun of me once for that term, calculated anticipation. But it’s nothing more than the practical result of what you know. There are guys who just go to home plate and say, I’m looking for a curveball. Why? What leads you to that decision? You can’t defend a decision like that unless you have an understanding of what a pitcher may do in that particular scenario. If it’s an intelligent, veteran pitcher, especially, there’s a certain way he wants to pitch you. It’s your job to know what it is. You have to watch, study, figure it out.
It’s an ongoing process. If I’m hitting a guy pretty well and taking something away from him, he’s not coming back with that same pitch. He might show it to me—say, a fastball high and outside—but unless he makes a mistake it’s not going to be a ball I can handle. So I can limit the possibilities through the process of elimination and get an idea of what I might see that’s hittable. On the other hand, if a pitcher starts beating me with a certain pitch in a certain area, I can be assured that, sooner or later—probably sooner—I’ll get it again. And that has to become a part of my plan. I have to decide whether I’m going to make an adjustment to handle that pitch or let it go in the “calculated anticipation” of something else.
If I have reason to believe that a pitcher’s going to work me inside and I don’t handle the ball inside, most of the time I’m not walking up to the plate hoping to get a cut, right off the bat, at a pitch inside. My plan is just as important as his plan. I’m a professional: I’ve got to stay on my plan and not deviate from it until I get two strikes, at which point the plan is pretty much worthless. Now, if I’m convinced that the guy is absolutely determined to work me inside and nowhere else, that may allow me to cheat a bit and back up in the box. But that’s an unusual circumstance. More often, at least until two strikes, I’ll still be looking for a ball away that I can square.
It becomes cat and mouse. The pitcher may say to himself,
“He’s got to be looking inside. Let me try to sneak one past him outside.” If he’s smart and he’s done his homework, he won’t say that; but it happens, thankfully.
There are so many permutations to all of this. I may have hit his fastball hard three times that day. It’s a close ballgame and I’ve lined to shortstop, I’ve hit a sharp ground ball to second base, and I’ve just missed a good fastball and skied it to center field. He’s gotten me out with the fastball, but he’s probably thinking he’s running out of luck. Now I can go to home plate figuring that I’m going to see a breaking ball and wait for it. I’m trying to think with him.
Bob Gibson
But a batter can’t do that pitch by pitch by pitch. It’s more of a general plan. He’s got something in mind that he’s looking for and he’ll look for it three out of four pitches or what have you. But he can’t get into a situation where he’ll be going pitch by pitch, guessing each one. Unless you really get lucky, that’s not going to work.