by David Nemec
Unfortunately, little discussion of early-day quick pitch exponents can elsewhere be found.
A RETOUCH is the act of a runner in returning to a base as legally required.
This rule is seldom strictly enforced on a long foul ball down the line that, say, sends a runner on first base scampering almost to third before it is called foul so long as the runner passes in the neighborhood of second in returning to first. In any case, any missed base or failure to tag it is an appeal play by the defense; the umpire cannot initiate it. Nor can the team on defense initiate an appeal once the next pitch has been thrown. In the event a runner on any base does not tag his base of origin after a foul ball has been hit, he cannot be thrown out on an appeal in any case because the umpire-in-chief cannot put the ball in play again until every runner has properly tagged his base.
The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.
In theory, the strike zone was changed in 1969 when it was reduced at its upper limit from the top of a batter’s shoulders to his armpits and at the lower limit from the bottom of a batter’s knees to the top of his knees. The truth, however, is that umpires subsequent to 1969 gradually shrank the upper limit of the strike zone until it became the beltline. To halt this practice, the Official Playing Rules Committee rewrote the definition of the strike zone prior to the 1988 season. But some older arbiters allegedly ignored it and still went by the pre-1988 strike-zone configuration, whereas others found it easier to picture the armpits as the upper limit rather than an imaginary midpoint between the beltline and the top of the shoulders. In 1995, the definition of the strike zone was again rewritten. Though umpires were strongly advised to adhere to it, some current players and managers still contend that too many umpires continued to fall into three groups: those that presume a pitch to be a strike unless there is a reason to call it a ball; those that presume a pitch to be a ball unless they deem it to be a strike; and the worst group of all, those that appear to have no regular approach at all to making ball-strike decisions. In recent years, however, to the displeasure of most umpires, electronic pitch-calling devices have been installed in many parks. Controversial as these devices are, their presence appears to have resulted in the strike zone becoming more uniform since, as we have already pointed out, they may otherwise one day strip this task from plate umpires.
Until the National Association came into existence in 1871, the strike zone was nebulous. Beginning in 1858, when the concept of calling strikes was first introduced, umpires were authorized to assess a strike on any pitch that was “within fair reach of the batter.” In 1871, the National Association adopted a rule that originated several years earlier, allowing a batter to request either “high” or “low” pitches. The strike zone for a high ball was between a batter’s waist and forward shoulder, whereas the low strike zone ranged from the waist to the forward knee. A batter was required to declare verbally his choice of pitches when he stepped up to the plate, and was not permitted to change his mind during his turn at bat. If a batter did not declare himself, the strike zone then became the entire area between the shoulder and the knee.
Quaint as the notion of a high and a low strike now seems, it endured for the first 16 seasons of professional play, from 1871 through the 1886 season. Prior to 1874, however, pitches in the wrong strike zone were not called balls but simply no pitches. In 1887, when the number of balls needed for a walk was pared to five and the number of strikes hiked to four, the high-low rule was eliminated. Confronting hitters with a strike zone double in size seemingly ought to have resulted in markedly lower batter averages, but quite the opposite occurred. Along with some major changes to the pitching rules, giving batters an extra strike and granting a walk after only five balls instead of six apparently more than compensated for the larger strike zone, at least in 1887.
By 1892, however, it was clear that a contrary adjustment was compulsory to restore a balance between hitters and pitchers, as the NL batting average that season plummeted to its 1880 level of .245. After considerable debate, the rules committee once again increased the pitching distance.
To compensate hurlers when the pitching distance was lengthened in 1893, groundskeepers followed an innovation that teams like the St. Louis Browns developed on the sly in the 1880s, claiming it quickened drainage of the infield after a rainstorm and began to raise the pitcher’s plate, centering it in a circular mound. There were no restrictions at first on how high a mound could be built. Teams like the New York Giants, with speedballers like Amos Rusie, consequently strove to have them tower above the batter, whereas clubs that were about to face Rusie in their home parks would shave their mounds the night before beginning a series with the Giants.
These sorts of shenanigans went on for a full decade since there was nothing in the rules to prevent it. Indeed there was nothing at all in the rules about mounds! Then, in 1904, all organized professional leagues adopted a rule that the “pitcher’s plate shall not be more than 15 inches higher than the baselines or the home plate . . . and the slope . . . shall be gradual.” The new rule was the first even to acknowledge that a pitcher’s plate did not have to be level with the surface of the playing field.
In the late 1960s, the game’s moguls faced a similar crisis that had forced their brethren to lengthen the pitching distance in 1893. After Carl Yastrzemski set an all-time nadir for a major-league batting leader when he won the American League hitting crown in 1968 with a .301 average, Bob Gibson topped the majors with a microscopic 1.12 ERA, and Cincinnati was the only major-league team to average as many as four and a half runs a game, one of the changes instigated in an effort to restore the balance between hitters and pitchers was to pare five inches off the mound and reduce its maximum height to ten inches.
Batting averages rose in 1969, but not nearly as much as they had in 1893 after the pitching distance was increased. Continued experimentation with the rules was necessary in order to procure more offense. Among the changes that eventually impacted on the balance between hitters and pitchers were reducing the strike zone and, in the American League at least, legislating that a hitter could be designated to bat in place of the pitcher.
To many observers, the strike zone seems to have expanded in recent years, but MLB authorities insist it has not (even though team and individual batting averages have shrunk to alarming proportions and strikeouts have soared). In actuality, by some accounts pitchers in 2019 put the ball in the strike zone less than 50 percent of the time, relying on their speed and free-swinging batters to chase pitches—particularly high and low ones—that are well out of the zone. Additionally, with two strikes on a batter, the number of pitches in the strike zone dropped below 40 percent. Whatever the truth of the matter is, it is a deeply disturbing reality that in 2018, for the first time in major-league history—in addition to there being a record number of batter strikeouts for the 13th straight season—the number of batter strikeouts (41,210) exceeded the number of base hits (41,019). It should also be duly noted that MLB conducted a novel experiment in the independent Atlantic League, its pet testing ground, in 2019. To coax pitchers back into the strike zone, particularly when the bases are empty, the Atlantic League allowed batters to run to first base and remain there if they reached it safely not just on a dropped third strike but on any mishandled or wild pitch regardless of the count.
A TAG is the action of a fielder in touching a base with his body while holding the ball securely and firmly in his hand or glove; or touching a runner with the ball, or with his hand or glove holding the ball (not including hanging laces alone) while holding the ball securely and firmly in his hand or glove. It is not a tag, however, if simultaneously or immediately following his touching a base or touching a runner, the
fielder drops the ball. In establishing the validity of the tag, the fielder shall hold the ball long enough to prove that he has complete control of the ball. If the fielder has made a tag and drops the ball while in the act of making a throw following the tag, the tag shall be adjudged to have been made. In 2019, the following was added to the definition of Tag: “For purposes of this definition any jewelry being worn by a player (e.g., necklaces, bracelets, etc.) shall not constitute a part of the player’s body.” The same stipulation regarding jewelry worn by a player was added to the definition of Touch.
Again, we cannot be sure when the word “tag” became part of baseball lingo. In the infant forms of baseball, a fielder did not retire a runner by tagging him with the ball or tagging a base before he reached it but by hitting or “soaking” him with a thrown ball. This barbaric method had vanished by the time the Cartwright rules were adopted, but the idea of requiring a fielder to tag a runner was not embraced until 1848. Prior to that season, it had been possible to nail a runner at any base—including home—simply by tagging it before he got there. Runners in the pre-1848 era were tagged only when they clashed between bases with a fielder who happened to have the ball. As of the 1848 campaign, however, it became necessary to tag a runner coming into a base on any play except a force out.
A WILD PITCH is one so high, so low, or so wide of the plate that it cannot be handled with ordinary effort by the catcher.
Many games have been decided by a wild pitch. Perhaps the most renowned instance in postseason history came in decisive Game Five of the 1972 NLDS (when LCS’s were still best-of-five affairs) on October 11 at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. The Reds entered the bottom of the ninth trailing the Pirates, 3–2, with relief ace Dave Giusti on the mound. After Johnny Bench led off the frame with a homer to tie the game, Giusti surrendered two more hits before giving way to Bob Moose, normally a starter. Moose retired Cesar Geronimo and Darrel Chaney, bringing up Hal McRae, who was batting for Reds reliever Clay Carroll. Moose unleashed a pitch in the dirt that eluded Pittsburgh catcher Manny Sanguillen, allowing George Foster to score the pennant-winning run from third base. It is still the only occasion in MLB history when a team trailed in the bottom of the ninth in a decisive winner-take-all postseason game and won it on a wild pitch.
Note that the final game of the 1886 World’s Series between the National League champion Chicago White Stockings and the American Association champion St. Louis Browns was also decided by Curt Welch’s purported “$15,000 Slide” (he actually scored standing up) in the bottom of the 10th inning after Chicago’s John Clarkson delivered a wild pitch with Welch on third to give St. Louis a 4–3 victory in Game Six of the Series. But it was neither a decisive winner-take-all game (as St. Louis was leading three games to two at the time), Nor was St. Louis behind when it took its final at bats.
WRENCHES IN THE WORKS
A term that is not yet in the rule book but ought to be. MLB contends that the game is healthier than it’s ever been, but attendance has been on a steady downward trend for several years and was at its lowest since 2003 in 2019. Instead, fans are following the game more and more on their cellphones or staying home to watch it on TV, where they get replays of almost every moment of interest they may have missed. And what are major league owners doing to bring people back to the parks? They are raising ticket and parking prices, constantly trading favorite players or letting them become free agents, tinkering with the rules after decades of almost no changes, and either eliminating, truncating, or discouraging former staples like the intentional walk, the squeeze bunt, the hidden ball trick, and the hit-and-run that have generated excitement and surprise ever since the dawn of major league ball. In addition, this decline also came when MLB players hit more home runs than ever before, with two clubs (the Minnesota Twins and New York Yankees) becoming the first clubs to ever hit 300+ dingers in a single season. If the game thought that the long ball would solve all its problems, attendance totals said otherwise.
And the players? Who wouldn’t be the first to reject a three-year offer of $18 mil per annum from a perennial contender whom you’ve served loyally for a year or two to grab a five-year contract for $20 mil per annum from a team that hasn’t sniffed postseason play in over a decade?
In 2018, the Gallup Poll concluded that the 9 percent of Americans who mentioned baseball as their favorite sport to watch was the lowest percentage for the sport since Gallup first asked the question in 1937. Americans named baseball as the most popular sport in 1948 and 1960, but football claimed the top spot in 1972 and has been progressively the public’s favorite ever since, currently by nearly a 5-to-1 margin over baseball even though its popularity, too, is slipping due to issues unrelated to the rules, style or tempo in which the game itself is played. In fact, according to data compiled by the Sports Business Journal in 2016, baseball has the oldest average player age of any of the major American sports.
Former New York Mets second baseman Wally Backman, the manager of the independent Atlantic League’s Long Island Ducks—MLB’s preferred petri dish—bemoaned in 2019 the many ways the game has departed from the style in which it was played while he was still active. At the same time, Backman, guaranteed by nature to introduce a cataclysmic element in any major-league team that would ever dare to hire him as its dugout chieftain, acknowledges a new generation has taken over the game. “If you don’t want to do it,” he proposes, “then you just get out of the game. Because things are going to change—that’s obvious.”
Backman understates the situation: Things have already changed. And skeptics have already connected the dots. To rekindle fan interest after the toxic 1994–95 strike, baseball moguls chose to ignore the herculean stats being posted by strongly suspected PED users. To win back the many fans whom the PED users soured on the game, MLB has introduced a ball that brings the same thrill, and even more often than the gigantic home run totals the PED users produced. Only it’s the ball that’s been ’roided now that the PED users have been weeded out to a large extent, and the public isn’t buying.
On August 10–11, 2019, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Juiced Ball Hits Triple-A.” The article categorically stated that, as promised in April 2019, the two Triple-A leagues—the International League and the Pacific Coast League—have switched to the same baseballs now used in the major leagues, unlike the less expensive balls used in the other minor leagues. The two top minor leagues were set on a pace to hit an astounding 2,100 more home runs combined than in 2018.
The official major-league ball is manufactured in Costa Rica and has higher specifications than minor-league balls. It also is constructed of slightly different materials than the minor-league ball. Minor-league baseballs are made in China and cost around half as much as the major-league balls, albeit their price is likely to go up owing to new tariff laws. the Wall Street Journal article confirmed that the current major-league baseballs have less air resistance and are more aerodynamic than the previous baseballs used.
Bob Nightengale wrote in USA Today on August 19, 2019: “The game is still played with the pitchers’ mound 60-feet, 6 inches from home plate, the bases 90 feet apart, three outs per half inning and nine innings in a regulation game. Those are about the only constants resembling the game of baseball as we once knew it.” Nightengale went on to cite the similar viewpoints held by former Cubs manager Joe Maddon (recently hired by the Angels) and longtime big-league fixture Lou Pinella among the several disgruntled baseball lifers he interviewed. He furthermore quoted Hall of Fame pitcher Goose Gossage as having said, “I can’t watch these games anymore. It’s not baseball. It’s unwatchable. A lot of the strategy of the game, the beauty of the game, it’s all gone. It’s like a video game now. It’s home run derby with their [expletive] launch angle every night.”
Don Malcolm, the provocative creator of The Big Bad Baseball Annual, recommends countering the game’s “escalating malaise” either by fixing the ball (extremely unlikely) or installing screens in all ma
jor- league parks, making home runs from “foul line to power alley distances achievable only with three or four times the present loft.” To his mind, the ideal configuration for the extra-base hit paradigm per game for each team is 1.7 doubles, 0.5 triples, and only, 0.9 home runs. If put to a vote among lifelong fans from all walks, a surprisingly high number may agree with Malcolm’s quotients, but among major-league players probably only pitchers, who are in the minority, would concur.
Baseball historian and critic Ev Cope observes that baseball is no longer “chess on grass” but “has become another sport of brute force—on the mound and at the plate. If ‘Inside Baseball’ is not yet dead, it is in intensive care.” Cope thinks this may simply represent “how American society has evolved. We seem to be more aggressive and not be as patient as we used to be, nor as sentimental. That proof is clearly evident in our or 3Ms: Media, Movies, and Music.”
Is all of this lamenting about the disappearance of so many treasured features of the pre-modern game even necessary, much less constructive? After all, every other major sport in America has undergone massive rule and equipment changes—including free agency—since baseball magnates shaved the mound to its present height in 1969, and none are the worse for it in the eyes of most of their ardent followers. Who is to say that in another few years the pitching distance won’t have altered, batters will no longer be able to get credit for an out-of-the-park home run (only a double) if they’ve previously struck out during the game, batters won’t automatically be deemed to have “fouled out” of a game when they whiff for a fourth time, and spectators won’t be able to place bets at their seats as to what a batter will do on every pitch?