Tom Boswell believes that this has gone too far. He proposes eliminating the balk rule. That would, he believes, put mediocre base stealers out of business and restore the equilibrium of 90 feet. However, there are less drastic measures that can, and have in the past, been taken. The balk rule is as elastic as umpires want it to be. The National League, in effect, recently altered the rule by different enforcement. The league began enforcing tougher balk rules to give base runners more of a break. They were trying to reacquire the reputation they got from the legs of Jackie Robinson, Lou Brock and Maury Wills—the reputation as a league of dash and daring-do. Kubek also believes (perhaps this is an old American Leaguer’s bias) that the National League panicked when Rickey Henderson burst on the scene as a base stealer. National Leaguers thought: Good grief! The American League, with its smaller parks, is the home-run league and now it is stealing our glory by stealing bases.
Catchers probably would, to a man, rally to Boswell’s proposal for eliminating the balk rule. Not long ago a competent catcher was expected to throw out 50 percent of runners attempting to steal. In 1989 the major league’s best was the Royals’ Bob Boone at 42.3 percent. American League catchers averaged 29.2 percent, National League catchers 31.9 percent. Those numbers are produced in part by the decline in the quality of catching, as will be noted in the next chapter. But the numbers also reflect the fact that runners are faster and, more important, that they have more information. For both reasons, expectations and standards have changed.
When Jose Canseco, the model of the modern sprinter-slugger, had his 40–40 season, Mickey Mantle mused—he was serious—that if he had known folks would make such a fuss about that achievement, he would have done it a few times. He certainly could have. The fact that Mickey Mantle, one of the finest players ever and certainly the swiftest slugger, stole only 153 bases in 18 seasons is partly explained by the fact that he had bad legs. A bone disease made every step painful and his managers wanted to avoid injuries that would make matters worse. But more than mere fear of injury (although that played a part) explains the fact that Joe DiMaggio, universally regarded as a brilliant base runner, stole a total of just 30 bases in his 13 seasons. In three seasons he stole none. In three others he stole only one. Ralph Kiner is second only to Babe Ruth on his ratio of home runs to at bats. Five times he hit 40 or more in a season, including 51 in 1947 and 54 in 1949. His career high in stolen bases also came in 1949. It was just 6. Not even accomplished base stealers stole many by today’s standards. Jackie Robinson’s best season total was 37. Willie Mays led the league four times with 40, 38, 31 and 27—a total of 136 bases, just six more than Rickey Henderson stole in 1982.
One reason expectations have changed is that the talent pool has changed. In 1947 Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier and was the National League’s stolen base leader. In the next 42 seasons, through 1988, the two leagues awarded 84 stolen base titles. Seventy-seven of them went to black or Latin players. No one knows why, for example, blacks are America’s best sprinters, but no one doubts that they are.
Another reason why more is now expected in the way of stolen bases is that we now know that more is possible. And more is possible because more is known. There is more information about what particular pitchers and catchers can and can not do.
Information is one reason why, after the 1989 season, Gwynn was the second player in half a century (Rod Carew was the other, though he finished his career at “only” .328) to have a career average of .330 and 200 stolen bases. Gwynn, says McKeon, “is on his own. He can go anytime.” His decision to go depends, in part, on the game situation. However, if Gwynn is a runner on first base and there is no one on second, he will be somewhat inhibited about stealing if there is a power hitter coming up next. He does not want to get caught stealing when the batter is someone who can drive him in from first base. And he certainly does not want to get caught stealing with two outs. So having Clark come to the plate right after him does inhibit Gwynn’s baserunning a bit. “I don’t want to take the bat out of his hands.” But he is not very inhibited. He is now so confident of his ability to read pitchers’ movements on the mound that he is not going to get thrown out often. “In a first-and-third situation, if I’m on first, if I steal early in the count, and they’re behind in the count, they’re just going to walk Clark. So I wait until it gets to be two strikes. If they’re ahead 0–2 and I take off and the pitch is a ball, I don’t think they’ll walk him 1–2.”
Gwynn continues: “I usually don’t like running on a l-and-0 count. The pitcher might throw the batter a good pitch to hit and the fact of me going might take the hitter’s concentration off hitting that pitch. One-and-1 is a good pitch to go on. They might pitch out, sure. But with a guy like Kruky [John Kruk] hitting they’re not going to come right down Broadway with it. They’re going to try to throw a breaking ball.”
Gwynn’s decision to try to steal also depends on what he knows about the pitcher’s and catcher’s “release times.” That means it depends on what he and Greg Riddoch, first-base coach and then manager, have seen on the field and on tape.
Let us here deal with the basic data. While the runner on first who is thinking about stealing is thinking about 90 feet, the catcher is thinking about 127 feet 3% inches—the distance from home plate to second base. And the catcher is hoping that his pitcher will hurry up. Hurry, that is, in getting the ball to the plate. That does not mean abandoning breaking balls and just throwing fastballs with a runner on first. Rather, what is meant by “quickness to the plate” is a good “release time,” the time that elapses from the instant the pitcher, in the stretch position, begins his move to the plate—the instant the “discernible stop” at the belt ends—to the moment the ball hits the catcher’s mitt. The runner on first wants to know that time. A time of 1.2 seconds is good, 1.3 is average and anything higher is an invitation to run. The runner also wants to know the catcher’s release time, “pop to pop”—that is, from the time the ball hits the catcher’s mitt to the instant his throw pops into the glove of the shortstop or second baseman covering second. That should be two seconds flat, or less. For this reason you may see a coach standing on the mound at Spring Training with a basketful of baseballs, pitching to a catcher. There is no batter; another coach stands next to the catcher, a stopwatch in hand; and an infielder stands at second base. The coach with the watch is measuring the “pop-to-pop” time. It is a measurement not only of the power of the catcher’s arm, but also, and at least as important, of the quickness of his “release.” What goes into a “release” includes three things.
First, how quickly he grabs the ball from his glove. This is especially important in the second decade P.B.—Post Bench. Johnny Bench, probably the greatest catcher ever and certainly the best of the postwar era, popularized the practice of catching the ball one-handed, with the “meat hand” (that phrase is not one of baseball’s lovelier locutions) held back at the catcher’s side, out of harm’s way. Now, catching is for those who, like John Paul Jones, want to make a vocation of going in harm’s way. The commonest harm to catchers comes from foul tips. They can break fingers, tear fingernails and do lots of other damage to the unprotected hand. That happens less now, thanks to Bench. But his style of catching requires special speed in plucking the ball from the pocket of the mitt. The second factor determining a catcher’s “release time” is how fast he rises and turns as much as he needs to before throwing. The third factor is the swiftness and compactness of his arm motion in sending the ball on its way. So the coach with the stopwatch will tell the catcher, “1.94, not bad… 2.12, you’ll not nail many people with that… 2.04, not good enough … good: 1.85 …” The difference between “not bad” (1.94) and good is nine one-hundredths of a second.
Pitchers’ and catchers’ release times are relatively new considerations in baseball. When Roger Craig was pitching in the 1950s, did anyone ever tell him his release time? “No, they didn’t know what that was.” One of the first people to tim
e pitchers’ moves to the plate was Lou Brock, who would do it while in the dugout during the years when he was setting stolen base records. Roger Craig, a former pitcher, and a censorious one at that, says you too often see the following sequence of events: The pitcher is slow to the plate, the catcher has to hurry his throw, the ball sails or skips into center field, the runner goes to third and scores on a sacrifice fly. “People then say the catcher lost the game. Actually, the pitcher did.” A catcher with a lightning release time and a cannon arm can at least partially make up for a pitcher’s deficiencies. By mid-August, 1988, Benito Santiago, the Padres’ catcher, had picked off eight runners—five of them at second. The eighth was the Mets’ Wally Backman, nailed by a throw Santiago had gunned to second from his knees. In the same game Santiago threw out Howard Johnson trying to steal. Later in the game Johnson said to Santiago, “I’m never running on you again.” And Backman said, “I had a stopwatch on [Padres pitcher] Andy Hawkins. It was taking him 1.5 seconds to come to the plate. Now, 1.3 is borderline and 1.5 you should steal standing up. Santiago throws out Hojo [Howard Johnson] easily. The guy is unbelievable.” The guy’s pop-to-pop time compensated for Hawkins’s sluggish move to the plate.
According to Craig, “The average pitcher’s release time today is 1.35 seconds. Rick Reuschel’s is the greatest. He gets rid of the ball quicker than any pitcher I’ve ever seen, around 1.1 to 1.2. The average is 1.35 to 1.4. We find a guy in the 1.5s and we’re going to run on him.” Some pitchers have two release times, say, 1.3 if they think the runner is a threat to steal, 1.5 if not. Others are 1.3 with a runner on first but are a more relaxed 1.5 with a runner on second. An observant advance scout can tell his manager that although particular players probably can not steal second off a particular pitcher, they probably can steal third.
“Let’s take Coleman,” says Greg Riddoch, referring to Vince Coleman, lead sprinter on the Cardinals’ track team. “From his stealing lead he is 2.9 seconds to second base. Tim Raines [of the Expos, the last man to lead the National League in stolen bases in the era B.c.—Before Coleman] is 3-flat to 3.2. Knowing those facts, I can predict, with the pitcher’s and catcher’s release times, whether we have a chance to get him. So now let’s say our pitcher is 1.2 to the plate and our catcher is 2-flat. Cumulatively that’s 3.2 seconds. Now, you take Tim Raines, who’s 3.2 to second at his slowest. You have to be perfect to get him. That tells me what I have to do to try to hold Raines on first. I don’t want to show him the same move twice in a row. Most base runners, give them the same move twice in a row, they’re gone. So before the first pitch I just hold the ball. The second pitch I throw over to first base. The third pitch maybe I throw to first again. The fourth pitch maybe I quick-pitch to the plate. By mixing his moves the pitcher makes it difficult for the runner to narrow the calculation of when to go.” And it tells the pitcher’s manager when it might be best to call a pitchout.
Riddoch is an example of those baseball people who matter at the margins of a sport where marginal differences matter a lot. He was born and still lives in Greeley, Colorado. After graduating from the University of Northern Colorado he signed with the Cincinnati Reds organization. He never made it to, or even close to, the major leagues. However, in baseball there is no sting to the adage that “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” In baseball, those who never could do it with major league proficiency, no matter how hard they tried, often are the ones who can teach it well. They can because for them striving was largely a matter of the mind.
It is a small, cozy world, this community of baseball. Riddoch, who worked for the Reds for 18 years, managed in their minor league system for 9 years, with stops in Seattle, Washington, and Billings, Montana, and Eugene, Oregon. In Eugene he managed against Walla Walla when Gwynn was in his rookie year in professional baseball. Riddoch talks in the quiet, flat tone of someone trained to be orderly, which he has been. He has a B.A. degree in business administration and a master’s degree from Colorado State in education administration. He taught psychology and coached for 13 years at the high school level. “I’m a detail person,” he says. Gwynn says Riddoch’s eye for details helped him steal 56 bases in 1987, Riddoch’s first season as a Padres coach.
On a warm May morning in the visiting team’s locker room at Wrigley Field, Riddoch was an island of soft-spoken calm as the younger men arrived to dress for the day game. Some of the early arrivals played cards and others played fast-and-loose with the rules of nutrition, washing down jelly donuts with sodas. Looking around him, Riddoch said that people in every industry, every business are looking around at one another and wondering why some are successful and others are not. The answer, he said, is that we are all creatures of habit, but successful people make a habit of attention to detail. “In our industry, when a pitcher is going to try to pick a runner off first base, he’s going to try to set up that runner with something so that he can make his best move at the right time.” So Riddoch videotapes all opposing pitchers’ moves to the plate and to first base. There is always a tiny telltale tip-off. “We communicate 90 percent of what we do nonverbally. We communicate with body language or voice language—tone of voice.” Pitchers communicate more than they want to. A right-handed pitcher, with his back to the runner on first base, may betray his intentions because today’s uniforms are so much tighter than the old-fashioned flannels. Yogi Berra says, “If a pitcher’s uniform fits too good, the base runner can see his buttocks tighten up just before a pickoff attempt.” A pitcher’s smallest mannerisms can reveal various intentions. Enough becomes predictable to narrow the odds against—in baseball the odds are almost always against—success. If Riddoch slows down the tape of a pitcher’s motion he is always going to find a fingerprint of intention.
In 1987 and 1988, his first years of on-field duties with the Padres, Riddoch often spent several hours a day studying videotapes in slow motion. Pat Dobson, a former pitcher who is now the Padres’ pitching coach, sometimes watched with him. Riddoch was content to pick up one clue in four hours. One pitcher might bring his hands to a slightly different stop position—slightly higher or lower—when he is going to throw to first rather than to the plate. Or the clue might be a slight tilt to the pitcher’s shoulders, or where he puts his foot on the rubber, or even how his toe is pointing when he lifts his front leg. (That last is, he says, a dead giveaway for one particular “left-hander who is extraordinarily successful in this league.” He will not say who it is. Loose lips sink ships.) “There are always some players,” Riddoch acknowledges, “who think this is ‘Joe college’ stuff.” But more and more players have, like Gwynn, gone to college. Since 1973 a majority of the players signed from the amateur draft have had some college experience. In the 1980s the average has been around 80 percent.
A lot of people in baseball know many of the things that can be learned from what Riddoch does with the videotape but, he says, they fail at the discipline of “staying on task.” They do not do the detail work day in and day out, every inning. That is a habit he developed by being, as he puts it, “a limited-tool player. In order for me to compete, I had to have an edge. I wasn’t fast but I could steal 15, 20 bases just knowing pitchers’ moves.” Riddoch coaches first base, so he is in a position to shout what he sees to his runners. “Some pitchers do a jump, a spin move to first. In order to do that, the back heel has to raise to step off the rubber.” The raising of a heel brings a shout from Riddoch, calling the runner back to first.
When Gwynn gets to first, Riddoch may say, “Watch the back heel.” If, when watching the heel, Gwynn sees any motion other than the significant lift of the heel, he knows that the ball is not coming to first, so he can lean toward, or go toward, second. There are more clues to pick up from right-handed pitchers because they have a more complicated task in throwing to first. They begin with their backs toward first. Riddoch says the left-hander’s move is more troublesome because a left-hander is facing the runner and (here you hear the aggrieved voice of the First Base Coaches’
Guild) umpires rarely call balks on left-handers.
Two months after I talked with Riddoch in Chicago, Gwynn talked to him in San Diego, on the diamond, in a game. Gwynn was on base; Nolan Ryan was pitching for the Astros. Riddoch, said Gwynn, sometimes takes a stopwatch out to the first-base coaching box to measure release times. “I’ll bounce back to the bag and he’ll go”—here Gwynn simulated silently mouthing the words “one-five-four”—“so I know that if I can get to second in three-flat, I can beat it.” In fact, Riddoch had timed Ryan at 1.54 and Gwynn stole second. Pitching is a matter of rhythm and if a pitcher is intending to break his rhythm and throw to first, he will reveal his intentions with some small detail. Always? “Always,” says Gwynn, with serene, smiling finality. “A lot of people can’t believe that, but if you look at the tape, every time there is something he does to tip it off. There’s guys like, well, a pitcher for Houston, who when he comes to first his toes point in a particular way—down. When he goes to home you see the bottom of his shoe.” Who is this fellow? Another Gwynn laugh. “I can’t say because he might read this.”
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