Men at Work

by George F. Will

  Pitchers complain, with reason, that the world is plotting against them. (Remember: Paranoiacs can have real enemies.) But batters, too, have had some setbacks. If hitters repine for what really was their golden age, they repine for the years between 1870 and 1887, that paradisiacal era when the batter was entitled to tell the pitcher where in the strike zone—high or low—he wanted the ball thrown. And even until 1901 batters had better conditions than today. Not until 1901 (in the National League; 1903 in the American League) were the first two foul balls counted as strikes. This rule change was made in response to the perverse genius of a few players such as Roy Thomas, a Phillies outfielder who once fouled off 22 pitches before walking.

  Furthermore (since we are giving batters their turn at baseball’s wailing wall), batters are always on the defensive. Baseball’s fundamental act of offense—swinging at a thrown ball—is essentially reactive. Lou Brock said that there are only three things involved in hitting—the pitcher, the ball and the batter—and once the ball is released from the pitcher’s hand there are only two, and the question becomes who is better, you or the ball. Usually, the ball is. The major league average for batting failure is about 74 out of 100 times. About 7,000 men have come to bat in the major leagues. Eight of them managed to bat .400 over a full season. As Reggie Jackson says, if you play for 10 years and have 7,000 at bats and 2,000 hits you have had a pretty fair career but “you’ve gone 0-for-5,000.” Never mind getting hits. How about putting the ball in play? Mickey Mantle once said, “During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ball player will average about 500 at bats a year. That means I played seven years in the major leagues without even hitting the ball.” Once, after striking out swinging at three bad pitches, Yogi Berra had the brass to ask indignantly, “How can a pitcher that wild stay in the league?” Berra was so gifted at hitting pitches that were out of the strike zone that Mel Ott swore Berra got hits on pitches that, if they had not collided with his bat, would have been wild pitches, colliding with the backstop. But the answer to Berra’s question is: Such pitchers stay in the major leagues because there are a lot of hitters who, like Berra, do not discipline themselves to swing only at what is in or near the strike zone and who, unlike Berra, do not have the talent to compensate for their indiscipline. Catcher Terry Kennedy, who was Gwynn’s teammate before moving to Baltimore and then San Francisco, has now seen Wade Boggs up close and offers this comparison: “Gwynn is so aggressive, sometimes you can get him to swing at a bad pitch. Wade Boggs never swings at a bad pitch.” Boggs’s discipline is apparent in the way he “works the count.” This, like almost everything else about Boggs, has been noted by Chuck Waseleski, known to readers of the Boston Globe’s sports pages as “the maniacal one.” He lives in Millers Falls, Massachusetts, and is the business manager of an engineering firm. In his spare time, which he seems to have a lot of, he crunches numbers in ways they have rarely been crunched before. For example: In 1989, in 742 plate appearances, Boggs swung at the first pitch just 50 times. He put the first pitch in play just 29 times. Kirby Puckett put the first pitch in play 176 times. Puckett’s impatience, if that is what it was, did not prevent him from batting .339 and becoming the first right-hander to win the American League batting title since Carney Lansford in the strike-shortened 1981 season, and the first in a full season since Alex Johnson in 1970. It makes you wonder how high his average might have soared if he had been more patient. Patience is an important part of Boggs’s style. In 1989 Boggs demonstrated the importance, at least to him, of being ahead in the count. Here, compiled by Waseleski, is Boggs’s batting average by count:

  Note the difference between the counts 1–2 and 2–1. Boggs can be patient at the plate because he is a fine contact hitter. In 1989 he swung and missed just 58 times in 1,191 swings. And yet he failed to get hits 67 percent of the time. Why? Because hitting is hard.

  In the section of the rule book devoted to instructions for umpires there is this unequivocal and unexceptionable advice: “Keep your eye everlastingly on the ball.” Easier said than done. Easier for umpires, who are looking directly at the pitcher, than for batters. Following the flight of the ball is much more difficult for a batter. He is standing sideways, looking to his left or right, and, when swinging, trying to make an educated guess, and read the pitcher’s motion and release point, and then the rotation of the ball (for example, the small red dot made by the seams on the tight rotation of a well-thrown slider), and then striding and holding his hands just right just long enough and turning his hips and then his upper body in the precise flow of energy while keeping his head down and keeping his eyes everlastingly on the ball. All the batter usually knows for sure is that the pitcher is trying to trick him, and occasionally to frighten him, and every once in a while to hit him with a hard, swiftly moving object.

  The distance from the front edge of the slab of rubber on the pitcher’s mound to the back of home plate is 60 feet 6 inches. Suppose a pitcher throws directly over the top, fully overhand, and releases the ball at least 7 feet above the level of the plate (counting the 10-inch height of the mound) and about 55 feet from the plate. The belt-level top of today’s strike zone is about 3½ feet above the plate. That means the ball moves 3½ feet vertically while traveling 55 feet horizontally. And that does not include the irregular motion imparted to a slider, a curve, a split-finger or even a plain fastball by its velocity.

  In the major leagues, what makes all the difference is the movement the ball makes—or fails to make—as it passes over the plate. In 1951 Warren Spahn was pitching for the Boston Braves at the Polo Grounds when the Giants sent to the plate a rookie who was 0-for-12. Spahn threw the ball and the rookie crushed it. Willie Mays’s first hit was a home run off a Hall of Famer. Spahn later said, “For the first 60 feet it was a hell of a pitch.” (Later, remembering that Mays was hitless in his young career when he came to the plate, Spahn said, “I’ll never forgive myself. We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if Td only struck him out.”) A 90-mile-per-hour fastball that leaves a pitcher’s hand 55 feet from the plate is traveling 132 feet per second and will reach the plate in .4167 second. A change-up or slow breaking ball loitering along at just 80 miles per hour travels 117.3 feet per second and will arrive in .4688 second. The difference is .052 of a second and is crucial. Having decided to try to hit the pitch, the batter has about two-tenths of a second to make his body do it. The ball can be touched by the bat in about 2 feet of the pitch’s path, or for about fifteen-thousandths of a second. So anyone who hits a ball thrown by a major league pitcher—who even just puts the ball in play—is doing something remarkable. The consistently good hitters are astonishing.

  Musial once told a rookie, “If I want to hit a grounder, I hit the top third of the ball. If I want to hit a line drive, I hit the middle third. If I want to hit a fly ball, I hit the bottom third.” You can imagine how helpful Musial’s advice was to a mere mortal. Gwynn picks up the rotation of the pitch only about 20 percent of the time. Usually he just tries to follow the flight of the ball. “If Gooden’s curveball starts out pretty high, chances are it’s going to finish down somewhere. So it’s either a big mistake or a good curveball.” What Gwynn’s opponents respect most about him is how rarely he is fooled by such a pitch, or any pitch.

  Jim Lefebvre recalls what he calls the expression of “ultimate respect” in a team meeting. In 1965, his rookie year with the Dodgers, the team would discuss how to pitch and defense each team the first time the Dodgers met them. “So we are going through the league. ‘Willie Mays. Hard stuff way inside. If you miss you’d better miss in, so he can’t get his arms out. You get the ball out over the plate, it will take you a five-dollar cab ride to find it.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Wow! Willie Mays.’ And we go through the other guys—McCovey, Banks—as the other teams come through. The last team to come through is the Braves. ‘Eddie Mathews. Great high fastball hitter, you gotta do this and this and thi
s.’ So all of a sudden Henry Aaron’s name comes up. Bad Henry. Here we are with all those great pitchers—Koufax, Drysdale, others—and the room went dead silent. Nobody said a word. Then someone said, ‘When he hits one, make sure nobody’s on. Next.’”

  When asked how he pitched to Mickey Mantle, Frank Sullivan of the Red Sox said, “With tears in my eyes.” When Davey Johnson, the Mets’ manager, was asked how to pitch to Gwynn, he laughed and said, “Throw it down the middle and hope it confuses him.” Johnson says he has seen the likes of Gwynn before, in Tony Oliva of the Twins and Rod Carew of the Twins and Angels. He recalls that in pitching against them the sensible theory was: “Let’s not get cute. Throw it right down the middle because that will confuse them. They’re not going to know what field to hit it to. If you threw Oliva the up-and-in pitch, he’d hit it to left field, like Gwynn does. Oliva used to pull low-and-away breaking balls. There was no way to defense them. They had great hand-eye coordination and what I call ‘barrel control,’ putting the barrel of the bat right on the ball. That’s why I say with guys like Gwynn, throw it down the middle and hope they hit it at someone.”

  Mike LaValliere, the Pirates’ catcher, says of Gwynn, “He’s one of the few guys in the league there is no ‘book’ on. He’s like Keith Hernandez. He’s going to get his hits and you just hope no one’s on base. He has such a short, compact swing and such a good idea of the strike zone that you are not going to fool him often. Out of 650 at bats in a season you will fool him maybe ten times.” Ten times is less than twice a month.

  There are similarities between Gwynn and George Brett. Brett was the last man to flirt with a .400 season by being over .400 at one point in September. A pitcher once said of Brett, “The only way to pitch him is inside, so you force him to pull the ball. That way the line drives won’t hit you.” Jim Frey, who managed Brett for a while with the Royals, was asked what advice he gave Brett about hitting. Frey said, “I tell him, ‘Attaway to hit, George.’” He has more power than Gwynn but they are similar in keeping their hands back, even when fooled by a pitch. Even if, when they are fooled, they are far out in front, with their weight shifting toward their front foot, their hands are still back. Thus they still have a chance to compensate and slap the ball by snapping their wrists. Batters who bring their hands forward too fast are finished with a pitch when they are fooled by it.

  Gwynn, like Brett and Boggs, has one important natural advantage. He is left-handed. That is not always an advantage in baseball. Indeed, it can be argued that baseball has a built-in bias against left-handers. This bias is glaring, for example, in the fact that the bases are run counterclockwise. This custom reflects the convenience of right-handers who want to be infielders. Almost all infielders other than first basemen are right-handed because on most plays they can throw to first without turning their bodies as far as left-handers would have to. The consolation, such as it is, for lefthanders playing defense is that they are suited to first base because their glove hand is on the side the throws come from, and they can throw more easily than right-handed first basemen could to start the 3–6–3 (or 3–4–3) double play.

  However, left-handers get their revenge as batters. At the plate they stand a step closer to first and the momentum of their swing causes them to uncoil moving toward first. As a result, the average left-hander among today’s major leaguers gets there a full tenth of a second faster than the average right-hander (4.05 versus 4.15). Until 1870 the left-handers’ advantage in the sprint to first did not matter so much because running to first was not the headlong dash it now is. Until 1870 a batter could not overrun first base without being tagged out.

  Another advantage for today’s left-handed hitter is that he faces right-handed pitching about two-thirds of the time, so most of the breaking pitches he sees are moving in toward his power. These facts help explain why in the postwar (1946–89) era 55 of the 88 league batting championships have been won by left-handers. Kevin Kerrane, professor of English at the University of Delaware and baseball scholar, notes that 34 of the 55 were won by long-range strategic thinkers like Ted Williams, George Brett and Wade Boggs, who, although they throw right-handed, had the wisdom as children to become left-handed hitters. (There have been few “reverse crossovers,” players perverse enough to throw left but insist on batting right. Rickey Henderson is one. Another was a thin fellow who played first base for Yale, George Bush.)

  About one thing Karl Marx, a lefty, was right. Change the modes of production and you will change the nature of work, and consciousness. Baseball’s two fundamental tools are the ball and the bat. Neither is what it used to be. Although baseball adopted a cork-centered ball in 1910, aggregate major league averages did not jump until 1919. Remember, we have agreed to credit (or blame) Australian yarn. In any case, the advent of the lively ball changed almost everything in the game. Bats, too, have changed, but not, as the ball did, suddenly. So it is difficult to determine exactly when and how the changes began making differences.

  Let us begin at the beginning, and I mean the Beginning. The Big Bang got the universe rolling and produced, among the flying debris, the planet Earth. It (and here we may have evidence of a kindly Mind superintending things) is enveloped in a thin membrane of atmosphere. The membrane is not too thick to keep out necessary energy and not too thin to let in lethal rays. And it is just right to cause raindrops to patter on Pennsylvania ridges where ash trees grow. They grow surrounded by other trees that protect the ash from winds that might twist and weaken them. In this protection they grow straight toward the sunlight. The result is wood wonderfully suited to being made into baseball bats. I think that I shall never see a tree as lovely as these things made from them.

  The bats in use at any time, unlike the balls, have important differences. This is so because players are keenly interested in, and occasionally neurotic about, these instruments by which they pursue an acceptable rate of failure at the plate. Shoeless Joe Jackson believed that his bats had to winter in South Carolina to stay warm. (Don’t snicker unless you, too, have a .356 career average.) Richie Ashburn slept with his bats, but only, he says chastely, on the road. Orlando Cepeda used to discard a bat after getting a hit. His reasoning (in which I find no flaw) was that there are only so many hits in a bat; you can not know how many; so why risk using a bat from which all the hits may have been wrung? Ted Williams is said to have shipped some bats back to Louisville because the lathe operator had made a mistake of five-thousandths of an inch when turning the bat handles.

  Gwynn has a more relaxed relationship with his bats. One day at San Diego State, just after basketball season, he wandered into the storeroom looking for a bat and picked up a little aluminum thing with a heavyweight name. The “Tennessee Thumper” weighed 31 ounces and was 32 inches long. Thus began a happy relationship between a young man and a piece of metal. When he became a professional and had to switch to wood he picked a bat of the same length and weight. He still wants his bat light but with a big barrel. So instead of achieving lightness by having the barrels of his bats shaved, as many hitters do, he has them “cupped,” with a portion of the end of the barrel hollowed out like the bottom of a wine bottle. The only change he has made he made in 1984, when he decided his bat was “too quick” on his swing. He changed to a bat that, like the old one, weighed 31 ounces but was half an inch longer. It is, by the standards of olden times, a twig. The young Babe Ruth supposedly used a 52-ounce bat. Later he used bats “only” 44 to 48 ounces.

  But mighty records can from little bats spring. Wee Willie Keeler used a 30½-inch bat, but he was just 5 feet 4½ and weighed only 140 pounds. And his bat was big enough for eight 200-hit seasons. Joe Morgan, the career home-run leader among second basemen, used an even lighter bat—30 ounces. Ernie Banks’s 32-ounce bat propelled 512 home runs. In the 1950s Banks and Henry Aaron exemplified a new kind of power hitter. They used thin-handled bats that they whipped with their quick, strong wrists.

  Thin-handled bats break—often. But all bats are breaka
ble. On July 15, 1887, Pete Browning, an outfielder for the Louisville club, broke his bat. A fan who also was a wood-turner made Browning a new one. The fan’s name was John Andrew (Bud) Hillerich. Browning went 3-for-3 in his first game with the new bat and he soon became known as “The Louisville Slugger.” So did his bat. A company, and one of America’s most famous trademarks, was born.

  For many years bats did not break nearly as often as they do now. Lefty Gomez, the Hall of Fame wit and pitcher, said he broke only one bat: “I ran over it backing out of the garage.” There have been people who, unlike Gomez, were good at bringing their bats into contact with pitched balls and broke remarkably few bats. Bill Terry used only two bats in 1930 while hitting .401 with 254 hits. Ira Berkow, sports columnist for The New York Times, reports that Joe Sewell, the last living member of the 1920 Indians’ team that beat the Dodgers in a seven-game (5–2) World Series, still has in a glass case at his home in Mobile, Alabama, the one bat he used throughout his 14-year career. It is long (35 inches) and hefty (40 ounces) and must be enjoying retirement because it had a hard working life: Not only did it bang out 2,226 hits but it was constantly making contact. Sewell struck out only 114 times in 7,132 at bats, the fewest strikeouts recorded in any extended career. The fact that Jim Rice several times snapped bats on checked swings may reveal as much about the nature of today’s bats as about Rice’s wrists, powerful though they undoubtedly are. Bo Jackson is an impressive specimen, but when he breaks bats over his knee, and even over his head (wearing a batting helmet), one does wonder about the wood, or whether today’s batters have gone a bit too far in favoring thin handles. Whatever the reason for so many bats breaking (some baseball people say that wood isn’t what it used to be), the fact that so many are breaking has an interesting consequence. A college player’s baseball education begins when he leaves school—and it begins immediately.