In Spring Training, 1989, when New York Mets right fielder Darryl Strawberry and first baseman Keith Hernandez got into a scuffle during the taking of the team picture, a wit said that it was the first time in years Strawberry had hit his cutoff man. Some of today’s outfielders seem to think that hitting a cutoff man with a throw from the outfield is an unintelligible, trivial and optional ritual. Actually, it is an essential skill. It enables a play to be redirected, away from trying to cut down the lead runner to trying to cut down a trailing runner, or at least prevent him from advancing. He might advance if a throw comes in from the outfield too late to get the lead runner and too high or off-line to be cut off by the appropriate infielders properly positioned. As Tommy Henrich of the Yankees said, “Catching a fly ball is a pleasure, but knowing what to do with it after you catch it is a business.”
Done correctly, defense should almost always succeed in frustrating the first-and-third double-steal plays of the sort Tony La Russa likes. Kubek recalls that when Casey Stengel drilled the Yankees on defending against first-and-third double-steal situations, he would put the team’s two fastest runners on the bases just to show that if everyone—pitcher, catcher, infielders—did exactly what they were supposed to do, not even the fastest runners could make the double steal work.
The Orioles have three basic defenses for first-and-third steal situations. On one the catcher comes up throwing to third—that is, he does not even consider trying to throw out the runner going from first to second. This is apt to be the option decided upon if the runner on first is fast and the chance of throwing him out is slight. The second play is for the middle infielder, whose job it is to cover second on a steal, to see the runner breaking from third toward home, cut in front of second, take the catcher’s throw on the run and fire the ball right back to the catcher. The third is for the middle infielder responsible for covering second to get to second, straddle the bag, ready to receive the throw, and listen for the other middle infielder to shout “tag him” if the runner on third is not going home.
“Most first-and-third baserunning plays,” Ripken believes, “rely on a mistake by an infielder in order for the runner on third to score. I think mistakes are at a minimum at this high level of baseball, so these plays are not worth the risk.” For example, if the opposing team has runners on first and third and the runner on first does the “stumble start” to get caught in a rundown, there is no way the runner on third can score if the Orioles’ infielders do their jobs right. Doing it right means they must make no more than one throw to nail the runner in the rundown between first and second. The first baseman receives the pickoff throw from the pitcher and starts chasing the runner toward second, hard. The object is to get the runner going as fast as he can run as quickly as possible. “I’m inching up,” says Ripken, “and when I see him at full speed I take off toward second and yell ‘Now!’” Once the runner is in high gear, Ripken charges directly at him. No runner in baseball—“I can chase down Rickey Henderson at that speed”—is fast enough to come to a screeching halt, reverse direction and force Ripken to make a second throw, back to first—the second throw on which the runner from third could score.
The Orioles have three bunt defenses for situations with a runner on second. On one play the first baseman charges. He or the pitcher must field the ball. The second baseman and shortstop rotate to their left—the second baseman covering first, the shortstop covering second. The third baseman stays at third in the hope that it is a bad bunt, meaning one pushed hard enough that either the pitcher or first baseman can pounce on the ball and get it to third before the runner gets there.
On the second play the first baseman stays back, the pitcher covers the first base side, the third baseman charges the ball, the second baseman covers second and the shortstop covers third. It is sometimes said, mistakenly, that the shortstop “races the runner to third.” Actually, it is a timing play, with the shortstop breaking for third well before the hitter puts his bat on the ball, and thus well before the runner breaks full speed for third. The timing works this way: The Orioles’ pitcher looks back toward the runner, and when the pitcher turns his head back to the plate, Ripken runs toward third. The pitcher must deliver the ball as soon as he turns back to the plate or the batter might have time to adjust to what he sees and hit the ball through the huge hole vacated at short. “In recent years,” Ripken says, “people have become more aggressive. They will square around to bunt and if there is no place to bunt it, they will pull back and try to hit the ball through.”
The third play is exactly the opposite. It is a pickoff play. It begins like the second play: The pitcher looks back at the runner, then turns back to the plate. As he turns his head, the third baseman charges in and Ripken runs toward third. But when the catcher gives a hand sign—say, opening his hand between his thighs—the pitcher turns and throws to the second baseman who has sprinted to second base, behind the runner who has focused his attention on the problem of beating Ripken to third.
“There is so much information out there,” Ripken says, “you ought to use it.” Information in the form of knowledge of an opposing manager once enabled Ripken to make a 6–3 assist on a bunt. It was a two-out squeeze play. Ripken was playing alongside one of the many immobile third basemen the Orioles used in the 1980s. The runner broke from third, Ripken knew it would be safe for him to spring in toward the middle of the diamond because the batter would not be swinging with the runner coming. Ripken fielded the ball and nipped the batter at first. The play was made by anticipation, which meant guessing right about the opposing manager. Ripken thinks (he is not sure) it was Billy Martin, who liked first-pitch squeeze plays.
Martin was “tendency-prone,” but he had so many tendencies it was hard to predict what he would do next. The proliferation of plays on a Martin-managed team showed how well he understood that the key to offense is multiplying scoring opportunities. The key to that is multiplying base runners. Good defense reduces base runners three ways: by reducing hits, reducing errors and increasing double plays. Today there are about 60 percent more double plays per base runner than there were in the dead-ball era. This is the result of quicker fielders and quicker movement of the live ball on smooth (and often carpeted) infields. And there is another difference: gloves.
In the 1880s about half the runs scored were unearned. In the 1980s about one-ninth were unearned. True, for a few years in the 1880s an error was charged to the pitcher for a walk, balk, wild pitch or hit batter. Still, the decline in the number of errors, and the improvement of defense generally, constituted as radical a change in the game as the increase in the number of long hits. And by far the most important reason for the change—more important than the improvement of playing fields—was the introduction of, and then the revolutionary improvement of, gloves.
The first gloves were flesh-colored because the wearers were embarrassed by the unmanliness of seeking protection from stinging hits and throws. But catching the ball in a glove was more artistic than catching balls in caps, a practice that faded out as fielders’ gloves came in. They came in quickly. The path of progress was blazed by a pioneer who weighed physical pain against moral opprobrium and chose to endure the latter. In 1875 Charles Waite, a Boston (or perhaps St. Louis—this is ancient history) first baseman, braved a wave of derision from fans and competitors when he wore a small glove. It looked almost like one of today’s batters’ gloves, minus the fingers. The trail up the mountain of improvement is steep and strewn with scoffers, but Waite was the wave of the future. He began the transformation of defensive baseball from a two-handed to an essentially one-handed skill. All fielders have worn gloves since the retirement in 1894 of Jerry Denny of Louisville. (Bill James calls Denny “the last real man.”) The tiny padded gloves of the 1890–1920 era, which weighed about 10 ounces, were large enough to be the main reason why errors per game declined from 6.66 to 2.83. The year 1920 is a notable demarcation because it saw the introduction of the Bill Doak glove featuring webbing
between the thumb and fingers. By the end of the 1950s, improvement of gloves was not over but innovations had done about as much as could be done to cut the rate of errors. Then artificial turf helped a little, but only a little because by then groundskeeping of dirt and real grass was good almost everywhere. The improvement in defense is the main reason scoring has declined an average of .14 run per decade for 11 decades (even though scoring has increased since The Revolution Against the Pitcher after the 1968 season, and the introduction of the DH in 1973).
Until 1954 players were not even required to take their gloves back to the bench with them when they came to bat. They would just toss their gloves on the grass, which gives you a good idea of how little regard the players had for this tool. And in fact, as late as the early 1950s many gloves still were remarkably small and premodern. Charlie Gehringer, who played second base for the Tigers from 1924 through 1942, lived to see the difference modern gloves could make. “In our day you didn’t see the plays you do today. I can’t remember anyone catching one like jumping over the fence and it would stick in the big glove, ’cause it wouldn’t. Maybe I dove for a ball once or twice, but you’d only hurt yourself probably and still wouldn’t do more than knock it down. Today [balls] stick and you can get up and throw them out if they’re hit hard. Nobody seemed to think fielding was that important… hitting made all the difference.”
Technologies do indeed condition crafts. In the 1960s Randy Hundley abandoned the traditional stiff catcher’s mitt in favor of a flexible hinged model. This made it possible for him to squeeze the ball without using his unprotected right hand. Soon two young future Hall of Famers, Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk (Bench is in the Hall, Fisk is heading there), perfected one-handed catching. But what is fine for geniuses like those two is less than fine for lesser talents. Some old-time catchers such as Birdie Tebbetts, and the not-at-all-old Tim McCarver, believe one-handed catching has led to laziness and a decline of the catcher’s craft. “Too much reaching,” says Tebbetts. “Too much blocking of balls with their gloves instead of shifting their bodies. Too much backhanding.” Tebbetts also believes that base stealers are benefiting from the catchers’ practice of keeping their throwing hands away from their gloves. This, he says, adds to the time it takes to wing the ball on its way toward second base. McCarver is equally disapproving: “The fundamental purpose of a catcher never gets taught to most kids. If a catcher can’t block a tough pitch in the dirt with a runner on third in a one-run game, the pitcher can’t let his best curveball or split-finger go for fear it will end up at the screen. You’d be surprised how many times during the season a pitcher gets blamed for hanging a curveball or split-finger, and the reason he hung it is because he’s afraid his catcher won’t catch the tough one.”
It takes Ripken about two weeks to break in a glove and he usually uses two a year. He changes gloves during the year because he wants a glove that is still somewhat stiff, because he does not want it to close too easily. “At third base you catch more balls one-handed. You have to lunge more to your left and right so you break your glove in ‘longer,’ more like a lacrosse stick. At shortstop your glove is flatter because a lot of the balls you catch are not actually caught. You do not squeeze the ball, you almost catch it, with a flat hand. The ball almost ricochets into your [throwing] hand. Some Latin players actually do deflect the ball to show how quick their hands are. It looks good but it’s too risky for me.” Some middle infielders want gloves with tight “basket weave” webbing between the thumb and fingers because they are afraid they may get a finger caught in the hole of an “?-weave” web while trying to grab the ball and turn a double play. Ripken, who prefers the H-weave, says that if you catch the ball properly it is not in the webbing. Furthermore, the holes in the H-weave are useful when you are trying to catch popups in day games when the sun is blinding—in Oakland, for example. You can shield your eyes by holding the glove high, but you can follow the flight of the ball by looking through the webbing. Needless to say, the Japanese have seen a commercial possibility in this. They have put tinted plastic—in effect, sunglasses—in the webbing of some gloves.
The dramatic improvement in baseball defense—the skills, information and equipment—is one reason why it has become riskier for a team to rely heavily on winning by having big innings. Such innings are harder to come by when good defense cuts down on base runners, increases double plays and reduces the number of “four-out innings.” The big-inning approach to baseball in the 1950s produced a predictable response from pitchers; it produced a generation of pitchers skilled at throwing hard sliders at the bottom of the lowered strike zone. Then along came artificial turf and teams tailored to it. Such teams were stocked with swift hitters who liked low, hard pitches. Those pitches were perfect to drive down onto the hard, fast surfaces. While baseball was frozen in the Fifties’ big-inning frame of mind, baseball architecture was changing in a way that would, in time, change minds. It has been said that we make our buildings and then they make us. That has been true in baseball. Architecture has been called frozen music. The new music of baseball has often been monotonous. Richie Hebner, who played for the Pirates, Phillies, Mets, Tigers and Cubs, blurted out the melancholy truth: “I stand at the plate in Philadelphia and I don’t honestly know whether I’m in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis or Philly. They all look alike.” Fourteen of the parks currently in use were opened between 1953 and 1971. Eleven of them are congenial to pitchers. In a remarkably few years baseball abandoned such hitters’ havens as Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, Crosley Field in Cincinnati (Robin Roberts, the Phillies’ Hall of Fame pitcher, on his great thrill in All-Star competition: “When Mickey Mantle bunted with the wind blowing out at Crosley Field”), Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.
The second wave of material changes that altered baseball thinking began in the late 1960s. In 1968 there were only two fields—one and a half actually—with artificial turf. They were the Astrodome and the Comiskey Park infield. Today there are ten. (Comiskey Park has since gone back to grass.) It is easier for artificial turf teams to adapt to playing on grass than for grass teams to adapt to turf. This is the fielders’ version of the hitters’ axiom, “Look for the fastball and adjust to everything else.” Fielders get used to fast surfaces and adjust to those that are less fast. And other adjustments are required. Ray Miller says that on turf, when one person shifts, everyone shifts, because if you leave a big gap you are risking a triple. One statistic suggests that artificial turf is probably more favorable to hitters (the ball scoots through the infield faster) than to infielders (the ball gets deep quicker so infielders with strong arms can play deeper and sweep more territory). The statistic is this: Artificial turf stadiums tend to reduce double plays and grass fields tend to increase them. An Elias Bureau study of double-play groundouts indicates that some teams have a significant difference in the number of double plays they make at home and on the road. This suggests a new “park factor.” The crucial variables affecting double plays include the amount of foul territory for pop fouls to be caught in, the size and contours of the outfield, and the likelihood that teams will play for big innings. If they play for big innings, and disdain plays such as sacrifice bunts and stolen bases, that will increase the number of double plays (more runners loitering on first).
As a catcher, Tim McCarver liked artificial turf because throws from the outfield to home plate got there quicker on a bounce on the hard surface. The fraction-of-a-second difference could be enough to enable him to tag the runner with the ball in his hand rather than in his glove. A catcher, says McCarver, will die before dropping a ball held in his hand. Ray Miller believes that improved defense has done more than artificial turf has done to take away the bunt. Good bunters can kill the ball on artificial grass, but today’s better athletes play more shallow in the infield and spring to the ball more quickly. Plastic has made defense easier in many ways. Ripken thinks lights
have, too. He prefers to play at night because defense is more difficult during day games, especially in high summer, and particularly in older parks. Then it is harder for infielders to see the ball coming off the bat because fans are apt to be wearing white or other light colors, and in most older parks the seats come down to field level.
Players serious about defense pay attention to their surroundings. When Keith Hernandez was with the Mets he played 81 games a year in a stadium located beneath the flight paths into La Guardia Airport. He studied takeoff and landing patterns as indicators of wind direction because, he said, the fluttering of flags and pennants was not an accurate indicator. In Fenway Park Ripken generally prepares to back up the left fielder in case the left fielder, having failed in an attempt to catch a ball up against The Wall, is not in a position to play the carom.
“As a third baseman,” says Ripken, “every time you go to a new park you should roll a ball down the line to see if it rolls foul or fair.” If the groundskeeper is earning his keep, the ball will roll one way or the other. A determined groundskeeper for a bunting team should be able to build an inward slope on the foul lines, a decline of as much as two inches in the two feet from the foul line to the infield grass. Such a slope radically improves the odds on a bunt staying fair. The groundskeeper at Comiskey Park provided such a slope in the late 1950s for the benefit of Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox. The swift, spray-hitting Dodgers of the early 1960s were helped by a huge roller that was used not only to compress the hard infield but also to mash the outfield grass, making it a faster surface on which more balls could zip past outfielders to the fence. A grounds-keeper is the servant of the manager, who may use him the way a president uses the CIA: stealthily. When the Cincinnati Reds had Frank Robinson, Gus Bell and other sluggers, the groundskeeper dug a hole in the front of the mound where some visiting pitchers would plant their feet when delivering the ball to the plate. This increased the odds on some pitches floating high in the strike zone. Ripken says, gratefully, that for years—before the Orioles discovered the joy of running—the Memorial Stadium groundskeeper “would doctor the infield when Rickey Henderson came in, watering down the baselines from first to second. Make it muddy, a slow track. We didn’t have anyone who stole bases.”
Men at Work Page 37