There are two reasons—each of them sufficient—why Bill Mazeroski should be in the Hall of Fame. One reason is that as he was leaving the church on his wedding day, with his bride on his arm, he put a plug of tobacco in his cheek. The other sufficient reason is his defensive play. Many men are in the Hall only because of their hitting. This group includes some players who were at best mediocre on defense and were far from being among baseball’s best batters (another Pirate, Ralph Kiner, comes to mind). But Mazeroski was no slouch as a hitter. His career average was .260 over 17 seasons. And he hit the most dramatic home run in World Series history, the ninth-inning shot over the left-field wall in Forbes Field that beat the Yankees in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. It is the only home run that ended a Series.
Jim Kaplan, author of Playing the Field and poet laureate of the defensive dimension of baseball, thinks that the glitter of that moment has distracted people from Mazeroski’s true greatness. Kaplan believes it is demonstrable that Mazeroski was the greatest defensive second baseman ever and that it is arguable that he was the greatest defensive player of any position. Kaplan notes that when Mazeroski took infield practice at the 1958 All-Star Game, “stars from both leagues stopped to watch him—the fielding equivalent of watching Ted Williams hit.” Mazeroski led National League second basemen in putouts 5 times, total chances 8 times, assists 9 times (a record) and range factor (putouts and assists divided by games) 10 times. His major league records include double plays by a second baseman in a season (161), in a career (1,706) and the number of years leading the league in double plays (8). His lifetime fielding average of .983 was achieved in spite of the notoriously bad infield at Forbes Field.
The exclusion of Mazeroski from Cooperstown is a case of simple discrimination against defensive skills. The exclusion of Richie Ashburn is harder to fathom. Ashburn was much more than merely adequate at bat. He had a .308 lifetime average, with two batting titles. He batted over .300 in 9 of his 15 seasons. Mays and Mantle batted better than .300 ten times each, in 22 and 18 seasons, respectively. Mantle’s career on-base average was .422, Mays’s was .384, Ashburn’s was .394. Doubles? Mays averaged 24 a year, Ashburn 21, Mantle 19. Mays scored an average of 94 runs, Mantle 93, Ashburn 88 while hitting just 29 home runs in his career—an average of fewer than two a year. That is a big part of his problem: He did too much without home runs. Another part of his problem is that he did it 90 miles too far west. If he had put up most of his numbers in New York City, under the media microscope, he would already be enshrined at Cooperstown.
Now we come to what should be the clincher, the fact that Ashburn holds six of the ten most important records for single-season putouts in the outfield, five of the top nine for total chances.
Ashburn retired after the 1962 season, which he played with the Mets. It was the Mets’ slapstick (40 wins, 120 losses) first season. He was named the Mets’ MVP, and said, “Most valuable player on the worst team ever? Just how did they mean that?” He is fifth in career putouts and chances behind four Hall of Famers (Mays, Tris Speaker, Max Carey, Ty Cobb), all of whom played at least 288 more games than Ashburn played. Many balls he caught, which less swift and less intelligent outfielders would not have, were snared at the end of long sprints. He caught them because the play started with him well positioned and intelligently anticipating. A substantial number of those balls were doubles denied. Why is a double denied on defense so much less admirable than a double delivered on offense?
“The typical American male,” wrote James Thurber, “strikes out the Yankees side before going to sleep at night.” But there are many red-blooded Americans (of both sexes; this is the Nineties, for Pete’s sake) who, when on the edge of sleep, dash deep into the hole between short and third to spear a hot grounder and then throw Rickey Henderson out at first. These sensitive, caring, learned Americans demand that the Hall of Fame shape up and fill out its ranks with the likes of Mazeroski and Ashburn. Those two may not rank with Dreyfus on the list of history’s great victims, but the undervaluing of defense does say much about the standard measures of baseball excellence. And it says much about the misunderstanding of how games are won.
ALL-TIME SINGLE-SEASON LEADERS:
PUTOUTS BY AN OUTFIELDER
Taylor Douthit 1928 547
Richie Ashburn 1951 538
Richie Ashburn 1949 514
Chet Lemon 1977 512
Dwayne Murphy 1980 507
Richie Ashburn 1956 503
Dom DiMaggio 1948 503
Richie Ashburn 1957 502
Richie Ashburn 1953 496
Richie Ashburn 1958 495
ALL-TIME SINGLE-SEASON LEADERS:
CHANCES BY AN OUTFIELDER
Taylor Douthit 1928 566
Richie Ashburn 1951 560
Richie Ashburn 1949 538
Chet Lemon 1977 536
Richie Ashburn 1957 527
Dom DiMaggio 1948 526
Dwayne Murphy 1980 525
Richie Ashburn 1956 523
Richie Ashburn 1953 519
Lloyd Waner 1931 515
Games are won by a combination of informed aggression and prudence based on information. La Russa says, “Be aggressive offensively—when in doubt, push. But defensively, it’s the opposite. Be very basic, take the outs that are there, don’t gamble in a way that will open up a big inning for the other team.” There are sometimes more outs within reach than seem possible. One night in 1987 the Giants, playing at home, had hit 5 home runs and were still losing, 6–5. Then they tied the score in the ninth and had the bases loaded with one out. The Reds brought their outfield in. The Giants’ Will Clark singled sharply up the middle. The Giants won, right? Right, but they might not have. The Reds’ center fielder, Eric Davis, charged the ball, scooped it up and sprinted across second base for a force-out on the runner coming from first. It was such a bang-bang play he still would have had time to throw on to first and get the batter for an inning-ending, and perhaps game-saving, double play. He had time, but there was no first baseman to throw to. When the Reds’ first baseman, Dave Parker, saw Clark’s hit go past the infield, he decided the game was over and left the base. The moral of the story is: It isn’t over until it’s over. As has been said.
But it is over when one team, the one with the fewest runs, runs out of outs. You can win a game even if you have terrible pitching that gives up runs in bunches. Just be sure to score one more run than the sum of the bunches. (On August 25, 1922, the Cubs were pounded by the Phillies for 23 runs. The Cubs won, 26–23. As Bob Prince, the Pirates’ broadcaster, used to say at the end of a cliff-hanger victory, “Had ’em all the way!”) You can score only one run and win. Happens all the time. You can win getting only one hit. It is possible to win getting no hits. But to win a nine-inning game you must get 27 outs.
It is exceedingly rare that a team wins even a division title while leading the league in errors. The porous Dodgers of 1985 led the major leagues with 166 errors. Before that, the last time a team led the league in errors and won the division was 1971. The Giants of that year had stone hands but they had large muscles. If you are going to be sloppy in the field you had better be able to bring Bobby Bonds, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey to the plate.
Casey Stengel was right: “I don’t like them fellas who drive in two runs and let in three.” “You can’t win,” says La Russa, “unless you catch the ball behind good pitching and don’t give the other team extra outs.” “That was Earl’s philosophy,” says Ripken. “Let’s not give them any more outs than they’re entitled to.” For six months—Spring Training and the first five months of the season—baseball conversation, even among baseball people, is about pitching and hitting, and especially power hitters. In the seventh month, September, the question is always Who is going to win? And invariably the answer, at least the answer given by baseball people, is “the team that gets the best pitching and defense.” One of the elements in Earl Weaver’s equation for winning a pennant was to make fewer than 100
errors in a season. Think of 100 errors as 100 times in which the other teams enjoyed four-out innings. Bill Rigney says that when he is asked to evaluate a team, the first question he wants answered is, How well do they catch the ball? Add up all the hits, bases on balls and stolen bases you get on offense, Rigney says. In how many games does the total top 27? That is how many outs your defense must produce.
To understand the primacy of defense, try this. Imagine that the rules of baseball were amended to require four outs to retire a side. What would happen? Scores would soar, games would go on and on and on. A 33 percent increase in the number of outs almost certainly would result in much more than a 33 percent increase in runs. But mediocre defense does just that: It gives the other team four-out innings. A ground ball just beyond the reach of an infielder who was improperly positioned, a double play just missed because a flawed flip from the shortstop caused the second baseman to deliver the ball to first a fraction of a second too late—such lapses do not show up in a box score. But when an excellent defensive team plays a mediocre defensive team, the two teams might as well be playing under different rules. The team playing against the mediocre defensive team is, in effect, getting four or more outs in, perhaps, four or more innings.
“Positioning the defense,” says Whitey Herzog, “can be worth five or ten games a year.” A pitcher worth ten games a year may have a million-dollar salary. So why do some clubs not bother with defensive charts? Sloth. “The premium,” says La Russa, “is on getting guys out. The stuff we do offensively, talking about how to hit the guy, talking about how we are going to do things in particular situations—bunts, whatever—all that is well and good. There’s a place for it. But the premium is on the stuff you do to get guys out—positioning, and how you are going to pitch particular players. I want to be able to have a comfortable feeling, sitting in the dugout, that whoever comes to bat, I have a general idea where the ball is supposed to go, and a pretty specific idea of how you’re going to go after him. So when you’re watching the game you can compare what you think going in with what you are seeing. A lot of times the key at bats come late in the game. You want to be able to adjust if a hitter has been doing things you have not anticipated.”
The wonder is that, given how much information there is floating around, there are not more unusual adjustments made. Tom Trebelhorn, manager of the Brewers, says, “When we play Sparky and the Tigers, I love to do goofy stuff.” Then he tells a story that demonstrates that the stuff is not so goofy. In 1987 he used a six-man infield with one outfielder. With a Tiger runner on third and no one out, Trebelhorn played a five-man infield. He brought in his center fielder, Robin Yount, a former shortstop, to play slightly to the right of second base. The pitcher was responsible for any ball hit up the middle and there were three infielders between second and third. The Tiger batter was Chet Lemon, a right-handed pull hitter. The Brewers’ pitcher threw Lemon off-speed pitches down, he pulled a ground ball into the packed left side of the infield for the first out. Immediately there was a rain delay. In the clubhouse Trebelhorn told his team that when they went back out on the field they would play a six-man infield. The next Tiger batter was to be Pat Sheridan, a left-hander. In 24 at bats against the Brewers he had hit 17 ground balls. The only balls he had hit in the air had all gone to a certain small area of right-center field, where Trebelhorn planned to play his single outfielder. Trebelhorn told his pitcher to go to the mound, pick up the resin bag and throw it down as a signal for two outfielders to run into the infield. Trebelhorn told the pitcher to keep the ball down. Alas, the best laid plans… The pitcher got the ball up in the strike zone and Sheridan hit it to the one outfielder, but deep enough for a sacrifice fly, scoring the runner from third. “In this particular game,” Trebelhorn says, “we were down about 5–0; we were dying on the vine. I got my guys excited. We ended up losing about 8–5, but the maneuver took the focus off the negative and put it on something positive. And there was some commonsense statistical information to back it up.”
Information is everywhere. Late one afternoon before a night game in Boston, Tony La Russa was standing behind the batting cage watching Doug Jennings take batting practice. La Russa said, “Watch. You’ll see why I had to bunt yesterday in Baltimore.” In Baltimore Jennings was up and Luis Polonia was at second with no one out. As La Russa watched from behind the Fenway cage, Jennings, a left-hander, hit one BP fastball—about 58 miles per hour—after another toward short. “That’s his stroke,” La Russa said. “There is no way he is going to advance the runner by pulling an 85-mile-per-hour fastball to the right side.” That is the sort of information the big man on the left side—the shortstop—likes to know. He can get it from advance scouts who facilitate anticipation.
William Ashley Sunday, who later became famous as just plain Billy, the evangelist, was playing center field for the White Stockings, as they were then known, when a Detroit batter belted a long fly. Sunday dashed after it with, he later said, a prayer on his lips. Perhaps he would have run faster and made the catch with less fuss if he had not been praying, but never mind. He made the catch and came to a momentous conclusion: “I am sure the Lord helped me to catch that ball and it was my first experience in prayer.” Gosh. A career of saving souls might not have happened if back then the White Stockings had used advance scouts to tell Sunday where to play, thereby making his long run, and Divine Intervention, unnecessary.
An advance scout’s reports, other than those about players new to the league, are less important for information on the player’s general tendencies than on how he is hitting right now, meaning in the last three or four games. Ripken says this was important, for example, when trying to decide how to play defense against Reggie Jackson, a left-hander. “When Reggie was hitting the ball well, he waited a long time and hit the ball to my right. But when he was struggling, he would swing harder and get out earlier and he would pull more balls. He would get over the top of balls—‘top’ them. So if I knew Reggie was struggling I could play him more to pull. When he was hot he hit a lot of homers to left-center field. He would hit hard ground balls—rockets—to my right. When everyone’s hitting the ball well, they see the ball longer and they wait to see what it’s going to do. When they’re hot they’re quick.”
Quickness is the quality most rewarded in baseball. Quick moves by the pitcher to the plate, by the catcher to second. Remember Ted Williams on hitting: “Wait-wait-wait and then quick-quick-quick.” Defensive quickness decides games because the difference between baseball success and failure is measured in tenths, sometimes hundredths, of seconds. Quickness has constant synergism on defense. Around the infield, and the outfield, too, it radiates. Keith Hernandez has, by the aggressive mobility and artistry of his play, made more of a change in the playing of first base than anyone since Charles Comiskey, who was the first first baseman to play off the bag with no runners on base. No one any longer thinks of first base as a safe place to park an arthritic and immobile elder. In his prime Hernandez showed the baseball world the ripple effect of an infielder ’s range. Because he could move so well to his right, all the holes in the Mets’ infield were squeezed just a bit narrower than they otherwise would have been as the rest of the infield edged to its right. No one can say for sure how many potential hits were thereby turned into outs in the course of a season, but it is certain that the ERA of the Mets’ pitching staff reflected the Hernandez Factor.
Such a ripple effect can originate anywhere in the infield, and dramatically from center field. Tris Speaker played such a shallow center field that several times—once in the 1912 World Series—he completed an unassisted double play at second base. Shortstop Mark Belanger had such range going back on pop-ups that he was virtually a fourth outfielder, enabling the left fielder and center fielder to play a bit deeper than they otherwise would have. When first and third basemen have good range, shortstops and second basemen are able to squeeze the biggest hole on the diamond, the one exploited by Wade Boggs and others who hit back up the mi
ddle. The better a third baseman is at going to his left, especially on slow grounders, the deeper the shortstop can play. The concept of third-base play was altered suddenly in five games in October, 1970. The World Series that year between the Orioles and Reds was the first Series involving a park (Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium) with artificial turf. The Reds had four right-handed power hitters (Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Lee May, Hal McRae). They spent five days pulling the ball at the best glove ever stationed at third base, Brooks Robinson, and they spent the winter regretting it.
In October, 1987, almost four years to the day after he made the final putout of the World Series (catching a soft semi-line drive off the bat of the Phillies’ Gary Maddox), Ripken was watching the Cardinals-Twins Series at home on television and marveling at something he saw, something that proved the importance of a third baseman with good range. “A left-hander was pitching for the Cardinals with a runner on first and a 2-and-0 count on Gary Gaetti, a strong right-handed pull hitter. And Ozzie [Smith] is playing him up the middle. [Terry] Pendleton has tremendous range for a third baseman, but no one can throw hard enough to throw the ball by Gaetti. [By “throw the ball by” Ripken means almost by—preventing Gaetti from pulling the pitch.] So I think: ‘Maybe the situation dictates that the pitcher will pitch around Gaetti, not give him a pitch to hit.’ But the pitcher throws the ball inside and Gaetti hits a sharp one-hopper to straightaway short, where Ozzie isn’t. Pendleton is playing so far off the line that he almost catches it. Ozzie dives for it and catches it at straightaway short and forces the runner at second. I am sitting there thinking, ‘How in the world can Ozzie think he can play that far up the middle?’ The answer was in the fact that Pendleton nearly caught the ball and he had no business even being close to it.”
Men at Work Page 39