When asked how big a problem Jackson is when he is on first base, Ripken replies with the pure baseball man’s sense of superiority to someone who is less than completely committed to his craft: “Oh, Bo has many fundamental strengths. He could be just like Rickey [Henderson], but it seems that when some people have that much speed they don’t take the trouble to get a good jump. Their speed takes care of their jump. But think how fast they could get to second base if they did all the little things everybody else has to do. Bo’s not yet a great base stealer, as great as he can be, because he has not learned the fundamentals—how to get a good jump, how to time the pitchers. He hasn’t stolen that many bases and he’s faster than Willie Wilson in a dead sprint. But I’ll bet he’s not as fast as Willie first-to-home because he [Bo] doesn’t ‘cut’ the bases as well.” (Through 1989 Wilson had stolen 588 bases, placing him eighth on the all-time list.) “Because Bo’s physical tools are superior to those of everyone else, he can run faster, throw harder, hit the ball farther than anyone else. But he doesn’t yet get up well with the pitch. He doesn’t read the ball off the bat as well as he could if he had had more baseball experience.” (By “getting up with the pitch” Ripken means that a runner on first, while facing the catcher, should begin to glide sideways toward second and then be able to turn smoothly and sprint off the glide if the ball is put in play. A runner on first “reads the ball off the bat” well if he instantly knows whether it will be a ground ball, a routine fly or a long drive.)
Now the baseball purist in Ripken is speaking with undisguised disapproval: “The same is true on the double play. Bo doesn’t get there [to second] as fast as some other people, even though he is faster than everybody. I’m not as worried about Bo as I someday will be. Don Baylor used to be fast and he got so he could get there quicker than anybody because he did things the right way.” In those words—“the right way”—the Ripken blood, and that of baseball, speaks.
CONCLUSION
“Maybe the Players Are Livelier.”
A baseball elder gazed upon the game and was not pleased by what he saw:
Baseball today is not what it should be. The players do not try to learn all the fine points of the game as in the days of old, but simply try to get by… [sic] It makes me weep to think of the men of the old days who played the game and the boys of today. It’s positively a shame, and they are getting big money for it, too.
So wrote a former player and manager years after retiring. He wrote it for the Spalding Base Ball Guide of 1916.
It is an old baseball tradition, complaining about the character and quality of contemporary players. However, baseball is both intensely traditional and interestingly progressive. By progressive I mean steadily improving. The traditional side is obvious in baseball’s absorption with its past and its continuities. Charles Finley, who as owner of the Oakland Athletics fielded some of the finest teams of the 1970s, suffered from incurable fidgets and tried to inflict upon baseball various innovations, such as designated runners and orange baseballs. But he did acknowledge the game’s remarkable continuity. He liked to say, “The day Custer lost at Little Bighorn, the Chicago White Sox beat the Cincinnati Red Legs, 3–2. Both teams wore knickers. And they are still wearing them today.” There is an aura of changelessness to sport. There is the flux of competition, but it occurs within the ordering confinement of clear rules. Yet like any human contrivance, sport is an organic institution, evolving with changes in the forces that play upon it. Baseball’s seasons, coming one after another and comprising a nearly seamless web, are deeply satisfying to one’s sense of social transmission. It is the sense of society always changing somewhat but having as its primary business the passing along of slowly accumulated customs, mores and techniques. Memory, says Tom Boswell of the Washington Post, is baseball’s fourth dimension. For the fan, freezing and savoring images is an important part of the pleasure. No sport matches baseball’s passion for its past. And there is a second sense in which memory is always central to baseball’s present. Many of those who play and manage have ravenous appetites for remembrance. It is how they, and their craft, become better.
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal. The Grand Canyon is the work of the Colorado River. Where did baseball come from? Lots of places, including (it seems so natural) Valley Forge. Baseball was evolving from lower forms of activity at about the time the colonies were evolving into a nation, and baseball became a mode of work—as distinct from a mere pastime—remarkably soon after the nation got going.
This is a nation that knows precisely when it got going. Unlike most nations, this one had a clear founding moment, in Philadelphia, presided over by the Founding Fathers. It is, therefore, natural, and tolerable as amiable nonsense, that the national pastime claims to have had a founding moment and a Founding Father. Part of the agreeable nonsense about baseball being an echo of our pastoral past is the myth that Abner Doubleday invented the sport one fine day in 1839 in the farmer Phinney’s pasture at Cooperstown. Actually, the thing Doubleday helped begin was the Civil War. (He was stationed at Fort Sumter when the first shots were fired.) The New York Times obituary of Doubleday did not even mention baseball. The untidy truth is that the sport evolved from two similar, but interestingly different, games based in two cities, New York and Boston.
The New York version won the evolutionary contest, partly because New York had one of the essential ingredients of social success, a great lawgiver. The United States had a population of about 20 million and New York City about 700,000 the day (June 19, 1846) Alexander Joy (his parents certainly knew how to name baseball’s constitutionalist) Cartwright went to a meadow on the slopes of Murray Hill near Third Avenue in Manhattan and laid out a diamond-shaped playing area with bases 90 feet apart. Puritan values made many early American communities inhospitable to play. Play is, after all, a “pastime,” and to some stern Americans back then it seemed impious to think of the Creator’s precious gift of time as something to be whiled away. Play was then considered a form of idleness, and an idle brain was the Devil’s playground. But baseball, which began as play, quickly became a form of work. As pure play it was a spontaneous, improvised adaptation of games with English roots. The diary of George Ewing, a soldier in the Continental Army thawing out at Valley Forge in 1778, records that on April 17 there was a game of “base.” It was, no doubt, a cousin of the game of “baste ball” that a Princeton student described in 1786.
Baseball’s adolescence was the era between 1876, the founding of the National League, and 1902, the formalization of relations between the National and American leagues. In 1876 the nation celebrated its centennial, puffed out its chest, and went rollicking toward industrialism and urbanization. By 1902 America was a world power, as full of energy and confidence as the Rough Rider in the White House. Between 1876 and 1902 there were five or six (it is a matter of opinion) major leagues. This was an era of healing wounds from the Civil War (visored baseball caps were inspired by soldiers’ caps worn during the Civil War—and perhaps partly by jockeys’ caps) and creating the commonalities that would build a nation of immigrants. Baseball was part of that healing and building. This rambunctious age saw the democratization of literacy, and that brought the dawn of the age of newspapers. The price of a ton of newsprint plummeted from $40 in 1860 to $2 in the 1890s and editors, eager for a regular supply of noncontroversial news, launched sports sections where advertisers could sell to male readers.
Today baseball is big business, part of the vast entertainment industry that has grown in response to the growth of leisure time and disposable income. In 1989, 55,174,603 spectators, a number equal to approximately one-fifth of the combined populations of the United States and Canada, paid to get into the 26 major league ballparks. What spectators pay to see is a realm of excellence, in which character, work habits and intelligence—mind—make the difference between mere adequacy and excellence. The work is long,
hard, exacting and sometimes dangerous. The work is a game that men play but they do not play at it. That is why they, and their craft, are becoming better.
Baseball has been called the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America. No topic of baseball conversation is more interesting and instructive than this question: Is the caliber of play as good as it used to be? I believe it is better. Sandy Alderson, the Athletics’ general manager, says that judging a baseball team is a lot like surfing in the sense that waves come in, break and go back out, but you can not tell from one or two or even a dozen whether the tide is coming in or going out. Telling that takes more time. Gauging the trajectory of a baseball team takes more than a few games. Judging the trajectory of baseball itself is inherently problematic. But baseball has a trajectory; nothing stands still. John Thorn, a baseball historian and analyst, may be right that baseball “has changed less than any other American institution of comparable antiquity.” Thirty years ago historian Bruce Catton wrote that if someone from President McKinley ’s era were brought back to earth and seated in a baseball park “he would see nothing that was not completely familiar.” “Dugout to dugout,” said Bill Veeck, “the game happily remains unchanged in our changing world.” Well, as we say in Washington, yes and no. Yes, the structure of the game is essentially what it has been since the turn of the century. But for many reasons noted earlier, hitting and pitching and fielding and managing have changed enough over the years that it is not easy to make comparisons between the achievements of today and yesterday.
For many reasons, including dumb luck and other mysteries, extraordinary constellations of talent can come together in one short era, in any field of endeavor. Consider that thirteen thinly populated colonies produced the fifty-five men who went to Philadelphia to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. There are similar clusters of extraordinary talents and achievements in baseball. Ten of baseball’s thirteen .400 batting averages occurred in a 15-year period, 1911 through 1925, when baseball was an adolescent and, after 1920, the lively ball era was in its infancy. Twenty-eight times American League hitters have had 150 or more RBIs in a season. But all 28 occurred in the 29 seasons between 1921 and 1949. And 19 of the 28 seasons were by 4 sluggers: 7 by Gehrig, 5 by Ruth, 4 by Jimmie Foxx, 3 by Hank Greenberg. Note that 14 of those were by first basemen who were contemporaries. In 1935 Greenberg had 100 RBIs before the All-Star break. And he did not make the All-Star team, even as a backup. His misfortune was to be playing first base at the same time as Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx. As if putting an exclamation point to punctuate an era, two men from the same team, Ted Williams and Vern Stephens of the Red Sox, both got 159 RBIs in 1949. In the National League there have been only 7 seasons of 150 or more RBIs. Six of the 7 were within 16 years (1922–37). (The seventh was by the Dodgers’ Tommy Davis in 1962.) Only 7 players have compiled 100 or more extra-base hits in a season. Consider the list of the 9 times it has been done:
100 OR MORE EXTRA-BASE HITS IN ONE SEASON
It has been 4 decades since anyone has done it and 4 of these achievements were in a 3-year span, 1930–32. Only 6 players have had seasons in which they hit at least .350, had at least 150 RBIs and hit 40 or more home runs.
Note that this has been done 13 times, all in a span of 16 seasons (1921–36). More than half of these super seasons occurred in a 4-year burst (1930–33).
There are almost as many ways to play with baseball numbers as there are ways to play with a baseball. Taken together, the many meanings that can be given to, or extracted from, the numbers compel this conclusion: There is an irreducible indeterminacy in baseball judgments. This is so in spite of, or perhaps because of, the abundance of data. About pitching, the records are clear but their meanings are not. Cy Young once told a reporter, “I won more games than you ever saw.” He won 511. John Thorn and John B. Holway note that although Bob Feller won only 266 games, he lost 4 years to World War II. He had won 107 before Pearl Harbor and had just turned 23. At 23 Walter Johnson had 57 wins; Cy Young and Grover Cleveland Alexander had none. Alexander finished with 373, tied with Christy Mathewson. But Alexander did not get to the major leagues until he was 24 and lost most of a season to World War I. But for the war he probably would have won 400 games, something no one is apt to do again. The 5 best pitchers of the postwar period have been (I will brook no argument) Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver. Seaver won 311 and lost 205 in a 20-year career, often with weak teams. His winning percentage of .603 is almost identical to that of Walter Johnson (.599), who toiled most of the time for weak teams. Seaver’s career ERA was 2.86. But Walter Johnson won 416 games, the second-highest total, even though his Senators were shut out in 65 of his starts and got only one run in 38 others. True, Johnson played in baseball’s truest “pitcher’s park,” Washington’s Griffith Stadium. (When Johnson was pitching there the left-field line was 407 feet, center 421, right 328.) Johnson could (in a hoary old baseball saying) “throw a blueberry through a battleship.” Someone has calculated that if Christy Mathewson had played for the Senators when Johnson did, when the Senators were often weak, instead of for the Giants when they were usually a powerhouse, Mathewson would have won 276 games instead of 373, and if Johnson had played for those Giants he would have won 567 rather than “only” 416. Such calculations have a spurious precision. Still, they can make points by pointing to broad general conclusions, one of which is that Johnson was the best pitcher, ever. Period. (By the way, he hit .433 in 1925, a record for a pitcher, and in 1913 fielded 1.000 with 103 chances, another record.)
Christy Mathewson pitched 3 shutouts in the 1905 World Series. Walter Johnson pitched 11 shutouts in one season. Carl Hubbell won 24 consecutive regular-season games (16 at the end of 1936 and 8 at the beginning of 1937). Seven times in the modern dead-ball era (1900 to 1919) pitchers pitched 300 innings without yielding a single home run. Detroit’s Ed Killian pitched 1,001 innings from 1903 through 1907 without a home run. Pitchers used to pitch more—more innings, more games, more complete games, more shutouts. But, then, as has been noted, they often threw fewer pitches per inning than are thrown today. The nature of the ball, the role of the relief pitcher, the five-man rotation, the need today to pitch warily through lineups well stocked with power hitters—all these and other differences make it difficult to make definitive comparisons. Furthermore, modern-day strikeout records are more impressive than those of the first six decades of the century. In 1988 Roger Clemens struck out 291 batters in 264 innings for an average of 9.92 strikeouts per 9 innings. That tied him for fourteenth on the list (fifteenth after 1989) of best single-season strikeout ratios. The year before, Nolan Ryan, then 40, recorded the best ratio ever. Here is a list of the top 20 seasons:
PITCHERS WITH MOST STRIKEOUTS PER 9 INNINGS, ONE SEASON
(Since 1900, Minimum Innings: 175)
Of those 20 seasons, one is from the 1950s, 5 are from the 1960s, and the other 14 are from the 1970s and 1980s.
The lesson to be learned here is that any baseball numbers must be considered in a complex baseball context. Nolan Ryan’s career strikeout record, which rose to 5,076 in 1989, is not to be sneezed at, but he is pitching in an era when striking out has lost its stigma for batters. It is an era in which free swingers hold the bat at the knob and hack, not caring very much if they often do not make contact. When Ryan joined the Rangers in 1989 he had as a teammate Pete Incaviglia, who went directly from college to the major leagues. As was noted earlier, whatever else he learned at Oklahoma State, he did not learn the strike zone or the iniquity of striking out. Incaviglia is an egregious case, but an instructive one. In 1986 he led the league in strikeouts with 185. He tied for the lead in 1988 with 153. His total from those two seasons was 338, just 19 short of Ty Cobb’s total strikeouts (357) over 24 seasons. Bo Jackson, another man who took a fast track to the major leagues, struck out 318 times in the 1988–89 seasons. In the magic year of 1941 (it was my bad luck to have been born on May 4 of that year, so I missed a f
ull month of the season), Ted Williams struck out just 27 times while hitting .406 and belting 37 home runs. That year DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games and struck out just 13 times. Bo Jackson accumulates more strikeouts in two months than those two hitters accumulated—40—in a full season.
The modern power pitcher whose strikeout numbers most resemble those of Ryan is Steve Carlton. In 1971 Carlton was 20–9 with the Cardinals. Before the 1972 season he was traded from the Cardinals to the Phillies. In 1972 the Phillies finished last and had a team batting average 24 points worse than the Cardinals. Yet Carlton won 27 games. It makes you wonder how many he might have won if he had not been traded.
Some baseball people believe that pitching is especially subject to wide fluctuations in quality because the talent pool is always shallow and expansion of the number of teams can drain it to the muddy bottom. In 1960 one American Leaguer (Mickey Mantle) hit 40 or more home runs. In 1961 two new teams were added—only about 20 new pitchers—and the American League suddenly had 6 hitters with 40 or more home runs. Some people say expansion is the reason Roger Maris broke Ruth’s record in 1961. However, Kubek notes that since 1961 the American League has gone from 10 to 14 teams and the National League has expanded from 8 to 12 teams and no one has come close to Maris’s record. Anyway, in 1927 Ruth hit 7 of his 60 home runs off rookie pitchers.
Men at Work Page 41