Craig Wright says, “This is the first time in baseball history that speed and power have flourished at the same time.” This is partly because the prevalence of power hitters makes pitchers want to put maximum body force into more pitches, even when they are throwing from a stretch position. That makes them somewhat slower to the plate, and thus makes speed on the base paths more valuable. Today, says Tom Trebelhorn, “there are people you can not throw out unless they make a mistake. It’s physics—it’s time and motion. By the time you can get the ball from here to here, they can run from there to there.” One reason games are longer is that players are quicker. As base stealing has become more important, pitchers have had to throw to first more frequently. A good base runner takes a lead long enough to require him to dive to get safely back to first on a good throw-over, so then he must dust himself off. It takes time. The baseball consensus is that catching is not as good as it once was. The scarcity of talented catchers makes the quality worse. “Since the shortest way to the big leagues is as a catcher,” observes Jack McKeon, “it means that in the position where a kid needs the most experience he is getting the least.” Baseball people who think the work ethic is weakening point to the paucity of good catchers. Catching, it seems, is déclassé and, more to the point, difficult. This is an era when good catchers are scarce and several of the best are methuselahn (Bob Boone and Carlton Fisk will both be 42 on Opening Day, 1990). But help is on the way in a familiar form. It is an American tradition that immigrants do the hard work, the dirty work, the heavy lifting. Two of the best young catchers are the Padres’ Benito Santiago and the Indians’ Sandy Alomar, Jr., both from Puerto Rico.
“Absolutely true,” says La Russa about the notion that more and more players are getting to the major leagues before they know the fine points of the game. Or the not-really-terribly-fine points, such as how to hit a cutoff man on a throw from the outfield. In the decade 1979 through 1988, 47 percent of baseball’s 6,476 draft picks came from college programs. Seven of the top ten picks in 1988 were from colleges. College programs must do the work done not so long ago by the minor leagues. Tim McCarver remembers that when he signed with the Cardinals in 1959 they had 5 Class-D teams and 7 in higher classifications. Today the Cardinals have just 8 minor league teams. Some clubs have only 5. Is three years in a serious college baseball program—at, say, Southern California or Miami or Arizona State—comparable to three years in the minor leagues? “Absolutely not,” insists Al Rosen. He says the inculcation of the basics of baseball is stronger and the competition is tougher in the minor leagues. As proof, Rosen cites the number of players who have outstanding college careers but who struggle and even fail in the professional rookie leagues.
Jim Lefebvre says that because young players are “force-fed” so quickly into the major leagues, it is common to see mistakes of a sort that once were rare. For example, in a 1988 game against Texas the Athletics had runners on first and third with one out when a ground ball was hit right over third base. The third baseman fielded the ball and, hoping to start a double play, looked at the runner on third to freeze him, then threw to second. When he threw, the runner on third made a mistake: He broke for home. He would have been out by 20 feet if the Rangers had not obligingly made their own mistake. The second baseman did his job: He fired the ball toward home. But the pitcher inexplicably—reflexively, but where did he get that reflex?—cut off the throw. In fact, the throw was gunned so hard it knocked his glove off. “There are,” says Lefebvre, “a lot of instinctive-type things young players don’t do right. When I came up the Dodgers had 16 farm teams—3 Triple-A teams. The players that made it to the majors were survivors. They knew their trade. They played, they played, they played.”
Doug Melvin, director of the Orioles’ farm system, says professional experience is bound to be more intense than any college program: “Look at the number of games they play. In three seasons a good college team may play 140 games. A kid would get perhaps 400 games with us.” Immersion in baseball is more complete in a professional setting. The best way to study “situation baseball” is to be in the situations, often. For a second baseman, for example, there are 20 or so possible permutations of his duties, as cutoff man or in some other role, depending on where the ball is hit (fly ball? down the line? between the right fielder and center fielder?), whether there are runners on base (runner on third? first and third? second and third?) and what the score is.
Coaches’ salaries are going up because more teaching must be done at the major league level. In 1988 Mark Grant, the large and slightly wacky Padres relief pitcher, was 24 and in his second full season. One morning at Wrigley Field he was lolling around the clubhouse listening to the wisdom of Pat Dobson, the Padres’ pitching coach, about the importance of making a quality pitch to a particular spot with a runner on first and a left-handed hitter up. Keep the ball away, said Dobson, so the batter can not pull it. If he gets a hit to left, at least the fielder has a shorter throw to third from left field than from right, so there is a better chance of having runners at first and second rather than first and third. So a righthander like Grant should throw a left-hander something like a slider, hard and away, rather than a curve that would come in on the left-hander and would have the effect of speeding up his bat. Grant was fascinated by, and grateful for, this lesson. It was the sort of lesson that a young pitcher should learn long before he breaks into the big leagues.
I can give a personal example of a well-coached young player. During the seventh game of the 1987 World Series between the Twins and the Cardinals, Geoffrey Will, then 13, was sprawled on a sofa, in the invertebrate way of an adolescent, watching the telecast. In the sixth inning the Twins’ pitcher threw over to first baseman Kent Hrbek just as the Cardinals’ base runner, Tommy Herr, broke for second. Getting Herr out in a two-toss (at most two-toss) rundown should have been as close to automatic as anything in baseball can be. But Hrbek turned, fired the ball to second—and then stood where he was, in the baseline. Laconically, but instantly, the 13-year-old on the sofa said: “Interference.” He had seen in a flash what Hrbek was doing wrong and anticipated what Herr would do right. Hrbek should have gotten out of the baseline, either retreating quickly to first base or trusting the pitcher to get over and cover first. Standing in the baseline he was an invitation to Herr, who took it. Herr reversed himself and ran smack into Hrbek in an awful tangle of limbs as Hrbek belatedly tried to get back to first. The umpire should have called interference on Hrbek and awarded Herr second base. Instead, the umpire blew the call twice, first by not calling interference and second by calling Herr out (television clearly showed that he was safe). However, Geoffrey had demonstrated the result of good coaching at the junior high school level, coaching of a caliber that remarkably few players get even at much higher levels of baseball.
Mayo Smith, who managed the Phillies, Reds and Tigers until 1970, once said, “Open up a ball player’s head and you know what you’d find? A lot of little broads and a jazz band.” Not true. Maybe once upon a time, but I doubt even that. Obviously baseball, like banking and medicine and journalism, has its share of lowlifes and scatterbrains, but there are remarkably few. They can not last. The competition is too intense. Baseball’s modern-day drug problems have never been as serious as the old problem with alcohol. (When Clyde Sukeforth was managing the Dodgers’ Triple-A club in Montreal in the 1930s he once called a club meeting to say, “We’re going to play a baseball game today. I want nine sober volunteers.”) Today’s athletes, looking for long careers with lucrative final years, are better educated than players used to be about healthy living. They use less alcohol than earlier generations of players. La Russa says that ten years ago, when he started managing, he would try to build team cohesion by occasionally having parties on road trips. But the success of such parties generally depended on moderate use of alcohol. He estimates that half his current team does not drink—at all. He does not drink. Before the 1989 World Series resumed after the earthquake there was some sensible worrying abo
ut how the eventual winner should behave. Would popping champagne corks be appropriate? “I don’t care anything about champagne,” said La Russa. “I tasted some once because Dave Parker wanted me to know what Dom Pérignon tasted like. I’m not even comfortable with Budweiser being advertised in our ballpark.”
Today’s players are physically more impressive than players were even in the early postwar era. Al Rosen remembers that when he was Cleveland’s third baseman in the 1950s (in 1953 he hit 43 home runs and drove in 145 runs) he was considered a physically imposing slugger. He was 5 feet 10½ and 180 pounds. In 1989 the average height of major league players was a shade under 6 feet 3. But what about refinement, the essence of craftsmanship? Tony Kubek, whose father and three uncles played professional baseball, believes that “the greatest teacher is visualization—seeing others do it and aspiring to their level.” Before he died in 1988, Carl Hubbell mentioned the advantages young players have today just because they are able to watch major league players on television: “I was raised on a cotton farm in Meeker, Oklahoma. Didn’t even get a newspaper. Never saw so much as a picture of a real major league pitcher in his windup.”
There is less rawness in today’s baseball than there was long ago. I am not thinking about peccadillos. Yogi Berra was not the first and may not have been the last catcher to toss pebbles into batters’ shoes. But no one plays the game with the high-spikes savagery of Ty Cobb. And although Cobb may have set the major league record for concentrated meanness, he was hardly the only player for whom viciousness was a normal part of the game. John McGraw merrily recalled the time when
the other team had a runner on first who started to steal second, but… spiked our first baseman on the foot. Our man retaliated by trying to trip him. He got away, but at second Heinie Reitz tried to block him off while Hughie… covered the bag to take the throw and tag him. The runner evaded Reitz and jumped feet first at Jennings to drive him away from the bag. Jennings dodged the flying spikes and threw himself bodily at the runner, knocking him flat. In the meantime the batter hit our catcher over the hands with his bat so he couldn’t throw, and our catcher trod on the umpire’s feet with his spikes and shoved his big mitt in his face so he couldn’t see the play.
As a manager McGraw was a cauldron of hectoring fury. According to a Chicago sportswriter, McGraw was “the incarnation of rowdyism, the personification of meanness and howling blatancy.” But his was meanness with a purpose. He reckoned that relentless bullying of umpires could get his team 50 extra runs a season, or one every three days. Bill James says the coaches’ box was invented to confine the vituperative energies of the great St. Louis teams of the 1880s, which were managed by Charles Comiskey. Until the box was invented, players acting as coaches ran up and down the foul lines spouting obscenities at opposing pitchers. There are today no rivalries comparable to the last fierce rivalry, that between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Bill Rigney remembers a day in 1951 when the Dodgers completed a sweep of a three-game series with the Giants at Ebbets Field, enlarging their big lead over the Giants. The two clubhouses were separated by a thin, locked door. In the minutes after the final out, Jackie Robinson was pounding on the door with a bat, taunting Giants’ (and former Dodgers’) manager Leo Durocher, “Leo, I can smell Laraine’s perfume,” referring to Durocher’s wife, actress Laraine Day. Eddie Stanky, the Giants’ fiercely combative second baseman from Alabama, shouted through the door a blistering racial insult. Hank Thompson, the Giants’ third baseman, a black man, was seated near Stanky, who is white. Thompson told Stanky he approved of Stanky’s words. As Cal Ripken says, baseball is not an “enemy sport.” But that was not always true.
There is not only less unruly behavior on the field, there is less mischief with the field and other elements of the game. Baseball is more rigorously policed by the leagues than it used to be, so grounds-keepers are less likely to try such chicanery as moving second base slightly (as much as a foot, which is a lot in the race between the runner and the ball) toward or away from first. Some teams may still make the pitcher’s mound in the visiting team’s bull pen higher or lower and with a different slope than the mound on the field in the hope that this will cause a relief pitcher (or the starting pitcher in the first inning) to have trouble controlling his first pitches. But no one today will do what Bill Veeck reportedly did. It is said that Veeck’s Cleveland Indians used to move the outfield fences as much as 20 feet, depending on the opponent of the day. Eddie Stanky, who lacked Lord Chesterfield’s interest in gentlemanliness, tampered with the balls. When he managed the light-hitting 1967 White Sox he would store game balls for a week or more in a room with a humidifier running full blast. This made the air, and the balls, soggy with moisture. Removed from the room a few hours before a game, the surface of the balls would be dry but there would be two ounces of moisture inside, enough to take a dozen feet off the flight of a fly ball.
It has been said that baseball in the pre-Civil War era taught a puritanical America the virtues of play. But industrialists of the Gilded Age would approve of the way baseball has become a big business. Fifty years ago baseball was a comparatively mom-and-pop operation. Sunday play was not permitted in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia until 1934. In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court held, for purposes of antitrust regulations, that baseball is not a business. Today sports columnist Jim Murray says, “If it isn’t, General Motors is a sport.” General Motors would like to have baseball’s recent rate of revenue growth.
To gauge baseball’s current popularity, consider the way things were not so very long ago. One of the most exciting games ever played was the exclamation mark at the end of one of the most exciting seasons baseball has known. It was the third game of the three-game play-off between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951. The game, which was won by the Giants on Bobby Thomson’s three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth, capped “The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff” in which the Giants stormed back into the pennant race by erasing a huge Dodger lead after August 11. The game was played at the Polo Grounds, which had a capacity of more than 55,000. The attendance that day was only 34,320.
The 1989 season demonstrated a dynamic of success: The better things get, the more they get better. In 1989 major league baseball drew 55,174,603 fans, breaking by 2,175,699 the record set in 1988. It was the fifth year in which a new record was set. The Toronto Blue Jays drew 3,375,573, an American League record. Eight other teams also set attendance records: the Cardinals (3,082,000), Athletics (2,667,225), Orioles (2,534,875), Red Sox (2,510,014), Cubs (2,491,942), Royals (2,477,700), Giants (2,059,829) and Rangers (2,043,993). One reason so many people went to see baseball played is that it has never been played so well. And because so many people want to see it, in ballparks and in their living rooms, the caliber of play should continue to rise. Money matters; money attracts talent. After the 1988 season baseball struck a bonanza. As a result, the level of the game should be even higher in the 1990s and beyond. This is so even if there is expansion of up to six more teams, which there probably will, and should, be. Indeed, expansion, which means more careers open to talents, should in time make baseball even better.
Peter Ueberroth’s final services to baseball were two new television contracts. CBS will pay $1.08 billion for exclusive over-the-air (noncable) coverage of major league baseball in the four seasons 1990 through 1993. In 1989 NBC and ABC were paying about $100 million apiece for baseball. CBS will pay $270 million a season. This will buy 16 regular-season games, the All-Star Game, both League Championship Series and the World Series. Even if both LCSs and the Series go to 7 games, CBS would be televising just 38 games, paying $7.1 million per game, or $790,000 per inning, $132,000 per out. That is a lot of six packs of beer. Also, ESPN made a four-season $400 million deal to telecast 6 games a week, 175 per season. In 1990 each team will get about $14 million—$10.38 million from CBS and $3.8 million from ESPN. In 1989 twelve teams had payrolls of less than $14 million. Then there are revenues from network radio. Ti
cket sales bring about $7.17 per ticket—more than $350 million annually. There also are substantial revenues from local radio, television, food and souvenir concessions and parking. (Of course all this must go to support the crushing costs of wood bats.)
Baseball’s general health is served by making baseball a more lucrative life. It is a matter of supply and demand. The more dollar demand there is for talent, the more talent is apt to be supplied. The pool of money is growing. When, in the mid-1990s, expansion comes, the number of jobs will grow, too. When the relative longevity of baseball careers is considered, the balance tips increasingly toward baseball in the competition with other sports for the services of young athletes. For those who become established major league players (playing at least two years), the average career now lasts about ten years. That may not seem long to you and me, but remember what Robert Frost said: “Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”
Ray Miller, moralist and social scientist, says “baseball is losing top athletes because baseball is not the easy way.” A young football or basketball star can go into a college program, get an education and go straight to the top professional level. A college baseball player goes out to play in minor league parks, most of which are a lot less spiffy than the ones he played in as an undergraduate. Furthermore, baseball is not the easy way because its skills are harder to master than those of other sports. Consider, says Al Rosen, football. A wide receiver or defensive end needs serious skills. The receiver has to learn his routes, the defensive end his zones, or man-to-man coverage. But these skills do not compare in difficulty with the skills required to hit a baseball. Rosen notes that two superb athletes who are NFL quarterbacks, John Elway of the Broncos and Jay Schroeder of the Raiders, both played college baseball and both had major league teams interested in them—but not very interested. Both, says Rosen, would have risen at most to Single-? ball. The highest degree of difficulty is in hitting. It is the reason why baseball is a business in which most beginners, even those destined for the top, begin in the mail room—deep in the minors. And most will not make it to the top.
Men at Work Page 42