It’s all or nothin’, ‘n’ nothin’ is winnin’
took nearly 13 minutes, then lining out.
Whether I’m managing the Giants or sitting in a box seat, I’d have preferred a bloop single on the first pitch, but oh how wrong I can be. As ever. “Oh my gosh, 21 pitches,” gushed Clint Hurdle when I asked the Pirates manager which he’d rather see. “I’ve watched Belt’s at bat I don’t know how many times. Much rather see the extended at bat. Just for the battle. From a manager’s standpoint, if you’re talking about managin’ the pitcher, I’d rather see a guy just dump a ball for a single and not run up 21 pitches against my guy.”
Hurdle is talking about the pure theatrical essence of the game, the physical, mental, and sometimes emotional comingling of cross purposes between batter and pitcher.
Such is the game’s ancient bedrock.
“It’s still baseball; a matter of if you make pitches or you don’t make pitches,” said Detroit Tigers manager Ron Gardenhire, who returned to the game this spring after three years of reversible retirement. “You get a lot of more information about weaknesses and strengths and all those things, and sometimes it drives you crazy and sometimes it works out really good because it’s good information — a lot of shifts, trying to get guys to pitch where they’re gonna hit the ball. My heads starts spinning in the dugout sometimes because of all the numbers they throw at ya, but it all equates to the same thing we’ve known our whole lives: It gets done through one-on-one competition and everything that happens out here is a result of mano a mano, pitcher facing the hitter. You’ll never stop that.”
I used to revel in the intricacies of this same dynamic, but I can’t help but notice the way these epic two-strike struggles, like some mutating contagion, have folded themselves into and exacerbated the game’s growing tedium.
The nature of that tedium, which the game’s most thoughtful administrators have tried to alleviate with fitful tweaks in the pace-of-play protocols (a seventh mound visit now requires a bottle of wine), is shackled to the ever-expanding portion of the game in which the ball is not in play. Strikeouts this season are at another record-busticating pace, walks are plentiful and revered, homers are flying everywhere.
There’s a name for the kind of baseball where lots of people strike out, where lots more are trying to wait out a walk, and where some only want to hit the ball over the fence: Little League Baseball.
Happily enough, you still need a glove in the big leagues, and it had better be some quality leather like the kind brought to work by Sean Rodriguez, the Pirates super defender and a man who looks perfectly comfortable regardless of position in an arena that’s less comfortable every day, and for essentially one reason:
“Velo,” is what Rodriguez calls it. VEE-lo. “The ball’s comin’ off (the bat) a lot harder now,” Rodriguez explained after authoring two dazzling defensive plays that preserved a 1-0 Pirates victory Thursday. “Velo(city) is up, all three of those things (homers, walks, strikeouts) come hand-in-hand with a lot of velo. It’s hard for guys to control that much velocity. And then naturally if you hit it, it’s gonna go.
“I know people say, well, maybe the ball’s a little more dense. I don’t think so. I’ve been in the league long enough to know the ball isn’t going any further because of the weight of it; it’s that the pitchers are throwing that much harder.”
Fastball velocity is at an all-time high, which is metastasizing the batters’ inability to adjust to breaking pitches. In other words, VEE-lo is slowing the game toward a standstill. There’s a solution, of course, and it’s not to lower the mound again. Move the pitching rubber back a little. Two feet ought to do it. And sure, you can file that under ideas that are dead on arrival because this is baseball, after all, where the pitches might be fast but the innovation has two speeds, slow and no.
Compounding it all, hitters just don’t care that they’re striking out like Little Leaguers.
“I do think that generationally speaking, probably starting about five years ago, maybe a little earlier than that, that when the analytics got involved, there’s this idea that an out’s an out,” said Hurdle, who has long railed against the abundance of strikeouts (his Pirates have the fewest in the league) and isn’t backing down. “And there are some kids who are going to hold onto that because they may have a swing-and-miss swing and that makes them more comfortable — well it’s OK because (\[an out’s an out]. Well, it’s the easiest out to record in baseball and that’s somethin’ I’ll stand by. How many times do you want to make the easiest out there is to record in baseball when you only get 27 of them? There’s no defensive adjustment, no defensive play to be made.”
On Wednesday, the San Diego Padres struck out 16 times at Colorado, putting the ball in play only 12 times in 32 plate appearances. The same night in Los Angeles, the Miami Marlins struck out 15 times. Across a full schedule of games, teams gave away about 32 percent of their outs without putting the ball in play. For perspective, in 1995, Tony Gwynn only struck out 15 times. All season. In 577 plate appearances. (For a more meticulous treatment on strikeouts, see Post-Gazette baseball writer Bill Brink’s excellent Sunday piece on Page C-6).
Meanwhile, the Washington Nationals’ Bryce Harper is on pace to draw 200 walks. No wonder fans are starting to nod off over their cell phones, at least in the games that don’t include the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani, the 23year-old rookie from Japan who, in this first month, has done little to dispel comparisons to Babe Ruth. He was slugging .619 at the weekend, and in four starting mound assignments, was averaging 11.5 strikeouts per nine innings. And talk about VEE-lo! As per ESPN Stats & Info, Ohtani’s fired 16 pitches of 100 miles per hour or more already, while all of baseball’s other pitchers have combined for nine. He might be a once-in-a-lifetime talent, but as for the game’s general watchability, is Ohtani the solution or just another part of the problem with that Veelo?
If you’re wondering, the Giants do not play the Angels again this season, so there’s no chance of an Ohtani-Belt battle that could extend itself through the night. Good. For the record, when asked by the San Francisco Chronicle if he’d watched his 21-pitch at bat from last week, Belt said, “No, I’ve got too much stuff to do.” As for his conversation with Angels catcher Martin Maldonado during its final stages, Belt said, “I think I just told him I was going to bunt. I hate when other people do this. I’m trying to put the ball in play.”
Yeah, that’s still a good idea.