WALKING THE LINE

 

              

Mario Mendoza was the quintessential good-field, poor-hit baseball player, logging nine seasons in the Major Leagues (1974-82) with three teams even though his lifetime batting average was a puny .215. The shorststop failed to top the .200 mark through five different campaigns, maybe a record for a position player. In an offhand remark during a 1980 television interview, the sterling slugger George Brett coined the phrase “below the Mendoza Line” to describe the any player with a sub-.200 batting average during any season. ESPN personality Chris Berman picked it up and ran with it, making it part of baseball’s lingo.

               It should be noted that Mendoza survived the shame attached to his name by continuing in baseball past his playing days as a well-regarded minor-league coach and manager. Eventually, he was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame of Mexico, his native land.  As time wore on another term, “on the interstate,” has come to rival the Brett-coined one to describe batsmen with sub-.200 averages (I--, get it?). That, at least, makes the onus impersonal.

               The ignominy that attaches to recording Mendozian numbers seems to have dissipated with the years, however; their frequency has gone up as batting averages have gone down, the defining characteristic of the current diamond era. According to one internet posting, an average of 16.1 players with at least 100 times at bat averaged under .200 during the seasons 1981 to 1990. The next 10 years the figure rose to 18.2 and in the next 10 (2011-20) it more than doubled to 38.8. Over that 30-plus-year span overall MLB averages have dropped from the .270s to the .240s. A .250 hitter used to be considered a liability. Today’s he’s above average.

               That the trend has continued this season is surprising if not shocking. Last year’s overall batting average of .244 was the lowest since the .237 posted in 1968, in the Bob Gibson-Juan Marichal-Sam McDowell era. The game responding radically, the next season dropping the pitching mound to 10 inches high from 15 and four years later allowing the American League to enact the designated-hitter rule.

That last move worked immediately, with the all-MLB average rising to .257 in 1973 from .244 the season before. This season the National League finally took up the DH, a move that eliminated 2021’s 4,829 pitcher at-bats and .101 average. It also hiked enforcement of ball-doctoring, which is what those end-of-half-inning pitcher-hands checks are all about. Through last week, though, this season’s overall BA stood at .243, a loss instead of a gain. It seems that nothing less than turning to slow-pitch softball will stem the decline.

Indeed, the game’s main reaction to the hitting drought has been to denigrate the messenger-- the batting-average stat—as obsolete. In recent seasons the letters OBP, SLG and OBS have come more into view; respectively, they stand for on-base percentage, slugging, and on-base-plus-slugging, a combo of the two. The OBP adds walks and hit-by-pitches to hits in compiling batter efficiency. The slugging mark is a bow to power hitting, a home run counting four in the measure, a triple three and so on down. Anything above .350 is considered a good OBP, anything above .750 a good OBS.

 I’m old fashioned when it comes to baseball stats, leaning most heavily on batting average, home runs and runs-batted-in for grading hitters. Yes, those are incomplete measures, but like the Dow Jones Industrial Average they provide the comfort of deep and easy historical comparisons. Many fans know Babe Ruth’s lifetime BA of .342 but few know or appreciate his more-impressive OBS of 1.164.

Still, there’s something to be said for the newer approach. Last season, for example, Tim Anderson of the Chicago White Sox hit a robust .309 but walked just 22 times (to 119 strike outs) so his OBP was a just-OK .338, and 17 home runs lifted his OBS to .806. Teammate Yasmani Grandal batted .240—69 points less than Anderson-- but walked 87 times and hit 23 home runs, so his OBP was .420 and his OBS .939.  Which player would Sox fans rather have seen come up in a “clutch” situation last year?

Further, some of the players currently straddling the Mendoza Line are having what otherwise are good offensive seasons. Kyle Schwarber of the Philadelphia Phils, a heavy-legged outfielder, was batting just .211 last week but was named to last month’s All-Star Game and leads the National League with 34 home runs. Minnesota Twins’ centerfielder Byron Buxton is hitting .223 but with an OBS of .848. The New York Yankees’ first-baseman Anthony Rizzo’s comparable numbers are .224 and .846.

One-note sluggers long have been able to stay afloat in the Majors despite sub-Mendoza batting averages-- Mark McGwire hit .187 with 29 home runs in 2001, Mark Reynolds hit .199 and 32, respectively, in 2010. Their current-day counterpart is Joey Gallo, whose 38 home runs with the Yankees last season was a record for a sub-.200 hitter (he batted .199). This year Gallo is hitting .165 and wore out his Gotham welcome; he’s a Dodger now.

Injuries have reduced some former stars to Mendoza Line status. Dodger Cody Bellinger was the National League’s rookie of the year in 2017 and most-valuable player in ’19, but a series of mishaps—including one incurred while high-fiving a teammate during a home-run celebration—sent him crashing to a .165 BA last season and .210 on so far in this one. His teammate Max Muncy, a two-time all-star, is hitting .179 under similar circumstances. They have more company down there than they would have had in past years, but I’m sure that’s little consolation.

  

  

 

 

              

LIKE NOTHING EVER HAPPENED

 

               When I visited New York frequently, in the 1980s and ‘90s, my favorite restaurant there was Pino’s, on 34^th Street near Park Avenue. It was a neighborhood place, of the sort that when a regular wanted to make a reservation on his way home from work he’d lean in and holler “see ya at 7:30!”  The food was good, linguini with clams a specialty.

               The proprietor was Jerry Casale, a big, friendly Brooklyn native and gifted schmoozer. As a glance at the restaurant’s memorabilia revealed, he’d been a baseball player, a right-handed pitcher. In 1959, as a 25-year-old rookie whose career had been interrupted by a two-year Army stint (they did that then), he posted a 13-8 won-lost record as a starter with the Boston Red Sox. The next season he won two of his first three starts before he developed what was known as a “sore arm.” That was pretty much it for him; he struggled through the rest of that season and parts of the next two before the pain forced him to quit the game and seek his fortune elsewhere.

               Like many another pitcher with a similar history, Jerry’s misfortune was that he was born several decades too soon.  If he had played in this century or late last, chances are he could have undergone “Tommy John surgery” and pitched again, as well as before.

               I put the words “Tommy John surgery” in quotes because it’s unusual that a medical procedure be named for a patient, not the surgeon who devised it. John was a 31-year-old, left-handed pitcher, a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, in 1974, the year he went under the knife of orthopedist Dr. Frank Jobe, the Dodgers’ team physician. I’m not doctor, and never have played one on TV, but I can tell you that John had a strained ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow, the piece that connects the humerus, the long bone in the upper arm, to the ulna bone in the forearm.

 Using a tendon taken from another part of John’s body, Jobe replaced and reattached the injured sinew, something that hadn’t been done before. John sat out the 1975 season but returned to pitch the following year. He’d posted 124 victories in 12 seasons before the surgery. He was just as good afterward, winning 164 more games before retiring in 1989.

The technique is easily described but not so easily undergone. Although it’s usually performed on an out-patient basis today it requires about four months of inactivity to heal, and a year or more before pitching can be fully resumed. Further, the technique wasn’t an instant hit. Jobe wasn’t sure how it would turn out with John so he didn’t do in again until two years later, and didn’t see fit to publish an article about it until 10 years after that, in 1986.  Between 1974 and 1994 it was performed just 34 times.

But changes in the game have made pitchers’ elbow problems more frequent and increased the need for remediation. Pitchers keep throwing harder, and as speed-gun readings have increased so has the elbow stress hard throwing produces. Early specialization and longer schedules at the kids-game level also leads to more “sore arms” down the road.  

 As more surgeons learned it and as successes piled up (it’s about 90% effective now), the procedure became almost ubiquitous in baseball; it’s estimated that about a third of the 400 or so pitchers now on Major League rosters have had it, sometimes more than once. That’s in addition to the thousands of times it’s been done on players at other levels, down to high schoolers. Parents have been known to request the procedure for their sons before a problem develops, to improve the kids’ chances of success. That’s a bad idea, but it’s probably been done.

Ligament-replacement surgeries, sometimes using cadaver parts, have spread beyond elbows; ruptured Achilles tendons used to end sports careers, but now they can be treated that way. Ditto for injured-shoulder parts. In all, they’re probably the biggest advances in sports medicine ever.

 “Tommy John surgery” has become part of the American lexicon; a few years ago John turned over his original elbow cast, signed by Jobe and the 1974 Dodgers, to the Smithsonian Institution, for exhibition. It’s been suggested, seriously but posthumously (he died in 2014 at age 88), that the surgeon be named to Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Subsidiary but probably related celebrity for the name is seen in the advent of a Tommy John men’s underwear line. The ex-pitcher has no ties to the maker, and pondered suing it, but dropped the idea when he learned that it would cost six-figure legal fees to mount a court challenge.

Tommy John himself carries on at age 79, living in California with his second wife, whom he married last January. After he retired as a player he stuck around baseball as a broadcaster and minor-league coach and manager. In 2020 he contracted a severe case of covid that required several months of hospitalization and a rehab that continues. He’s said he watches little baseball these days, finding the sport “unrecognizable.”

John’s Major League career spanned 26 seasons (1963-89), a run matched by few. His career won-loss record was 288-231 and his ERA was 3.34. He was a very good pitcher for very long time but never a great one, and didn’t come close to the 75% vote required for election in 15 years on the Hall of Fame’s sportswriters’ ballot, topping out at 31.7%. Last year, however, a Hall veterans’ committee elected to membership Jim Kaat, whose pitching record (283-237 over 25 years) mirrored that of John’s, so John’s stock for eventual election has risen. When he’s elected (and he will be) they should transport his elbow cast from the Smithsonian to Cooperstown.