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.