A MAN FOR HIS TIME

 

               Major League Baseball’s GEY (Great Experimental Year) is about half over, with mixed results. The biggest change— the addition of a pitch clock—has been a success, reducing average game times to two hours 38 minutes from 3:04 last year, all from the elimination of dead time. Ditto for the new-found limits on pitchers’-mound visits, which should be cut back further or eliminated altogether. Fewer pitching twitches and, maybe, bigger bases have triggered an increase in stolen bases, also good.

               The rest, not so much. Increasing offense was the second aim of the GEY, through limits on infield shifts, but the effects of that have been minimal, the all-game batting average for the season’s first half hitting .248, up just five points from last year’s full-season mark. Virtually unchanged has been the strikeout rate at 8.7 per team per game, against last season’s 8.8. For five straight seasons strikeouts have exceeded hits in MLB, and this year should make it six. Nobody’s cheering that.

               The continuing K epidemic probably is beyond rules jiggering. That’s because the pitchers have gotten far ahead of the hitters, with no end in sight. Thanks mostly to better coaching from the ground up, and to Tommy John surgery, which has taken some of the risk out of throwing hard, today’s hurlers can put speed on and do tricks with baseballs oldtimers could only dream of.  Triple-digit deliveries used to be rare but now they’re commonplace; breaking balls literally “fall off the table,” to use the announcers’ cliché.

               Batters have not been exempt from blame for the strikeout siege. Since that cute Nike TV commercial of 1991 declaring that “chicks dig the long ball,” home runs have dominated the game’s offensive landscape, jumping from .8 a game in ’91 to a high of 1.39 in 2019, a 73% increase. They’ve since tailed off a bit, but the fact their numbers have stayed high despite improvements in pitching testifies to the continuing desire of batters to hit them. While it might make sense to choke up on the bat a bit, the better to put wood on the more-elusive pitches, the batters’ mantra seems to continue to be swing for the seats, and strikeouts be damned. Back in ’91, batters struck out at a rate of 17% of official times at bat. Last year the rate was 25%.

               So here we are in 2023 and a “new” type of player has emerged. He’s the type whose entire game is the long ball. I put “new” in quotes because guys like that long have been around. The prototype is Reggie Jackson, who for 21 seasons (1967-87) terrorized foes of, consecutively, the Oakland A’s, New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels, enroute to 563 career home runs and a Hall of Fame spot despite what seemed like a lot of whiffs. In retrospect, though, Reggie was quite restrained at the plate, striking out 26% of the time, just a jot higher than today’s “everybody” average, and his lifetime BA of .262 is about 20 points higher than today’s.

               A couple of current players stand out as exemplars of the all-or-nothing ethos. One is Joey Gallo. A bearded giant, standing a listed 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds, he has made a living in baseball despite a career .198 batting average over nine seasons (2015 to the present) with the San Francisco Giants, Milwaukee Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers and, now, the Minnesota Twins. He’s consistent in that regard, not hitting more than a full-season .200 since 2019. He stood at .183 for ’23 at the All-Star Game break.

               Gallo has power, though, with 192 home runs to his credit. He’s at times been a part-time player, so that figure might not be overly impressive, but it works out to a robust 38 homers a season on a 162-game basis. But the other side of his weighted ledger is equally wowing—228 strikeouts a year. It’s cold enough in Minny without him fanning the breezes.

               Based on those numbers Gallo would get the “new guy” award, but he loses out because he’s a good outfielder, having won Gold Gloves with the 2020 and ’21 Twins. The other fellow I have in mind can make no such claim. He’s Kyle Schwarber of the Philadelphia Phillies. After being drafted No. 4 in 2014 by the Chicago Cubs, he came up in ‘15 as a catcher, his primary position at Indiana U. When it quickly became apparent that wouldn’t work in the Bigs he was tried at first base and left and right fields, with similar results. He now splits his time between designated hitter and left field, the position where he can do the least harm afield. He can catch a routine fly, and isn’t bad coming in on balls, but is slow afoot and lost when one heads over his head. One thinks he ought to wear his batting helmet out there.

               At the plate is where he earns his keep, a left-handed hitter cutting a Ruthian figure at a thick-middled 6-feet tall and 230 pounds.  His .228 lifetime BA isn’t terrible by current standards but it’s headed south, reaching just .184 so far this season. His home run totals are just fine, though, numbering 221 to date and working out to a round 40 per 162-game average, which in the eyes of his employers over-balances his strikeout rate of 185.

               Unlike most one-dimensional players, Schwarber has done well in the game’s honors department, winning All-Star Game places in 2021 and ’22 and a starting spot on the U.S. team that was runnerup (to Japan) in last year’s World Baseball Classic. He won a World Series ring with the 2016 Cubs and helped the Phillies to the 2022 Series. He’s being paid a reported $20 million this year and is on the books for the same figure in 2024 and ’25, not bad for a fellow of 30.

Steve Jobs could have had Schwarber in mind when he said “Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”

 The trick, of course, is to find the right thing.

              

                

                

KNUCKLEBALL PRINCESS

 

               I’m retired and, thus, have time to spare. I fill it partly by surfing the internet for interesting stories. I found one the other day on the MLB.com website. Its headline read “Knuckleball Princess.” Couldn’t pass up that one, huh?

               It turned out that the headline was out of date. The story’s subject, Eri Yoshida, is a Japanese woman of 31 years who as a 16-year-old became the first member of her sex to play professional baseball in her homeland.  The “princess” label was appropriate then but not so much 15 years later. But as they say in the newsbiz, if you have a good line you use it every once in a while.

               What was immediately newsy about Ms. Yoshida is that she had taken her act to the U.S. by appearing in something called the Empire Professional Baseball League, a minor league unaffiliated with Major League Baseball that has five teams based in upstate New York, one of which is called the Japanese Islanders. That’s despite the fact that all but six of that team’s rostered players appear to be Americans. The “whys” of those last couple of things are illusive; my attempts at elucidation failed. But I’m satisfied the EPBL is real, so this piece can continue.

               The New York gig represents a comeback of sorts for the woman, a 5-foot-1, 115-pound right-hander with a knuckleball speciality. She learned the pitch in her Yokohama hometown at age 14 from a TV show on Tim Wakefield, who rode the delivery to a 200-win career that spanned 19 MLB seasons (1992-2011), 17 of them with the Boston Red Sox.

She’d pitched in a men’s U.S. minor league before, beginning in 2010 as a dewy eyed 18-year-old with the Chico Outlaws of the California-based Golden Baseball League, also unaffiliated. Her three seasons with that club were interesting, to say the least. It reportedly had high points, including a four-inning stint in which she surrendered but one hit. But if she could be good she also could be horrid, giving up a total of 81 hits, 57 walks and 28 hit-batsmen over 78 innings, with a 7.62 earned-run average. Back to the drawing board she went, pitching for and coaching Japanese women’s teams. Still, she says she has “a dream in [her] heart” to succeed among men in the land of baseball’s birth, so she’s trying again.

The idea of women beating men at sport’s heights has enduring appeal even though it has little grounding in fact. Sexual politics is a cause, as is our love of underdogs of all sorts.  Exceptions are eagerly seized upon-- in 2014 Mo’ne Davis, a 13-year-old girl playing on a Philadelphia team, pitched a shutout in the Little League World Series, busting 70 mph fastballs past bewildered boys. The crowd went wild, and Sports Illustrated put her on a cover, along with a story that revealed her ambition to star in either MLB or the NBA.

But while girls usually mature (i.e., go through puberty) earlier than boys, and in the Little League-eligibility ages of 11 through 13 often are taller and heavier, boys mostly have passed them by the mid-teens and by adulthood have a sizable edge in “lean body mass” (i.e., muscle). That’s the basis of male athletic superiority.

Plenty of women can beat plenty of men in plenty of sports, but at the elite level in which both sexes compete in the same events over the same courses (e.g., track and field and swimming), men’s records are about 15% better than women’s, across the board. That’s also about the difference in average driving distance on the PGA and LPGA tours, which is why the women pros compete on shorter courses than do the men. Yes¸ 29-year-old Billie Jean King beat 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in their hyped Battle of the Sexes in 1973, but a truer tennis test came 19 years later when Jimmy Connors, then aged 40, handily beat 35-year-old Martina Navratilova despite getting only one serve per point in his service games and letting Martina hit into the doubles’ alleys.   

 That said, however, Ms. Yoshida’s continuing experiment bears notice. If a woman ever does play in baseball at a high level it well might be as a knuckleball pitcher, whose soft, no-spin offerings depend on unpredictable air currents for their motion. The delivery is as much an intellectual exercise as a physical one, something that’s rare in sports. It’s hard to hit but not hard to throw; the trick is getting it around the plate consistently. Jocks of both sexes are take-charge types, out to impose their wills on foes. The k-ball requires just the opposite.

Pat Jordan, a pitcher turned writer, explained it best is his excellent autobiography “A False Spring.” He wrote, “A knuckleball pitcher has no control over the peregrinations of the ball. To be successful he [or, uh, she] must first recognize this fact and decide that his destiny lies only with the pitch, and throw it consistently no matter what.”

Getting stats from the obscure Empire League ain’t easy, but early returns on Ms. Yoshida there were not great. In her first three innings she gave up five hits, four walks and two hit-batsmen, and seven earned runs.

 It might help if she were bigger than 5-1, 115. I can think of no man that size who made a splash in the game (“Wee” Willie Keeler stood 5-4 and weighed 140). She’s just 31, though, and that’s young for a knuckleballer. Hall of Famer Phil Niekro, the model for the type, pitched until he was 48 and was just getting started at her age. You go, girl!  

And oh yes, at last sighting Mo’ne Davis was an infielder on the women’s softball team at Hampton U., in Virginia.