THE WICKED FLOURISH (continued)

 

               It’s baseball playoffs time again and the Houston Astros are in them. No surprise there—they’ve qualified for seven consecutive postseasons now. That’s the second-best such record extant, behind only that of the 11-straight Los Angeles Dodgers, a bigger-payroll team. And if they were asked, the Dodgers might opt to swap records with the ‘Stros, because the Houstons have won two World Series (in 2017 and ’22) during their streak, to the Dodgers’ one (in 2020).

               You might think that such excellence would be celebrated widely, but cheers are pretty much limited to in or around the East Texas metropolis. The Astros go about their business wearing a scarlet letter, albeit a “C” instead of Hester Prynne’s “A.” The “C” stands for cheater, which is what the team was for all of its championship 2017 season and a good-sized chunk of the next, before its misdeeds came to light.

               Short memory is a lamentable modern condition, but I’d wager that most folks—or, at least, most baseball fans-- recall what the Astros did.  That was to carry out the most egregious scam in the history of American team sports. Some Astros’ brains devised a computer program that doped out the signs of rival catchers and named it “Codebreaker.” It then set up video systems in their home and some other ballparks that would beam the stolen signs to their team’s dugout. From there the scheme went low-tech: the pitches were relayed to batters by bangs or lack therof on a dugout trash can, silence meaning a fastball and one or two bangs, variously, meaning a curve or changeup.

               Almost equally mind-blowing was Major League Baseball’s response to the wrongdoing. The Astros were allowed to keep their ill-gotten 2017 trophy and fined a few draft choices and a piddling $5 million, which is the cash maximum the game’s owners allow themselves to be penalized no matter what they do. Worse, a review ordered by Commissioner Rob Manfred wrote a report calling the program “player driven and executed” even though it named for blame only one player, Carlos Beltran, who at age 40 was in his last season anyway.   A coach, Alex Cora, was suspended, along with manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow.  For one (1) year each.

               Such leniency should have been expected; it’s well known in other contexts that firing or otherwise penalizing managers or execs is cheaper and easier than doing the same to players. Further, our team sports have a complicated relationship with rule-breaking; as the jocks put it “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’.”  Baseball outfielders can be counted upon to signal catches after they trap line drives, and all good football offensive linemen have a few artful holds in their bags of tricks. Sign stealing is a feature of both baseball and football, and it’s okay if done with the naked eye instead of electronically.  On another level, the taking of performance-enhancing drugs is treated as an individual offense, with no responsibility attached to the takers’ teams.

               The Astros’ sins were of a different order—obviously planned and carried out by a team’s leadership with the intent of securing a competitive advantage over a long period of time—and if that’s not condemned nothing is. But after their brief penance manager Hinch reemerged as manager of the Detroit Tigers, coach Cora popped up to manage the Boston Red Sox and player Beltran, hired and later quickly fired to manage the New York Mets, now is in that team’s front office.

               The only cheater still out of baseball is GM Luhnow, and one can deduce that’s mostly a function of his personal unpopularity. An engineer and management consultant by trade, he came into baseball in 2003 as a data analyst with the St. Louis Cardinals, having no baseball background and evincing open disdain for those who do. That image was magnified when he became the Astros’ GM in 2011, already carrying the nicknames “The Accountant” and “Harry Potter.” His claim to ignorance of the sign-stealing plot is ludicrous given the fact he was the only top Astros’ exec with the technical chops to put it together. Over the last few years he’s busied himself with soccer teams in Mexico and Spain, but he’s said he’s had feelers from several MLB clubs.  No one would be surprised to see him back in the Bigs soon.

               Baseball man or not, Luhnow’s path to building the ‘Stros was tried and true. The team tanked seasons 2011 through 2014, averaging just 58 wins (and 104 losses) a year but accumulating prospects and prime draft choices. Except for a stutter during the plague year of 2020 it hasn’t had a losing season since, meaning it knew what to do with the players it acquired.

               The team knows when to hold, as it has with the infielders Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman, lineup anchors who have been in Houston for 13 and eight years, respectively. Under Luhnow’s successors it has shown it can identify hitters, such as young-vet stars Kyle Tucker and Yordan Alvarez. It’s had good success developing pitchers, and when in need it can pop for veteran help, as it did in August when it assumed more than $50 million in salary obligations to reacquire the Hall of Fame-bound pitching ace Justin Verlander, whom it had let go to free agency the year before.

               This year’s Astros lack the oomph of previous editions, having snuck into the playoffs via two last-games wins, but once in them there’s no telling how far they might go.  Virtue may not be rewarded in sports but talent always is, and there’s still no lack of that in Houston.

                             

              

                

                 

                

BS HIGH

 

               When it comes to the corruption surrounding sports in the USA I’m not easily appalled, but that barrier was breached the other day when I watched an HBO documentary titled, appropriately, BS High. It was about “Bishop Sycamore High School,” a non-existent entity created by a Columbus, Ohio, conman who recruited some 50 football hopefuls and put together a schedule of games highlighted by a contest with rich and mighty IMG Academy that was televised nationally by ESPN. 

               As journalism, the production was lackluster. The game in question took place two years ago (on August 29, 2021) and the circumstances surrounding it had previously been published and aired, albeit to an Ohio audience smaller than that of HBO’s.  Key facts were missing or presented blurrily. The producers raised issues they did not later address, and their ire was directed mostly at Ohio authorities for allowing it to happen rather than at the (much) larger context in which it occurred.

               Further, it glorified its central figure, one Roy Johnson, who pulled off the scam without any credentials as a coach or educator and with a checkered past. The cheeky Johnson was interviewed extensively on camera, alternatingly laughing and snarling, but clearly enjoying the attention he was receiving.  Attention, after all, was what his play was all about, and he accomplished it in spades.

               In a scheme that predated the IMG game by a couple of years, Johnson cast his net among local African-American boys who had those sports “dreams” we hear so much about but had been passed over by college-football recruiters.  Using the “sports academy” model that has become ubiquitous in this land, he told the young men (and their parents) that his “school” would give them the gridiron exposure they need to crack the collegiate big-time.

If the subject of academics arose it was glossed over in Johnson’s pitch, and later. BS High never had any classrooms or teachers, and the documentary produced no complaints on that score from the recruits or their parents. And why should it? As one young “student” put it, the deal was “you come, play ball and move up.”

  That view echoed a similar one voiced a few years before by Cardale Jones, then a starting quarterback for Ohio State U.  right there in Columbus. “Why should we have to go to class if we came to play football?” he asked.

At any rate, having charged tuitions variously described in the show as $12,000, $16,000 or $20,000 (who paid, how much and how was never spelled out) Johnson assembled a team a few months before the 2021 season. It practiced on a rented field with the players living in hotel rooms he never paid for and eating whatever he could scrape up. One ploy he cheerfully admitted to was ordering 25 prepared chickens from a grocery store and then not having them picked up until just before closing time, after they’d been marked down.

By that time he’d assembled an eight-game football schedule against high schools that, apparently, asked few questions. The first two games resulted in losses by scores of 38-0 and 19-7. The televised IMG game, from a field in Canton, Ohio, connected to the NFL Hall of Fame there, was so ludicrously one-sided—final score 58-0-- it wound up exploding the whole scheme. Even though most of its players were older than the high-school norm, Johnson’s team lacked talent and plan, and several of his players suffered on-field injuries.  It didn’t have enough helmets to go around, so players swapped them as they ran on and off the field. The thing should have been whistled before the 60 minutes expired. The stink it generated resulted in BS High’s last five games being cancelled, and its players dispersed.

               It was fitting that ESPN and IMG Academy were hooked in the scam. ESPN, ever hungry for programming, has fed the professionalization of high-school sports by featuring prep games on its stations. IMG Academy, in Bradenton, Florida, is the model U.S. youth-sports factory. IMG was created  in the 1960s as International Management Group by Mark McCormack, the visionary lawyer/agent who, with golfer-clients Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, revolutionized jocks’ commercial ties, generating income that far exceeded their on-field earnings. The firm now is an octopus with international tentacles across the sports spectrum.

               IMG got into the ed biz in 1987 by buying the Florida tennis school run by Nick Bollietieri and quickly expanding its offerings to seven more sports (football, basketball, baseball, soccer, golf, track and field and lacrosse).  Its 1,000 or so current students, in grades six through 12, attend academic classes in the morning and spend afternoons in intensive sports training under professional eyes. Its teams criss-cross the country playing games and its golfers and tennisers play national tournament schedules.

               Full tuition for boarding students is about $90,000 a year, or $70,000 for day students. Scholarships are available, but the place is there to make money so not every student gets one. While the aim of most-students’ parents is a college scholarship of some sort, the economics of that aren’t clear—just a one-year, full-tuition payment exceeds the money value of many such “rides.” Chalk up the rest to parents’ desires for vicarious thrills, the surrender of colleges’ educational missions to their entertainment arms, and our general sports craziness.

               HBO’s search for villains in its documentary began and ended with Johnson; the producers waxed apoplectic over the fact that Ohio criminal law has no penalty for deeds such as his. That left retribution, if any, to the civil courts via lawsuits, a number of which Johnson is facing.

Equally to blame, though, were the parents who turned their sons over to the conman and paid to do so. If any of them thought to visit the “school” to check on his educational claims (a subject not addressed in the show) they must have bought into the “just play ball” reasoning. Not without cause, though.   

                             

              

TENNIS ANYONE?

 

In my columnizing days I looked forward to the U.S. Open tennis tournament, which takes place every year around this time. It meant two weeks in glorious Gotham on the Wall Street Journal’s dime, my favorite way to travel. Wife Susie or one or another of my kids often would join me for a few days, using tickets to which I had access. Sometimes a New York friend, too.

While I loved visiting the city (living there hadn’t been quite as big a pleasure), I also loved the tennis. I was an avid player then, so I had a feeling for the sport, and the Open offered total emersion. I best liked the first week, when the side courts were active and unfamous players would have it out in early-round matches.  I was something of a tennis maven, able to hold forth on that 43^rd-ranked woman from Sweden or that tall, lefty Australian junior, and whatever the court the tennis was excellent. As Charles Barkley said about the NBA, there are no bad players in the U.S. Open.

But no more. Now I barely watch the sport— maybe a set here and there on TV during the Grand Slam tournaments, almost never a match start to finish. The main reason is that the stylistic differences that used to flavor competition no longer exist. Just about every top player plays the same, baseline-rooted game, and while small differences in ability are decisive at the elite level they’re hard to discern with the naked eye. It’s difficult to tell the players apart if they aren’t wearing different-colored clothes.

 Evidence of the change has been easy to see. Wimbledon’s grass courts used to show wear in sideways-T-shaped patterns on each side of the net, one path along the base line and another down the center to the net. In recent years only the baselines paths show wear. Gone is the so-called “big game,” the serve-and-volley style that brought glory to the likes of Jack Kramer, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras and Martina Navratilova, along with the puncher-boxer matchups that made for memorable duels.  The great rivalries of recent-decades past—McEnroe-Borg, Sampras-Agassi, Navratilova-Evert—were of that nature. Now it’s all boxer-boxer, for better or (by me) worse.

The villain is technology, which has changed tennis more than any other sport. Starting about 1980 the wooden racquets that always had been standard in the game began giving way to ones made of first, metal, and ultimately, graphite. The new materials created weapons that were stronger, lighter and more flexible than before. They also allowed larger racquet faces, from a former nine inches across to 10 to 12 inches, with corresponding increases in the size of “sweet spots,” the face areas for optimum shot results.

  Those things made tennis easier to play, which was good for recreational players, and boosted the power of the pros’ games. At first it was supposed that big servers would benefit most at the expert level and, indeed, service speeds have zoomed. People oohed and aahed at 100 mph serves in Kramer’s day but now top women players routinely register triple digits while the best men exceed 130 mph.  Returners, however, countered by stepping back a pace or two, and the new racquets permitted them to blister back their deliveries almost as fast as they came in. That made net-rushing unprofitable.

What’s happened in tennis has been paralleled in other sports, but with fewer consequences. Pole-vaulting heights climbed radically with the 1960s switch from bamboo to fiberglass poles, and the advent of high-tech clubs and balls have allowed the golf pros to conquer space, but both sports have proceeded much as before, only over greater distances (PGA Tour courses used to measure about 6,800 yards, today about 7,500 is the norm).  In tennis, the whole serve-and-volley game has been a casualty, probably a permanent one.

The predominance of the baseline style has changed tennis in another important way, with longer rallies making for longer matches. This comes through strongest at tennis’s biggest showcases, the Grand Slam events (Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens). There, the men play best-of-five sets singles matches instead of the best-of-three format of the women, and the other men’s tournaments. Best-of-three setters usually are concluded in about 90 minutes while best-of-fivers that go all the way typically run about 165 minutes (two hours, 45 minutes). 

Oftimes, though, four- or even five-hour contests take place, sometimes punctuated by contestants cramping and/or barfing. That’s inhumane. Murphy’s Law made its certain appearance in 2010 at Wimbledon when John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played a fifth set that went 138 games (70-68) in a match that spanned more than 11 hours over three days. Wimbledon didn’t allow a fifth-set tiebreaker then and the fossils that run the place took eight more years to institute one.  Such is the state of tennis governance.

Five-setters can be tough on spectators, too. In my trips to the French Open, whose gritty clay (dirt) courts permit the longest rallies, I learned that the seasoned match-goer watches the first set of a men’s singles match and goes to lunch during the second. If the sets are even after two, he or she might sip another glass of Beaujolais before returning to the stands.

Men’s tennis in this century has been dominated by three players—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic—who have won 20, 22 and 23 Grand Slam titles, respectively. Federer, now retired, is best known for his grace, Nadal for his athleticism.  Djokovic’s main strength is stamina, as attested by his astonishing 37-10 career won-lost record in five setters. They’re running marathons out there, and when the men’s Slams grind to conclusions he’s usually been the last standing, a man for his time if there ever was one. Usually, I’ve been watching the highlights on Sports Center.

 

 

NEWS & VIEWS

 

               NEWS-- COLLEGE CONFERENCE ALIGNMENTS CHURN

               VIEW— ITS ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

               The tectonic plates of big-time college sports are on the move again, leaving carnage in their wake. The U’s of Oregon and Washinton have left the PAC 12 for the Big Ten, following the earlier switch by UCLA and Southern Cal. Arizona State, Arizona and Utah moved from the PAC 12 to the Big 12, filling the holes left when Texas and Oklahoma fled that conference for the SEC. Clemson and Florida State are said to be mulling leaving the ACC for the SEC, Cal-Berkeley and Stanford are talking to the ACC. You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Left in the dust are the 64-year-old PAC 12, now all but defunct, and whatever vestiges of regionalism the other conferences embodied. The Big Ten, once a prime source of Midwestern identification and pride, now stretches from sea to shining sea, and with Cal and Stanford the ACC (which stands for Atlantic Coast Conference) would, too.  Traditional ties, such as those between Oregon and Oregon State and Washington and Washington State, have been torn asunder. Making the moves more head scratching, the severing of Cal and UCLA was approved by the same Board of Regents that governs both.

Another likely casualty is the NCAA, a mere spectator to the above proceedings. The conferences now have the power, and can be counted upon to use it. The NCAA used to be potent politically and in the courts, but no more. Its decades of countenancing exploitation and hypocrisy finally brought down its shame amateurism, and through court-approved NIL (name, image, likeness) payments college athletes are able to be paid by check. The organization now exists mainly to run a basketball tournament.

Behind the moves is money. The key word is “content,” which is what the schools’ sports arms provide to television and streaming operators. That’s the same thing the professional leagues sell. The PAC 12’s collapse followed immediately on the league’s failure to secure a TV contract that would have satisfied its members. Big-time college sports are businesses pure and simple, separate from and often conflicting with the schools’ educational missions. Contributions to university athletics departments shouldn’t be tax-deductible.

 NEWS—THE U.S. WOMEN’S SOCCER TEAM BOMBS AT THE WORLD CUP

VIEW—IF YOU WERE SURPRISED YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION

The two-time defending champs’ elimination in the round of 16 was regarded as shocking, but it shouldn’t have been. The team’s pre-tourney games, all in the U.S., resulted in narrow wins, and it had lost twice in its only previous foreign venture (to WC host country New Zealand) this year. I watched its first WC game against Viet Nam, which turned out to be the worst team in the 32-country field, and found its 3-0 win unimpressive, remarking to wife Susie that it would be in trouble against better units. Its next three games, against the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden, all resulted in ties in which it scored a total of one goal.  Its eliminating loss to Sweden came in a penalty-kicks shootout.

It's news-media bad form in the U.S. to criticize female athletes or teams, but the soccer team’s pre-tourney hype in this land went beyond praise, to adulation. This was from a press corps that had little apparent knowledge of the women’s game beyond these shores. Thanks largely to the federal “Title 9” legislation of 1972 that vastly broadened women’s athletic opportunities, the U.S. long dominated women’s sports around the world. The rest of the world, however, has caught up on just about all fronts; for example, none of best basketball players extant (Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid and Luca Doncic) are Americans, and the best baseball player (Shohei Ohtani) is Japanese.

No doubt there will be a lengthy post-mortem of the WC debacle, with coaching and team organization getting most of the blame, but old-fashioned big-headedness shouldn’t be overlooked. Future team members should be advised not to read their press clippings.

NEWS— THE BALTIMORE ORIOLES SUSPEND TELEVISION BROADCASTER FOR PASSING ALONG A FACT

VIEW—WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

Kevin Brown’s sin, in chatter before a July game against the Tampa Bay Rays in Tampa, was to point out that the resurgent O’s had beaten the Rays three of five times there this season after losing 18 of 21 from 2020 through ’22. It’s the kind of tidbit that’s included in every team’s pre-game press notes, including the O’s before the game in question. But mouthing it on O-paid air was a no-no.

The incident was only an extreme example of the state of play-by-play sports broadcasting on both radio and TV. Broadcasters are not independent observers but employees of their teams, expected to promote them.  Even the best of them—Vin Scully, Harry Caray, Jack Buck, Jon Miller—are or were “homers.” It was just that their teams allowed them to describe the games before them, including, sometimes, the bad with the good.

These days, homerism has morphed into cheerleading, with nary a discouraging word allowed. I subscribe to MLB’s Extra Innings package, which gives me access to just every about game that’s televised, and to most of the boys (and sometimes girls) in the booths home teams are the good guys, foes the villains. Home players are referred to by first names or nicknames, like pals, foemen by family names. Home guys succeed by merit, foemen by chance. Every crew of umpires or refs has it in for the broadcasters’ employers; non-stop, one-way bitching over calls is the rule.  Best choice to avoid the blather: watch with the sound off.     

 

  

 

   

 

 

              

NFL WORST

 

               I’m told that the state motto of Alabama is “Thank God for Mississippi.” By that gauge the Arizona Cardinals must have emitted a collective groan when the notorious Daniel Snyder sold the Washington Commanders, nee Redskins. That left the Cards as the clear choice for worst organization in the National Football League and, maybe, in all American pro sports.

               That’s saying a lot, you say? Well, the Cardinals are that bad. For instance, what other team’s lineage includes Al Capone?

               More about Capone later, because the Cards’ “now” is plenty bad enough. Their won-lost record last season was 4 and 13, which wasn’t the league’s worst but it was close, and extended a losing tradition that dates to the team’s founding. The club was among the 14 original members of what in 1920 was called the American Professional Football Association, along with the Akron Indians, Muncie Flyers and Chicago Bears. The loop changed its name to the National Football League two years later.

                In their 103 years of existence in Chicago (1920-59), St. Louis (1960-87) and Arizona (1988-present) the Cards have won just two NFL titles—in 1925 and 1947—and the first of those still is contested by folks in Pottstown, Pennsylvania (current population about 23,000), who believe their late and lamented Maroons were cheated by scheduling manipulations. The Cards’ all-time record of 581-790-41 includes the NFL lead for losses. Their winning percentage of .426 ranks third-lowest among the 32 current teams, ahead of only the Jacksonville Jaguars and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, relative newcomers both.

               It’s a foregone conclusion that the season that begins next month will worsen those marks. Since the end of last season the team has had its best offensive player—wide receiver Deandre Hopkins—in effect quit, its best two defensive linemen-- J.J. Watts and Zach Allen—leave via retirement and free agency, respectively, and its defensive leader, safety Budda Baker, ask to be traded before reneging.

 Quarterback Kyler Murray, the recipient of a five-year, $250 million contract in 2021, is a sourpuss whose work ethic has been questioned. He’s a smallish guy who likes to carry the ball, meaning he’s injury prone. He missed the last six games of 2022 with a hurt knee and it’s anybody’s guess when he’ll be combat-ready this year.

The Cards start the season with a new head coach but the former one hasn’t exactly gone away. Kliff Kingsbury (four-season AZ record 28-37-1) was fired only a year after he was given a six-year contract extension at $5.5 million per, and the Cards have to keep paying him until he finds a new job. He recently was seen enjoying the beaches in Thailand.

Players thinking of joining the team might heed a recent survey by the NFL Players Association that ranked it last in the league in five of eight “quality of employment” categories, including food service, weight room, locker room, training facilities and treatment of families. Its overall rank among the 32 teams was last, by a lot.

               And upstairs in the front office, all is not well. The team has a new general manager after the old one left for still-undisclosed health reasons after serving a suspension for extreme DUI. The team was named in ex-Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores’ racism lawsuit against the league, for firing black head coach Steve Wilks after just a season on the job (2018) so it could hire Kingsbury.  It’s also being taken to arbitration by fired former vice president Terry McDonough, who charges President Michael Bidwill with a Snyder-like list of beastly executive behaviors aimed at himself and other team employees. Bidwill denies all.

                The Cardinals are one of five NFL teams that are, essentially, family businesses, headed for decades by nepots (the others are the Bears, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers and Cincinnati Bengals). The founding father was Charley Bidwill, who bought the team in 1933 for a reported $50,000, including $5,000 in cash and $45,000 in assumed debts.

 A lawyer and businessman, the basis of Bidwill’s fortune was Sportsman’s Park, a Cicero, Illinois, horse track that closed in 2002. In Illinois and elsewhere racing is a political business, dependent on state legislatures for operating dates. Bidwill was splendidly placed for that, being the son of a Chicago alderman and the brother of a state senator. Reputedly and reportedly, his partner at Sportsman’s was Capone. At the gangster’s death in 1947 Bidwill bought the track outright from Capone’s lawyer, Edwin O’Hare.

When Bidwill died later that same year control of the team, and the track, passed to his widow, Violet. When she died in 1962 they went to the couple’s adopted sons Bill and Charles Jr., the latter nicknamed “Stormy” for his bad temper. The two didn’t get along and in 1971 they split, Bill taking the Cardinals and Stormy the track. Bill in 1988 took the team to the Phoenix area. His son, Michael, runs it now.

The Arizona move didn’t improve team fortunes-- it’s had but seven winning seasons in its 35 there. The sole high spot came in 2008 when it made its only franchise trip to the Super Bowl despite a 9-7 regular season won-lost record. The Cards’ original Arizona home was Arizona State U’s Sun Devil Stadium¸ from where it annually trailed the NFL in attendance. A new stadium, opened in 2006, cured that, but nothing else.

If a vote were taken, Arizonans would remove the Bidwills by a landslide margin. Tsk, tsk, in the NFL an owner needn’t succeed to prosper—Snyder, who bought the Skins for $800 million in 1999, got $6 billion-plus when he sold, and the Cards must be worth at least that. Not a bad return on Charley’s $50,000, huh?

 

              

                             

 

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.