How baseball is like church

Short version assuming there is one: back in 1990 I was going to the Kansas City Royals fantasy camp and decided to take hitting lessons and was stunned to find out there was a right way to do just about everything and even though I’d been watching baseball my entire life, I knew next to nothing about how it was actually played.

A condition not uncommon to the average American male.

Realizing just how little I knew, I got interested and started reading instructional manuals about baseball and asking professional players why they did what they did and initially some of them blew me off because they thought when it came right down to it I’d be unwilling to put the mental effort into understanding baseball.

Kind of like telling Albert Einstein you have five minutes so maybe he could go ahead and explain the Theory of Relativity which sounds like an explanation of why we start behaving like our parents and doing the same shit we used to laugh at when they did it, but as I’ve come to learn Al’s theory is a tad more complicated than that.  

Anyway…

A lot of people say they love baseball when what they really love is wearing a baseball cap, speculating that given half a chance they could have played in the Big League Leagues and drinking beer in the stands until they work up enough courage to yell insults at the umpire. BTW: if you hear some dude – and the odds are about 99.9% it will be a dude – yell, “C’mon, Blue!” he’s yelling that because he thinks it makes him sound knowledgeable because that’s what you call umpires, which is true in Little League, but in pro ball umpires have names and players are expected to learn them.  

So if you want to look like an expert, study your program and figure out which umpire you’re insulting and then when you yell, “C’mon, Frank!” the people around will take note of your expertise and ask each other, “Who the fuck is that drunk guy yelling at?”

My advice is don’t yell stuff at ballparks, because you might not like what they yell back.

True Story Alert

OK, that just reminded me of a story and the names will be deleted to protect the guilty.

During a pitching change a rookie first baseman was talking to a veteran ballplayer who was running the bases for the other team and a fan sitting in the front row was wearing out the runner with insults and making it hard for them to talk. So finally the veteran turned around and said this to the fan:

“Your wife wants to fuck me and your kid wants to be me. Shut the fuck up.”

The rookie said “Jesus, we can talk to fans like that?” and the veteran said, “Kid, it’s the Big Leagues, we can do whatever the fuck we want.” So next time they start in with that Field of Dreams, misty-eyed, Americans Coming Together To Enjoy Our Shared History horseshit, remember that story.

Also: if the fan’s wife and kid were with him, how uncomfortable was that ride home?

A Mystery of the Universe explained

A while back, a reader from the United Kingdom (let’s call him “James” because that’s his name) asked about watching baseball on TV and wanted to know what he should look for.

In response to his question, I wrote a nine-part term paper that Leo Tolstoy would find overly wordy and managed to talk about baseball in Switzerland, the Justice League and the possible Norwegian Brown Rat heritage of Jason Kendall’s dog.

In response to my hard work, James asked me yet another question which goes to show you no good deed goes unpunished and the fact that I’m writing yet another term paper goes to show you I’m actually glad James asked his questions because at least he’s interested and my immediate family has long since given up even pretending to stay awake once I start talking about baseball.

Their loss…or so I tell them once they wake up.   

Anyway…

Here’s James’ most recent email:

Thank you for going above and beyond to answer my questions. Being an advocate of maintaining tradition, I was partial to the Cleveland Spiders. Can you bust a myth? We constantly hear that "that pitch was down and in (or low and inside), just "where lefty batters love it." It's never explained. Why should a lefty batter love a down and in pitch any more than a righty? I vaguely recall Keith Hernandez saying lefty batters are better low ball hitters than righties and righties are better high ball hitters. I've read a couple of interesting theories on the web. 1. Ballpark dimensions. The right porch is typically shorter than the left porch in the majority of ballparks. 2. A bevy of right handed throwers batting from the left side. The dominant right hand at the bottom of the handle instead of on top has an impact on the swing that favours hitting the down and in pitch.

James, I’m semi-glad you asked

Here’s the explanation I’ve heard and having attempted to play baseball myself it makes sense to me and it also comes from big league ballplayers so it might actually be true. (I tend to find people who have actually played baseball more credible than some of the overly-opinionated baseball fans currently living in their parent’s basement who would need a fresh pair of Fruit of the Looms if someone hit a line drive in their direction, but still think they’re baseball experts.)

And away we go…

Swinging a baseball bat involves two motions: rotation and weight shift. (Actually it involves a lot more than two motions, but things will get complicated enough as is, so for now let’s concentrate on those two.)

1. Rotation is the circular, spinning motion of the swing.

2. Weight shift is the back-to-front motion which transfers the batter’s weight from the back foot to the front foot. 

Now here’s another baseball principle you need to remember:

The speed and trajectory of a baseball coming straight at you is harder to judge than the speed and trajectory of baseball when viewed from the side.

Watch enough baseball and sooner or later you’ll see an outfielder misjudge the depth of a ball hit right at him.

If it’s a fly ball, fans probably won’t notice because the outfielder will have time to recover and get to the right spot, but if it’s a line drive there’s not much recovery time so a first step in the wrong direction and that outfielder will look like he’s auditioning for a supporting role in the latest installment of The Bad News Bears. This is why the outfielder next to the outfielder making the catch is supposed to be yelling, “In, in, in!” or “Back, back, back!” The outfielder off to the side has a better angle.

Righties vs. righties and vice versa

So…a right-handed pitcher throwing to a right-handed batter with an overhand delivery will tend to release the ball in line with the hitter’s head. For a brief moment, the ball is coming directly at the hitter’s head and it’s sometimes hard to read pitch trajectory until the ball’s movement gives the right-handed hitter a better viewing angle and then he can try to identify the pitch and react accordingly.

Because of their point of view when facing a right-handed pitcher, right-handed hitters have to wait, wait, wait and then be quick.

Back when he was still playing, Kevin Seitzer (current Atlanta Braves hitting coach) once got hit in the head with a fastball and when I asked Kevin his last thought before getting beaned he said: “That’s not a slider.”

Here’s what that looked like if you want to see it and having just watched it myself, you probably don’t:

So the need to wait and then be quick means right-handed hitters tend to emphasize rotation (spinning in one place) which makes their swings shorter because they don’t have a lot of time for weight shift (spinning while simultaneously moving forward).

When facing right-handed pitchers left-handed hitters don’t have that problem.

They have a better viewing angle on a pitch from right-handed pitchers (because it doesn’t start at their heads) which helps them identify pitches earlier and that means they can afford to emphasize a little more weight shift. Which is also one of the reasons left-handed hitters tend to have prettier swings than right-handed hitters; their swings can look longer and more graceful.

It’s also why batting champions are often left-handed; they have an advantage because most pitchers are right-handed.

Which is also why teams want left-handed pitchers because they take that advantage away from left-handed hitters and lefty hitters often really struggle against lefty pitchers because they don’t get to see that left-handed release point nearly as often and their swing mechanics might not be set up to handle it.

As great as George Brett was, he hit .318 off right-handed pitchers and .280 off left-handed pitchers (which means George is pretty damn great because most hitters would be happy to hit .280 off anybody). You’ll find similar numbers on most left-handed hitters. Here’s a slow motion video of George swinging the bat and pay attention to the back to front weight shift:

Pitch location

Now imagine the strike zone from the pitcher’s point of view and divide that zone into nine equal boxes. A pitch in the down-and-in box on a left-handed hitter allows him to extend his arms and drop the bat head like a golf club. A weight shift swing handles that zone well.

Now take that same pitch at the same velocity, but put it in that up-and-in box and a longer swing will have trouble because the hitter can’t extend his arms and that means he’s got to swing sooner to catch the ball out in front of the plate to give him room to swing and swinging sooner makes it easier to get fooled.

What have we learned today?

Longer swings that tend to emphasize weight shift handle the pitch low in the zone well, but can struggle with the pitch up and in.

Shorter swings that emphasize rotation have an easier time with the high pitch.

Now, having said all that (at length) there are always exceptions to just about every rule of thumb in baseball so don’t have a cow or some other barnyard animal if some left-handed hitter hits high fastballs well or some right-handed hitter doesn’t.

If you made it this far, congratulations

People’s reluctance to learn about the technical parts of baseball was summed up by Leo Durocher when he said:

“Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.”

If you’re one of those people who enjoy the game on a surface level there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You can enjoy The Godfather without going to film school, but if you go to film school I’m guessing you’d start noticing things in The Godfather the rest of us miss and would get more out of that movie than everybody else.

And now you and James know why left-handed hitters like the down-and-in pitch, but I wouldn’t try to explain it to anybody even if they ask.

A lot of people love baseball, but as Leo the Lip pointed out: they just don’t love it that much.