Tonight is the first game of the World Series and I’m looking forward to it, but millions of people find baseball boring and it certainly can be if you don’t pay attention and aren’t drinking heavily to relieve the boredom.
OK, so let’s say you decide to believe me and try to pay attention to a sport that seems to have all the action of someone in the final stages of a coma; what should you pay attention to?
I’m glad to pretend you asked.
If you get stuck watching the World Series tonight, here are a few of the things you might want to pay attention to, but keep in mind that this is a very, very incomplete list and remember there are exceptions to just about everything I’m going to say.
And away we go…
Pay attention to the count
This is easily the most important thing to focus on when watching a ballgame and here’s why: when the pitcher has to throw a strike, if he has to do it with a fastball because he can’t control is off-speed stuff, there’s a pretty good chance he won’t get away with it for long.
Most of the time, fastballs are the easiest pitch to throw for a strike because they’re relatively straight which – unfortunately for pitchers – is what makes them easier to hit. If the pitcher can’t throw his off-speed stuff for strikes and will go with a heater whenever he’s behind in the count, teams figure this out and will look for a fastball in counts like 2-0, 2-1, 3-0, 3-1 and depending on the situation, 3-2.
For example: During the 2022 season the Philadelphia Phillies hit .253 as a team, but put them in a 2-1 count and they hit .376.
If the pitcher gets ahead in the count, then he can throw any damn thing he wants and it doesn’t have to be a strike and hitters have to try to cover all those different pitches which is why the Phillies hit .164 in 1-2 counts.
Pay attention to velocity
So let’s say your pitcher is having trouble controlling his off-speed stuff and hitters are looking for a fastball, a veteran pitcher might “add and subtract” which means throwing one of those 2-1 fastballs with just a bit more velocity or a bit less velocity so a pitcher who was throwing 95 suddenly throws 98 or 92 and hitters will tell you that’s just enough to make them miss and foul back a 2-1 fastball they thought would come in at 95 MPH.
So pay attention to velocities which they show after every pitch in one of those on-screen graphics that keep you aware of what the score is after you wake up from that two-inning nap you took.
Also…
Pitchers who want to stay in the league awhile will develop fastballs with some kind of movement – a cutter, a sinker, etc. – so when they have to throw a fastball isn’t always straight as a string.
Pay attention to the catcher’s mitt
Pitchers can get away with fastballs in fastball counts as long as they’re well-located which means hitting a hole in a batter’s swing.
As the pitch is being delivered look at the catcher’s mitt and where the target is set up, then pay attention to how much the catcher’s mitt has to move to receive the pitch. If it moves a lot that means the pitcher is missing his spots and that also means the defense will probably have to play “straight up” and that brings us to defensive shifts.
Pay attention to shifts and pitch location
There’s a technical definition of playing “straight up” but we’re going to ignore that for now and say “straight up” is everybody positioned where they’ve been positioned for the last century or so and you play that way when the pitcher doesn’t know where the ball is going…which also means the defense doesn’t know where it’s likely to be put in play, so you stand in a spot that allows you to cover ground to your left and right.
Now let’s say you go ahead and shift and overload the right side of the infield because the hitter is a lefty who pulls the ball, which means your pitcher should throw him off-speed stuff or inside fastballs and once in a while you’ll see a pitcher miss location and throw what was supposed to be an inside fastball to the outside part of the plate.
Because of the pitch velocity and location that makes it easier to for that left-handed hitter to put the ball in play on the left side of the field which is about as populated as certain parts of Utah I drove through this summer.
That generally means someone screwed up – threw the wrong pitch or threw the right pitch and missed location – although…and here comes one of those exceptions I talked about, some hitters pull everything so maybe they thought he’d also pull that outside fastball, but as a coach once told me, when a hitter does something out of the ordinary it can make everybody on defense look like an idiot.
Pay attention to wall balls
Before the Series is over you’ll probably see some defender have to make a catch near a wall and the right way to do this is get to the wall in a hurry, find it with your bare hand or glove (in the picture above you can see the outfielder’s hand on the wall), then get ready to leap or come away from the wall to make the catch which I just made sound way easier than it is in Real Life so clearly I ought to have my own sports-talk radio show which often feature highly-opinionated guys who have never actually played the sport they’re highly-opinionated about.
Anyway…
Some players don’t like getting near a wall because walls tend to be fairly solid and running into one can fuck up your day and possibly your career. Those guys will stop short of the wall and often miss a catchable ball.
Pay attention to catchers on one knee
Putting catchers on one knee is the latest fad in baseball because the numbers guys have decided it will get the pitcher more calls on low strikes and maybe that’s true, but what we know for sure it gives the catcher a much better chance of taking a foul tip in the nuts.
Not sure why dudes find this so funny (as long as it’s not their nuts), but they do so keep an eye out for that because it’s always good for a laugh.
According to the stats I looked up, wild pitches and passed balls are actually down this season, but I don’t know who’s keeping those stats because I’m seeing a lot of catchers fail to block pitches from that one-knee stance.
Pitching changes
In the old days you paid attention to pitch count and you wanted to get as much as you could from your starting pitcher because if he pitched seven innings you could hand the ball directly to your best relievers who pitched the eighth and the ninth innings and avoid those not-so-hot middle relievers in the sixth and the seventh.
Say your starter was going to throw 100 pitches and 15 pitches-an-inning is about average; so do the math and that gets you six innings and change. Which means if your starter didn’t try to strike everybody out and pitched to contact and had a seven-pitch inning along the way, that set everything up just the way you wanted.
But if the starter had a 27-pitch inning somewhere along the way, he’d have to come out early and maybe a so-so reliever would pitch the sixth because of what your starter did in the third.
Pay attention and lots of games are won or lost in the sixth and seventh inning because the starter couldn’t go deep enough to get the ball to the best relievers.
OK, that was how things used to work, and men wore hats and ties to ballgames and women didn’t smoke in public and America was the best country on Earth (unless you weren’t a White Male Christian and then things sucked pretty bad) but all that’s over because now the number guys like matchups.
Managers will pull a starter who’s pitching well early to get a favorable matchup in a key situation and there are at least two problems with that approach.
Sometimes matchup numbers are based on less than 10 at-bats so the numbers can be fairly meaningless, but they’re still used because they cover everybody’s ass; when the press asks why you did what you did, you can always say you did what the numbers told you to do which is pretty much how the Tampa Bay Rays lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Rays manager kept his job.
Also…
Pitchers do not have the same stuff night-after-night, so every time you bring in a new one you increase your chances of finding one that doesn’t have it.
In conclusion…
Tomorrow I’ll write about hitting and base running and I hope this makes tonight’s game more interesting and if it doesn’t I’m pretty sure drinking heavily will help.
Happy you are delving into the "little" things in baseball. As often as I agree about things you talk about (which is frequent), this is your real forte that we cannot get from others.
Just enjoying watching the Phillies get to Verlander. And thanks for showing us what little things to watch for :)