The Ballplayer’s Dilemma

Put the team first or protect your numbers?

I once read a thing (and I have to say “thing” because I can’t remember if it was in a book, magazine or on the back of a cereal box) that said your body wants to keep doing whatever it’s been doing so if you take a walk every morning at 8 AM, about 7:59 it says let’s get going and if you eat a cookie every afternoon at 4 PM right about 3:59 it says where’s my damn cookie and the reason I’m thinking about all that right now this minute is because I usually wake up about 5 AM in Kansas City, Missouri and my body wants to keep doing that except I’m in Sacramento, California and apparently my body hasn’t looked at a map lately because I’m currently wide awake at 3 in the damn AM.

Which means I’ve got about 4 hours to kill before anybody else gets up and when that happens I usually write something so I hope you enjoy this byproduct of my insomnia.

And away we go…

So here’s the deal on professional athletes.

The word “professional” means they do it for money; not because they love their school or their town or maybe even their teammates, so if hitting home runs gets professional ballplayers paid lots of money that’s what they’ll try to do.

It has long been my belief that if Major League Baseball paid top dollar for ventriloquism and tap dancing, ballplayers would buy a dummy and some tap shoes and start practicing.

But ballplayers know they can’t come right out and say their individual numbers are more important than their team winning because it sounds bad to admit, “Yeah, we lost, but I had two hits, so I’m gonna sleep OK tonight” and all ballplayers would much rather win than lose because it’s way, way, way more fun, but if a player doesn’t put up the numbers that get him paid and keeps him employed he won’t be on the team for long.

OK, so a player walks up to the plate and has to decide whether to protect his own numbers or do what’s right for the team and those aren’t always the same thing and to illustrate what that means in Real Life, let’s take a look at…

Man on second, nobody out

When I was trying to learn how baseball was played at the highest level it was frustrating because every time I thought I understood something, someone who knew more than me (and there seemed to be way too many people who fit that description) would start explaining all the exceptions to the rule I’d just learned and that’s what ballplayers mean when they say it’s important to “understand the situation” which gets to the heart of “situational hitting.”

OK, so man on second, nobody out…

If one run means something (you don’t play for one run if you’re down by six in the eighth inning) a right-handed hitter needs to hit a groundball to the right side (a fastball away is a good pitch for that) and a left-handed hitter also needs to hit a groundball to the right side (he wants a pitch he can pull and something off-speed or a fastball middle-in will work) because a groundball to the right side will allow the runner to take off for third base right away. (If the ball is hit in the air the runner will have to wait to see if it drops so you try to keep it on the ground.)

And once that runner gets to third base with one out, if things go right he can score without his team getting another hit. A fly ball to the outfield will score the runner and –depending on whether the middle infielders are playing back – so will a groundball up the middle.

Starting to see what I mean about exceptions?

Well, brace yourself because here’s another one.

If you’re a 7-8-9 hole bottom-of-the-order-type hitter the team will probably want you to move the runner over, but if you’re a 3-4-5 hole heart-of-the-order-type hitter the team might say the heck with that, you’re one of our best hitters, go ahead and drive the runner in from second base.

But now let’s say the game is taking place in the minor leagues and even though you’re a 3-4-5 hole heart-of-the-order-type hitter, the team might want you to move the runner anyway because you might be hot shit in West Overcoat, Iowa, but when you get to the Big Leagues, you’re going to be a bottom-of-the-order guy and you need to start working on those skills.

Danged if you do, danged if you don’t

So let’s imagine the player puts his team first and hits a groundball to the right side and moves the runner over; when he gets back to the dugout he’ll get a bunch of high fives from his teammates and a big fat 4-3 out in the scorebook.

At the end of the year is anyone going to remember the hitter gave away an at-bat for the good of the team?

When I first started covering baseball I was using a system that kept track of stuff like moving runners, leadoff walks and plate appearances of eight-or-more pitches and most fans hated it because it was stuff they didn’t really care about, but most ballplayers loved it (which ought to tell you something) because I was giving the players credit for the things that normally didn’t get noticed and one of the players asked if he could use my information if his case went to arbitration.

(It didn’t, but the fact that a player wanted to use those statistics told me I was on the right track.)

I’ve been asked more than once how I got Jason Kendall to talk to me (Jason didn’t like most reporters and as I once wrote, “He looks like head of security at a meth lab” and reporters were mostly scared shitless of him) and here’s the answer to that question:

The very first time I talked to Jason (he scared me, too) I asked if he knew how many times he’d blocked a pitch in the dirt with a runner on third base in a game the Royals went on to win by one run.

Jason said he had no clue and I said “seven” and he said how did I know that and I said I was keeping track and if he won seven games with walk-off home runs we’d be putting up his statue, but because he was winning games by keeping sliders in the dirt from going to the backstop, nobody noticed.

Jason said if I was going to cover baseball like that he’d help me and he still does to this day because I still call him up and ask questions.

OK, so a player puts the team first and his teammates appreciate it, but at the end of the year the team will be happy to punish him if his numbers aren’t good enough. Now how about the player who says to hell with the team and takes care of his own numbers?

If a player gets 600 plate appearances and hits 30 home runs, he’s going to be rich.

And nobody is going to remember just exactly when he hit those 30 home runs and I’ve yet to hear anyone on ESPN say, “Bobby Baseball hit 35 home runs last year, but 18 of them didn’t really mean anything.”

A teammate of a very famous player once called him the “King of the three-run home run when we’re down by five.”

Now here’s how that works:

If a team has a big lead in the later innings their pitcher might start pouring in fastball strikes, figuring any ball in play favors him (and until people start hitting .501 the pitcher’s right) unless the pitcher is covering his ass and numbers and is still trying to strike batters out because he knows when he gets to the end of the year nobody is going to knock some runs off his ERA because he gave up those runs when his team had a big lead and the runs didn’t matter.

So when an announcer asks how in the world a pitcher can walk a batter with a six-run lead, there’s your answer: the pitcher is still trying to hit corners and punch people out because nobody is going to remember he had a six-run lead when he gave up a three-run homer.

Teams want players to put the team first because the manager and GM might lose their jobs if the team doesn’t win enough games, but that same team will then turn around and punish players for not putting up good enough numbers.

Gets complicated, doesn’t it?

Why put the team first if your teammates don’t?

Once they started putting a runner on second base in extra innings, I decided to see if the team that moved the runner over to third base with a bunt or a groundball to the right side won more often than teams that didn’t and here’s the very first thing I discovered: digging through a huge pile of numbers is excruciatingly boring.

Somebody has to do it (and I’m guessing it’s the kinda guy who thinks a pocket protector makes a swell anniversary gift), but that’s not me and before long I gave it up, but not before I discovered something else.

Moving the runner over is less valuable than it used to be because with a runner on third and one out, so many guys fail to get the ball in play when they keep trying to hit a home run and strike out.

So a hitter has less incentive to put the team first, give up an at-bat and move the runner 90 feet if the guy on deck isn’t going to do the same thing.

A manager who would probably rather have his name left out of it once said a team could do amazing things if you could somehow convince every player  to put the team first. But let one guy be selfish and protect his numbers and a bunch of other guys are going to say to hell with it, if he’s not going to put the team first, neither am I and pretty soon you have a selfish team that refuses to do the small stuff that wins games, which they never talk about on TV:

“Yeah, Jose is a .300 hitter, with 31 bombs and 102 RBIs but everybody in baseball knows he’s a selfish jerk and nobody wants him for a teammate.”

(If they would talk about that stuff, I’d watch a lot more sports talk shows.)

So that’s the Ballplayer’s Dilemma – put the team first or do everything he can to protect his individual numbers – and this is the second time I tried to write about situational hitting and got sidetracked because when you sit down to write you can stick with the original game plan or follow your instincts and go where the story leads you.

And that’s the Writer’s Dilemma, but it’s really not all that bad because these days both choices pay like crap.  

P.S.

I’ve watched the first four episodes of “The Captain” – the ESPN documentary series about Derek Jeter – and several people interviewed have said Alex Rodriguez wanted to be a star and Jeter wanted to win, which is the answer to the question a ballplayer once asked me to think about:

“How come everybody wants to be Jeter’s teammate and nobody wants to be A-Rod’s?”

And now you know the answer.

P.P.S.

(And you also know right about 3PM one of us is going to be taking a nap.)