The Baseball Fan

It's getting harder all the time...

If you’re a new reader – and I’ve picked up quite a few of you since that upside-down flag cartoon controversy and the Latrobe Bulletin did me the enormous favor of banning political cartoons while simultaneously promoting my work – you may not know that every so often I write about Baseball.

Which some people think I do way too seldom and other people think I do way too often, but one of the few joys of being semi-retired and not having an employer is (and let me put this as diplomatically as possible): Not Giving A Rat’s Ass.

(And if you’re thinking “That’s the diplomatic version?” trust me; it could have been much worse and often is.)

In any case…

Today is about Baseball and even if you’re not a Baseball fan, you should keep reading because it’s also about how people in charge of things often don’t understand the things they’re in charge of and make bad short-term decisions and I'm not talking about Elon Musk even though it sounds a lot like I am.

Hang in there and I’ll try to keep this interesting and you’ll learn some things you can use to annoy people around you anytime there’s a Baseball game on TV, although these days finding a Baseball game on TV is much harder than it should be.

More on that momentarily, but in the meantime…

Spring Training and ABS

Semi-recently a friend asked if I’d been watching spring training games and if so, what I thought of ABS. My first thought was:

“They’re using Anti-lock Braking Systems in Baseball?”

I hadn’t been watching spring training games because in their quest to squeeze every last dime out of Our National Pastime, Major League Baseball has made it extremely difficult to be a Baseball fan.

For example:

I currently have YouTube TV and in 2023 they got sideways with MLB over a new contract extension and that was two years ago so I expect YouTube TV and MLB to kiss and make up about the same time Melania Trump holds Donald’s hand in public.

But until then…

For the low, low price of $149.99 I can watch MLB.TV this season which will show me “EVERY out-of-market game live!” which is a good deal if you ignore that “out-of-market” bit because when translated into actual English that means if you live in Kansas City, you can’t watch the Kansas City Royals.

MLB.TV purchasers can only see “out-of-market” games and MLB gets to define your market and according to the MLB crack cartographers (who just might be cartographers on crack) Guam is part of the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s market even though Guam is 4,500 miles away.

It would take 14 hours and 40 minutes to fly to the Bay Area to see a Baseball game live, but MLB doesn’t want the Giants or A’s to miss out on a single ticket sale, however unlikely.

So Guamanians are pretty much fucked, but so are Iowans because if you live in Des Moines, the Brewers, Cardinals, Cubs, Royals, Twins and White Sox are blacked out—MLB Rule of Thumb: if you’d find the games interesting, we won’t let you watch them—because MLB is also protecting the exclusivity rights of Regional Sports Networks.

Which seem to change all the time and this year if I want to watch the Kansas City Royals I need to sign up with the FanDuel Sports Network to get a Season Pass for $99.99, but then I wouldn’t see any other MLB teams, so I’ll also need MLB.TV and if you do the math, to be a baseball fan this summer it will cost me $249.98 which let’s face it, is still better than going to a game, paying $20 for a craft beer and refinancing your house if you also want a hot dog.

OK, so I hadn’t been watching spring training games because MLB and YouTube made sure I had no access to them, but then ESPN went nuts and showed four of them (and don’t forget, I’m paying to watch those too) and if you ever wondered why spring training lasts six weeks when players say they could be ready to play the regular season in two or three weeks, it’s because teams want those six weeks to sell you tickets and promote their teams and convince you “This is our year!” even though they’ve already had meetings with their analytics department and projected a win total and are fairly confident that their team will once again be horseshit.

So where were we?

Right: ABS.

Turns out ABS is actually Automated Ball-Strike System and I finally saw it used in one of those four ESPN spring training games (they’re allowing a limited number of ball-strike challenges) and I quickly decided it’s a bad idea because ABS is clearly inaccurate.

Which might seem like an overly-firm opinion for someone who watched just one game, but it’s the correct opinion because (and you may want to write this down or get it tattooed on an intimate body part that they’ll eventually laugh about in the funeral home) the ABS strike zone is like a pane of glass—two-dimensional—but in the Real World (where we’re all spending less and less time) the strike zone is three dimensional.

MLB does a whole lot of “Pay No Attention To The Man Behind the Curtain” hand waving and they gloss over details because if you ask too many questions, the flaws become obvious, but according to this 2022 ABS Reference Card the two-dimensional-pane-of-glass strike zone is set up in the middle of the plate which means if a ball passes through that area it would register as a strike, which would be the correct call.

But if a pitch has movement (think changeup, two-seamer, curve or slider) it could pass through the front or back portion of the strike zone, miss the middle and be called a ball by the ABS system.

Also…

The top and bottom of the ABS strike zone is based on the batter’s height (27% of his height at the bottom and 52.5% of his height at the top) which totally ignores the MLB rulebook because the strike zone is supposed to be determined by the batter’s stance as the ball is pitched. So because it’s just too big a pain in the ass to do it correctly, two 6-foot tall guys are going to get the exact same strike zone even though one stands up straight and the other one crouches.

And now…

Catcher Framing

My friend and former-Big-League-catcher, Jason Kendall, hates the word “framing” and thinks it’s bullshit—“You just catch the ball softly, Lee”—but good news for both of us: Jason doesn’t read this blog (he still hasn’t read the book we “wrote” together either) but his brother Mike does, so Mike, let’s keep this between ourselves because I don’t need to get in an argument with Jason about framing, mostly because I’m scared shitless of him and even more scared of his wife and I’m pretty sure she’d take that as a compliment.

Moving on as quickly as possible:

“Framing” refers to all the tricks veteran catchers use to make borderline pitches look like strikes (and I’ve heard a few of them) like:

• Swaying your knees as you receive a pitch because if it’s caught between the shin guards it looks more “strike-ish”…

• Keeping your glove-side elbow down and thumb up because if your body stays compact, less of it hangs out of the strike zone and…

• Angling your mitt so less of it hangs out of the strike zone. Both of these pitches are in the exact same place, but one looks like a ball and one looks like a strike because the catcher changed his glove position.

And if none of that works:

Taking the umpiring crew out to a bar the night before and paying their bar bill so next day when you don’t get a borderline call, you can complain: “Jesus, Bob, I bought you six beers last night and I can’t get a corner?” And if you think that never happens all I can say is you need to spend a lot more time talking to ex-Big League catchers.

True story:

Me and a buddy went to Wrigley Field for a day game and then went to a Chicago steak house for dinner and a few tables away Chicago Cubs first baseman Mark Grace and one of the umpiring crew from that day’s game were having dinner and while I don’t know for sure, it wouldn’t surprise me if Gracie picked up the tab.

And if you’re currently thinking: “See? Crap like that is that’s why we need ABS” I totally disagree because (and I believe I’ve already made this point) ABS isn’t accurate either. And one of the things that’s great about sports in general and Baseball specifically is watching a veteran ballplayer work and use everything he’s learned to get calls and help his team win and that includes schmoozing with umpires.

Jason has admitted he blocked balls in the dirt with no runner on base because umpires appreciated not getting drilled in the nuts and might show their appreciation in the very near future, so next time you see a catcher do that, now you know why.

There’s a reason catchers like Rick Dempsey could hit .233 lifetime and still play 24 years in the Big Leagues.

Hal Holbrook Was Right

As I’ve said before and feel doomed to say again: Corporate America likes to pretend it’s doing things for us when they’re actually doing things to us. For example:

5G was actually about bandwidth and getting more of it so they could use warehouse robots and fire humans and self-driving cars are actually about getting rid of drivers and AI is also about firing people, so with that in mind, why the big push to use a clearly flawed ABS system?

I’ll answer that question with another question: how long before MLB uses it against the umpires when negotiating contracts and wants to pay them less because they no longer have to call balls and strikes?

As either Hal Holbrook or Linda Lovelace (Deep Throat in either case) once said: “Follow the money…and gargle some Scope afterwards.”

OK, that’s it; next time it’s back to politics even though I’d rather watch baseball…

If only MLB would let me.