The Other Side of the Ball

So it’s early in the morning and I’m having that first cup of coffee, which has the same effect on me that spinach has on Popeye, and just in case you’re not older than dirt and don’t know what I’m talking about, here you go:

When I drink coffee I don’t actually grow muscles and I’m pretty sure Bluto could still kick my ass (actually, I’m pretty sure Olive Oyl could still kick my ass), but when I take that first sip of life-reviving caffeine, mentally I hear that Popeye theme song and feel ready to face the day and that being the case, today we’re going to talk about baseball because I haven’t written about it in a while and also because I may have put one too many scoops of French Roast in the pot this morning.

Warning:

I’m about to sound like a grumpy, old man, talking about how things were way better in my youth and today’s kids have absolutely no idea how to drive a covered wagon or build a log cabin or crank start a Model T, but I think you gotta give me credit for being consistent because I was also a grumpy, young man.

Anyway…

There are things to like about analytics (some of the information is helpful) and lots of things to dislike and one of those dislikeable things is Baseball’s current infatuation with home runs and how it has changed the game and we’ll start my series of Grumpy Old Man complaints with…

Bad Defense

Hang around ballplayers and you might hear the phrase “both sides of the ball” as in “the side going away from you” and “the side coming toward you” and they’ll say stuff like “he helps you on both sides of the ball” and it’s a reminder not to forget defense which is easy for some people to do because there are so many numbers that measure offense and so few that measure defense and some of those defensive numbers aren’t worth a damn anyway and after looking into them I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw a well-fed beer vendor.

(Why I feel that way is a different column for a different day, but the short version is once you see how those numbers are put together, you realize they’re not nearly as scientific as their proponents want you to think.)

Moving on.

A run prevented is worth every bit as much as a run produced, but since it’s harder to measure things that don’t happen compared to things that do, some of the people who understand baseball through numbers give more weight to offense than defense.

And Baseball has become so fixated on hitting home runs that teams will play bad defenders as long as they hit enough bombs and a front office executive once told me his team needed to emphasize putting the ball in play to take advantage of all the opposition players who have a hard time catching one.

And if seeing is believing, here’s a sample:

Nevertheless…

Despite an over-abundance of Bad Defenders just waiting to be exposed by balls in play, so many hitters are swinging from their heels trying to hit the home runs, in four of the last five seasons total MLB strikeouts exceeded 40,000 (the exceptions being 2020 when they played a schedule severely limited by the Black Plague) and in 2022 we’re well on the way to making it five out of the last six seasons.

And just in case you want more evidence that candy bars and baseball were better when you were a kid:

Between 1969 and 1997 total MLB strikeouts were never more than 30,000 and if you go back even further (or maybe it’s farther) strikeouts didn’t exceed 20,000 and yeah, in some of those years they played fewer games (hey, it’s not my fault baseball owners are greedy and keep adding games to the schedule) so that being the case let’s look at team strikeout averages and in the last seven years the team average for strikeouts per game is the highest it’s ever been.

Trying to hit home runs means more strikeouts because you have to swing sooner to pull the ball into the short part of the park (the corners) and you might have to swing harder and both those mean you’re more likely to get fooled and/or miss the baseball.

Fewer balls in play mean less action and it’s one of the many reasons attendance keeps dropping and young sports fans would rather watch two people inside a cage beat the living shit out of each other and as my son pointed out (and he’s a big UFC fan):

“This clearly ought to be illegal.”  

Watch a game today (which baseball is making harder because they’re selling the broadcast rights to the people who want us to gamble during games and I can only assume eventually they’ll sell the rights to a drug cartel) and you’ll see a lot of bad defense: miscommunication, missed cutoffs, botched rundowns, bad throws, throws going to the wrong base, balls going between a defender’s legs and with all the overloaded infield shifts, missed double play opportunities and guys failing to get to the right spot for cutoffs and relays.

Looking at errors per team per game doesn’t tell the whole story because a lot of that stuff I just mentioned doesn’t actually count as an error and you’ve got to know baseball to realize that the cutoff man never got to where he needed to be which is why the runner on second base felt free to make the turn at third and score a run.

Also…

Spend any time at all talking to a really good defender (like Alex Gordon) and you’ll realize how much work goes into playing one position well, but now, because too many teams don’t value good defense as much as they should, mediocre defenders are being asked to play multiple positions with predictable results.

If a guy can’t play one position worth a damn, what do you think is going to happen when he’s asked to play four?

And how about…

Catchers on one knee

OK, so the analytics guys (and possibly gals and let’s not forget the people who are somewhere in-between) have decided that catchers who get down on one knee can set a lower target which means their mitt will be more likely to come up toward the zone instead of going down away from the zone to receive a low pitch and that means more low pitches called strikes which sounds like a pretty good deal if you’ve never actually been behind the plate.

I asked former Big League catcher and three-time All-Star Jason Kendall what he thought of the one-knee stance and he said:

“It’s a great way to get hit in the nuts.”

Getting down on one knee exposes the catcher’s huevos rancheros to 100 MPH foul tips and also means a catcher can’t move as well which means he’ll be more likely to get lazy and try to glove a pitch instead of block it which also might mean more wild pitches and passed balls and more stolen bases because if he stays in the one-knee stance with a runner on base, he might have a harder time popping up to make a throw.

Kendall also pointed out that once you get to two strikes you might want your pitcher to throw his nastiest slider in the dirt (the catcher will ask for that by tapping his mitt on the ground) and count on blocking it, but if the catcher is down on one knee – especially with a runner on third base – the pitcher might be a little reluctant to crank off a really nasty breaking pitch and give up a run on a wild pitch.

Maybe getting down on one knee is worth it because you get more low pitches called strikes (more on that in a minute); maybe it’s not.

It’ll take a while to see how this all works out, but we might not know for sure even then because when I asked former Royals manager Ned Yost if they’d been doing infield shifts long enough to know if they were worth it, Ned said he didn’t know because the numbers he got were “skewed.”

When I asked what that meant, Ned said the analytics guys wanted to take credit whenever they got an out while in a shift, even though the ball might have been hit to a first or third baseman standing where they’ve been standing since Moses came off Mount Sinai lugging the 10 Commandments and a bad attitude. 

Bottom line: if the analytics department advocated infield shifts or one-knee stances, they want their suggestions to work out and might ignore any evidence that suggests it didn’t.

And now more on that whole “getting pitches called strikes” information I so foolishly promised four paragraphs ago.

The High Strike

Baseball is constantly changing and if hitters decide they want to hit the ball in the air because it’s really, really hard to hit a homer with a ground ball, a lot of hitters want to hit the ball with a slight uppercut and once pitchers figured out hitters were doing that, they started blowing high fastballs past hitters with slightly loopy swings.

And if a catcher sets his target really, really low and has to move his mitt a lot to receive a high pitch, it’ll be interesting to see if umpires will call that a strike because one of the reasons you see a pitch that was definitely in the strike zone called a ball is because the catcher set up inside and had to move his mitt too much to receive an outside pitch (or vice versa).

Umpires sometimes won’t call that a strike because it looks bad to fans.

Now here’s a video from the National High School Baseball Coaches Association and it’s pretty interesting because they did a survey on the one-knee stance and the umpires they talked to didn’t like the one-knee stance because with the catchers setting up lower they felt exposed and more likely to get smoked by a foul tip and if there’s one thing you don’t want when you’re trying to get borderline pitches called strikes, is an umpire who’s pissed-off at you.

As always, there’s a human element to the game and if you ignore it, you’re missing something.

The Undervalued Player

I probably said this before because once you reach a certain age you’ve probably said everything before and just don’t remember, but a really smart front office guy once told me a lot of people missed the true message of Moneyball.

According to him the true message was not that walks and home runs are good; the true message was that undervalued players are good and I hope so because that might mean some team is eventually going to zig while everyone else zags and stock up on undervalued players that play great defense, can handle a bat and steal bases.

Also…

I’d like candy bars to go back to costing a nickel and being the size of a presto log.

OK, that’s it for today and I originally planned on also talking about the Lost Art of Situation Hitting, but I had too much to say about defense so we’ll have to get back to that another day, assuming I buy more French Roast and consume way more caffeine than I should and have to burn it off by writing something.  

Have a nice day.