Three Magic Words: “I Don’t Know”

Opinions are supposed to be based on evidence and conclusions, but as you may have noticed, we (and by “we” I mean the Human Race which may or may not include certain politicians and media members) tend to form opinions with very little evidence.

In my opinion (see what I just did there?) that’s because we hate to say those three magic words that would improve all our lives if we could just spit them out:

“I don’t know.”

Ask a cab driver about brain surgery and he’ll probably offer up an opinion. Ask a sports-talk radio host what’s wrong with the local team and he’ll tell you despite the fact that he’s never played a sport or been in a locker room and is so fat he can’t see what shoes he has on without a mirror. (I was going to use “political cartoonist” and “climate change,” but that seemed a little too close to home and if you’re going to hang me I’m not gonna supply the rope).

If we could all admit that on many subjects we don’t have enough information to form an opinion the World would be a better place and we’d live in Peace and Harmony and Cats could marry Dogs and very nervous Lambs could lay down with Lions and Sports Fans wouldn’t yell so much stupid shit at baseball games.

And we’re finally getting to the point of this rant.

I know a fair amount on maybe two subjects and one of them is baseball (go ahead and make guesses on the second one and don’t let the fact that you have absolutely no evidence stop you) and yet there were times I was dead wrong about what I was seeing.

But I was lucky because after games I could go talk to the people involved and find out what really happened. 

For example:

Let’s see you get out if it

So a team had a starting pitcher who thought his manager constantly pulled him from games too soon and right now is a good time to talk about why managers and not pitchers make that decision.

Good pitchers always think they’re going to get out of whatever dicked-up situation they created and I once asked a pretty good reliever if he had to be like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail; cut off his arm and he’ll say it’s just a scratch.

The pretty good reliever said, exactly.

Talk to the guys who play baseball for a living and they’ll tell you how important confidence is and if you don’t at least believe you’re going to get a hit or a strike a guy out you’ve got pretty much zero chance of doing so.

Which reminds me of yet another Jason Kendall story:

He came to the plate against a pitcher he’d been teammates with and caught, so Jason knew everything the guy threw and when he liked to throw it and before the at-bat began Jason looked out at the pitcher and said:

“You know I’m getting a hit off you.”

The response of a confident pitcher might have been to “buzz the tower” (throw a fastball up and in) dump the hitter on his ass and say, “Oh yeah? Hit that.” But Jason’s former teammate wouldn’t look him in the eye and the at-bat ended with a home run.

Ballplayers will try to intimidate each other which is why closers come up with some Heavy-Metal-Coming-In-From-The-Bullpen music or grow their hair long or pose like a seagull with a back problem while getting the signs.

The message is: “Just look at me, I’m a Bad Ass and you got no chance.”

Anyway…

The pitcher who thought his manager constantly pulled him too soon had finally pissed his manager off and one night the pitcher was getting his ass handed to him and the inning was getting ugly and fans were booing and the pitcher was staring into the dugout after every pitch (a sign pitchers want to be taken out) and since they were losing by a healthy margin anyway, the manager said screw it:

Let’s see you get out of it.

Fans saw it as bad managing (the manager was failing to pull a struggling pitcher), but it was actually good managing. He was teaching that pitcher and every other pitcher on his staff a lesson: don’t bitch about me pulling you or I just might let you hang yourself.

If you’re such a good baserunner, why did you just get picked off?

A pretty good baserunner got picked off first base and of course fans lit him up on social media because that’s the kind of thing some fans like to do.

I asked him what happened (after all, he was a pretty good baserunner) and he said he was stealing signs.

If catchers get sloppy they might leave their knees too wide while giving signs and a runner on first base with a good lead can see them, which is helpful because runners want to steal on off-speed pitches because they take longer to get to the catcher than fastballs.

The pretty good baserunner said just as he glanced in to steal the sign, the pitcher made his pickoff move and caught him.

So a decent reason for getting picked off, but I couldn’t write about it because the pretty good baserunner wanted to steal signs again the next night and didn’t want the opposing team’s catcher to know he was doing it, plus he didn’t want some pitcher to “buzz the tower” in retaliation.

Giving 110 percent

A player with good speed didn’t bust ass down the first base line on a routine grounder and being an occasional idiot I pointed it out and said even though the grounder was routine, a guy with that kind of speed might force an error by running hard.

Later, a coach pulled me aside and said that player had a slight hamstring pull, but they didn’t want the other team to know because if the player made it to first base, the other team would consider him a threat to steal.

Here’s why that matters:

If a runner is a threat to steal the pitcher has to worry about him and make pickoffs attempts and rush his delivery and get the ball to home plate in a hurry (and if you pay attention, you’ll see a lot of home runs hit when the pitcher used a “slide step” delivery) and the pitcher will probably throw more fastballs, all of which help the hitter.

This was another story I couldn’t write because the team didn’t want anybody to know the player was semi-hurt, but playing through it. And if you’re thinking the team shouldn’t play a guy who wasn’t 100 percent, talk to ballplayers and they’ll tell you the only time they’re 100 percent is the first day of spring training and they’re often playing through minor injuries which they don’t want to share with the public or the opposition.

Timeout for a further digression on giving 110 percent:

If you paid any attention at all during school you know giving 110 percent is mathematically unlikely, but we like the idea of someone going all out, all the time, which is an amateur’s point of view and one I had to change.

Professionals know keeping a team healthy is a huge deal, so you don’t want guys running into walls or diving into the stands to make a catch in a game they’re losing by 10 runs.

Knowing when to back off and when to go all out is the sign of a professional; thinking players should run into solid objects to make catches that don’t matter is the sign of an amateur.

Don’t you know you just can’t steal off him?

So a runner got picked off first base by a pitcher who had not allowed a stolen base all year and once again the Know-It-All Fans lit up the base runner and his team on social media: “Don’t you know you just can’t steal on that guy?”

Here’s what those fans didn’t know:

Let’s say you’ve got a runner on first base who takes 3.4 seconds to get to second base once he gets his full lead.

Now let’s say the catcher’s “pop time” (the time between the pitch popping into the catcher’s mitt and the catcher’s throw popping into a middle infielder’s glove) is 2.0 seconds, which is about major league average.

Do the math and if the pitcher takes 1.3 seconds to deliver a pitch, you can’t run on him; if he takes 1.5 seconds you can. (This is why first base coaches carry a stopwatch; they’re re-checking delivery times.)

So this pitcher you couldn’t run on was too quick to the plate, but…

One of the things coaches do is watch video and compare a pitcher’s motion when he goes to home plate with a pitcher’s motion when he tries a pickoff and they’ll go through video frame-by-frame and look for the first thing that’s different.

That’s called a “key” and let’s say when the pitcher is going home the bill of his cap goes down because he’s checking the runner out of the corner of his eye (put a baseball cap on and try it and you’ll see what I mean), but when he’s going to attempt a pickoff the bill of his cap doesn’t go down because he wants the runner to think he’s forgotten all about him.

So now the runner can take off when the bill of the cap goes down (remember: it won’t go down if he’s about to attempt a pickoff) and maybe a pitcher with a 1.2 delivery (which you can’t run on) becomes a 1.5 (which you can). And that’s pretty much what happened: a coach found a key that meant they could run on this pitcher, but the base runner was too amped up – “How exciting…I’m going to be the first one to steal a base off this guy” – left too soon and got picked off.

Once again, a story I couldn’t write because they didn’t want that pitcher to know they’d found a key on him.

Today’s lesson

This might sound odd coming from a political cartoonist because I express opinions every day, but if you think about it – and I have – most of the opinions I express are pretty obvious so I feel confident in expressing them.

Opinions like:

• We haven’t done enough to stop climate change.

• People who complain about law enforcement going too far when they conduct a search of Mar-a-Lago, but have no problem with law enforcement shooting unarmed Black men are hypocrites.

• And Sarah Palin is not a Mensa candidate.

Pretty much every time I talked to a player, coach or manager about a decision they made, they had a decent reason for doing what they did and I learned I shouldn’t be too quick to form an opinion until I had more evidence.

And if this story isn’t enough to keep you from jumping to conclusions, what will?

“I don’t know.”