What you need to know about the Home Run Derby, All-Star Game and the “routine” play

The first thing you absolutely need to know is that people who put articles on the internet often write headlines that promise way more than the articles deliver, like “13 Things That Will Kill Your Cat and You Need to Get Rid of Right Now!” which is a cheap trick I’d never use just to get more people to read an article about baseball.

Moving on and not a moment too soon…

Tonight is the Home Run Derby and if you watch it they’ll probably talk about the pressure on the contestants, but are a little less likely to talk about the pressure on the guys throwing baseballs to those contestants.

As pretty much every father and/or mother who ever tried to throw batting practice to his son’s and/or daughter’s team has discovered, it’s difficult to throw a baseball to the same location over and over again. (Also, we really need to do something about our Nation’s Pronoun Crisis.)

Which reminds me of a story, as most things do.

My son’s team got a hitting lesson from big league ballplayer David Segui and when it came time for the kids to use what David had shown them, a father was throwing batting practice and since he was having a hard time throwing strikes he was getting embarrassed and started urging the kids to swing at pitches out of the strike zone.

Meanwhile…

Big league hitter David Segui was telling the kids not to swing at those pitches.

There’s an important if somewhat depressing lesson to be learned here: most dads and/or moms will throw their children under the bus and hold them down if it means avoiding even the slightest bit of embarrassment to themselves, which reminds me of Abraham being willing to kill his son because God told him to as a test of faith, which …let’s face it…is kind of a dick move by God.

As we all know, God let Abraham off the hook and instead told Abe to drill Isaac in the ribs next time Isaac’s Little League team (the Moriah Mariners) took batting practice.

Nevertheless…still a dick move by the theoretically Almighty.

Somewhat-related story alert

Ted Williams or maybe it was Ted Turner or Ted Bundy once said, “You can’t hit a bad ball good” and what that means is pitch selection is a big deal because when you swing at pitches out of the strike zone your swing mechanics break down to reach that bad pitch which also means your swing mechanics are inconsistent when you get a good pitch.

Assuming you still care about baseball despite what the owners have done to it: watch what happens when a hitter gets a fastball down the middle.

Those are pitches big league hitters need to hit hard and if the hitter swings and misses or fouls it off or doesn’t swing at all, he’s got problems and since you maybe get one good pitch to hit per at-bat, that at-bat is often over; the pitcher made a mistake, the hitter didn’t take advantage and big league pitchers rarely make two mistakes in a single at-bat despite what you’re currently seeing from the Kansas City Royals pitching staff. 

And now back to the Home Run Derby

The Derby contestants will find a pitch location that gives them the best chance to hit a home run in Coors Field and then they’ll want the person throwing baseballs to hit that location over and over again and if the guy throwing can’t do that, he really screws up the chances of that contestant.

The hitter will be a big league player used to pressure, but the guy throwing might not be ready for 40,000 people watching him throw batting practice.

Also…

When a player gets the chance to participate in the Home Run Derby their team might not be all that thrilled because trying to hit home runs can screw up a hitter’s swing. For instance: Salvador Perez is in the Derby and so far this season when Salvy hits a fly ball his batting average is .311 which sounds OK until you see his average when he hits a line drive: .762.

On the other hand, 20 of Salvy’s home runs came on fly balls so if you’re into slugging percentage more than batting average, that might not bother you, but then you can’t get mad when he takes a home run cut and swings and misses.

You can’t have it both ways unless you’re Lady Gaga.

In any case: if you’re a Royals fan you might want to pay attention to what Salvador Perez does for the next week after the All-Star break which reminds me that I once decided to look up what happened to Home Run Derby contestants after the regular season resumed and made an amazing discovery:

Looking up statistics is really, really, really boring and best left to people who think memorizing all the prime numbers is an interesting hobby.

If you decide to take on that Home Run Derby project, you might want to pay attention to what happens when a pitcher throws a pitch out of a slide step (the pitcher barely picks up his foot and “slides” toward home plate in order to speed up his delivery and make it harder to steal bases) which is a statistic that would actually be useful because it would tell us what effect a base stealer has on pitchers, but the downside is you’d actually have to watch a baseball game and pay attention which a lot of people who say they love baseball really don’t want to do.

Think of this as a test of your love and I believe I deserve a lot of credit for not asking you to kill your son.

The All-Star Game

Back in 2012 I was covering the Royals and starting to get an education about how baseball is played at the highest level and after watching the 2012 All-Star Game realized it was pretty bad baseball and maybe not in the way you think.

In 2012 the National League hit three triples (Pablo Sandoval, Rafael Furcal and Ryan Braun) because American League pitchers threw down-and-in pitches to batters hitting from the left side and fastballs away to batters hitting from the right side and pitches in those locations tend to produce balls hit to right field, but the American League right fielder (the ever popular Jose Bautista) was not playing near the right-field line.

In real games pitches thrown need to match up with defensive positioning which is why you now see players take out cards to remind themselves how the pitcher is going to attack the hitter so they can go stand in the right spot.

All-Star games get kind of hectic and there might be no time to get together on a pitching game plan and defensive positioning so much of the time we’re actually watching a glorified pick-up game.

Great plays are often the result of bad baseball  

So the pitcher misses location or decides to throw a pitch he told everyone he wasn’t going to throw and the ball is hit to a location that isn’t defended.

Or…

The defender is day-dreaming (happens more than you might think) and gets a bad jump.

In either case somebody has to make a great play to cover the mistake which is one of the reasons you see pitchers look so relieved when an outfielder makes a diving catch: the outfielder just covered a mistake by the pitcher.  

Those diving plays will be put on ESPN as examples of great defense when they’re often examples of athleticism covering up lousy defense. As a big league ballplayer once said to me: “How about standing in the right spot to begin with?”

So once you get clued in on how things work and start paying attention, routine plays become things of beauty: the pitcher executed a pitch and the defender was positioned in the right spot. (And sometimes the guy who should get the credit for the great defense is the coach who watched hours of video so he could put the defender where he was needed.)

When catcher Jason Kendall played in Milwaukee he had a sign he’d give to centerfielder Mike Cameron that let Cameron know a slider was coming and if the hitter put that slider in play he’d likely hit it to the pull side of the field and that meant Cameron could start moving before the hitter ever made contact.

So fans would see Cameron make what looked like a routine catch of a fly ball, but it wasn’t routine at all: it was a pitcher executing a pitch and veteran catcher and outfielder working together to make the catch look routine.

OK, that’s it for today and if you watch the Home Run Derby pay attention to the guy throwing and if you watch the All-Star Game, pay attention to the routine play.

Because Baseball and Life are more rewarding when you pay attention.