Baseball I
Many people seem to think that baseball is boring. Before I even get close to writing today’s article, I am going to say that they are dead wrong. People who say that baseball is boring either lack the skill to understand the drama going on out on the diamond, or have had too many bad experiences and are allowing themselves to be painted into a corner with their statements. I am not going to ask you to give baseball “another” chance, but I am going to ask you to pay attention.
I love baseball. I have endured strikes, steroids, Pete Rose, the “Red Sox Nation,” and the Atlanta Braves “dynasty” of the 1990’s. If those things couldn’t kill off my love for the game, then nothing can. A lot of people love baseball still, and they flock to the stadiums to watch the greatest players ever play the game. That is not my opinion. It is fact. The best baseball that has ever been played is going on right now. This is why I love it so much. If you don’t think so, I have bundles of statistics and attendance records to prove otherwise, but I am not going to sit here and talk to you about numbers.
I am going to talk about numbers. I am sorry, I lied. But don’t fret; this isn’t somebody’s ERA or some team’s stolen base percentage or any of the other gobbledygook that confuses the average person. I am going to talk about the most important stat of baseball. I am going to talk about the Out.
The out is the single most important factor in the game of baseball. It is often forgotten amid all the other statistics with much more flashy names like “MVP” or “BA” or “GIDP” which are all fine statistics in their own right, but none of them compare to the simple, yet huge “out.” Why is the out so important? The out is the measurement of how you take away another team’s ability to score. Simply put, if you make outs, they aren’t making runs. And if they aren’t making runs, they won’t win…you do.
If a team is ahead by a single run and they have the ability to make outs, it doesn’t matter that the team they face is made up of robotic Ted Williams hitting machines, if the machines are out, they are out. You can’t make runs if you are sitting in the dugout. By making those Ted Williams cyborgs sit down instead of running the bases, your single run is good enough to win the game. Also, with a lineup of such hitting prowess, you’d probably get to see some incredible plays on the field, so it’s a win/win situation…even if your team only scored one single run.
But the out is still even more important than that.
I have heard baseball’s detractors say that the games need to be limited by a time clock like football or basketball. I say that baseball already has a clock; again, it is the out. Instead of a clock that measures time in minutes and seconds, baseball’s clock ticks down in terms of outs. Each team in every game is granted 27 outs to do as much hitting and scoring as they can. If they work through or waste their outs, they are going to lose. However, if they hold on to those precious outs and make every at-bat count, they have a good chance of winning the game.
So by measuring a team, league, game, division, or player by the outs made both at bat and while on the field, you can get a better understanding of the worth that a particular a team, league, game, division, or player has. For the sake of argument, let’s just go with a player for now. If a player strikes out or pops up a lot, he makes more outs and he is a detriment to his team. If a player hits behind the runner, walks a lot, and avoids double plays, he grants his team an advantage.
Conversely, if a player is excellent at defense, be it on the pitcher’s mound or in the field proper, he is worth more to his team than a player who makes errors or walks batters. The more quickly you make outs for your particular team, the more chances you take away from the other team to score.
It’s all pretty simple once all the statistics have been boiled down to one usable and tangible stat. It is also a heck of a lot more interesting because while watching a game, you can actually see how the “out statistic” works. When your favorite player gets up to bat and slashes a line drive over the short stop’s head. That is an out being avoided. It’s also pretty exciting too. When a “strike ‘em out, throw ‘em out” play occurs, it is outs being generated…and they are one of the best plays in all of sports to watch happen. When you watch a genius on the pitcher’s mound, throwing a perfect game…you get the idea. The out is king.
So, who was good at avoiding outs?
Just off the top of my head, I can rattle off a few of the biggies: Ted Williams (the cyborg), Lou Gehrig, Barry Bonds, and Ty Cobb. These guys just didn’t get out. They avoided being struck out by the pitcher at the plate and they avoided being put out by the opposing team’s defense. The fact that they all batted left handed is for a discussion at a later date, but someday I promise to write an article about lefties versus righties and why left-handed people suck…
So, these guys avoided getting out. That’s kind of a big deal, but here is another, even bigger deal: they got on base, making the opposing team’s defense face another batter. Why is this important? Well, if we lived in a world where fatigue, injury, and pain were nonexistent, being on base wouldn’t matter. But we aren’t machines (except the previously noted Ted Williams), we live in a place where people wear out and shut down. The more batters a defense faces, the more they prolong the game and the more chances there are for errors committed on the field, bad pitching decisions, and more hits by the offense. By being good at getting on base, Ty Cobb made the other players around him better.
On the other side of the diamond, there are great guys out there who have the ability to take away hitting (and because of that, take away scoring) from another team. Guys like Ozzie Smith, Yogi Berra, Pudge Rodriguez…they excel in making the other team out. Taking this a step further, they make the players around them excel as well; you can’t make a double play (usually) without somebody else.
Teams with the highest percentages of not being out, tend to be champions. It is no fluke that the latest baseball dynasty of the New York Yankees in the mid to late 1990s had the highest OBP (On Base Percentage) of any other team during that time frame. Uh oh, there’s another stat there! You said you wouldn’t use stats! Calm down dear reader, OBP is just a fancy way of saying “that guy avoids being out.” During their reign, the Yankees were better at anybody else at “avoiding being out.”
How can a batter avoid being out? Well, the first one is pretty simple. Hit the ball. Hitting the ball and reaching first base safely is probably the hardest single thing to do in modern professional sports. Don’t believe me? Okay pal, YOU try to hit a Randy Johnson fastball or a Mariano Rivera Cutter and then come on back to me. There is a correlation between batting average and OBP, but batting average doesn’t take all the other factors into consideration. OBP also includes walks and being hit by a pitched ball. It takes a great deal of skill to walk. It is hard to believe that sitting there and holding a bat takes skill, but most major league baseball players are doing much much more than that while they are at the plate.
There is drama there.
Back when I was playing, the coaches all used to say “swing at the first pitch.” But that doesn’t really work once you get to a place where all the pitchers are throwing 90 MPH fastballs with razor straight accuracy or deceptive sliders that seem to fall off a table. If you get up there and swing at the first pitch, you are going to strike out…pitchers love your type of hitter. The guys who get up and give the pitcher the once over; let him throw a few pitches and don’t bite at the junk stuff, those are the guys you have to be careful with. If you aren’t, you are going to be up there on the mound, throwing 90 to 100 pitches by the fifth inning. Guys like David Ortiz and Bobby Abreu are particularly maddening to pitchers. They will work a 3-2 count by fouling the ball off five times and making the pitcher work to the point of distraction. When you get a pitcher distracted, you usually make it to first base safely.
Again, we are back to helping your team out and making the other players around you play better. If you’ve thrown 90 pitches by the fifth inning, your arm is cheese and I can guarantee you that you won’t be around to see the seventh inning. Hit the showers bub. If a batter knows your arm is cheese, that is about the time when they tee off on you. Or, the pitcher fears the hitter and walks them. Hitters from Ty Cobb to Mike Schmidt made a living off of worn out pitchers. It is actually shocking to see some of those guy’s hitting stats, them being two of the most feared hitters of all time…
If runs, hits and walks are drama, being hit by a pitch is out-and-out spectacle. Nothing quite makes a dust up on the diamond (unless you are George Brett or you really like pine tar) like being hit by a pitch. Of course “chin music” is as much a part of the game as grounders, pop ups, and tobacco spit. Every pitcher has done it at least one or two times, but none of them will admit it in front of the cameras. It’s just one of those unwritten rules of the game. Chin music aside, there are honest balls that get away from a pitcher. Fingernails snag, sweat gets on the ball, arms lose their strength…stuff just happens and batters get hit. The best part is that they also get a base…and that’s part of OBP or “getting on base safely.”
Craig Biggio, who just quit last year, is second on the all time list for being hit by pitches. His HBP total is 285 and that means that in 285 chances where the opposing team could have gotten him out, they granted him a free base. Not a big deal? Try this on for size: that’s two extra seasons worth of hits. Craig was sore a lot, but he was also very productive. In his twenty year career with the Houston Astros, he had an OBP (remember, it measures “getting to base safely”) of .363. That means that for every ten times he got up to the plate four of those times he would wind up on first base…a potential run. Not getting out is a much better way to measure a players worth than to gauge him by his batting average. A batting average is just a measure of hitting, it doesn’t tell you what a team is gonna do, just how much a player is going to ask for on his next contract.
Here is a list of the all time greatest guys at “getting on base”
I will forgive you if you do not know who John McGraw is, but suffice it to say that those men in that table are probably the most productive men ever in baseball. They were also (with one or two exceptions) wildly successful and on championship teams.
The out, or the avoidance of being out is the single best way to calculate a team, league, game, division, or player…so don’t be a fool and get caught stealing, Yogi is behind the plate and he’s got a cannon.
