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Pitchers, Batters
and Jacob Ruppert
of TheColumnists.com
Some rambling thoughts of an armchair spectator during the baseball playoffs:
As a favor to viewers I would give baseball announcers some homework before the start of every game. They would be made to stand behind the batting cage during batting practice and watch the hitters swatting the batting-practice pitches.
They would find, no surprise, that the hitters don’t often hit these easy pitches (“cookies” the players call them) over the fence. More often than not when they swing at these straight fast balls-at nowhere the speed of what they face in games--they hit harmless grounders and pop-ups. It’s a fact: even when they get fat pitches that they know are coming, they still don’t automatically whomp the balls into the bleachers.
The point is made here because the announcers--even ex-catcher Tim McCarver--all too frequently say pitchers make a mistake when a batter connects for a big hit. The fact is that batters, as often as not, swing and miss so-called mistakes. McCarver has said as much every so often in the past.
A huzzah then to Yankee pitcher Phil Hughes, who said last month, “I haven’t hit my spots every single pitch I’ve thrown…If I make a mistake over the plate I get away with it most of the time.”
Yet the announcers almost always say the batter hit a pitcher’s mistake. Once in a while, they do concede--hooray!-- that a batter hit a good pitch. Nor does it take an advance degree in baseball watching to note how often batters take pitches right down the middle of the plate--for strikes--or don’t connect with pitches that might well have been called “mistakes” if batters had clobbered them.
While on balls and strikes, let me add that I have little faith in these pitch-tracking machines used on telecasts. We don’t know if the machine is tracking when the ball passed over home plate or when it went into the catcher’s glove. A pitch can be a strike passing over the plate, but wind up looking like a ball in the catcher’s glove. And vice versa.
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I have a thing about uniforms. Pin stripes, to every red-blooded American baseball fan, are associated with the rich and powerful New York Yankee$. So it is pathetic and a lack of imagination that other teams have emulated the big guys and employ pin-striped uniforms on occasion. Scoff at the New York Mets, Colorado Rockies and Philadelphia Phillies for a lack of creativity.
Notably, the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles
nee Brooklyn Dodgers do not copy the pin-stripers. The Dodgers
however, earned--ungepotchked-- (that’s a Yiddish
word meaning cluttered) honors for putting numbers on the front
of the uniforms. The St. Louis Cardinals particularly deserve
derision for placing numbers that clash with the wonderful redbirds
on the front of their uniforms. (And I know people will differ
with me on my spelling of ungepotchked).
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Call me Scrooge but I have mixed feelings about ball boys handing out errant foul ball grounders to kids in the front rows of the stands. I think those kids are blessed
enough to have such good, expensive seats. The balls should be tossed up to kids in the cheap seats…Are there any games played these days that don’t have thousands of fans waving towels handed out to them by home management?...And if ball players are too lazy to retrieve the garbage they strew all over dugouts--inevitably caught on cameras--maybe management ought to employ a designate cleaning person to get rid of the eyesaws. There will be a moment’s pause here while I do not mention players’ spitting caught on camera.
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When Ron Darling said “location is always more important than how fast the ball is thrown” it reminded me of a conversation I once had with Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford. I asked him if I would have any success if I were able to throw pitches in exactly the spot I wanted but with only batting-practice speed. He said that if there was no fear by the hitter of being hit by a pitch, the hitter would have no trouble hitting against me no matter how well the ball was placed.
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Most fans outside of New York (and LA with Vin Scully) are so used to listening to biased home team announcers during the regular season (call them “homers”) they think down-the-middle objective network announcers are prejudiced against their team. Network announcers invariably tilt toward the team that is behind….The announcers would be doing most viewers a favor if they explain that a four-seam fastball is a high pitch and a two-seam fastball is one that dips... My preferences on playoff announcers: 1. Tim McCarver, 2. Ron Darling, 3. Joe Buck, 4. Buck Martinez, 5. Chip Carey.
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Not all fans are savvy. Too many of them are dumb. Those would be the ones booing when an opposing pitcher frequently throws over to first base to catch a runner. This takes away from his attention to the hitter so it is a good thing for the home team. And booing an intentional walk doesn’t rate high on the baseball I.Q. meter. Nor am I enamored by the would-be cheerleader noodnicks who urge people to stand up when the home team pitcher has two strikes on a hitter. I would rather watch baseball from a sitting position. I’ll admit that I am not consistent; I do like the wave if it’s in the middle of a quiet game.
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The Phillies’ 11-0 rout of the Dodgers in Game 3 and the Yankees’ 10-1 shellacking of the Disneyland Angels in Game 4 reminded me of the classic comment by one-time Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert. He said his idea of a good game was when his Yankee$ “score eight runs in the first inning, then slowly pull away.”
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Oct. 26, 2009.
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