Posted on 04/01/2002 3:44:02 PM PST by BluesDuke
Lots of people look upon baseball's last several seasons and are not amused. Not everyone enjoys a ball game turned into a batting practise scrimmage. It's not that baseball doesn't have other problems to fix - like salary inflation, revenue sharing, and a division alignment that's all but cut the legs out from under the pennant races. But you could solve all those problems this minute and still have a game distorted by the idea that no one cares about anything but relentless offence. Real baseball fans - those who savour the noble game, not those who can't stand the quiet or the subtleties between home runs - either have or hold with one or another theory as to why, other than the owners' insane ideas about televisibility and cash fattening.
It's the rabbit ball. (Dubious.) It's Frankenhitters turning into tantrum throwers if a pitcher dares to come inside and move them back off the plate. It's wimpy pitchers afraid to come inside, lest a mortified hitter charge the mound or a judicial tyrant behind the plate run them at the first bar of chin music, maestro. (Six of one, half a dozen of the other.) It's pitchers leery of the risk because they know too many of their mates won't back them up if the other guys charge. (Guess how Mo Vaughn made himself persona non grata in the Anaheim Angels' clubhouse, folks. Mets be forewarned.) It's the hitter friendliness of the new yards, a lot of them. (Ironically, over the past few seasons, the park which started the otherwise salutary retopark trend - Camden Yards - would be a pitcher's park as configured now, if only the Baltimore Orioles had some pitching.) It's Roger Clemens, getting away with trying to shish kebab Mike Piazza during the 2000 World Series, because the Mets would have been spanked if even one Yankee uniform was sent on his tail in retribution. Blah-blah, woof-woof.
OK, maybe half or slightly more of the above are true, except maybe the rabbit ball theory. What is true is that the hitters rule the roost, and too many people whose love of the game goes no deeper than a Bob Uecker long ball are bent as best they can on keeping the hitters in power. Now, I love a long bomb into McCovey Cove as much as anyone. But baseball and war have this much in common: Too many bombs wreck too much unnecessarily. And a slap and slugfest a day can be even more sensorily numbing than a pitching duel. With a pitching duel you're seeing more continuous craftsmanship; with a slap and slugfest, you're seeing assault and battery, not workmanship.
These day's a team's batting practise machine has more fortitude than its pitching staff. It also has a better earned run average than the Texas Rangers' pitching staff. Should any of those pitchers have any sense of their own team history, they will pick up the phone and dial 1-800-GAYLORD. It wouldn't hurt a lot of other pitching staffs, either. Balanced baseball may have little hope other than a few stouthearted pitchers greasing some palms - also, some fingertips, sleeves, caps, and anyplace else from which they can get more on the ball than invitations to hit them across the International Date Line.
Maybe it wouldn't matter what you throw Barry Bonds, or even Ichiro Suzuki. Maybe they'll go yard 73 times or pile on 273 hits even if you throw them a shot put. But who passed any law saying you have to let baseball's lawmakers make it easier for them?
Let the nannygoat contingency bleat their heads off about undermining moral revival. Then let's quit pretending and admit it: Baseball fans love outlaws on the field. Especially on the mound. We love few things more than watching hitters cringe and opposing managers snivel when they think a pitcher has more on the ball than his thumb and forefingers. And we love it when we see a pitcher going through whatever fidgety motions he goes through when he wants the big ogre at the plate to think he's about to oil it up and go. If you think I'm spitting in the wind, you don't remember how even Mets fans, if not always the Mets themselves, held a sneaking admiration for Mike Scott's reported scufflaw performances. The only thing bothering us was why Scott didn't have the brains to learn his tricks while he was a Met.
Today's pitchers, most of them, are a bunch of pink squirrels. They're also not Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, or Pedro Martinez, either. They need to know the sacrifices of their elders. Players love talking frozen ropes about those who came before them but that stops when the subject moves beyond salaries that equal Delaware's state budget. Time to tell these pink squirrels on the mound of those who came before them and taught the world about grease under pressure: Hugh Casey, Harry Brecheen, Preacher Roe, Eddie Lopat, Lew Burdette, Whitey Ford (Whitey Ford?), Art Fowler, Bob Purkey, Bo Belinsky, Joe Hoerner, Gaylord Perry, Tommy John, George Frazier ("I don't put any foreign substance on any ball I pitch - everything I use is made in the good old U.S. of A."), Don Sutton, Rick Honeycutt, Rick Rhoden, Mike Scott, Joe (Mr. Sandman) Niekro, Mike Flanagan, and others. Said pink squirrel pitcher now would probably think you're talking about the guys who landed in prehistoric times on a place called Iwo Jima.
Well, there's your opening. The pitcher's mound today is Iwo Jima, and it's begging to be re-taken by enterprising Yanks. Or Mets. Not to mention Rangers, Orioles, and Angels, among others. Even the sainted Atlanta Braves. What the hell is Don Sutton doing up in the broadcast booth instead of down around the mounds? Greg Maddux isn't getting any younger. John Smoltz couldn't hurt from a different kind of Tommy John surgery.
Where have you gone, Gaylord Perry-o? The eyes of Texas ought to be upon you. Last I checked, even Lew Burdette was still alive and well in Florida someplace. Surely he could use the extra income.
On the other hand, the political correctness police would probably lock Burdette up and throw away the key. Burdette's M.O. involved his chewing tobacco - the big Milwaukee Braves righthander of yore would spit into a certain spot on the mound until he had his own little cesspool. (Jay Johnstone, the famous flake who began his career with the Angels as Burdette was winding down his career on the same club, swears by it - and once swore at it, like many other hitters afore him). Burdette could scoop up a load of this toxic waste whenever he bent down to adjust his shoelaces - as he did frequently. "I swear," Johnstone has said, "that when he pitched you could see that sh@t flying all over the place. You'd walk back to the dugout needing a clean shirt. The problem, though, was that you were walking back to the dugout."
If Whitey Ford were healthy (he is said to be battling cancer), maybe he could teach his own version of Lord of the Ring. Ford's favourite trick, after he was nailed throwing a mud ball, was a rasp in his wedding ring. After that one was exposed ("Whitey," Jim Bouton has recorded an umpire telling him, "go on back to the clubhouse. Your jock strap needs fixing. And when you come back, it better be without that ring!"), Whitey went to the buckle ball - his own, or catcher Elston Howard (Howard would catch a low pitch and scrape the ball on the shin guard buckle before throwing it back to Ford). Young pitchers of today, learn something of chutzpah: Whitey Ford's free lance carpentry became such a habit that by his own admission, when he got fed up being rapped around in Old-Timer's Games, he began cutting balls in those games, too.
Or, maybe, some enterprising pitching coach could take a clue from former Oriole pitching coach Ray Miller, who was once confronted by an outraged pitcher after Miller let it slip that this pitcher had a pretty good spitter if he wanted to use it. Miller told him, approximately, that it almost didn't matter if he didn't have it - just letting the word get out that you have it takes a point off your ERA. (Thomas Boswell calls it "hitter hydrophobia" - spitter on the brain, says he.) Meanwhile, wouldn't it be a magnificent discipline test for today's Frankenhitters if, facing a pitcher whose nickname could be Greased Lightning, they had to just bring up the patience to cash in big - as in, what they used to call hitting it on the dry side? (Translation, according to Boswell: wait for the one that doesn't break.)
This could make baseball gobs of fun all over again. Unfortunately, baseball has a pretty skewed sense of job creation. When you've got (presumably) Lew Burdette, Whitey Ford, Gaylord Perry, Bob Purkey, and Tommy John out of work and with knowledge and wisdom to pass on to a generation of ballplayers who think wisdom is the tooth you got knocked out on a play at the plate, you know baseball isn't looking at the big picture. The hitters aren't getting any smaller. Neither are team ERAs. The time for baseball's salivation is now.
:)
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