MALE PATTERN FITNESS: Comment on The Hits Just Keep Coming

The Hits Just Keep Coming

February 01, 2007

Nick Bromberg sent me this link from The Hardball Times about an underreported trend in baseball:

The incidence of hit batsmen in major league baseball has dramatically increased in the past couple of decades; a significant transformation has taken place in the very nature of the game. Yet this transformation has caught little notice, engaging neither broad contemplation nor comprehensive understanding. ...

Through the early decades of the 20th century, the incidence of batters being struck by pitched balls steadily declined, in both the American and National Leagues. As the sport developed from its rough-and-tumble origins to its slick and professional maturity, the pitchers' control improved, and the batters' tactic of semi-intentionally taking the HBP as a means of getting on base faded. By the 1930s, the typical team had a hit batsman little more than once every 10 games.

In subsequent decades, the rate waxed and waned, but never in either league reached the levels of the 1900s and 1910s. Until the 1990s, that is, when, in both leagues, the occurrence of batters being pelted with pitches suddenly returned to the dead-ball era norm. But not for long; swiftly the rate soared past that, and in the past few seasons we've witnessed pitched balls smacking flesh at a frequency not known in more than 100 years.

The author, Steve Treder, offers a variety of explanations for this trend. The main one is the counterintuitive idea that, as baseball has tried harder to reduce hit batsmen, and as the quality of helmets and other protective gear has improved, hitters have gotten bolder, and started crowding the plate more.

In past decades, pitchers like Bob Gibson or Don Drysdale wouldn't allow that kind of confidence. If they saw a batter digging in with his cleats in the batter's box, they'd send a fastball sailing under his chin to discourage him from getting comfortable.

It's also worth noting that, for most of baseball history, pitchers tended to be bigger than hitters. Walter Johnson, for example, was 6-1, 200 pounds. In his best season, 1913, he was 36-7, with 243 and a 1.14 ERA. The hitters he was facing were, generally, much smaller.

Ty Cobb, for example, was the same height, but 25 pounds lighter. Eddie Collins was 5-9, 175. Frank "Home Run" Baker was 5-11, 173. (Baker, by the way, never hit more than 12 homers in a season.) Ray Chapman, whose death by a pitch to the head in 1920 inspired the creation of batting helmets, was 5-10, 170. One of the reasons Babe Ruth was such a paradigm-changing slugger was the fact he was one of the first big guys who was allowed to become a full-time hitter. He was only 6-2, 215, but that still made him bigger than most professional ballplayers, including the pitchers he faced. (Lou Gehrig, another relatively big guy for his era, was just 6-0, 200 pounds.)

Now baseball is a game of big men at just about every position. Thanks to modern nutrition and conditioning, they're much stronger than their predecessors. Hitting batters is proportionally more dangerous, given how hard today's pitchers throw. And umpires, as Treder notes, are quick to warn pitchers who throw inside to hitters:

Since the 1980s, umpires, presumably discreetly directed by MLB to do so, seem to have torn from the rule book the page that describes how close to the plate the batter may legally assume his stance. Coupled with hitters' unprecedented knowledge that any pitch more than a shade inside will generate a warning from the ump that the next inside delivery will send the pitcher to the showers, the result is a hegemony that earlier hitters could only dream about.

"Crowd" the plate? Many modern batters, with or without an elbow guard, set up permanent residence on the inner half.

Thus the modern pitcher, though more skilled than ever before, and despite facing far stronger sanction than ever before against attempting to brush hitters back, finds himself unable to avoid hitting batters at a rate not seen since the sport's primitive antiquity.

This is nothing more than a guess, but I wonder if some pitchers today just skip the traditional "purpose" pitch -- what they used to call "chin music" -- and go ahead and hit the batter if they want to send him a message.

There's really no consequence, aside from giving a free base to a runner. The umpire generally won't throw a pitcher out for a first offense. Even if there's a bench-clearing brawl, nobody actually gets hurt. What the umpire will do is warn both benches, but all that means is that the other team's pitcher will get penalized for retaliating. The pitcher who actually hit a guy on purpose gives up nothing but a baserunner.

So why wouldn't a pitcher just plunk a guy, if he thinks the situation calls for a message to be sent? It makes a lot more sense to hit a guy without warning than to go through the archaic ritual of throwing inside to intimidate guys who are probably too big and confident to be intimidated in the first place.

Posted by LouSchuler at February 1, 2007 09:42 AM

The Hits Just Keep Coming

February 01, 2007

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