Most days I wonder what to write about, not today; It is my favorite day of the year, Opening Day of the baseball season. Everything is still possible. I usually write an emotional poetic ode to the greatest game but this year I’m going to get more granular. I’m living in a different baseball world than many of my peers. So many people on my baseball groups think that baseball is ruined. The baseball world that I see is in full bloom. There have been few times in history where there were so many great young players. Vlad Guerrero Jr, Juan Soto, and Fernando Tatis are generational talents. They are all 23 years old. They are being joined this year by Wander Franco who is 21. The top score a player can get in the scouting reports is 80. In all the years there have been only two 80s given in the hit tool, the Vlad and to Wander. What did Vlad do last year? He just hit .311 with 41 HR and 111 RBI and that sells him short as he also walked 83 times. These are all guys I’d pay to see play. My beloved Mets have a shortstop that had an off year. He was a league average hitter but is a genius in the field. He plays with such elan that his nickname is Mr. Smile. The Mets also have the Polar Bear, fist baseman Pete Alonso who set a rookie record in 1919 with 53 HR. Last year he hit “Only” 37. They also have the greatest pitcher on the planet, by a good margin, Jacob deGrom aka the deGromminator. Unfortunately he got hurt last year in the midst of one of the greatest pitching seasons in history. His ERA was 1.08, the record in the live ball era is 1.12 by Bob Gibson in 1968. The thing is that was in 1968 when nobody was hitting. His ERA+ was a video game 373, that means he was 273% better than the average pitcher. His average pitch travels just a hair under 100 MPH, has great movement, and goes where he wants it to go.
The point about Gibson’s remarkable 1.12 ERA coming in the Year of the Pitcher is important. By any measure it was one of the greatest seasons ever, nobody was close to him even in a year where I think 6 pitchers had an ERA under 2.00. But when we see a year like that it doesn’t mean that the batters were bad. It means they were poorer relative to the pitchers that seasons compared to most. The reality is that both the pitchers and hitters are progressively getting better. How do we know that? The athletes in every sport are getting better which we can see when measuring not against each other but against objective measures like time, distance, and weight. Modern athletes run and swim faster than their predecessors, they throw the shot put and discuss futher, they jump higher and futher, and lift heavier weights. Nutrition and training have evolved tremendously over the years. In baseball the one objective measure we have is how hard pitchers throw, and they throw much harder than they used to. If we brought Babe Ruth through a time machine to battle deGrom he wouldn’t know what hit him. He literally never faced a pitcher like that. His batting stats would be not nearly as good as they were. But, and this is a big but, bigger than the Babe’s ample butt. If the Babe were alive today he’d have the modern training and nutrition. He would probably not have developed that belly, though he might have. He would be more muscular. He would be faster and stronger, and he’d still have that otherworldly hand-eye coordination. So how would he do given those things? I have no idea but probably better than Vlad or anyone else playing. But maybe not, we can’t tell for sure. We just know that he exceeded his contemporaries more than any else ever has.
Another thing that excites me today is that for the first time there’s a science of baseball, not just inherited lore. While there were always players that improved there was no way of helpiing them improve, now there is. It became obvious with the launch angle revolution. They were able to adjust their swings and hit the ball in the air more often. What happened? Some of those that were mediocre contact hitters became power hitters. The Mets’s Daniel Murphy led the way. Between the ages of 23 and 30 he hit just 9% better than the average hitter. The next season he led the league by hitting 55% better than average. Little guys like Jose Altuve and Mookie Betts made the same transformation.
In the mean time they routinely teach pitchers to not just throw harder but make the ball move more. Just as importantly the best teams optimize their pitch selection. This is how every year the Tampa Bay Rays can take a bunch of generic relief pitchers off the scrap heap and make them great. Some people hate this. They don’t want baseball to learn from science. As a math/science person I love it.
There are changes I don’t like, the universal DH and the ghost runner in extra innings but they don’t ruin the game. The heart of the game is still the way Willie Mays described it. “You pitch it, I hit it. You hit it I catch it.” Everything else is pales in comparison. I watch a game today and see the same thing as I did in 1969, A pitcher on a mound throws the ball far harder than any mere mortal. It takes about four tenths of a second to reach the plate. In that time the batter has to determine where the curving pitch will be when it reaches him, time the swing, and make contact. The ball travels so fast that his eyes cannot move fast enough to see the ball hit the bat. He computes it’s path in that 0.4 seconds and swings. What has changed is that the ball is traveling quite a bit faster than in 1969 and moving more on average. If he makes contact in fair territory some fielder instantly computes where the ball will go. There’s no defensive play I enjoy more than watching a centerfield take off at the crack of the bat, run a straight path to where the ball will land, then turn and catch it. Every aspect of the encounter is a thing of beauty. It’s a thing of beauty when the batter rockets one over the wall and it’s a thing of beauty when he’s totally fool and the ball ends up in the catchers glove.
The Mets will be on soon. I will not be able to watch, we don’t have cable, and I can’t afford the streaming packages that include SNY, the Mets’ station. I’ll listen on the radio. I watch games on National TV, and of course I’ll go to games.
It’s Thursday so Gord’s Gold is on tonight. If your local game is rained out give it a listen on Folk Music Notebook at 9 PM EDT, rerun at 2 AM. If not you can listen tomorrow on Mixcloud. The show opens with a set about baseball including Steve Poltz’s tribute to Tony Gwynn #19 and Chuck Brodsky’s to Moe Berg. Not a baseball fan, there’s plenty more great music by people like Molly Tuttle, Bob Dylan, Shemekia Copeland, and Leonard Cohen.
Wise Madness 