Baseball has always been heavy-laden with statistics, to the point where, well deservedly, it is mocked and satirized. What?s the most ground balls to the second baseman hit by a left-handed batter in a night game in the last 36 years? Har-de-har-har. The sport?s an easy target.
But for all that, statistics are both the substance and the charm of baseball. No sport can be so easily quantified. No team sport can be so perfectly broken down to measure individual accomplishment. Only with tongue partly in cheek would I suggest that the reason American boys do better in math than reading is because so many of them grow up learning to compute batting averages.
Recommended Stories
But I have this uneasy feeling that one relatively new statistic is a monster threatening to harm the game it is supposed to merely be tabulating. The numbers are running the show. In this, I am reminded of Robert Coover?s novel of several years ago, “The Universal Baseball Association,” wherein the main character invents a baseball game that he plays with dice. Only one time, he rolls the dice and it comes up that his favorite star player is killed by a beanball. No, no! He must deny his numbers, his carefully constructed universe, to save the player. But then, by doing so, he has lost the very game he created.
And somewhat like that, this dreaded statistic, the pitch count, which professes to save pitchers? arms, may be, in the process, damaging the whole greater game.
It all started innocently enough. Teams began to pay attention to the number of pitches a pitcher threw to make sure he did not overextend himself. But what began as a guide has now become a mantra: He?s thrown a hundred pitches ? take him out, that fragile vessel on the mound, even though he seems to be breezing along. God forbid that we should hear from the pitcher?s agent that we have abused the poor dear by allowing him to throw one curveball too many.
But even worse is the law of unintended consequence. Once the pitch count mattered so much, teams began to concentrate on making the pitcher pitch more pitches. Suddenly, actually hitting pitches is subsidiary to simply staying at the plate as long as possible. Baseball is beginning to remind me of basketball before there was a 24-second clock, when the idea was to freeze the ball.
All you hear about now is something called “a great at-bat.” Did the guy who was great at-bat geta hit? No, he just stayed up there at the plate, waiting the pitcher out, “working the count” ? that other odious new expression ? and fouling off pitches.
Next time you watch a baseball game, take note of how many foul balls there are. Really. This is one statistic somebody should start paying attention to. It?s easier to foul off pitches now, because the new parks don?t have much extra territory where foul pops can be caught and because hitters are stronger, with whippier bats, so they can get around on pitches at the last instant and bang it foul.
Please, baseball, stop paying so much attention to pitch counts and instead count the minutes that drag on … and on. Play ball! Pitch the ball! Swing at the ball! Hit the ball!
Frank Deford?s column also appears as commentary Wednesdays on National Public Radio?s Morning Edition. Deford is a Baltimore native and an award-winning author who has written 14 books. He can be reached [email protected].
