Don’t be surprised if the Giants-Royals World Series is decided by 90 feet. After all, baseball is a series of contests for 90 feet—the distance from home to first, first to second, second to third, and third to home again. The two teams are bidding for the same property for nine innings, both when they’re at bat and in the field. The club that wins more of those 90 feet skirmishes, says George Washington University head baseball coach Gregg Ritchie, puts itself in position to win ball games.
Ritchie came back to GW after a career in professional baseball that lasted nearly 30 years, with his most recent stop in Pittsburgh as the Pirates’ hitting coach. We were teammates at GW and I hadn’t seen him since, and then he returned to take over at our alma mater in 2013. With the postseason upon us, I asked him if he’d share some of his insights into the game.
We’re sitting in his office in Foggy Bottom, decorated with mementoes from GW baseball history. One of Ritchie’s predecessors as head coach here is Mike Toomey, now an assistant general manager with the Kansas City Royals. Toomey’s late father scouted for the Royals, too. With two other former Colonials employed as Royals’ executives, GW baseball is leaning heavily toward the Royals in the World Series. On the other hand, Ritchie himself was drafted by the San Francisco Giants back in 1987—after he was scouted by Toomey, who was then working for the Giants. In any case, I get the feeling that Ritchie’s investment in professional baseball at this point is not in particular clubs, but in the game itself. I think he just wants to see baseball played at its highest level succeed, which it surely will. The game has its own stark beauty.
“I want to show you something really cool,” Ritchie says, as he moves to the chalkboard and draws a line down the middle.
“Oh, this is cool,” says one of his assistant coaches, Jon Tatum. “Since I’ve been here, this is one of the most important things I learned from coach.”
On the left side of the line, Ritchie writes +90, and -90 on the right.
“Sacrifice bunt,” says Ritchie. “Plus 90,” says Tatum, meaning it moves the runner another 90 feet closer to home and scoring a run. Ritchie writes it out in the left-hand column. “Double play,” he says next. “Another plus 90,” says Tatum, meaning the team in the field has won this skirmish by taking 90 feet away from the team at bat. That, too, goes in the left-hand column.
Minus 90s are failures to execute, in the field, at the plate, or on the mound. For instance, a throw from the outfield that misses the cutoff man and allows the runner to take an extra base forfeits 90 feet. On the offensive side, failure to lay down a sacrifice bunt and move a runner closer to home is a minus 90. Bad at bats are those that make the job of the next hitter harder not easier. Those, too, are minus 90s on the offensive side.
There are dozens of possible plus and minus 90s, all of them the function of either executing team fundamentals properly, or failing to. He’s not loading up the left side of the margin with home runs for the offense and strike outs for the defense, but what lots of baseball commentators call—mistakenly, from Ritchie’s perspective—the “small things.” The way he sees it, this is baseball skill and it’s what decides outcomes. “The higher the ratio of plus 90s to minus 90s,” says Ritchie, “the more likely you are to win ballgames.”
That seems especially so in the postseason when superior pitching leaves little room for error. The 90-feet paradigm helps illuminate the playoffs to date. As I argued yesterday, the Royals advanced to the World Series by properly executing team fundamentals, but let’s break that down into a few 90 feet segments. In Tuesday night’s game, KC twice scored runners from third with less than two outs, on a sacrifice fly (+90) and a fielder’s choice (+90). From this perspective, the decisive margin then wasn’t the 2-1 final score, but +180 feet for the Royals. Same on Wednesday when in the first inning Lorenzo Cain bunted to advance two runners (+90) and Eric Hosmer then pulled a batted ball to the right side of the infield to advance the runners safely (+90).
The +/- 90 paradigm also sheds some light on the Washington Nationals’ postseason performance. As Ritchie explains, there are going to be lots of one-run games in October because the pitching is better. In the Nats-Giants series, there were three one-run games. The Nats came in to the playoffs with perhaps the best pitching staff in baseball—“their strikeout to walk ratio was best in the league,” says Ritchie—but the Giants staff matched them. That’s not surprising because come October the pitching is necessarily first-rate: mediocre staffs are weeded out by a 162-game season. Accordingly, from this perspective, the Nats washed out of October not because they didn’t hit—it’s always hard hitting premier pitching under pressure in a win or go home series—but because they kept losing skirmishes for 90 feet.
The real heartbreaker for the Nats wasn’t game two when Brandon Belt’s solo home run in the top of the18th inning won it for the Giants 2-1. That happens—it’s baseball. No, what went wrong for the Nats was best exemplified with the 3-2 loss in game four, when in the very first inning Gio Gonzalez failed to field a comebacker to the mound and then a bunt. His inability to make two pitcher-fielder plays, and execute team fundamentals, cost the Nats 180 feet—and eventually two runs.
In the seventh inning of game four, relief pitcher Aaron Barrett bounced a wild pitch in the dirt. But physical errors are, like home runs, a part of the game—the real issue here was Nats’ catcher Wilson Ramos’ failure to block the ball. Instead, of dropping to his knees and keeping the ball in front of him, he tried to pick it off his backhand. The Nats lost game four by one run not because they didn’t hit, but because they gave away at least 270 feet to a stingier rival.
When the Giants messed up team fundamentals, they, too, paid for it. The Nats’ one victory, in game three, was a byproduct of Madison Bumgarner’s errant throw to third after a Ramos bunt. The Giants’ southpaw probably should’ve gone for the sure out at first—the bunt was good enough that it virtually ensured the runners would advance—but when he threw it away and runners started circling the bases, he gave the Nats some 360 feet. That kind of territory is very hard to make up in October.
The Giants and the Royals made it this far in the postseason because they’ve won their wars for 90 feet more often than their opponents. And it’s those serial skirmishes rather than home runs that will almost surely decide who wins the World Series.
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