Dave “Cobra” Parker, the once-in-a-generation right fielder for the multiracial “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates of the 1970s, played baseball with reckless abandon. In a close play at the plate, he collided with Mets catcher and former Colorado University football standout John Stearns and wound up with a fractured jaw and cheekbone — then returned to the plate first in a goalie mask and later in a modified football helmet. Cursed with balky knees, he used a rocket arm to hold base runners close. And he prided himself on his proficiency as a first-pitch fastball hitter, swinging away and rarely working deep into the count during a career in which nearly a quarter of his walks were intentional.
Parker was a two-time batting champ, league MVP in 1978, a World Series champion in 1979, and a notorious local celebrity, a king of Pittsburgh’s disco scene who wound up embroiled in Major League Baseball’s cocaine trials during the early 1980s. The one thing he wasn’t, at least by modern statistical standards, was an inarguably great player. Based on conventional metrics, Parker finished his career with borderline Hall of Fame credentials: 2,712 hits, a .290 batting average, and 339 home runs. In spite of that, he accounted for only 40 “Wins Above Replacement”; a typical Hall of Fame right fielder has delivered 72.1.
Parker addressed this discrepancy between the traditional “counting stats” and advanced analytics in his recent autobiography, Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood. “The Pirates taught a batting philosophy focused on getting the run home,” he wrote, explaining why the franchise ranked among the bottom of the National League in walks during a decade in which they won two World Series and appeared in six National League Championship Series. “You hear a lot today about on-base percentage, folks rolling their eyes at small ball … but we were so talented, we had such elite, legendary playing ability, that we didn’t care about walks.”
Parker, like many athletes of his generation, played within the context of the advice coaches gave him — “I was told to drive brothers in, from the earliest age, and I did it just about as good as anyone” — but found within those then-looser parameters a way of stamping the game with that je ne sais quoi that distinguished a star professional athlete from his teammates and rivals. Even so, Parker acknowledged that, had he played in a later era, he would’ve followed the statistical revolution that began with the Moneyball Oakland Athletics of the early 2000s and accelerated right up to the present. “If y’all wanted me to walk, I would’ve walked,” he continued. “You think Scoop [star batsman Al Oliver] would’ve sneered at a damn regression analysis if he heard a way to get ten more hits?”
Therein lies the rub. Professional athletes of all stripes, Parker included, will do whatever it takes to maximize their chances of winning, even if it means utilizing a narrow range of acceptable approaches to their games. Baseball has seen enough advances in the use of statistical analysis to have launched a half-dozen well-regarded books, including one that covers the Pirates’ use of pitch framing and shrewd defensive shifts to return briefly to relevance during an unexpected three-year playoff run between 2013 and 2015.
Basketball now occupies a similarly optimized place, with the post-“hand check era” that began after the 2003-2004 season reducing defensive aggression by barring defenders from placing and holding their hand or hands on an opposing player away from the basket. With this change in place, the aggressive defense that characterized the heyday of Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan evanesced, and a series of enterprising coaches and general managers exploited lookalike high-percentage offenses built around three-point shots, slam dunks, and little else in between. Pro football, with quarterbacks and receivers now protected against the defensive interference that prematurely ended many careers in the 1970s and 1980s, has evolved into a pass-heavy affair that 44-year-old Tom Brady can continue to dominate.
Tennis, arguably the most popular of the mano a mano sports, has gone from a sport ruled by bandy-legged little men with idiosyncratic styles — think Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe — to one dominated by tennis academy-trained Novak Djokovic, as close to a lab-grown “perfect player” as any in the game’s storied history. Even mixed martial arts, a far less mainstream one-on-one sport once known for its “freak show” fights, has settled on a more or less tedious winning philosophy: straight punches thrown at distance supplemented by copious kicks to the opponent’s legs and well-timed sprawling and grappling against the cage to prevent takedowns.
Academics and former players have long lamented these changes. The revolution in management described first by James Burnham and later by Samuel Francis didn’t necessarily lead to greater managerial efficiency, only more layers of management. Allen Guttman’s 1978 book From Ritual to Record described how sports evolved from events primarily serving ceremonial or play functions to carefully recorded and controlled mass-media industries staggering under the weight of their recorded statistics. Christopher Lasch devoted a section in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism to this “degradation” of sports, the ever-increasing commercialization and professionalization of which has led to sports becoming a “business subject to the same standards as any other.” The result is a sports “managerial apparatus” that “makes every effort to eliminate the risk and uncertainty” from its big-budget spectacles, culminating in “the demystification of sport, the assimilation of sport to show business.”
Lasch is right, insofar as much of show business has converged on a seemingly unbeatable PG-13 Marvel Cinematic Universe template of CGI action. Viewers get the finest of Hobson’s choices: You can watch any movie you want, as long as it’s an Avengers movie — the most agreeably middlebrow blockbuster that can be manufactured by committee under current circumstances. And sports spectators find themselves on the receiving end of a similar bargain: You can watch any sort of baseball game you want, as long as it involves innumerable walks, strikeouts, pitching changes, and home runs because this is the statistically safest route to success.
However, even in the midst of all this perfectly calibrated, lookalike action, one still encounters surprising moments. The most unusual story in baseball concerns Japanese import Shohei Ohtani, a 26-year-old Los Angeles Angels designated hitter and right-handed pitcher who will almost certainly remain the only player in league history to strike out 145 batters and hit 45 home runs — unless he goes against every statistical best practice and improves on those numbers next year. Gable Steveson, the 21-year-old enfant terrible of amateur wrestling, seized Olympic gold in freestyle wrestling for the United States using little more than extremely well-honed collegiate folkstyle methods, upending the conventional wisdom that held that even all-time collegiate greats such as Cael Sanderson needed to suffer a defeat or two in international competition before finally mastering the ostensibly faster, more fluid, and more technique-driven Olympic style.
Stories such as Ohtani’s and Steveson’s remain capable of captivating an otherwise indifferent public largely tuned out to any of this spectacle save for occasional YouTube or TikTok highlights. Meanwhile, those of us fortunate enough to remember great athletes such as Dave Parker can count our lucky stars that they ran on their own two feet rather than walking at some staff statistician’s behest.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
