Speed not reasonable and prudent
Is there any way to limit pitcher's arm injuries? We have an idea, but a lot people are not going to like it. Plus my earliest memory of Bob Uecker and Vin Scully.
TOP OF THE FIRST
When all my hopes rested with Bob Uecker
Bob Uecker turned 90 in January. I thought this would be a good time to share my earliest memory of two Hall of Fame announcers.
In 1966, my uncle Fred promised to fly me with my grandmother to San Francisco for the World Series if the Giants made it.
The National League pennant race came down to the last day of the season.
The Dodgers were playing a doubleheader at Philadelphia. The Giants were playing at Pittsburgh. If the Dodgers lost one game and the Giants beat the Pirates, the Giants would be a half game behind and would play a makeup game against the Reds. If the Giants won again, there would be a playoff against the Dodgers.
There was no national TV, because MLB was in the second year of its strategy to grow the game by severely limiting games on national TV.
Baseball had another strategy for growing the game — by limiting radio. For a while in the 1960s, there was a rule that MLB games couldn’t be carried in a minor league market if minor league games were going on.
We lived outside Tacoma, Washington, and we did not normally get Dodgers games on the radio. I am not sure if that rule was still in force in 1966, or whether we didn’t get MLB games because no local station wanted to carry them.
But that fall, a couple of local radio stations carried some late-season Dodgers games after the Tacoma Cubs and Seattle Angels wrapped up their PCL seasons.
Anyway we got home from church, and the Dodgers were finishing up the first game, Dodger win.
Vin Scully was announcing the game for the Dodgers. He became part of the soundtrack of my life when we moved to Arizona a few years later because Dodgers games were carried on Phoenix radio. But I was not aware of Scully until this game, even though he called the 1965 World Series on NBC-TV, which I had watched.
The second game matched the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax against Jim Bunning. Sounds like a great pairing, but Koufax was unhittable that day, and Bunning . . . not so much. The Dodgers took a 6-0 lead into the ninth.
Meanwhile, the Giants came back and beat the Pirates. So my hopes for the World Series were riding on a ninth-inning comeback by the Phillies.
But I was 9. I believed it could happen.
Dick Allen, the known as Richie, led off and reached on an error. Harvey Kuenn and Tony Taylor singled.
There was activity in the Dodgers bullpen.
Bill White doubled off the wall, clearing the bases. It' was 6-3. Koufax was on the ropes. You could hear the crowd going nuts.
"California, here I come" was playing in my head. ..
And then Vin Scully said, as only he could: "Now coming to the plate for the Phillies is . . . Baawb Youu-cker."
My father patted me on the shoulder and said, "I'm sorry, son."
This is the part of the story that baffles me. My father was not a big baseball fan. But he seemed to know of Uecker and his abilities. Somehow my father knew.
Still, I was 9. And I believed in the Phillies’ backup catcher.
Uecker struck out. The crowd went quiet.
Koufax retired the next two batters to clinch the pennant for what proved be to his last pitching victory.
And it was 35 more years until I got to a World Series game.
HEART OF THE ORDER
Baseball reaches its McCain moment
Pitchers are blowing out their arms at an alarming rate, and ‘something must be done.’
When I heard that the Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg officially retired, my reaction was “I thought he already retired.”
He pitched a total of 31 1/3 innings from 2020 through 2022. Strasburg, who suffered from thoracic outlet syndrome, hadn’t pitched at all since 2022. After leading the Nats to a World Series title in 2019 — Washington D.C.’s first since 1924 — he signed a big contract for $245 million over seven years.
The Nats were trying to get out of paying him the full value of his contract. He held firm, and finally the Nats realized it wasn’t going to happen. There were reports Strasburg agreed to have some of the payments deferred. The announcement was made on April 6.
His retirement was a reminder that brilliant pitching often leads to arm injuries.
Not that we need any reminders.
The Guardians’ Shane Bieber, the Marlins’ Eury Perez, and the Braves’ Spencer Strider were all injured early this season. The Astros’ Justin Verlander was sidelined and came back, but at that point, the team had five other starting pitchers — Cristian Javier, Framber Valdez, Jose Urquidy, Luis Garcia, and Lance McCullers, Jr. — on the injured list.
The Yankee’s Gerrit Cole was injured before the season started and will be out until June. Yankees reliever Jonathan Loaisiga will miss the season with a torn ulnar collateral ligament.
The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani won’t pitch this season because he is recovering from elbow surgery.
And I could go on.
A McCain Moment
By now, you have already heard the litany of causes: pitchers throw too fast, grip the ball too tight to get more spin, throw too high a percentage of breaking balls, — particularly sliders — play too much year-round baseball as kids, and the pitch clock makes pitchers work too quickly. Analytics have shown that strikeouts are better than getting outs on balls put into play.
We have fans, journos, bloggers, podcasters, sports talk show hosts, managers, the union chief, YouTube creators, pitchers, retired pitchers, and hitters weighing in.
With so much attention focused on pitchers’ arm injuries, we have reached a “John McCain Moment.”
Whether you like the former senator from Arizona’s politics or not, McCain had this tendency widely known to those in the news business in his home state: If a problem rose to prominence without an obvious solution, McCain would demand something be done without really saying what.
We had a headline mocked up on the bulletin board at The East Valley Tribune that read “McCain calls for action.”
That’s where baseball is at.
Pitching evolves
In many ways, Strasburg was the poster boy for the good and the bad of modern pitching — and he always looked like an arm injury about to happen.
It wasn’t anything to do with his mechanics. I don’t know enough about that. It was the readings on the gun.
When he was healthy, Strasburg had the most electric stuff I’ve ever seen: A fastball in the upper 90s, sometimes hitting 100 mph, a change-up in the upper 80s, and a curveball that looked like something out of a Wiffle ball game. From 2010 through 2019, he went 112-58 with a 3.17 ERA and averaged 10.6 strikeouts per nine innings.
Strasburg’s palette of pitches was a gift and a curse.
In say 1970, a 90 mph fastball was considered a plus fastball. It’s true that we didn’t know for sure how fast guys were throwing. It was more of a rough idea, a ballpark figure if you will As I wrote in a post last summer, it was several years later that anyone came up with a reliable, portable way to measure a pitcher’s speed.
By the 1980s, we had radar guns. I was an official scorer for extended spring training in 1984. The coaches had a gun that they used on occasion. I don’t know how proficient they were with it, and exactly at what point in the delivery they measured the speed of the pitch.
Few guys were lighting up the radar gun in Mesa, Arizona that spring. Extended spring training consisted mostly of guys who had played in short-season minor league and weren’t ready to go to a full-season league or guys who were on some sort of rehab — or both.
There was a kid named Larry Lewis with the Mariners. He had a wicked split-finger fastball that was measured at 88 mph. So he must have had a four-seem fastball over 90 mph — and anything 90 mph or above would have been considered “throwing gas.”
There was a kid named John Burkett , who would go on to the majors in wins in 1993 with 22, pitched 15 seasons in the big leagues, and was a two-time All-Star. He played one year in Rookie League for the Giants and had some arm problems, as I recall.
One of the guys who went on to have a successful MLB career was Doug Jones, a Brewers’ minor-leaguer who was rehabbing. He who threw maybe 85 mph tops.
I remember the coaches telling the pitchers that although velocity got them signed, getting outs was the way to advance through the system.
Around the turn of the century, TV broadcasts started showing a radar gun reading on every pitch. You could see a 90 mph fastball was no longer something to get excited about.
By 2008, the average MLB fastball was clocked at 91.9 mph.
By 2023, the average was 94.2 mph.
Human arm unevolved
The National League went to overhand pitching in 1884. I’m guessing it took a few years for sandlot pitchers and other amateurs to change.
By the time I was hanging out each morning at Fitch Park for extended spring training, overhand pitching had been used in MLB for 100 years, and universally used in other forms of the game for at least 90 years. A lot of people had been throwing the ball as hard as they could for a long time. And at that point, 90 mph still was considered elite.
Strasberg’s array of pitches would have been unthinkable in 1984.
The movie “The Natural” came out that summer. Somebody throwing pitches like Strasburg would have been in the same realm of fantasy as Roy Hobbs hitting a pennant-winning homer that caused the stadium lights to explode.
But Strasburg threw those pitches in real life.
And they were thrown with a human arm that featured the same basic equipment as human arms in 1984 and in 1894 and in 1884.
Speed limit
We are tracking the speed of every pitch in professional baseball now. Let’s just put in a rule that says you can’t throw over 92 mph.
If you exceed the limit, it’s an illegal pitch and called a ball. If the pitch is put into play, the offensive team has a choice of taking the result of the play or the called ball.
A couple of years ago, there was talk about moving the mound back six inches or a foot— which has other problems — because there are so many pitchers throwing so fast — and, in part because of the velocity, with such wicked movement — it’s not only killing pitcher’s careers, it’s killing the offense.
After an uptick in batting average and runs scored last season, both those categories are down through April 23.
A 92 mph pitch is hardly a batting practice fastball. But if that were a speed limit, it would lessen arm strain and force pitchers to do more than just throw. They would have to be crafty, mix their pitches, and hit their spots.
Older hitting stars might stay in the game longer because hitting would be more about pitch recognition and knowledge and less about reflexes.
And it’s not like a speed limit would turn every batter into a .300 hitter. History shows that not so long ago, pitchers were able to get MLB hitters out without 100 mph heat.
I shared this idea with a friend, who described it as turning against human progress, casting me as a sort of kinesiological Luddite. I’d love to read your comments.
SHORT HOPS
Chuck Tanner and his forgotten band of base thieves
The Reds are on a pace to steal around 300 bases this season. That’s a lot.
The MLB record is 347 by the 1911 Giants.
Since 1914, only two teams have stolen more than 300 bases in a season. One was the 1985 Cardinals. They stole 314. That was a running team at the height of Whitey ball.
The other was the 1976 A’s who set the American League record with 341. Does that surprise you? It sure surprised me.
When I think of the Athletics of the early 1970s, I think of teams built around solid defense, strong pitching, power hitting — the formula that won three successive World Series titles — and a lot of facial hair.
Although the A’s had some fast players, I don’t remember the A’s of that era for their prowess on the base paths.
The A’s were among the league leaders in stolen bases every season, but it was not an era of base-stealing. In 1975 the A’s stole 183, 164 in 1974, and 128 in 1973. In 1977, Oakland was back down to 176. So 1976 was an aberration.
Of the A’s stolen bases, 156 came from three players I would expect to steal a lot of bases.
The A’s Bill North led the majors with 75. That was a career high, but he had stolen 50 two times before, including 54 in 1974 when he led the American League.
Bert Campaneris had 54, the seventh time he topped 50. Claudell Washington who was a great athlete, had 37.
Don Baylor had 52 steals! Baylor ran well for a big guy when he was young, and he stole 20 or more bases eight times. But his highest total outside of 1976 was 32.
Sal Bando stole 20. The only other time his stolen bases total reached double figures was his rookie season.
Phil Garner stole 35, which doesn’t seem out of character for a quick, scrappy middle infielder. But he only stole four the year before despite playing in 160 games. And he had stolen as many as 10 just once in the minors. He stole 32 the next season and finished with 225 steals in his MLB career.
The A’s had a couple of guys, Matt Alexander and Larry Lintz, who did almost nothing but steal bases.
Lintz stole 31 bases. He played in 60 games and had four plate appearances.
Alexander appeared in 61 games, had 30 plate appearances, and stole 20 bases.
Manager Chuck Tanner said there was no great strategy or philosophical concept behind stealing so many bases, merely that the team did what they needed to do to try to win ball games.
That season ended an impressive run for the A’s. They had won the past five AL West titles. They trailed the Royals for most of the 1976 season, surged at the end and finished with an 87-74 record, 2.5 games behind Kansas City.
The A's must have had stolen bases on the brain that year. In June, they drafted Rickey Henderson in the fourth round.
Power is back on in Visalia
The Class A Visalia Rawhide entered play on April 25 with only one home run in the season.
OK, the D-backs California League team had only played 16 games.
Still, that’s pretty anemic.
Junior Franco hit one in the fifth inning and another in the ninth for a walk-off win over the Inland Empire 66ers.
The Rawhide is on a roll. Druw Jones hit one the next night in a 3-1 victory over the 66ers.
Not exactly the 2023 Braves or 2019 Twins, but a definite improvement.