BASEBALL by The numbers
So I have decided to include baseball essays on my website. Actually, it’s about damn time that I wrote about the “Grand Old Game.” I’ve been an ardent fan of our “National Pastime” since 1962, when I was an inept little-leaguer living in Texas.
Way back then, a revolution was occurring in the Majors. The preceding summer the owners of the teams in the American League, which for the previous sixty years was comprised of the same eight franchises, decided to expand to ten. The National League felt obliged to respond, so they added the New York Metropolitans in an attempt to cash-in-on the mortified fans of the recently departed Dodgers and Giants,[1] and then, almost as an afterthought, the NL owners tossed into the pot the Houston Colt .45s, staking claim to America’s burgeoning, fourth-largest city, right smack-dab in Texas. I was in heaven. It didn’t matter that the 1963 incarnation of the Colt .45s, who played in a rattle trap, mosquito-ridden stadium, had undoubtedly the most truly awful lineup in the history of baseball — not kidding here, the numbers don’t lie — yet these were my childhood heroes. And so they remain. With pride I can still recite their names and their historically futile statistics.
I don’t deny that my baseball writing is disproportionately driven by statistics. I honestly don’t care who swapped wives, or who took PEDs, or the numerous suicides, or any of that other icky personal stuff (well, maybe just a little), but my stories are unrepentantly based upon numbers, and how numbers define this game to an astonishing degree. Numbers set baseball apart from all other prominent sports. Football, quite simply, is problematic to quantify, apart from those players on offense who gain yardage, complete passes, catch passes, or score points — or players on defense who record sacks, interceptions, or “tackles.” Line play, probably the most important factor in a football game, still resists quantification. Basketball certainly incorporates numbers — scoring, free throws, rebounding, and steals, but that’s about it. Oh yeah, minutes played. Soccer might be the most difficult of the major sports to quantify as it can become a complete blur.
However, in baseball there is absolutely no shortage of numbers. Baseball is legendary for glorifying statistical achievements, and at the forefront are fundamental categories such as batting average, home runs, runs scored, and runs batted in, as well as other statistical standards such as games played, plate appearances, at bats, hits, doubles, triples, total bases, slugging percentage, walks, and strikeouts — not to mention more obscure categories such as grounding into double plays, at-bats per strikeout, intentional walks received, and sacrifice bunts laid down. And those are just statistics for batting. A player’s fielding ability is graded by the number of chances (balls handled), putouts, assists, errors, double plays, and innings in the field, which can be converted into fielding percentages and zone ratings. Pitchers have their own vast universe of numbers, such as wins and loses, saves, games pitched, innings pitched, batters faced, complete games, shutouts, earned run average, hits per nine innings, walks per nine innings, WHIP, strikeouts, wild pitches, and hit batters, to name just a few. And each and every one of these numbers has a story to tell.
So, to begin this series of baseball articles, let me step up to the plate with that most disconsolate of statistics — getting drilled. Poetically referred to as “chin music,” and prosaically denoted on your score sheet as HBP (hit by pitch), this remains the game’s greatest physical danger. And, of course, we’ll not only look at batters who leaned too far over the plate, but we’ll also stare back at the game’s most notorious headhunters. Find the text here.
Some other topics on deck:
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Thieves and Pickpockets: The Stolen Base
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Giving It Up: The Sacrifice
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Twin Killings: The Double Play
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The Game’s Boldest Decision: The Triple
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Loosing Your Shit in Public: Managerial Ejections
My sources? First and foremost is Baseball Reference, a truly astounding and meticulously researched digital database. Coupled with biographies from the Society for American Baseball Research, I simply cannot adequately express my admiration for the folks who put this whole operation together and maintain it. I have also encountered wonderfully unexpected details from books such as Baseball Babylon, by Dan Gutman; Baseball: A Doubleheader of Facts, Feats & Firsts, by the Editors of The Sporting News; and The Golden Age of Baseball, by Paul Adomites, Robert Cassidy, Dan Schlossberg, Bruce Herman, and Saul Wisnia. Furthermore, I consider library collections of old newspapers to be indispensable to any form of research. Libraries are one of the true cultural treasures of our species and need to be honored and protected, in all ways.
[1] My father’s family was from Brooklyn. My dad’s older sister, Winifred Stasinsky (she had married a Polish window washer) has been described as the fattest, loudest woman in Brooklyn. And she lived for the Dodgers. In the summer of 1963, when I was staying with Winnie and Rudy on their second floor apartment on 328 Ninth Street, I happened to inadvertently mention the Los Angeles Dodgers, and she turned to me like a rabid animal and snarled, “DODGERS?! DODGERS?! THERE ARE NO DODGERS!!
