Hey, Pitchers, Can't You Go 9 Innings Anymore?
PLUS: RAYS PROVIDE A ONE-IN-A-MILLION CEREMONIAL FIRST PITCH
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Before pitching his perfect game in Oakland, Yankees right-hander Domingo German had a 7.77 ERA in four starts preceding his gem against the A’s . . .
The Atlanta Braves are bidding to become the first NL team with 300 homers — and only the third in history, since the 2019 Minnesota Twins (307) and New York Yankees (306) did it previously . . .
As NL Player of the Month for June, Atlanta All-Star Ronald Acuña Jr., now a four-time All-Star, hit .356 with nine home runs, 22 RBIs, seven doubles, 14 stolen bases and 26 runs scored while posting a 1.112 OPS . . .
Yandy Diaz, the All-Star first baseman nobody knows outside of Tampa Bay, leads the Rays in batting and on-base percentage . . .
San Francisco’s surprising emergence as an NL wild-card team is due in large part to closer Camilo Doval, who converted 23 of his first 25 chances while finishing more games (34) than any other reliever in the majors . . .
With Rhys Hoskins down for the count and Bryce Harper still hurting, the most valuable player on the Phillies is Nick Castellanos, a strong Comeback of the Year candidate . . .
With Shane McClanahan sidelined, the AL’s All-Star Game starter could be fellow Cy Young contender Shohei Ohtani, who was already elected to start the game as designated hitter . . .
Don’t look now, but Reds reliever Alexis Diaz is pitching as well as his injured brother Edwin, normally the closer for the Mets.
Leading Off
Complete games faded long before you think
…and stop using Marichal/Spahn as a mic drop!
By Jeff Kallman
Complete games faded long before you think
And stop using Marichal/Spahn as a mic drop!
It’s come to this. Anniversaries of classic or incandescent baseball moments make you nervous instead of celebratory. Why? Because . . . social media. Bring forth some classic game’s anniversary, and you bring forth a near mob of social mediacrities ready to shoot darts into the hides of today’s “sissies” who can’t even go six, never mind nine.
Naturally, the July 2 anniversary of the Juan Marichal vs. Warren Spahn marathon—won in the bottom of the 16th when their fellow Hall of Famer Willie Mays whacked a home run to bust the shutout and win it for the Giants, 1-0—brought out some of the worst.
After all, 16 innings! And one of them was an old man of 42! So who are these money-coddled punks today fooling? They haven’t got what it takes! They’re fragile/brittle/gutless/spineless/take-your-pick-less! Spahn and Juan and those guys would have fist-fought you if you even thought of lifting them after six.
Spahn and Juan and those guys been more aberrational than you think for a very long time.
For the record, Spahn—whose hardest fastball wasn’t exactly all that fast, and who developed his trademark screwball and slider late in his career—averaged 7.7 innings per start lifetime, which was exactly 1.1 more than the major league average during his career. The left-hander was also a merry prankster off the mound who often teamed with Braves rotation mate Lew Burdette as a traveling slapstick provocateur.
Marichal—with his five-pitch repertoire and fabled array of about sixteen differing windups and maybe eight different leg kicks including the famous Rockettes-high kick—averaged 7.6 a start, also 1.1 higher than his career’s Show average. The Dominican Dandy could blow a hitter away when he wanted to do so, but most of the time the smiling right-hander (once nicknamed Laughing Boy) preferred to toy with them.
But those are partial digressions. The Marichal/Spahn marathon was an outlier among outliers just as Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan’s entire career was an outlier among outliers. “Most pitchers,” The Athletic’s Keith Law has written (in The Inside Game), “can’t handle the workloads that Ryan did . . .”
[T]hey would break down and suffer a major injury to their elbow or shoulder, or they would simply become less effective as a result of the heavy usage, and thus receive fewer opportunities to pitch going forward. Teams did try to give pitchers more work for decades, well into the 2000s, but you don’t know the names of those pitchers because they didn’t survive: they broke down, or pitched worse, or some combination of the above.
Wrote Sridhar Pappu, in The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age:
The myth that baseball players were tougher and more resilient back in the day, that they were willing to endure anything for the sheer love of the game, is just that—a myth. In truth, they were victims of terrible medical advice, merciless management, and unforgiving fans who believed that a worn-out, hurting arm signaled a kind of moral weakness.
The next time you pick up old baseball writing and see this pitcher or that pitcher described with “tired arm” or “shoulder fatigue,” your red flags should be blowing hard in the wind. Those were euphemisms for injuries severe enough to compromise or end pitching careers.
In the same year as the Marichal/Spahn marathon, Cincinnati manager Fred Hutchinson said damn the critics and lifted his young righthanded ace Jim Maloney from a game in which Maloney had a no-hitter in the making—against Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax. Maloney incurred a muscle strain in his arm, and Hutch, himself a former pitcher, didn’t hesitate. “When a fellow has an arm like that,” he told reporters, “you just don’t take chances.”
It's a shame that Hutch got nailed by cancer in 1964 and Maloney’s two successor Reds managers, Dick Sisler and Dave Bristol, behaved as though arm pain was either an excuse or an illusion. “Listen,” Bristol was once quoted as saying, “if a guy’s arm is sore he wouldn’t even be able to throw the ball. Right? If he can throw it up to the plate and get somebody out, then it can’t be that sore, so he’s gotta stay in there.”
The hard-throwing Maloney ended up pitching through shoulder issues from 1966 until his retirement after 1971. Even during his four best seasons (1963-66), Maloney averaged only thirteen complete games a year, the big weenie.
Which reminds me. At the end of the 1930s, as hitter-happy a decade as you can find, complete games fell below half at 45 percent and the average pitching start was 6.9 innings. At the end of the 1940s (and this allows for World War II’s interruption), complete games fell to 40 percent of starts and the average start lasted 6.7 innings. (Who’s checking the guts around here??)
The 1950s? Ended with 27 per cent of starts ending in complete games and an average 6.4 innings per start. The 1960s, that pitching-dominant decade? Expansion added more games to the ledger, of course, but only 22 per cent of all pitching starts ended in complete games, though the average start remained 6.4 innings. (The wimpification of the game!!)
And that was the decade in which teams became sharper about bullpen deployment and starter preservation. In fact, no less than Roger Angell himself noticed (at the end of 1968) “the instantaneous managerial finger-wag to the bullpen at the first hint of an enemy rally [has helped tip] the balance of this delicately balanced game.”
The 1970s? Ended with 20 per cent complete games; 6.3 average innings per pitching start. The 1980s? Ended with ten per cent complete games; 6.1 average innings per start. (Wussies, the lot of them!!)
We celebrate games such as as Marichal/Spahn, or Harvey Haddix’s busted 1959 perfecto in the 13th inning, because they were outliers, not because they were a norm. So quit using those games, or Nolan Ryan’s career, as the measurement. The actualities have always been different, which the harrumphers might have discovered or re-discovered if they’d done their homework before shooting their tweeters off.
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.
Cleaning Up
A Ceremonial First Pitch to Celebrate
By Dan Schlossberg
As a general rule, fans don’t pay attention to the person throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game.
But those who went to Tropicana Field on May 5 had an entirely different reaction.
That was the day Helen Kahan not only threw out the ceremonial pitch before the Yankees-Rays game but received a standing ovation from the 25,000 fans who saw it.
It’s not just that May 5 was her 100th birthday but that Helen Kahan was incarcerated in multiple Nazi concentration camps before escaping from a death march as World War 2 neared its end in 1945.
“I never got to play sports when growing up,” said Kahan, a resident of Seminole, FL who is a volunteer educator at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg.
During the pre-game festivities that included Kahan’s son and daughter, the Rays announced a $10,000 partnership grant with the museum, one of several in the state of Florida.
“I never could have imagined celebrating a birthday like this,” she told the Jewish Press of Tampa Bay. “I’m so grateful that I am here to tell my story and help the world remember why kindness and empathy are so important for us all.”
Kahan prepared for her pitch by watching her grandsons and great-grandsons play catch. In addition to her two children, she has five grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren — all of whom went to Tropicana Field to watch the family matriarch.
“It was very nice,” she said after bouncing the pitch she threw to Rays relief pitcher Kevin Kelly, one of several players who met that day. “Everybody celebrated.
“I came from a Hitler camp that did not give me anything but numbers.”
Kahan’s arm bears the number 7504, a tattoo she was given at Auschwitz. She was also incarcerated at Bergen-Belsen and Lippstadt.
Born in Romania in 1923 but deported to Auschwitz at age 21, Kahan realized a lifelong dream when she immigrated to America in 1967 with her family.
Reverberations of her first pitch continued throughout the game, which the Rays won, when the team showed a short video segment about her odyssey.
“It was the coolest thing for our entire family,” said daughter Livia Wein. “Having a lot of our friends in the stands also made it very special.”
The event was covered by ESPN and many other media outlets, including social media.
Never has such a short first pitch received such prolonged exposure. And never has one been so worthwhile.
I’m glad the Tampa Bay Rays saved their biggest hit of the season for the first pitch.
Here’s The Pitch weekend editor Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is author of 42 books, vice chairman of the SABR Elysian Fields chapter, and writer for forbes.com, USA TODAY Sports Weekly, Memories & Dreams, Sports Collectors Digest, and many other outlets. His email address is ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia
“I know we’re going to be good. We’re gonna have every chance to be in the mix for the World Series every single year. And so that gives me some kind of serious long-term comfort. We’re not going to reverse course. We’re always gonna adjust.”
— San Diego Padres owner Peter Seidler on his team’s terrible first half
Not surprisingly, Nolan Ryan struck out the most different hitters (1,182), though Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, and Zack Greinke also fanned at least 1,000 different batters . . .
Players with three five-hit games within a calendar month: George Sisler, Ty Cobb, Dave Winfield, and Luis Arraez . . .
Before he finished at .390, George Brett was still hitting .400 on Sept. 19, 1980 — the latest for anyone since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941 . . .
Two of the top four players hitting .400 after 400 plate appearances played for the Colorado Rockies: Todd Helton in 2000 and Larry Walker in 1997 . . .
According to the SABR Baseball Records Committee, Helton would have qualified for the NL batting title with a .400 average had he quit after his third plate appearance on Aug. 21, 2000 (qualifyers need 402 plate appearances) . . .
NL All-Star second baseman Luis Arraez, below .400 but maintaining a huge lead in the NL batting title derby, will be the first man to win a batting crown in one league and follow up with a batting crown in the other . . .
Speaking of Arraez, his margin over Ronald Acuna, Jr. is historic. Check out these from the past:
Largest BA leads, MLB, pre-break
1. 62 pts. -- 1977 Rod Carew (.394) vs. Bob Bailor/Ted Simmons (.332)
2. 52 pts. -- 1939 Joe DiMaggio (.435) vs. Morrie Arnovich (.383)
3. 39 pts. -- 1935 Arky Vaughan (.398) vs. Bob Johnson (.359)
4. 38 pts. -- 1983 Rod Carew (.402) vs. George Brett (.364)
5. 36 pts. -- 1955 Al Kaline (.371) vs. Roy Campanella (.335)
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.
Jeff Kallman is spot on - today's pitchers are not weenies!
Beautiful feature by Dan about the 100-year-old lady.