Full House Read online

  Moreover, the three living lineages include only a fraction of former perissodactyl diversity, for several major groups have been lost entirely— including, most spectacularly, the large-bodied and prominently horned titanotheres of early Tertiary times, and the chalicotheres, with their powerful digging claws.

  Steady perissodactyl decline has been matched by a reciprocal rise to dominance of the contrasting artiodactyls, once a small group in the shadow of ruling perissodactyls, and now the most abundant order, by far, of large-bodied mammals. The perissodactyls survive as three twiggy vestiges. Artiodactyls are the lords of largeness—cattle, sheep and goats, deer, antelopes, pigs, camels, giraffes, and hippos. Need any more be said? Horses are remnants of a remnant, yet their story provides our false icon of progress—life’s little joke. Antelopes represent the most vigorous family in an expanding and dominant group—but who has ever seen a picture of this group’s astonishing success? Antelopes are examples of nothing in our museums and textbooks.

  I therefore submit that the history of any entity (a group, an institution, an evolutionary lineage) must be tracked by changes in the variation of all components—the full house of their entirety—and not falsely epitomized as a single item (either an abstraction like a mean value, or a supposedly typical example) moving on a linear pathway. As a final footnote to life’s little joke, I remind readers that one other prominent (or at least parochially beloved) mammalian lineage has an equally long and extensive history of conventional depiction as a ladder of progress—yet also lives today as the single surviving species of a formerly more copious bush. Look in the mirror, and don’t be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.

  Part Three

  THE MODEL BATTER :

  EXTINCTION OF

  0.400 HITTING AND THE

  IMPROVEMENT OF

  BASEBALL

  6

  Stating the Problem

  During my lifetime, two events clearly stand out above all others as milestones in the history of batting in baseball: Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak (see page 32), and Ted Williams’s seasonal batting average of 0.406. Unfortunately, I missed them both because I was too busy gestating during the season of their joint occurrence in 1941. Boston Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy had offered to let Williams sit out the meaningless doubleheader of the season’s last day (the Yankees had clinched the pennant long before). Williams’s average stood at 0.3995, and would have rounded up to an even 0.400. No one had hit 0.400 for ten years, since New York Giants first baseman Bill Terry reached 0.401 in 1930. Ted couldn’t bear to back in. He played both games, went 6 for 8, and finished the season at 0.406. No one has hit 0.400 since then (closest calls include George Brett at 0.390 in 1980, Rod Carew at 0.388 in 1977, and Ted Williams himself at 0.388, sixteen years later in 1957, the season of his thirty-ninth birthday) . So I’m still waiting to see for myself what life in utero denied to my conscious understanding—and I’m not getting any younger.

  Between 1901, when the American League began and Nap Lajoie hit 0.422, and 1930, when Terry hit 0.401, batting 0.400, while always honored, cannot be called particularly rare. League-leading averages exceeded 0.400 in nine of these thirty years, and seven players (Nap Lajoie, Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson, George Sisler, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Heilmann, and Bill Terry) reached this apogee, three times each for Cobb and Hornsby. (Hornsby’s 0.424 in 1924 tops the charts, while three players exceeded 0.400 in 1922—Sisler and Hornsby in the National League, Cobb in the American. I am, by the way, omitting the even more common nineteenth-century averages in excess of 0.400, because differing rules and practices in baseball’s professional infancy make comparison difficult.) Then the bounty dried up: the thirties were a wasteland (despite high league averages during this decade, as I shall show later); Williams reached his lonely pinnacle in 1941; since then, zip.

  If philately attracts perforation counters, and sumo wrestling favors the weighty, then baseball is the great magnet for statistical mavens and trivia hounds. Consider baseball’s virtues for the numerically minded: Where else can you find a system that has operated with unchanged rules for a century (thus permitting meaningful comparison throughout), and has kept a complete record of all actions and achievements subject to numeration? Moreover, unlike almost any other team sport, baseball’s figures are records of individual achievements, not elusive numbers that may be assigned to a single player, but really record some aspect of team play— for baseball is a congeries of contests between two individuals: hitter versus pitcher, runner versus fielder. Thus, records assigned to players of the past can be read as their personal achievement, and can be compared directly with the same measures of modern performers. No wonder, then, that the largest organization of scholarly fans, the Society for American Baseball Research, is so numerically minded, and has contributed, through its acronym, a new word to our language: sabermetrics, for the statistical study of sporting records.

  Humans, as I have argued, are trend-seeking creatures (perhaps I should say "storytelling animals," for what we really love is a good tale— and, for reasons both cultural and intrinsic, we view trends as stories of the best sort). We are therefore driven to scan the charts of baseball records for apparent trends—and then to devise stories for their causes. Remember that our cultural legends include two canonical modes for trending: advances to something better as reasons for celebration, and declines to an abyss as sources of lamentation (and hankering after a mythical golden age of "good old days"). Since 0.400 hitting is both so noticeable and so justly celebrated, and since its pattern of decline and disappearance so clearly embodies the second of our canonical legends, no other trend in baseball’s statistical history has attracted such notoriety and engendered such lamentation.

  The problem seems so obvious in outline: something terrific, the apogee of batting performance, was once reasonably common and has now disappeared. Therefore, something profoundly negative has happened to hitting in baseball. I mean, how else could you possibly read the evidence? The best is gone, and therefore something has gotten worse. I devote this chapter to the paradoxical claim that extinction of 0.400 hitting really measures the general improvement of play in professional baseball. Such a claim cannot even be conceived while we remain stuck in our usual Platonic mode of viewing 0.400 hitting as a "thing" or "entity" in itself—for the extinction of good items must mean that something has turned sour. I must therefore convince you that this basic conceptualization is erroneous, and that you should not view 0.400 hitting as a thing at all, but rather as the right tail in a full house of variation.

  7

  Conventional Explanations

  More ink has been spilled on the disappearance of 0.400 hitting than on any other statistical trend in baseball’s history. The particular explanations have been as varied as their authors, but all agree on one underlying proposition: that the extinction of 0.400 hitting measures the worsening of something in baseball, and that the problem will therefore be solved when we determine what has gone wrong.

  This chorus of woe may be divided into two subchoirs, the first singing a foolish tune that need not long detain us, the second more worthy of our respect as an interesting error reflecting the deeper mistake that made this book necessary. The first explanation invokes the usual mythology about good old days versus modern mollycoddling, Nintendo, power lines, high taxes, rampant vegetarianism, or whatever contemporary ill you favor for explaining the morally wretched state of our current lives. In the good old days, when men were men, chewed tobacco, and tormented homosexuals with no fear of rebuke, players were tough and fully concentrated. They did nothing but think baseball, play baseball, and live baseball. Just look at Ty Cobb, sliding into third, spikes high (and directed at the fielder’s flesh). How could any modern player, with his high salary and interminable distractions, possibly match this lost devotion? I call this version the Genesis Myth to honor the appropriate biblical passage ab
out wondrous early times: "There were giants in the earth in those days" (Genesis 6:4). I don’t think that we need to take such fulminations seriously (I shall give my reasons a bit later). For salaries in millions that can last for only a few years of physical prime and be lost forever in a careless moment, modern players can muster quite ferocious dedication to their craft; modern ballplayers certainly take better care of their bodies than any predecessor ever contemplated in the good old days of drinking, chewing, and womanizing.

  The second, and more serious, approach tries to identify a constellation of factors that has made batting more difficult in modern times, and therefore caused the drop-off in leading averages. I shall argue that, while several of these explanations correctly identify new impediments to hitting, the premise of the entire argument—that disappearance of 0.400 hitting can only be tracking the decline of batting skills (either absolute or only relative)—is flat wrong. The extinction of 0.400 hitting measures the general improvement of play.

  The Genesis Myth finds greatest support, unsurprisingly, among the best hitters of a more disciplined (and less remunerative) age who must suffer the self-aggrandizing antics of their modern, but now multimillionaire, counterparts. Ted Williams, the last 0.400 hitter, told reporters why his feat will not be soon repeated (USA Today, February 21, 1992): "Modern players are stronger, bigger, faster and their bodies are a little better than those of thirty years ago. But there is one thing I’m sure of and that is the average hitter of today doesn’t know the little game of the pitcher and the hitter that you have to play. I don’t think today there are as many smart hitters."

  In his 1986 book, The Science of Hitting, Williams made the same claim, and explicitly embraced the key postulate of the Genesis Myth by stating that, since baseball hadn’t altered in any other way, the decline of high hitting must record an absolute deterioration of batting skills among the best:

  After four years of managing ... the one big impression I got was that the game hadn’t changed.... It’s basically the same as it was when I played. I see the same type pitchers, the same type hitters. But after fifty years of watching it I’m more convinced than ever that there aren’t as many good hitters in the game.... There are plenty of guys with power, guys who hit the ball a long way, but I see so many who lack finesse, who should hit for average but don’t. The answers are not all that hard to figure. They talked for years about the ball being dead. The ball isn’t dead, the hitters are, from the neck up.

  In 1975, Stan Musial, Williams’s greatest contemporary from the National League, echoed similar thoughts about declining smarts in an article titled "Why the .400 Hitter Is Extinct" (in Durslag, 1975). "In order to be successful ... batters must have a quality that isn’t too common today. They must be able to go to the opposite field. Somehow, this art hasn’t been mastered by too many of today’s players."

  And lest one wrongly conclude that such thoughts circulate only among dyspeptic old warriors, consider a journalist’s opinion written in 1992, as Toronto’s John Olerud made a credible bid, but fell short (Kevin Paul Dupont in the Boston Globe): "Too few smart hitters. Too many guys looking for the baddest pair of wraparound sunglasses rather than sharpening the shrewdest hitting eye."

  The more reasonable, and partly correct, second category—the claim that changes in play have made batting more difficult (the Genesis Myth, on the contrary, holds that the game is the same, but that batters have gotten soft)—includes two distinct styles of argument among its numerous versions. I shall call these two styles "external" and "internal." The external versions maintain that commercial realities of modern baseball have imposed new impediments upon performance.3 This theory of "tougher conditions" features three common arguments, always fervently advocated when this greatest of all statistical puzzles hits the hot-stove league: too much travel within too grueling schedules; too many night games; and too much publicity and constant prying from the press (particularly when a player threatens to reach a plateau like 0.400 hitting).

  The internal argument holds that aspects of the game opposed to hitting have outstripped the power of batters to compensate and respond in kind—in other words, that batters have not been able to keep up with increased sophistication in other aspects of play. This "tougher competition" theory also features three arguments (each with several subcategories)— rather obvious in this case, as representing the three institutions of baseball that might challenge good hitting:

  Better pitching (invention of such new pitches as the slider and split-fingered fastball; the establishment of relief pitching as a specialty, with a resulting requirement for facing new and fresh arms in late innings, rather than a tired opponent seen several times before in the same game).

  Better fielding (conversion of gloves from tiny protective coverings to much larger, ball-gobbling machines; general improvement of defense, particularly in coordination among fielders).

  Better managing (replacement of intuitive, "seat of the pants" leadership with modern, computer-assisted assessments of strengths and weaknesses for each individual batter).

  In supporting the external theory of "tougher conditions," for example, Tommy Holmes stressed the subtheme of "harder schedules" in his article "We’ll Never Have Another .400 Hitter" in the February 1956 issue of Sport magazine:

  They [0.400 hitters of yore] started all of their single games in mid-afternoon, doubleheaders a little earlier. They never played later than sundown and usually were finished hours before dark. They did not play in the hot sunshine of one day and in the heavy damp night air the next. If they did not get the proper rest and eat proper food at regular hours, it was nobody’s fault but their own.

  For the other two subthemes, my colleague John J. Chiment of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University polled the large contingent of baseball fans in his lab, and sent me the following in defense of the nocturnal theory (letter of April 24, 1984): "The consensus at BTI favors ’Night Games’ as the real problem. You just can’t hit’m if you can’t see’m. Which is not to say that ’The rise of the speciality relief pitcher’ and ’Modern moral turpitude’ don’t have their adherents."

  Finally, in June 1993, Colorado Rockies manager (and former savvy player) Don Baylor upheld the "intrusive press" theory when his star Andres Galarraga and Toronto’s John Olerud both exceeded 0.400 (before their predictable decline later in the season): "Can you imagine the pressure there’d be nowadays, the press conferences that would be held after every game? If a guy is hitting 0.400 in August?" As Olerud continued to flirt with 0.400 in August, George Brett blamed the same source—and he should know, for his average stood at 0.407 on August 26, 1980, while he finished that season at 0.390. Brett remembered the journalistic assault:

  It was the same damn questions over and over and over. Gees, it was monotonous, and boring. In 1961, when he was chasing Babe Ruth [for the record of home runs in a season] Roger Maris lost his hair. In 1980, I got hemorrhoids. I don’t know what will happen to John, but I imagine it will be something.

  The internal theory of "tougher competition" also enjoys wide support in all three major versions:

  1. BETTER PITCHING. During my lifetime as a fan, pitching has changed more dramatically than any other aspect of the game. In my youth, during the late 1940s, most pitchers relied on curves and fastballs and they expected to work a full nine innings unless seriously shelled and tired. Relief pitching didn’t exist as a specialty; if the starter tired, the manager just put in the next man available. Now, nearly all pitchers have expanded their repertoire, with sliders and split-fingered fastballs as favored additions. And relief pitching has become an essential component of all good teams, with recognized subspecialties of middle relievers (good for several innings of work when starters falter) and closers (all-out throwers for a crucial final inning, day after day).

  Better pitching has therefore figured prominently in attempts to explain the disappearance of 0.400 hitting. Stan Musial, for example, stated (in Durs
lag’s article, cited previously, on "Why the .400 Hitter Is Extinct"):

  Two things have pretty much taken care of the .400 prospect. One is a thing called the slider.... It isn’t a complicated pitch, but it’s troublesome enough to take away the edge that batters used to have. A second reason is the improvement of the bullpen.

  2. BETTER FIELDING. Holmes (1956, pages 37-38) cites "the tighter defenses that are rigged against the hitter today" as the primary reason for why (as his title proclaims) "We’ll Never Have Another .400 Hitter." Holmes views more efficient gloves as the primary culprit (and he was writing in 1956, when gloves were downright diminutive compared with today’s baskets and snares):

  Probably the sporting-goods manufacturers made an even greater contribution to curbing batting averages by producing gloves and mitts vastly superior to the ones old-timers wore.... The player actually did catch the ball with his hands, and his gear served to reduce the numbing impact. Now a glove is an efficient magnetic trap for the ball.... Today the glove, not the hand, makes the catch, with the deep pocket between the thumb and first finger doing the work.

  3. BETTER MANAGING. Computers and boardroom tactics now permeate managerial staffs. Charters and number-crunchers scrutinize every swing, trying to locate a batter’s weakness. Richard Hoffer (1993, page 23) cites more "scientific" managing as the main reason for the demise of 0.400 hitting. Speaking of Williams’s last success, in 1941, Hoffer writes, "He didn’t have to cope with the constant charting, the defensive structure that managers routinely call into place now."