“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi Berra

Let me first apologize for being negligent in my writing; I’ve been doing my “Spring Cleaning” – if you can believe that! I power washed our backyard patio and pool deck; washed all of the windows in our house (inside & out); cleaned all of the nasty yellow pine tree pollen off our patio furniture; cleaned our outdoor grills; cleaned and organized the garage; purged my closet of clothes & shoes that I never wear; and sort of cleaned up my office, although a casual observer probably wouldn’t notice. Now that my “Spring Cleaning” is complete, I’m back to writing, like I never left. So, let’s talk some baseball.

The other day, I received an interesting email from a reader who stumbled across some of my baseball stories and is obviously an avid baseball fan. The part of the email that piqued my interest was a request to give my thoughts on how the game has changed since back in the day when I was bouncing around the minor leagues. After some careful consideration, I decided to share my thoughts.

Let me first say that I love the game, and I loved playing the game, but let’s face it, the game of baseball is not the same today as it was when I was playing, fifty years ago. So, let’s examine some of the changes made in the game and see if they took Yogi’s fork in the road.

Free Agency

In 1972, after being drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers, I signed MLB’s “standard contract” with a provision referred to as the “reserve clause.” The reserve clause provided that, the player could not sign a contract with another team, and at the team’s discretion, the player could be reassigned, traded, sold, or released. In other words, the player was the team’s property. All players were required to sign the “standard contract,” which resulted in the teams holding all the cards during the negotiation of a player’s salary; with the player’s only options to either accept the team’s offer or to holdout and refuse to play.

The reserve clause was effectively nullified in 1975 by the Seitz decision in the Messersmith/McNally Arbitration, a ruling by arbitrator Peter Seitz, which declared that MLB players could become free agents upon playing one year for their team without a contract. This led to the MLB players union negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with the MLB owners in 1976 that set forth the rules of free agency for the first time.

As an interesting side note, in 1976, Ted Turner signed Andy Messersmith to a three-year, $1 million contract with the Atlanta Braves, and it just so happened that I was invited to Braves spring training and got to meet the first MLB free agent millionaire!

By today’s standards, Messersmith’s $1 million free agency deal looks like peanuts. However, without Messersmith breaking the reserve clause fifty years ago, we might not have Shohei Ohtani signing a $700 million, 10-year deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2023, and Juan Soto signing a $765 million, 15-year deal with the New York Mets the following year. There’s no doubt that free agency changed everything – the ballplayers today are playing for serious money!

Money Changed the Game

My last year playing professional baseball was 1979 with the Richmond Braves (AAA), and as I recall, I got paid about $1,800/month during the five-month season, or about $9,000 for the year. The major league minimum salary that year was $21,000.

Most of the guys I played ball with, including many of the big-league ballplayers, had to work at a job during the offseason to make enough money to pay their bills. And since they were working during the offseason, they probably didn’t have time to pick up a baseball or swing a bat until a month or so before they reported to spring training.

As John Kruk, the chubby first baseman for the Phillies in the early 1990s and career .300 hitter, famously told a female reporter who questioned if athletes should smoke cigarettes in the dugout, “I’m not an athlete, I’m a baseball player.”

Unlike Kruk, most of today’s baseball players look like athletes that could play linebacker at a D1 college. However, keep in mind that today’s ballplayers are rewarded with a major league minimum salary of $760,000/year and the potential of someday hitting the lottery with a free agent contract in the multi-million-dollar range! I suspect most of them don’t have to work at a job during the offseason to make ends meet, which affords them the opportunity to spend most of their time in the gym getting bigger and stronger. Which partially explains why baseball has become more of a “power” game with pitchers focused on throwing 100mph and hitters focused on hitting home runs.

You Get What You Measure

The first time I saw a radar gun being used to clock the velocity of a pitched ball was in 1978 during spring training. Prior to the use of radar guns, a pitcher’s velocity was measured more by comparison to other pitchers. Little did we know at the time that there were “fast guns” and “slow guns” being used, so the velocity being measured was still questionable depending on which gun was being used.

As you might expect, the traditional baseball guys (coaches and scouts) were skeptical about the new technology. Kansas City Royals manager, Whitey Herzog said, “That gun doesn’t tell you if the ball has movement or not. You got guys throwing 85 miles an hour who are more effective than guys throwing 90 miles an hour.”

And my great uncle, Hugh Alexander, who was a legendary major league scout for more than 50 years, told us what he thought about radar guns, “I was against those things the first time I ever heard of the sons of guns. I’ve said this from the beginning, and I still stand by it: If you give a scout a gun, he’ll become dependent on it. What did all the guys do all those years without the gun? We did it with the naked eye, and we didn’t make too many mistakes. You can tell what a pitcher’s got if you can just see. The hitter will tell you what he’s got.”

Of course, it you’re a baseball fan and you’ve read Michael Lewis’s Money Ball or seen the movie, then you know that professional baseball has been taken over by statisticians, measuring everything from velocity of a pitch to launch angle of a batter’s swing. Not only has statistics taken over the game, but the velocity of every pitch is posted on the scoreboard during the game!

As Richard Hemming famously observed, “You get what you measure,” and now we get pitchers throwing 100+ mph! But at what cost? Even though starting pitchers are almost always limited to throwing no more than 100 pitches (a subject I will discuss later), it’s estimated that nearly 2,500 professional baseball players have undergone Tommy John surgery to repair a torn ligament in their pitching elbow, and the number of procedures has increased about 9% per year. Also consider that more than one-third of current MLB pitchers had Tommy John surgery at some point in their career.

There’s more to pitching than velocity. Johnny Sain, probably one of the best pitching coaches of all time, said that there are five key elements for a pitcher to keep the batter off balance: velocity, location, movement, change of speed, and the pitcher’s delivery. But the only one of those elements quantified on the scoreboard for the fan is velocity. Consequently, velocity became the measurement by which all pitchers are judged. However, some of the greatest pitchers of all time were not flamethrowers, but they knew how to get batters out. Greg Maddox was one of my favorite pitchers to watch, he was a surgeon on the mound, and this is how he described his formula for success, “I was very fortunate to learn at a young age that movement was more important than velocity. Location was more important than velocity.”

What’s Happened to Starting Pitchers?

When was the last time you saw a starting pitcher pitch a complete game? Last year you would’ve had a better chance of winning the lottery than seeing someone pitch a complete game.

In 2024, there were 2,430 games played in the MLB and only 26 complete games pitched. Compare that to 1975 when there were 1,942 games played in the MLB and there were 1,052 complete games pitched! Believe it or not, there was a time when it wasn’t unusual for starting pitchers to throw more than 300 innings in a season, and now it is rare for a pitcher to throw more than 200 innings.

When I played during the 1970s, we counted pitches, but there was no hardline cutoff on how many pitches you could throw before the manager would take you out of the game. In fact, one time I pitched 13 innings against the Columbus Clippers (Yankees AAA), threw more than 200 pitches and won the game. After the game, I told the reporter, “Whatever it takes to win a ballgame.” If you wanted to be a starting pitcher, that had to be your mindset. You never looked over at the dugout like you wanted to come out of the game, because it was your game to win or lose! And if you didn’t believe that, then what in the hell were you doing out there?

The 100-pitch limit for pitchers became a talking point in the 1980s, then became a more common guideline in the 1990s, and by the early 2000s it became adopted as the gospel. Today, if a coach lets a pitcher throw much more than 100 pitches in a game, they would probably be excommunicated from baseball and/or sued for malpractice. Consequently, starting pitchers rarely pitch more than five or six innings (pitchers average 15 – 18 pitches/inning) before the corps of relief pitchers are called in to finish the game. Unfortunately, a starting pitcher must pitch at least five innings to be credited with the WIN in a nine-inning game. Consequently, the 100-pitch limit could easily keep a pitcher from completing five innings and having a chance to hang a “W” by his name!

I find it interesting that the purpose of the 100-pitch limit was to reduce arm injuries; however, as pointed out earlier, over one-third of MLB pitchers have had Tommy John surgery on their elbow, and the rate of those surgeries has increased about 9% per year. I’ll go back to something Johnny Sain told me, “You get in shape to pitch nine-innings by pitching nine-innings.” Instead of banging weights in the gym, maybe these guys need to get in shape to pitch nine-innings!

Get Rid of the Shift

My son and I were sitting in the leftfield bleachers during Game 3 of the 2021 World Series. It was late in the game and the Braves were up 1 – 0, a lefthanded batter came to the plate for the Astros, and I noticed that the Braves shifted their entire defense to the right side of the field – but most unusual, their third baseman, Austin Riley, moved from his third base position to a spot about thirty feet behind the first baseman, Freddie Freeman. I nudged my son and said, “What the fuck are Braves doing, they’ve left the entire left side of the field empty, and Riley is standing in short right field behind Freeman! The Astro batter could bunt down the third base line for a double!”

The pitcher threw the first pitch, the batter got jammed and hit a weak pop fly over Freeman’s head and Riley caught the ball for the third out of the inning. Obviously, the Braves had a good scouting report on the Astros batter, but why, in a one run game, didn’t the batter just hit (or bunt) the ball to the opposite field for a gimme single and possible double so they would have the tying run on base?

In 2023, MLB and the MLB Player’s Association agreed to implement the “Shift Rule,” which restricted a team from having no more than two infielders on either side of second base before a pitch. The MLB said that the shift was “compromising the integrity of the game and that offenses weren’t able to exploit it.” Are you fucking kidding me – you mean to tell me that when the defense moved everyone to one side of the field, the hitter was unable to hit the ball to the opposite side of the field?

When the “Shift Rule” was first proposed, I asked a friend of mine who is an MLB manager why they needed a rule to stop the shift, when the hitters could easily stop it by hitting to the opposite field. He just shook his head and said that the hitters don’t believe they get paid to bunt or hit singles, they get paid to hit home runs, which was exactly why the shift worked.

This spring I saw another example of the “I get paid to hit home runs” mentality. During a spring training game, there was a runner on third base with no outs, and the defense brought the infielders in to stop the run from scoring. Almost any ground ball or weak line drive would have had a good chance of getting past the infielders and scoring a run, and most fly balls to the outfield would’ve allowed the runner to tag up and score a run. So, the hitter should’ve been focused on putting the ball in play, with a high probability that a run would score. But that’s not what this hitter did, he swung out of his ass at three pitches, struck out, and went back to dugout leaving the runner at third base. In my book, that’s bad baseball.

What happened to the hitters like Rod Carew, Pete Rose, Tony Gwynn, and Ichiro Suzuki to name a few, that could handle the bat and hit to all fields? Those were the type of guys that you hated to pitch to but loved to watch hit.

Time is Money

Baseball is one of the few sporting events that is not measured in time. The game is nine innings, and if it is tied after nine innings, the two teams keep playing inning after inning until one team wins. There is no time limit, no tie games, no sudden death, no prevent defense waiting for the clock run out. It’s the perfect game, unless you are one of the many who have sold their soul to the “time is money” rat race!

Football and basketball are played at a frenetic pace with the clock ticking. In those sports, how many times do we see a team moving the ball for a final chance to win the game, when suddenly the buzzer sounds, game over, and we’ll never know if the losing team could’ve scored the winning points. It’s a sad reminder that our days are numbered, and our time may also run out. However, baseball provides us with an expression of hope that was best expressed by Yogi Berra, when he eloquently said, “It ain’t over till it’s over!”

Some people complain that baseball games ain’t over till they’re over. But those are the same people who want tickets to the game so they can drink cocktails at the ballpark’s exclusive club while watching enough of the game on TV to be able to impress their friends with their meaningless baseball trivia. Meanwhile, the real fans enjoy watching each pitch, yelling at the umpires for their bad calls, and still have plenty of time between innings to grab a beer and a hotdog or maybe some peanuts and crackerjacks or maybe even get lucky and catch a foul ball! But it’s the TV networks who really control professional sports, and when they decided that baseball games were taking too long, then something had to be done to speed up the game.

Why Do Games Take So Long?

Traditionally, the length of time it took to play a baseball game was largely dictated by the pitcher, the catcher, and the batter. Most pitchers liked to work fast for two reasons: 1) to control the momentum of the game and keep the batter from getting comfortable in the batter’s box; and 2) to keep his fielders on their toes, so they were ready make plays. Usually, it’s the batter who attempted to gain control of the game by stepping out of the batter’s box and going through some silly routines like adjusting his batting gloves, drawing pictographs in the dirt with his bat, or scratching his nuts before getting ready to hit – all of which delayed the game.

In an MLB nine inning game, there is an average of 64 plate appearances (batter facing the pitcher). It didn’t take a genius to figure out that by reducing the time for each plate appearance by only thirty seconds would reduce the time to play a ballgame by more than thirty minutes. Since the umpires either couldn’t or wouldn’t make the pitchers and batters (mainly the batters) stop messing around to control the momentum of the game, MLB had to step in with the “pitch clock,” much like the “shot clock” in basketball, which established a specific time for the batter to get in the batter’s box and the pitcher to throw the ball.

Presto Chango, the pitch clock worked! In 2023, the first year MLB used the pitch clock, the average nine-inning game was 2 hours and 40 minutes, a decrease of 26 minutes compared to 2022, which was 3 hours and 6 minutes.

Personally, I have no problem with the pitch clock, and I like the fact that it forced the batter to stop messing around before he got in the batter’s box – after all, the fans (at least most of the fans) didn’t pay good money to watch a batter scratch his nuts!

Extra Innings

I will admit that as a player, an extra inning game was torture. After all, we didn’t get paid overtime to play extra-innings, not to mention the fact that it cut into our beer drinking time! But in retrospect, to continue playing the game with extra-innings until it was either won or lost was part of the beauty of the game. After all, “A tie is like kissing your sister.” Fortunately, I never had a sister!

George Brett, a lifetime .300 hitter for the KC Royals, used his own metaphor to motivate his teammates to win extra-inning games, “If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing your grandmother with her teeth out.” The thought of kissing your toothless grandmother would certainly motivate anyone to want to win the game!

However, the powers that be weren’t interested in the beauty of the game, they had schedules to meet, so they adopted the “California Rule” as the extra-inning tie breaker where each team started their half of the inning with a runner on second base. My first comment about this stupid rule is that anything that originated in California should be immediately outlawed! The only thing more ridiculous than the “California Rule” was when the MLB went WOKE in 2021 and moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in response to Biden’s inflammatory comments about Georgia’s new voting law. Coincidently, both the “California Rule” and decision to move the All-Star Game happened during COVID, so maybe we should blame the Chinese for infecting the MLB with a brain virus that caused those bad decisions!

Think about how difficult it can be for a team to get a runner to second base in an extra-inning game. First, a batter must get a base hit or walk. Then the manager must decide if he should: a) risk letting the next batter hit into a double play; or b) have the next batter sacrifice bunt the runner to second; or c) have the runner attempt to steal second base? However, with the “California Rule,” all the strategy involved in getting the runner into scoring position was lost. With the inning starting with a runner on second base, the only strategy remaining was to let the batter “Hit Away,” which was exactly what the statisticians and TV producers wanted.

Luke Appling

Let me end this long diatribe about the modern changes in the game I love with a story about Luke Appling. If you don’t recognize the name, Luke played for the Chicago White Sox from 1930 – 1950 with a two-year break to serve in WWII in 1944 – 1945. He had a career batting average of .310 and was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1964.

Luke was a hitting instructor for the Braves in 1978, and I had the good fortune of spending time with him in spring training and that summer while I played for the Savannah Braves.

One day, during spring training, some of us were standing around talking to Luke when the loudmouth coach for our “A” ball team began to give a pep talk to some of his hitters, telling them that they were bigger and stronger and better hitters than the old-time players. Since Luke was an “old-time player,” we turned to him and asked if he thought he could still hit today’s pitchers. After giving it some thought, he said, “Well, at 71, my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, so I might have to foul off a few balls before I hit one solid.”

Luke’s response reminds me of Toby Keith’s song about getting old, “I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.”

The game of baseball is always changing, the players get bigger, stronger, run faster, and throw harder – but at the end of the day it’s still mano a mano, pitcher against hitter. The good hitters learn to put the bat on the ball, and the good pitchers learn how to keep the hitter off-balance. And I hope that never changes.

Postscript

I purposefully didn’t address the Designated Hitter (DH) rule that was adopted in the American League in 1973 but wasn’t adopted in the National League until almost fifty years later, in 2022!

I was never much of a hitter. I could not only not hit my weight, I doubt if I could’ve hit my pet hamster’s weight. As a starting pitcher, I was conflicted on whether I should support the DH rule. On the positive side, having a good hitter DH for me could produce more runs, which would be a positive; however, on the negative side, that meant the opposing team would also have a DH in their lineup, which would be a much tougher hitter to get out than their pitcher. After careful consideration, I would favor the DH rule because I had confidence that I could get their DH out!

The other issue I didn’t address was the instant replay being used in baseball. All I can say about instant replay is that I don’t like it. I think umpires do a good job, and I don’t like second guessing them. I also don’t like the idea of abandoning the human part of the game and turning it into a video game where the umpires are replaced by computers. Think about it – who are we going to yell at if we don’t have real life umpires making controversial calls? Who are the managers going to get mad at and kick dirt on home plate when the computer misses a third strike? If the MLB and TV producers want to shorten the length of time to play a baseball game, then get rid of instant replay and let the umpires do their job!

I know that will never happen, just like I know that I will never use a typewriter to write one of these stories or a roll of Kodachrome to take a photograph, but I can still say, “Fuck Instant Replay!”

The End

[1] charts by 2018 BPI Consulting

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