Men at Work Read online

  MEN AT WORK

  The Craft of Baseball

  GEORGE F. WILL

  TO GEOFFREY MARION WILL

  “… and here’s the pitch. There’s a sharply hit ground

  ball to second… Geoffrey Will’s got it…”

  “There’s a lot of stuff goes on.”

  —TONY LA RUSSA

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 1990 EDITION: The Hard Blue Glow

  1. THE MANAGER: Tony La Russa, On Edge

  2. THE PITCHER: Orel Hershiser, In the Future Perfect Tense

  3. THE BATTER: Tony Gwynn’s Muscle Memory

  4. THE DEFENSE: Cal Ripken’s Information

  CONCLUSION: “Maybe the Players Are Livelier.”

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  As they were making their involuntary departure from the Garden of Eden, Adam remarked to Eve (or so it is said), “Darling, we live in an age of transition.” Of course, everyone everywhere always lives in such an age because change is life’s only constant. That has certainly been true of the nice slice of American life that is Major League Baseball (MLB).

  In the twenty years since the first publication of this book, baseball has experienced many exhilarating improvements and some disorienting and dispiriting turbulence. Through it all, however, baseball has remained a gift that keeps on giving because it never stops surprising, intriguing and challenging its attentive fans. Its steadily thickening sediment of statistics and other layers of history invite fresh comparisons of contemporary players and their achievements with those of previous generations. And for baseball fans, who must be the most argumentative Americans, comparisons entail controversies, which are integral to the vibrant life of the game off the field and around the calendar. Furthermore, baseball retains its remarkable capacity for evolving new subtleties pertinent to the related skills of assembling a team and playing the game. And even in baseball’s third century, it has a beguiling ability to generate enchanting new quirks. Consider this actual event from a minor-league game: a team hit into a triple play without the ball ever being touched by a fielder. How? Think about it. But while thinking, read on. You will find the answer at the end of this introduction.

  The continuing interest in this book twenty years after it was published is a tribute to baseball’s rich traditions and fascinating craftsmanship, and to the literacy—and numeracy—of baseball fans, who have an unslakable thirst for writings about the game. I am one of those fans, and in 1987 I wanted to read a book that, I discovered, had not been written.

  As a columnist preoccupied with politics and cultural matters, my purpose in writing, more often than not, is less to say what I think about a particular subject than it is to find out what I think about that subject. As an amateur student of baseball, I wrote this book during the 1988 and 1989 seasons, not to say what I knew about baseball—which, I soon discovered, was not much—but rather because no one had written it for me. I knew that, in the words of Tony La Russa that serve as this book’s epigraph, “There’s a lot of stuff goes on” out there, during a game. I, however, could not see it.

  Baseball, with the largest field of play of any sport other than polo, is the most observable of team games. The players—at most thirteen at any moment (and there are that many only when the bases are loaded)—are dispersed across a large and visually soothing green field. One can, however, observe something, be it politics or art or opera or baseball, without comprehending it. Like a novice visitor to a museum or cathedral, I needed a baseball docent.

  Actually, I decided I needed four of them. Hitting, pitching, fielding and managing are the four basic elements of baseball competition. So in the winter months after the 1987 season, I set about deciding which four people would best serve to illuminate the four crafts and finding out if they would have the time and patience to do so.

  Luck is an inexpugnable element of athletic competition; it was also a large factor in the creation of this book. It was my great good fortune that, as the 1988 season approached, baseball boasted four young, able, thoughtful, articulate and cooperative practitioners. Three were players still early in what then seemed to be promising careers. The fourth was a manager early in what has turned out to be a prodigious career.

  Before 1988, Tony Gwynn, having completed the sixth of what would be his twenty seasons, had appeared in only 769 of the 2,440 games he would play. In 1984 and 1987 he had won two of what would be his eight National League batting titles. Cal Ripken had played 992 games, less than a third of his career total of 3,001, but of those 992, he already was in—here was a harbinger of something big—a consecutive-games streak of 927. In the winter of 1987–1988 Orel Hershiser was preparing for the sixth of what would be eighteen major-league seasons. His record with the 1987 Dodgers was 16–16, but the Dodgers’ owner, Peter O’Malley strongly recommended that I make Hershiser my subject. How right he was.

  Gwynn and Ripken entered the Hall of Fame together in 2007. On induction day, the village of Cooperstown (population 2,300) had 75,000 visitors. At 4 p.m., immediately after the ceremony, I started my car, intending to drive back to Washington. Silly me. After sitting for two hours in congealed traffic a few yards from the Cooperstown Inn, where I had spent the previous two nights, I checked back into the Inn for another night. Six years into their retirements as players, Gwynn and Ripken could still draw a crowd. It was a satisfying inconvenience.

  Today, Gwynn is head baseball coach at San Diego State University, where he was a basketball as well as baseball star. SDSU is a few miles from PETCO Park, the Padres’ new ballpark. He never played there, but another Tony Gwynn, his son, now is, as his father was, a Padres outfielder. Ripken has become a baseball entrepreneur. His many youth-baseball enterprises are countering the recent tendency of other sports, such as soccer and lacrosse, to poach young talent that belongs, or so I think, in baseball. Gwynn and Ripken, who gave fans so many imperishable memories, are now transmitting the culture of the game to a rising generation of players.

  Hershiser had an excellent career, with 204 wins, 150 losses and an earned run average (ERA) of 3.48. His record was not luminous enough to earn him a place in the Hall of Fame, but it did include many good years and one of transcendent greatness. As luck would have it, that year was 1988, when he won the National League Cy Young Award with a 23–8 record and a 2.26 ERA. He set a record that still stands of fifty-nine consecutive scoreless innings and was the MVP of the World Series as he led the Dodgers to defeat Tony La Russa’s Oakland A’s. From this grateful author’s point of view, Hershiser saved his best for exactly the right season. Today, ESPN viewers get the benefit of Hershiser’s always-acute and often-acerbic baseball analysis. His is sports commentary for grown-ups.

  My book’s fourth subject is still a man at work. After the 1987 season, La Russa’s ninth in a major-league dugout, he was a manager who, at forty-three, was still young relative to many of his peers. Nineteen of the other twenty-six managers were older. La Russa then ranked sixty-fourth all-time in games managed (1,276) and sixty-first in wins (648). By the end of the 2009 season, he ranked third in games managed (4,772), third in games won (2,552), and second in games lost (2,217). It is certain that La Russa will, in due time, have a bronze plaque in Cooperstown. By then, if he chooses, he will have surpassed John McGraw’s total of 2,763 wins as a manager.

  He might choose not to. Chatting in the bowels of Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., on a late July afternoon in 2009, La Russa told me that he did not care about surpassing McGraw. Perhaps he meant that. He may well have meant it that day because it was a tiresome Monday. The Cardinals, the
n in the thick of a hotly contested National League Central Division race, were in town for only one game, a makeup of a regularly scheduled game that had been rained out a few weeks earlier. It was going to be a miserably humid—when it was not soggy—Washington night of more rain and rain delays. Under baseball’s unbalanced schedules, teams from one division are supposed to make only one visit to teams in other divisions, so umpires are reluctant to allow rain to cancel any interdivision games. Umpires would be especially reluctant to allow rain to cancel a one-game visit by a team trying to make up a previously rained-out game. La Russa knew that after rain delays and long after midnight the Cardinals would board a train for Philadelphia, where they would take the field not many hours after getting to bed early Tuesday morning.

  Which is to say, that night in Washington, when La Russa talked about walking away from the game, was the sort of night that can concentrate a manager’s mind on the attractions of getting off the major-league merry-go-round and doing something else. La Russa mentioned that he might like to run a bookstore. I will believe it when I see it.

  I do not think that, when push comes to shove, someone with La Russa’s competitive fire will bank his inner furnace before he ranks second only to Connie Mack, who holds the record for managerial wins with 3,731. That is, of course, one of baseball’s unbreakable records, as is Mack’s total of 3,948 losses. For fifty years, Mack managed the Philadelphia A’s—precursor of the Oakland A’s, who arrived on the West Coast after a thirteen-year sojourn in Kansas City. He was able to do that only because he owned the team.

  Besides, although La Russa certainly could become a Hall of Fame-caliber bookseller, serving lattes and literature to discerning customers, he is a baseball connoisseur and everyday he comes to work he gets to watch Albert Pujols, who, before his career ends, will rank among the dozen or so best position players, ever. La Russa may not choose to manage all the way to the end of Pujols’s career, but not many people ever left a Frank Sinatra concert early.

  We shall see. And speaking of seeing, since 1990 most baseball fans have been seeing their sport in better, more congenial, venues.

  The three most important developments in baseball since the Second World War were social, legal and architectural, respectively. They were the coming of Jackie Robinson in 1947, the arrival of free agency after the 1975 season and the 1992 opening of Baltimore’s Camden Yards, construction of which began in 1989, the year the writing of this book was completed. The consequences of Camden Yards were important in the Will household: In August 1990, during construction, I proposed to Mari where home plate would eventually be. The place was marked by a cinder-block. Mari wore a construction worker’s hardhat. Very fetching. My wedding ring, which I designed, features the MLB logo. Romantic that I am, I wanted Mari to know that in my heart she ranked right up there close to baseball. I shall have more to say in a moment about romanticism.

  The beneficent reverberations from Camden Yards are still being felt in the twenty-one cities where new ballparks have opened since it did.

  Forward-looking scolds are constantly telling us that we cannot turn back the clock. Fiddlesticks. Camden Yards is testimony to the truth that we can and sometimes should do exactly that. With red brick and green-painted structural steel, Camden Yards made a retro look seem fresh. Since 1992, demolition has done the constructive work of scrubbing from the surface of America the blight of “dual-use” stadiums in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis. “Dual use” is a euphemism that describes concrete piles that were lousy places to watch both baseball and football.

  It is a truism that we shape our buildings and then they shape us. The new ballparks are made for fans, and they make fans by bringing them closer to the action. I came to understand the importance of this in 2003, when I was a member of The Commissioner’s Initiative: Major League Baseball in the Twenty-first Century. Our panel’s assignment was to gather pertinent data about baseball’s fans—their preferences and complaints—and to recommend ways of making the fans’ experiences more satisfying. Our concerns ranged from the pace of play to new techniques and technologies for enriching television broadcasts of games. To me, the most illuminating datum we unearthed concerned another sport: whereas more than half of self-described baseball fans have attended a game in a major-league ballpark, 98 percent of NFL fans have never attended an NFL game. Granted, baseball fans have eighty-one chances a year to root, root, root for the home team, where NFL fans have just eight. Still, the fact that only 2 percent of NFL fans have felt impelled to set aside the bowl of Fritos, and get off their couches and out to the stadium, suggests that television makes NFL fans. Baseball fans are made by going to games, then television sustains their interest. This fact confirmed my longstanding belief that, whereas football is a spectacle, baseball is a habit.

  It is a habit that, in the last twenty years, has become easier to acquire, as is attested by soaring attendance. In 1990, MLB’s twenty-six teams drew 54,823,768 fans, for an average of 26,046 per game. In 2009, in spite of a severe economic contraction, the thirty teams drew 73,418,528, for a per-game average of 30,311. One reason for this is improved competitive balance, as indicated by the fact that eight different teams won the first nine World Series in this century.

  This improvement in competitive balance is partly a result of institutional changes in MLB. These include a “competitive-balance tax” on a few teams with payrolls above a high threshold, increased revenue sharing among the teams and a dramatic surge to MLB’s central fund revenues from advanced media, such as hundreds of thousands of fans watching games on their computers.

  I played a small part in some of these advances, which were among the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics. Its four members were Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell; Yale University President Richard Levin; and me. The panel was created by Commissioner Bud Selig in 1998. Its report influenced the owners’ agenda in the 2002 negotiations on a new collective-bargaining agreement with the MLB Players Association.

  It is likely, however, that even more important contributions to the competitive balance have been made by fresh thinking about some obvious—or so it now seems—truths about the game that have always been true but have not always been acknowledged or acted on by managers or general managers. Fresh thinking in dugouts about how the game should be played has led to fresh thinking in front offices about how to evaluate, price and assemble the fundamental asset of the baseball business—players.

  The years since this book first appeared can be called, with some forgivable exaggeration, the years when baseball slapped its palm to its forehead and exclaimed, “Come to think about it, baseball actually does have a clock—sort of.” The clock has twenty-seven ticks. They are called outs. One object of the game is to slow down the ticking. Husband your outs because, as Earl Weaver has often said, “If you don’t make the last out of the game, you never lose.”

  Weaver was the short, Napoleonic, often-irascible, sometimes-dyspeptic manager of the Baltimore Orioles. He was a scourge of American League umpires, one of whom said: “When the bastard dies, they’ll have to hire pallbearers.” Not true. His players may have fought him, but they also fought for him. He arrived at the Hall of Fame by getting them to October four times. He won 1,480 games—58 percent of all that he managed. He did so by practicing what he tirelessly preached: be stingy with your allotted outs because when you make three of them, you have to start all over again.

  Today we know with marvelous precision—because baseball’s best and brightest have crunched the numbers—what Weaver learned by the osmosis that occurs when a smart man pays close attention to his craft. For example, we know that bunting is usually a bad idea because a team is 27 percent more likely to score a run when it has a runner on first and no one out than when it has a runner on second and one out.

  Another example: When I was a bad-fielding and worse-hitting Little Leaguer
, playing for the Mittendorf Funeral Home Panthers in Champaign, Illinois, in 1952, my coach reiterated that a walk is as good as a hit. He told me that because I had a much better chance of getting a walk than a hit. The last twenty years have seen a sharp devaluation of batting average as a gauge of player value and increased interest in on-base percentage and on-base percentage plus slugging percentage (OPS). This revision of standards makes sense because a walk is a result of a constructive at bat and because not all hits are equally valuable. The difference between a 0.275 hitter and a 0.300 hitter is, essentially, one hit every two weeks. The difference between a single and a home run is 270 feet—three bases. There is a reason why Henry Aaron, who when he retired held the record for setting the most records, is proudest of having the most total bases (6,856). Advancing runners, including oneself, is pretty much the point of baseball offense.

  Some fans (and a lot more nonfans) complain that games have become slower. These critics have a point. The pace of the game would be improved if batters did not constantly step out of the batters box between pitches to take practice swings—good grief, they have been playing this game since T-Ball—and adjust their uniforms and tighten their batting gloves. (Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Hornsby, and everyone else who played before 1963 never wore those accessories.) It is, however, important to distinguish between the pace of a game and the length of a game. One reason games have become longer is that at bats have become longer—for good baseball reasons.

  Hitters have become more selective, in part because they are more willing to walk to first base. Furthermore, the more pitches a starting pitcher throws, the sooner his team is apt to be forced to resort to its relief pitchers. Middle relievers—the bridges between starters and closers—often are middle relievers because they are not good enough to be starters or closers. Teams whose hitters consistently take pitchers deep into counts, and which push the opposing starter’s pitch count close to one hundred by the seventh inning, are the teams most likely to run their season win total close to one hundred.