As the end of the 2002 season approached, the Milwaukee Brewers had a decision to make: Should they play their regular shortstop, Jose Hernandez, or should they bench him?
Hernandez was not injured, nor was he in a slump. Furthermore, with a 53-98 record the Brewers pretty much had locked up last place in the National League Central.
No, this was not about the Brewers generally but about Hernandez specifically. The shortstop had struck out 185 times the previous season, just missing Bobby Bonds’ major league record of 189, but now, with 11 games remaining, he had struck out 186 times and would almost certainly break the record if he played in the final games.
The Brewers, with Jerry Royster as the manager, decided to hold Hernandez for most of the remaining games. He played in four of the 11 games, struck out twice and finished with 188.
This scenario would not occur today. If strikeouts were undesirable and embarrassing then, they are not now.
“Cyber works have done all that,” Bob Boone said. “It’s just an out. There’s no caring about it like there used to be. You might hit a home run instead.”
Why doesn’t anyone care about strikeouts anymore, I asked Boone, a two-decade major league catcher, now an executive with the Washington Nationals. “Sabermetrics guys say it’s not a big deal.”
Not everybody is sold on the idea, Boone included.
“A hundred years ago,” Boone said, exaggerating slightly, “when Greg Luzinski was in Double A and I was around, Deron Johnson was helping Greg a lot and he said, ‘You keep swinging like that, you’re going to strike out a hundred times. You’re not going to the big leagues if you strike out that much.”
Luzinski got to the big leagues briefly in 1970 and struck out 32 times in 100 times at bat in 1971. He struck out more than 100 times in 10 of 13 seasons but reached 140 only twice, but he also hit 307 home runs in his career.
“It used to be embarrassing for a guy to strike out a hundred times,” Boone said. “I know it was for me personally. The embarrassment’s gone. Swing hard in case you hit it.”
Omar Minaya didn’t get a chance to strike out 100 times in the majors, but he was good at evaluating players and the likelihood of striking out.
“To me, strikeouts aren’t just an out,” said Minaya, who was general manager of the Montreal Expos and the New York Mets. “It means he has holes in his swing. Contact, to me, means a pitcher has to work. Putting the ball in play has a value. It can move runners over. Some people say RBI’s have no value. When I hear things like that, I say what are you talking about?”
While he was at it, Minaya mentioned some other recent developments that he didn’t care for. One was the idea that that wins for pitchers are outdated and meaningless.
“You say that to Tom Seaver and see what he says,” Minaya said. He also said, “Some people value power over contact. One thing that is talked about more and more is lifting the ball, lifting the ball more than contact. Lifting the ball off the bat. By lifting the ball, you’re going to have a better chance of hitting a home run, but in lifting the ball, you’re going to have more weaknesses and you would strike out more.
“With all the shifts, guys don’t even try to hit the ball to the opposite field. All these things are coming into play. A statistical analysis is done about value. Striking out was something you just didn’t do. Striking out was non-productive. People see striking out now as ‘well, if you have power and you strike out it balances out.’ I don’t believe it, but that’s what I’m hearing.”
And one more thing:
“Exit speed off the bat. Who cares?”
I couldn’t have expressed all of Minaya’s views better myself, except to add I thought when a ball clears a fence it’s a home run however far it goes and however fast it leaves the park. But this is a gimmick baseball’s technologists have come up with, and the results of their work is all over telecasts, no matter how meaningless it is.
But back to strikeouts, which gained particular prominence recently when the Yankees and the Cubs played an 18-inning game and their pitchers struck out their batters 48 times, most ever in a game of any length.
Aaron Hicks and Chase Headley each struck out four times for the Yankees, and five Chicago batters – the first three in the lineup and two lower in the lineup – struck out three times each.
In the 10th inning and top half of the 11th all nine batters struck out. Adam Warren added a 10th straight in the bottom of the 11th.
Can’t anyone here hit the ball?
“It’s a different thought process that’s evolved over the years,” said Dave Dombrowski, president of Boston’s baseball operations. “I remember when striking out 100 times for a big league hitter was a lot. They didn’t want to do that. It’s changed. It’s not like that anymore. You see a much different approach with a lot of players, most players actually.
“We’ve seen the evolution over the years where people put more emphasis on hitting the long ball. There’s really no change in approach when a batter has two strikes. That’s taken place over a long period of time and there’s no change in approach and it continues to evolve.”
Entering Sunday’s games the Red Sox had struck out the fewest times, 228, in the majors.
“It’s a difference in approach we take,” Dombrowski said, crediting the team’s hitting coach, Chili Davis. “We put emphasis on using the whole field and trying to make some adjustments with two strikes if necessary. That’s Chili Davis’ thought process.”
John Schuerholz, the Atlanta Braves’ Hall of Fame executive, offered a combination of reasons for the way pitchers appear to have become the dominant force in the game.
“Pitchers are being taught to throw hard at a young age,” he said, “especially when they’re at a caliber of travel team play. They know how hard they throw is the primary reason scouts put them on their lists. And if they throw hard and strike out people throwing hard that’s a good thing. It gives them recognition and it gets them on those teams. It gives them a better chance to go to college or a start in professional career.”
Size and strength also help, the Braves’ vice chairman said, except in cases where “their bodies can’t handle it and their muscles overwhelm their ligaments and tendons and the tissues in their arms and they fall apart.”
On the major league level, Schuerholz added another factor.
“We as professional baseball people” he said, “have begun structuring our pitching staffs in a way that after the sixth inning or starting in the sixth innings there are specialists. So when a pitcher starts a game there usually is a plan about who will come in to pitch the ensuing innings depending on the quality of the game and the score at that time.
“They have an overwhelmingly powerful fastball or a devastatingly wicked breaking ball or out pitch that gets people out in the seventh, eighth or ninth inning. So we have bigger, stronger kids who are throwing hard up to the measure of the radar gun and pitching on travel teams and other high-end competitive teams that demonstrate they should be considered for that quality of team.”
Should Major League Baseball be concerned with the increasing strikeout rate? After all, more strikeouts mean less hitting and less action for fans to enjoy.
“Baseball shouldn’t be concerned,” Schuerholz said, “because it’s cyclical. Sometimes it’s the age of the dominant pitcher. Sometimes it’s the age of the productive hitter. Sometimes the draft is racked with hitters, not often, not usually. But that happens. Then that cycle works its way through professional baseball in an 8 to 10-year period and then the cycle turns back to dominant pitchers and I think we’re probably seeing that now.”
Commissioner Rob Manfred hasn’t been in baseball as long as Schuerholz and, in his zeal to enhance the game for fans, may want to use the recent 18-inning game as Exhibit A for instituting a major change in the way baseball is played, for example starting each extra inning with a runner or runners on base.
He would be wise to let Schuerholz’s cycle exhaust itself and keep the game intact for the fans. Manfred could also urge the clubs to follow Chili Davis’ philosophy and teach their hitters how to make contact with the baseball.
K IS FOR STRIKEOUT AND KRAM
Wanting to be fair to sabermetrics, I asked my metrics mogul to comment on the idea that sabermetrics is the reason strikeouts are soaring. This is Zach Kram’s report:
1. One of the biggest reasons strikeouts have increased recently is pitchers are throwing a lot harder than ever before. In 2008, only 16 pitchers who threw at least 30 innings that year averaged 95 mph with their fastball; last year, 64 pitchers did. Obviously, higher velocity leads to more strikeouts, and higher velocity has become a league-wide phenomenon. Pretty much every team now has a handful of relievers who can throw in the upper 90s.
2. The strike zone has become bigger (particularly at the bottom of the zone), as documented, among other places, at the Boston Globe here. In the offseason that Rob Manfred proposed changing the zone to combat this problem, but obviously, if the zone increases in size, more Ks will follow.
Now the sabermetrics part comes into play. Sabermetrics don’t say that a strikeout is the same as any other out; things like run value charts that analysts use acknowledge that an out on a ball in play is generally better than a strikeout because it has the chance to move runners over—though this difference isn’t as great as some people might think because putting the ball in play could also lead to a double play, which a strikeout can’t (editor: unless a runner is out trying to steal on the third strike), so it negates the advantage of putting the ball in play somewhat.
Further, trying for more power often has the tradeoff of leading to more strikeouts, either because the batter doesn’t shorten his swing and therefore swings and misses more, or because he becomes more patient waiting for the “right” pitch to drive and therefore falls further behind in counts. And that’s where sabermetrics have the most emphasis, probably, because especially in recent years, more players have tried to hit for doubles and homers rather than singles (besides the Ichiro and Ben Revere types, of course), which increases both extra-base hits and strikeouts.