Category: baseball

State of the Game

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This will be a different piece today. I won’t pontificate on any subject, denigrate any group, or judge any policy. Of course, it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t hit someone, so here’s a joke from Bob Newhart:

I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means’ put down’. 

Sorry.

Today, I want to write about the state of baseball, specifically professional Major League Baseball. As much as I love the game (and always will), it is a shadow of the game it used to be. To back this up, I’ll use charts and graphs from 1967 and 1970 to the present.

Initially, I wanted to title this “Where Have All the Workhorses Gone.” Specifically, I was thinking about complete games. I checked, and in 1970, there were 852 complete games thrown by pitchers, and (as shown in the chart below) that was the lowest number of the 1970’s. Although it was the lowest number of complete games in the decade, it still accounted for 43.83% of all games played.

Contrast that with 2023, where there were only 35 complete games thrown. As a percent, 2023 matched 2022 as the lowest percent of complete games pitched at 1.48% of all games played. Here’s a chart showing complete games thrown from 1970 through 2023:

You might argue that the rise of free agency and sabermetrics, relief pitchers, and specialists has mitigated the pressure on starting pitchers, allowing teams always to have fresh arms. If that were true, you would expect the number of strikeouts to have increased over the years. And you’re right, although, as I’ll explain, that results from other factors. In fact, the number of strikeouts per game (and innings pitched) has increased since 1970.

As fans will tell you, if there are 27 outs in a game (24 if the winning team is playing at home) and 17 of them are strikeouts, that’s a boring game. And Major League Baseball listens.

Put that aside for a moment, and now consider the batter. In 1970, 27 players hit over .300. That number was steady, with an average of almost 25 players batting over .300 between 1970 and 1993. Note: 1981 was a strike-shortened season.

What happened in 1994? 1994 is considered the beginning of the “steroid” era. In 1994, 50 players hit over .300, which remained high throughout the steroid era of 1994 -2004, with an average of about 45 players batting over .300! Note: 1994 was a strike-shortened season.

After that, the wheels fell off. Between 2005 and 2023, the number of .300 hitters has steadily declined. The season that just ended only saw nine batters hit over .300. Nine.

The number is downright anemic if you look at the period from 2018 through 2023. The “high point” in that period was 2020, a season shortened not by a strike but by COVID-19 when teams were fielding players who did not opt to sit out for health reasons and when MLB was a welcome distraction from the pandemic but a shadow of its normal strength.

Okay, so if players aren’t hitting for average, they must be doing something else. Hitting for power! And the statistics bear that out.

The average number of home runs per game has increased every decade since the 1970s. The average number of home runs per game now (2.39 this decade) is higher than the average during the steroid era (2.16).

DecadeAverage Number of HRs per Game
1970’s1.49
1980’s1.61
1990’s1.91
2000’s2.15
2010’s2.14
2020’s2.39

Of course, the offset to swinging for the fences is a proportional increase in strikeouts. This brings us back to the beginning of this piece. However, instead of looking at strikeouts from the pitcher’s perspective, let us look at them from the batters. Lacing singles and hits to the gaps requires a relatively level swing. Like everything else in baseball, “launch angle” is now tracked. To hit home runs out of the stadium, your swing must be at more of an angle. Simple physics tells me that having the ball on one plane and a bat on the same plane has a better chance of contact than crossing the ball’s plane only at one point due to the increased uppercut swing. This alone should account for the drop in .300 hitters. But it has also resulted in an astronomic increase in seasonal strikeouts. Last year, there were 41,843 strikeouts during the season.

The number of players who struck out 100 times or more has increased substantially since 1970. Remember, 2020 was the pandemic-shortened year, and still, one player struck out more than 100 times!

And a new phenomenon has emerged. There are now everyday players who strike out more than 200 times a year!

There are other factors at play here. I can hear my pitcher brother talking about how the ball has changed over time, how the rules have changed, how umpires have changed. And I agree. I am identifying concerns as a lifelong fan of the game and how it has changed.

In 1967, the minimum salary in MLB was $6,000. The real median personal income in America was $4,527. Baseball players earned a multiple of 1.33 times more than the average American. The average MLB salary was $19,000, a multiple of 4.20 the average American. In 2020, the minimum MLB salary was $563,000, and the average MLB salary was $4,430,000. The median personal income in America was $62,797. The multiples for minimum and average to the average American are now 8.97 and 70.54, respectively. Put another way, the Real median personal income in America has gone up 1,287% from 1967 to 2020 ($4,527 to $62,797), whereas the minimum MLB salary has gone up 9,292% from 1967 to 2020 ($6,000 to $563,000). The average MLB salary has gone up 23,216% in the same period ($19,000 to $4,430,000).

I like home runs; I don’t like strikeouts. I love baseball, and I always will.

These are my notes. Maybe you love the modern game. I welcome any comments you may have.

My Hero Could Fly

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My kids grew up in the golden age of reading. They started reading chapter books just when the Harry Potter books took over the world. I grew up in the golden age of baseball. And by that, I mean the 1970’s. I grew up in Rhode Island that weigh station stop between Boston and New York. Many older baseball fans, stung by the Boston Braves leaving town, counted themselves as New York Yankee fans. Most of the kids I grew up with were Boston Red Sox fans. I was a Cincinnati Reds fan. Why? It’s a convoluted story of my father liking them as a kid because he followed Corky Valentine, a short-time pitcher for the Reds in the mid-1950s. Anyway, I grew up during the Big Red Machine of the mid-1970s.

I had most of the team in baseball cards. I meticulously considered my All-Star Game ballot long before dangling chads migrated to politics. And Pete Rose was my hero. He was me. He was not gifted athletically or physically. He was not a pitcher. He was aggressive “between the white lines.” And he was on one of the most dominant teams in baseball history. Tony Perez at first base, Joe Morgan at second base. Dave Concepcion at shortstop, Rose at third base, George Foster in left field, Cesar Cedeno in center field, Ken Griffey in right field, and Johnny Bench behind the plate. Believe me when I tell you, I wrote that from memory, as fresh today as it was when I was ten.

As the Fates planned, “my” Reds met my friends’ Red Sox in the 1975 World Series. Before each game, I would lay my baseball cards in their defensive positions on the rug. And while Game 6 almost caused me to drop out of school or seriously consider either homeschooling or the Peace Corps (rather than face my friends), the Reds won Game 7 and the World Series. Rose batted .370 and was named the World Series Most Valuable Player.

The thing about Rose as a player was that he was granted limited physical ability but an insatiable need to win, essentially at any cost. He was Charlie Hustle. Was he a showboat? Maybe, but he backed it up. I wanted to be a better player than I was. But I did love the game. My brother was a much better player than me, and I base that on the fact that he was a pitcher and played in college. I could barely break a window with my “fastball.” My brother once aimed at a kid’s head in Little League because he taunted him. Wrong? Maybe, but the kid didn’t do it again. Being competitive was equated with toughness. We were constantly reminded that we were not tough because we were not city-born. It was (and still is) a driving force to be overcome.

My father coached me and then my brother for many years. I can’t tell you the number of former players on those teams impressed by my father’s post-victory speech. He may have been disappointed in me (usually) or the team’s performance, but he always summarized his talk with, “The most important thing was we won, and they didn’t.” It never failed to bring goosebumps to the team. He was competitive, and so were we. Unfortunately, as my skills waned and were eclipsed by others, his pushing and my anger caused too many rifts. They ended in me withdrawing from baseball and fracturing our relationship for too long. I missed my brother’s college career because of it, and it is a regret I will live with always.

Pete Rose also made mistakes, permanently fracturing his relationship with Major League Baseball. Whether he, in the wake of the steroid era and Draft Kings advertising on MLB.com, deserves to be in the Hall of Fame cannot be settled here in 1,000 words (he does belong). He’s still a baseball fanatic and can tell you he batted .261 against Nolan Ryan for his career, but that one summer day in 1978, he went 4-4 with two doubles on an unseasonably cool July day in Cincinnati. He could tell you it was 71 degrees at game time. Ryan wasn’t supposed to pitch but came back on three days’ rest because… and he could do that with every pitcher and every game over every year of his long career.

Last weekend, my brother had the opportunity to meet Pete Rose at a baseball card show in Boston. In many ways, it culminated a baseball pilgrimage for the Fucile’s.

My dad is gone, and Rose is frail at 82, but he was my baseball hero, the tough hometown boy from Cincinnati. The Reds always were my dad’s favorite team and still are for my brother and me. My hero could fly.

Field of Memories

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Newport Historical Society Collections Online

Baseball has the ability to transcend time. Look at that photograph. Can you hear it? Ball meeting bat. Can you feel the contact in your hands? Not the connection of springtime baseball, the shock traveling from your seemingly electrocuted hands through your arms and into your teeth, but the solid contact made only in deepest summer. What position are you playing? Are you the batter? The pitcher? Infield? Outfield? On deck? On the bench? Can you hear the people in the stands? Can you smell the grass during the warm summer months? Look up. Can you see the soft white clouds watching the action as they carelessly pass overhead. That is baseball, and this was Basin Field in Newport, RI, in 1910.

Basin Field has hosted baseball games since the railroads backfilled the area initially used as a drainage area for steam engines. It is one of the oldest baseball fields in the United States and a gem.

Bernardo (Vlardino) Cardines was born in Venafro, Italy on November 15, 1895. After his father emigrated to Providence, Rhode Island, and paid for his son’s transatlantic crossing in 1907, they worked as tailors on Thames Street, eventually living with his aunt and uncle a block from what would become his namesake ballpark. Bernardo registered for service in June 1917, was drafted in April 1918, and was killed in action in France during World War I in September of that same year. Initially buried in France, his remains were exhumed and reburied in his hometown of Venafro at his father’s request, who had returned to Italy. Basin Field was renamed Bernardo Cardines Field in 1936. He may have been watching this game in 1910.

Perhaps it’s the story of the Italian immigrant, who, it is said, played baseball at the YMCA, or maybe it’s that baseball field that lives in my soul. It might be remnants of the recently played Field of Dreams game in Dyersville, Iowa, between my beloved Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago Cubs intertwined with scenes from the movie. It might be the link I share with my late father and brother, knowing we all played at Cardines. It could be that I’m just getting older and find myself warmed by the glow of glory days past, thinking of my teammates and adversaries, games and plays, moments and memories. Maybe it’s memories of watching Sunset League games played under the lights as a kid, knowing the 9 pm horn would sound from the fire station across the street and still jumping out of my skin when it went off. Cardines was the equivalent of Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium as a kid. The dream of eventually playing there was the equivalent of playing in the major leagues.

The photograph above struck me as a handshake reaching across time. The players in that photo are long gone. And yet, we share the experience of playing baseball on the same spot of land in Newport, Rhode Island. I know nothing about them other than they enjoyed the game. And that’s enough for us to be teammates and foes, brothers and friends.

Control

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Can this be how it works? I’m 57 years old and see more life in the rearview mirror than the open road ahead. With that perspective, I find it’s become essential to reflect on what I’ve done with my time on this planet. Blissfully ignorant of the repercussions of news events growing up in bucolic suburbia, adulthood, parenthood, citizenship demanded my attention as I aged. I’ve experienced events no one wants. People summarize it as “life” when you see death. I’m not special. Just frustrated.

After the massacre at the movie theater in Aurora, CO, I began to write. Not with the expectation of affecting change, but rather to give my anger, my emotions, an outlet, an offramp for the toxic blood poisoning my body. I saw gun violence stealing a generation. While some social issues had moved the Overton Window, political intransigence (keep cashing the NRA’s checks!) and eventual American ennui accepted gun violence as baked into the American fabric in the name of “freedom.”

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, CT, I began to speak. Surely, a tragedy of this scale would shock Americans (and politicians) out of their stupor. Nope! I talked to groups in Texas as the lone spokesperson for the Brady Campaign in Texas. The only one. That alone tells you all you need to know about the calculus of “I NEED my gun, dead kids and teachers be damned.” Thoughts, prayers, and sad face emojis flooded social media until America’s fruit fly attention span moved on to the latest “tragedy” affecting Kim Kardashian.

My anger peaked with the death of my wife. Fuck cancer makes a great tweet, a guttural reaction without consequence. Utterly suicidal and dying with my wife, I could not yell at the tumor. I took it out on God for a while (also useless) and even turned to God for a bit (utterly meaningless). There was no one to blame, no revenge to be had. No offramp for my anger.

And then Americans, in the obvious next step for a society that had abdicated all personal responsibility and suffered no consequences, elected a narcissistic moron president—a billionaire (if you believe him) speaking for the uneducated rubes. Merit and logic were dead. With each lie, with each crime, I expected consequences. None came. Robert Mueller fumbled the ball with no defenders anywhere near him. Facts were relegated to the trash bin. Tweets became governmental edicts. And I waited. Furious.

When I get angry (when I get down), it is because things should be easier. “Keep the simple things simple; the hard things are hard enough.” But nothing was easy. Changing a light bulb resulted in the glass bulb snapping off the metal base, a trip or two to Lowes, and a call to the electrician. Nothing was easy. Ultimately, I realized it was an absolute lack of control. There was nothing I could do about any of it. My wife was dead, guns were more important than life, freedom from fact and responsibility replaced actual democracy, and rabid evangelicals believed in Trump as the messiah. Stop the world; I want to get off.

And now we have Ukraine. Again, one man brings the world to the point of a world war—one man. Ukrainians are fighting to survive- as a nation and a people. “Denazifying” Ukraine? Really?

I’m reminded of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech as I watch an army destroy entire cities. Stepping back for a second, it seems bizarre that NATO and the UN watch the massacres with tepid financial penalties because Ukraine doesn’t belong to their club. It’s like a high school clique turning its back on a less cool student getting beaten up because they don’t wear the “right” jeans. I understand the political ramifications of engagement. But on a human level, it seems callous and impotent.

So here I am—no one special, poisoned with anger and unable to control or change anything. Hell, I can’t even watch baseball now! The billionaires are too busy fighting with the millionaires. I get the feeling that if aliens did visit earth, they’d look down and say, “Nah, they’re petulant adolescents with nascent technology and a penchant for killing each other. Keep driving.”

So, my clock continues to tick down, and I’m not ignorant enough for its promised bliss. I’ve read Viktor Frankl and Thomas Paine but still cannot find reason or acceptance. How do I accept all of this? How do I “let it go?” No, seriously, I’m asking.

Baseball

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On October 15, 2015, forty-three days after my wife died, I smiled and I cried.


Today, Major League Baseball should be opening its 2020 season. Unfortunately, like life everywhere, it is on hold as the world wobbles off its axis and addresses the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, like now, I am unsure and hesitant, worried about those I love and unsure about the future. Now, like then, I look to baseball to bring structure, excitement, comradery, and normalcy.


Today, MLB.com offered full-length games from its storied past. Without knowing why, I clicked on the American League Division Series Game 5 between the Rangers and Blue Jays. A winner-take-all game, it is better known as the game in which Jose Bautista flipped his bat after homering late in the game.


It started as a great game between pitchers Cole Hamels (Rangers) and Marcus Stroman (Blue Jays). Tied 2-2 going into the seventh inning, Rougned Odor singled for the Rangers and ended up at third after a sacrifice bunt and groundout. After Rangers’ right fielder Shin-Soo Choo took a high pitch, Blue Jays catcher Russell Martin attempted to throw the ball back to pitcher Aaron Sanchez. Unbelievably, the ball hit Shin-Soo Choo’s bat and rolled down the third baseline. Odor took off and easily crossed the plate while the Blue Jays wondered what happened.
After a long conversation between the umpires, Odor was granted home plate as the ball was considered “live.” Needless to say, in a tight game, the Toronto fans erupted in protest. Bottles, cans, and trash were thrown onto the field. Play stopped for what seemed forever. After such a close game, I, too, was upset to see a team lose a playoff series in such a meaningless manner. After failing to save my wife from the relentless attack of cancer, my sense of life’s unfairness seemed to distill itself into this moment. I was incensed. What happened next, through baseball, I still can’t properly process.


In the bottom of the seventh inning, through a series of errors that almost made me believe in (at least a baseball) god and righting the wrong from the previous half-inning, Jose Bautista stepped to the plate. With the fans (and me) standing and on a 1-1 count, pitcher Eric Dyson threw a meatball that righted my world. The monster blast that Bautista hit into the upper deck released every pent up emotion I had no way of handling following my wife’s death 43 days earlier.


With my children back at school, finishing their senior year at the University of Texas at Austin, I was living alone at home with my dying dog who would not see Opening Day the following season. My days at work were blue and my lonely nights and weekends utter blackness. Fortunate enough to have cable and splurging on the MLB package, baseball was my roommate, the television conversation.


To have the game I love bring a sense of fairness, where doing the right thing is rewarded in positive results, meant the world to me. To see the Blue Jays (and Bautista) win the game and set straight a correct but unnatural technicality somehow made me weep as if I had beaten cancer for my wife (or was even a Blue Jays fan). I watched that game today and realized how soon after my wife’s death that game took place and how much it meant to me then and why.


That day, baseball showed me a flicker of fairness. That day, Bautista did something I could not. That day, baseball brought me back.

When it is safe, baseball will bring us back again.

Inside Baseball

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I have been a baseball fan my entire life. Although there was a time when I was far too busy to follow the game or attend any of my brother’s games. I do not feel any regret for dropping any of the professional game’s doings, but I do have unending guilt for having missed my brother’s games. I was in the midst of starting a family and cultivating a career. There was no extra time in my life to allot to following the careers of those being paid millions to play the game I would have played freely only a few years before. Nor did I have any time to follow my favorite team. With 162 games to follow and 30 teams, there was no room in my simple brain to shoehorn in anything more than my job, keeping up the house, nurturing my young marriage and learning to be a father to twins. However, I should have made the time to see my brother play or at least to have inquired as to his success more often than I did.

Now the kids are all but off on their own and my wife has died. My career is a priority again after seven years as I focus once again on my job instead of my wife’s disease. I have just purchased a condo, so most of the upkeep that previously occupied my mind has been alleviated. And so, now I return to the game I love. I still only have so much room in my aging mind to keep track of statistics, so I find it easier to follow the local team instead of my boyhood team. To be sure, I still keep tabs on the Cincinnati Reds, but I also enjoy watching the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. I am one of the few people that can be a fan of both the Yankees and the Red Sox. In fact, I will usually root for the team behind in the standings whenever they play one another.

I spent the majority of my life hating the Red Sox. I was raised deep in Red Sox Nation and found that their fans were not baseball fans but Red Sox fans, a crime profoundly egregious to me. I found that those who followed only the Red Sox could not name many other players on any other team, nor tell me much about any other team. I was raised that this was an affront to true baseball fans. Now that I have reached middle age and have interests and obligations beyond baseball fandom, I understand why some limit their exposure to the local team. I try to keep track of other teams and succeed for brief periods of time; however, it is infinitely easier to keep abreast of the goings on of your local team when the news and newspapers are flush with necessary information. Unfortunately, due to my wife’s passing, I have an exceedingly large amount of free time now. I find that watching baseball on television not only fills the house with necessary sound to drown out the din of my ringing ears, but it wards off the loneliness being alone causes.

And it is not a question of latching on to a winner as the Red Sox are, I believe, destined to land in the middle of their division by season’s end, mostly due to the fact that they are both young at most positions and the fact that they do not have a starting rotation to compete throughout the year. I will keep track of other teams and certain individual players and once October rolls around, I will be wholeheartedly invested in the post season.

Baseball has been accused of being an old and dying game by some, including some big league players. However, I think it is a game which demands the best of a player on several layers, unlike most other team sports. Much of the mental game going on in a baseball game can go unnoticed by the casual fan. There are set plays in football that either work or don’t. There are very few set plays in baseball as each pitch represents a variety of opportunities. Should the pitcher throw inside and low, outside and high, off speed, a curve, slider, knuckleball, or bring the high heat with a two-seam fastball or a four-seam? Will the batter be thinking the same as the pitcher and try to take the outside pitch to the opposite field or try to pull the inside fastball? And what of the player on first base? Will he be looking to run? Will there be a hit and run, a bunt to move him along, will the batter try to hit behind the runner? And where does the defense align themselves? Are the middle infielders set to turn a double play, are the outfielders pulled in and on the lines to prevent a ball getting past them in the late innings? What signs is the manager flashing to the catcher? What signs have the catcher and first baseman worked out together? What about the signs the third base coach is flashing to the batter and man on first? Most of this invisible game is missed by the casual observer and it all resets after the next pitch.

Don’t get me wrong, baseball is not inhabited by brilliant people. Most players are no brighter than the average jock, but they are dedicated and knowledgeable of their profession. And it is incumbent upon the fan to follow along or risk having the game seem slow and boring. There is usually so much going on inside the game that there are rarely boring periods of the game. To get into a game at the deepest levels as a fan is to see a chess match played out in front of you. And it sets up the fan to participate in conjecture before each pitch. This is anything but boring. And that is not mentioning the physics involved in the game. Consider how difficult it is to hit a small sphere with a thin cylinder. Only one spot on the sphere will ever come into contact with the thin cylinder at a given time. Now try to place where you want the small sphere to go while the deliverer of the small sphere takes advantage of the effects the atmosphere has on the lacing of the small sphere by throwing it in order to have it curve inside, outside or down, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics. Now do all of that while 50,000 people are staring at you some expecting you to hit the small sphere a long way with your thin cylinder while others are hoping the deliverer of the small sphere can get the small sphere past you and into a predetermined zone acceptable to an arbitrator standing behind you. No, baseball is not an easy game, nor is it boring.

Baseball has been very good to me even when I was not very good to it. I have gone from a rabid fan to a father/husband and now to a fan again. Play ball.