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| Uncle Charlie is in the House |
| 05.10.04 (9:43 am) [edit] |
You know, right now the world is just too damn depressing to write anything even remotely amusing about world events. So I'll turn once again to the great American pastime, baseball.
Baseball is by far the hardest of the major professional sports. I am not going to belabor or argue the point. It just is. OK, one logical argument. Every year ESPN televises the basketball and football draft days. People hang on every word. Nobody cares about the baseball draft. This is because the chances of a rookie making an impact in their first year of professional ball is about nil. You have to learn baseball. Because it is so damn hard. If you want to boil it down, one thing makes baseball the hardest sport: the curveball. Yep, one lousy stinking pitch makes the whole game.
Baseball is a fascinating sport because of its balance. There is a balance between the pitcher and the batter. It is not a perfect balance, as the batter fails about 60 percent of the time. But the sucess rate is just enough make for a dramatic tension that rises and falls throughout each game. If pitchers are too successful, then games are boring. Zero to zero ties are not generally considered exciting. If batters are too successful, the tension goes out and games simply becomes an exercise to see if the last batter can score one more run to win. The curveball is a major factor in creating this balance. But how is it, you might ask, that the lowly curveball creates the dramatic tension that is baseball?
The first pitch of baseball was and is, the fastball. It is pretty much just a regular throw, but very, very hard. Major league fastballs are often over 90 mph. At that speed, the batter has less than a tenth of a second to decide whether or not to swing and where. Remarkably, however, major league batters can do just that. We are talking superhuman eye-hand coordination here. If the relatively straight fastball were the only pitch that could be thrown, no matter how fast, Major Leaguers would have a field day. Instead of failing 60 percent of the time, they would probably start succeeding at a 70 percent or higher rate. If they know or guess that a fastball is coming, any good hitter can knock that pitch a long, long way. We are talking fifteen or twenty home runs a game. Enter the curveball.
Fortunately for pitchers, the curveball changes everything. Where the fastball is straight, the curveball, well, curves. Instead of coming straight in, the curve moves down and away from the batter. But this is not it's most devastating feature. When the pitcher throws a curve, he releases the ball in the exact spot where he would if he was throwing a fastball right at the batter's head. So, in that tenth of a second, the batter has decide if he is going to die by being hit in the head, or if it is a curveball. It really is like that. Next time you watch a baseball game on TV, watch when they show the batter from the pitcher's point of view, watch the batter's feet. When the curve comes, you can see lesser batters flinch. Sometimes they will even duck out of the way of a pitch that ends up in the dirt. The curve does change everything.
Armed with a curveball, the advantage swings dramatically back to the pitcher. Now that any pitch could be either a curve or a fastball keeps hitters off balance. Almost no amount of eye-hand coordination can make up for the fact that the batter now is thinking "what pitch will he throw now?" A curveball makes a fastball seem even faster, as the batter spends part of his precious tenth of a second identifying the pitch. Greg Maddux, master curveball pitcher, gave up half as many runs per game as Nolan Ryan, the hardest throwing pitcher in baseball history.
Fortunately for the balance of the game of baseball, the curveball contains the seeds of its own destruction. There are two levels where the curveball actually works against the pitcher, one during each at-bat and one that takes place over the course of the season.
The curveball is notoriously difficult to throw well. It often does not go exactly where it is supposed to. In the same way that the batter now wonders which pitch might be coming, most pitchers have to think about when to best employ the curveball. This task of deciding which pitch to throw is so difficult that the catcher helps the pitcher with the decision. I am not making this up. The difficulty in throwing a curve also leads to the phenomenon of the "hanging curveball." Essentially a "hanger" is a curveball that doesn't curve. Hangers often end up as homers. Nobody said this game was easy.
Because of the difficulties in throwing it well, the curve does not make pitchers invincible. Even worse, the curve also makes pitchers unavailable. Throwing a curveball requires an unnatural arm motion. Hold your hand out like you are shaking hands. Now make a throwing motion with your thumb on top, so you end up in the hand shake position. That's a curveball. And your arm probably hurts. Using that arm motion and throwing as hard as you can puts tremendous stress on the shoulder and elbow. That stress keeps pitchers from pitching every day. In fact, most pitchers need three or four days to recover from each game. So the curve creates a need for more pitchers who pitch less often. A great pitcher now wins 20 games in a season, but in the early days of baseball a great pitcher might win 40 or 50 games and pitch almost every inning of every one of those games. Because of the curve, a great pitcher can dominate a game, but not an entire season.
Therein lies the balance of baseball. The batter doesn't know which pitch to expect, leaving him slightly off balance. The pitcher has to carefully consider which pitch to throw, with the possibility that a slight error in execution will lead to disaster. And the pitcher who was unhittable today will be on the bench tomorrow. It may look like everyone on a baseball diamond is just chewing and spitting, but believe me, they are thinking all the time. Mostly about when the curve might be coming.
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