The Flamingo’s Smile (20 page)

CREDIT: CATHY HALL
.

In the accompanying chart, I present the results for both leagues combined—a clear confirmation of my hypothesis, since both highest and lowest averages converge towards the league average through time.

The measured decrease toward the mean for high averages seems to occur as three plateaus, with only limited variation within each plateau. During the nineteenth century (National League only; the American League was founded in 1901), the mean difference between highest and league average was 91 points (range of 87 to 95, by decade). From 1901 to 1930, it dipped to 81 (range of only 80 to 83), while for five decades since 1931, the difference between mean and extreme has averaged 69 (with a range of only 67 to 70). These three plateaus correspond to three marked eras of high hitting. The first includes the runaway averages of the 1890s, when Hugh Duffy reached .438 (in 1894) and all five leading players topped .400 in the same year (not surprising since that year featured the infamous experiment, quickly abandoned, of counting walks as hits). The second plateau includes all the lower scores of .400 batters in our century, with the exception of Ted Williams (Hornsby topped the charts at .424 in 1924). The third plateau records the extinction of .400 hitting.

Lowest averages show the same pattern of decreasing difference from the league average, with a precipitous decline by decade from 71 to 54 points during the nineteenth century, and two plateaus thereafter (from the mid-40s early in the century to the mid-30s later on), followed by the one exception to my pattern—a fallback to the 40s during the 1970s.

Patterns of change in the difference between highest and lowest averages and the general league average through time

Nineteenth-century values must be taken with a grain of salt, since rules of play were somewhat different then. During the 1870s, for example, schedules varied from 65 to 85 games per season (compared with 154 for most of our century and 162 more recently). With short seasons and fewer at bats, variation must increase, just as, in our own day, averages in June and July span a greater range than final-season averages, several hundred at bats later. (For these short seasons, I used two at bats per game as my criterion for inclusion in tabulations for low averages.) Still, by the 1890s, schedules had lengthened to 130–150 games per season, and comparisons with our own century become more meaningful.

I was rather surprised—and I promise readers that I am not rationalizing after the fact but acting on a prediction I made before I started calculating—that the pattern of decrease did not yield more exceptions during our last two decades, because baseball has experienced a profound destabilization of the sort that my calculations should reflect. After half a century of stable play with eight geographically stationary teams per league, the system finally broke in response to easier transportation and greater access to almighty dollars. Franchises began to move, and my beloved Dodgers and Giants abandoned New York in 1958. Then, in the early 1960s, both leagues expanded to ten teams, and, in 1969, to twelve teams in two divisions.

These expansions should have caused a reversal in patterns of decrease between extreme batting averages and league averages. Many less than adequate players became regulars and pulled low averages down (Marvelous Marv Throneberry is still reaping the benefits in Lite beer ads). League averages also declined, partly as a consequence of the same influx, and bottomed out in 1968 at .230 in the American League. (This trend was reversed by fiat in 1969 when the pitching mound was lowered and the strike zone diminished to give batters a better chance.) This lowering of league averages should also have increased the distance between high hitters and the league average (since the very best were not suffering a general decline in quality). Thus, I was surprised that an increase in the distance between league and lowest averages during the 1970s was the only result I could detect of this major destabilization.

As a nonplaying nonprofessional, I cannot pinpoint the changes that have caused the game to stabilize and the range of batting averages to decrease over time. But I can identify the general character of important influences. Traditional explanations that view the decline of high averages as an intrinsic trend must emphasize explicit inventions and innovations that discourage hitting—the introduction of relief pitching and more night games, for example. I do not deny that these factors have important effects, but if the decline has primarily been caused, as I propose, by a general decrease in variation of batting averages, then we must look to other kinds of influences.

We should concentrate on the increasing precision, regularity, and standardization of play—and we must search for ways that managers and players have discovered to remove the edge that truly excellent players once enjoyed. Baseball has become a science (in the vernacular sense of repetitious precision in execution). Outfielders practice for hours to hit the cutoff man. Positioning of fielders changes by the inning and man. Double plays are executed like awesome clockwork. Every pitch and swing is charted, and elaborate books are kept on the habits and personal weaknesses of each hitter. The “play” in play is gone.

When the world’s tall ships graced our bicentennial in 1976, many people lamented their lost beauty and cited Masefield’s sorrow that we would never “see such ships as those again.” I harbor opposite feelings about the disappearance of .400 hitting. Giants have not ceded to mere mortals. I’ll bet anything that Carew could match Keeler. Rather, the boundaries of baseball have been restricted and its edges smoothed. The game has achieved a grace and precision of execution that has, as one effect, eliminated the extreme achievements of early years. A game unmatched for style and detail has simply become more balanced and beautiful.

Postscript

Some readers have drawn the (quite unintended) inference from the preceding essay that I maintain a cynical or even dyspeptic attitude towards great achievement in sports—something for a distant past when true heroes could shine before play reached its almost mechanical optimality. But the quirkiness of great days and moments, lying within the domain of unpredictability, could never disappear even if plateaus of sustained achievement must draw in towards an unvarying average. As my tribute to the eternal possibility of transcendence, I submit this comment on the greatest moment of them all, published on the Op-Ed page of the
New York Times
on November 10, 1984.

STRIKE THREE FOR BABE

Tiny and perfunctory reminders often provoke floods of memory. I have just read a little notice, tucked away on the sports pages: “Babe Pinelli, long time major league umpire, died Monday at age 89 at a convalescent home near San Francisco.”

What could be more elusive than perfection? And what would you rather be—the agent or the judge? Babe Pinelli was the umpire in baseball’s unique episode of perfection when it mattered most. October 8, 1956. A perfect game in the World Series—and, coincidentally, Pinelli’s last official game as arbiter. What a consummate swan song. Twenty-seven Brooks up; twenty-seven Bums down. And, since
single
acts of greatness are intrinsic spurs to democracy, the agent was a competent, but otherwise undistinguished Yankee pitcher, Don Larsen.

The dramatic end was all Pinelli’s, and controversial ever since. Dale Mitchell, pinch hitting for Sal Maglie, was the twenty-seventh batter. With a count of 1 and 2, Larsen delivered one high and outside—close, but surely not, by its technical definition, a strike. Mitchell let the pitch go by, but Pinelli didn’t hesitate. Up went the right arm for called strike three. Out went Yogi Berra from behind the plate, nearly tackling Larsen in a frontal jump of joy. “Outside by a foot,” groused Mitchell later. He exaggerated—for it was outside by only a few inches—but he was right. Babe Pinelli, however, was more right. A batter may not take a close pitch with so much on the line. Context matters. Truth is a circumstance, not a spot.

I was a junior at Jamaica High School. On that day, every teacher let us listen, even Mrs. B., our crusty old solid geometer (and, I guess in retrospect, a secret baseball fan). We reached Mrs. G., our even crustier French teacher, in the bottom of the seventh, and I was appointed to plead. “Ya gotta let us listen,” I said, “it’s never happened before.” “Young man,” she replied, “this class is a French class.” Luckily, I sat in the back just in front of Bob Hacker (remember alphabetical seating?), a rabid Dodger fan with earphone and portable. Halfway through the period, following Pinelli’s last strike, I felt a sepulchral tap and looked around. Hacker’s face was ashen. “He did it—that bastard did it.” I cheered loudly and threw my jacket high in the air. “Young man,” said Mrs. G. from the side board, “I’m sure the verb
écrire
can’t be that exciting.” It cost me 10 points on my final grade, maybe admission to Harvard as well. I never experienced a moment of regret.

Truth is inflexible. Truth is inviolable. By long and recognized custom, by any concept of justice, Dale Mitchell had to swing at anything close. It was a strike—a strike high and outside. Babe Pinelli, umpiring his last game, ended with his finest, his most perceptive, his most truthful moment. Babe Pinelli, arbiter of history, walked into the locker room and cried.

Postpostscript

Funny business. I labored for three years to write a monograph on the evolution of Bermudian land snails, and only nine people have ever cited the resulting tome. I wrote these few hundred words in a quarter hour’s flood of inspiration during an interminable round of speechmaking at my son’s annual Little League banquet (good for something besides sliced turkey, I always thought)—and it has already received more commentary than most of my technical papers combined.

Some people misunderstood (I received a blistering letter from Babe Pinelli’s pastor, virtually demanding a public retraction of my charge that the great ump had consciously lied, either for an early shower or a place in the sun). I received many more lovely letters, including one from Pinelli’s grandson who reported that “Babe never had second thoughts about the call and wouldn’t hear of any ridiculing.” Right on. One particularly kind broadcaster dug out his old tape of the incident and played it for me over the phone—after noting that Mrs. G. had deprived me of the pleasure, and that I had never actually heard the great moment.

I have been both pleased and amused to learn that this commentary, intended only as a sweet memory for a single event, has been read and discussed in several high school and college ethics classes. Just for the record, therefore, please don’t read the piece as an argument for mushy relativism in the search for truth. The narrowly empirical issue has a clear and unambiguous factual resolution—an absolutely inviolable truth, if you will. The pitch was high and outside. Flexibility based on circumstance arises only with respect to definitions, invented by people and not part of the external world. The pitch, in that particular context, was a strike, and Pinelli was right.

I must also confess a profound embarrassment, especially in the light of my last paragraph. My original piece identified the pitch as
low
and outside (as reported by Peter Golenbock in
Dynasty
, his history of the Yankee glory years—but no excuses, I shouldn’t have just copied). The
Times
even exacerbated the error by using as a title, not my intended line (now restored), but “the strike that was low and outside.” But even error can have its reward, thus proving that the world contains some intrinsic benevolence. Red Barber, that fine man and greatest announcer of them all, corrected me ever so gently on his weekly five-minute gem for public radio. He oughta know; he was there after all (and I wasn’t, as the piece testifies). I checked far and wide just to make sure. He was right, of course. The pitch was high, not low. Remember that old cartoon series—“the thrill that comes once in a lifetime” (like the kid who drives his wagon up to the gas pump and says “fill ’er up”). That’s how I felt. Can you just imagine—to be corrected by Old Redhead himself!