The annual Hot Stove League talk at Beattie-Powers Place
The World Series is over and I have returned to find fewer leaves on the trees by my home. Come to think of it, I am sporting fewer hairs on top of my head, too. But inside this bowed frame beats the heart of a baseball fan, which figures to get me through the winter. I delivered this talk on Saturday, November 9, at the Beattie-Powers Place in my hometown of Catskill.
Hello again. We’ve done this for seven or eight years in a row by now. “The Fourth True Outcome” is the way we have pitched today’s talk, though in the Q&A to follow you may ask me anything about players today or yesterday. I find myself feeling pretty animated by last week’s announcement of the ten candidates for induction by the Hall of Fame’s Modern Baseball Eras Committee.
By the Three True Outcomes I mean the home run, the strikeout, and the walk — those events on the field that may be credited directly to the pitcher or the batter without the intervention of fielders, some of whom will be more talented (or better positioned) than others. The Three Tree Outcomes provide management with superior metrics for evaluating which players to keep, discard, or pursue, but increasingly the three outcomes have seemed to dominate the field of play, to the point that a routine ground ball to shortstop may one day become as rare as the triple.
Strikeouts and home runs have been on the rise, yet unpredictably walks have declined where in prior periods of strikeout growth they would have been expected to increase, too. Pitchers are always in the ascendancy, leaving batters to whale or flail away until MLB intervenes with a rule change that restores balance between offense and defense. Oldtimers, by which I mean to include myself, complain that the game on the field increasingly resembles an arcade game, with regularly explosive outcomes, not the mix of thrills and lulls that they grew up with.
So, what do I mean by the Fourth Outcome, the one I dread — boredom and frustration, leading to less of a passion for the game? Those of you who have been to previous talks here at Beattie-Powers know that I have never been bothered by the length of a game, feeling as I do that three hours of any good thing is better than two. But I have worried about the matter of pace as it seeps into length — which has never been more achingly displayed than at this year’s World Series, which as has been my privilege I attended.
It was no masterpiece. Only the first game concluded with fewer than three runs separating the contestants, and Game Three set a record as the only nine-inning game in Series history to run over four hours with both teams combining for only five runs. Houston won, by the way, 4–1.
I was in the stands or the pressbox for seven straight games in which the home crowd left disappointed — for the first time in World Series history, seven straight wins by the road team. When it was all over, Washington fans were deliriously happy with the result — the city’s first championship in 95 years. But for those covering the game, as well as fans without a clear rooting interest, Game Three offered a paradigm of baseball’s current dilemma. The starting pitchers — Aníbal Sánchez for the Nationals and Zack Greinke for Astros — were both deliberate stylists who worked the edges of the plate, not flamethrowers who would willingly risk the occasional walk in the knowledge that a strikeout would soon set things right.
Game Three was slow even before the inevitable parade of relievers and commercial breaks. So many 3-and-2 counts, with foul ticks thereafter. So many times that a pitcher stepped off the rubber or a batter stepped out of the box. Throws to first base. Commercial breaks. Visits to the mound. We were past two hours before five innings were completed, as I recall.
I am indebted to Sam Miller of ESPN for detail:
* Of the 13 longest nine-inning World Series games this decade, six came this year. Game Three took 4 hours, 3 minutes.
* The 65 4–1 games played this year averaged just 2 hours, 55 minutes. Game 3 of the World Series was 68 minutes longer.
* Postseason commercial breaks are longer than regular-season breaks, by about 50 seconds. There are 17 between-inning breaks (one after every half inning except the final one), plus pitching change breaks (which are also longer in the postseason), so that adds around 17 minutes.
* World Series games are more pressured. Greinke took about six more seconds between pitches with men on base in this game, compared to the regular season, and about three extra seconds with bases empty. Sánchez took an extra four seconds with men on, and an extra second with the bases empty. This is the sort of thing that is imperceptible in the moment but adds up.
* On average, pitchers threw over to first base about 3.5 times per game in the regular season. Sánchez threw over five times just in the first inning, and continued to do so as the game went on.
Sam Miller offered additional granular detail, but you get the point.
I have loved baseball for many reasons, and one of these reasons is because it is slow: a stop-action sport which permits conversation or reflection. When Washington’s Trea Turner was called out for interfering with Houston pitcher Brad Peacock’s throw in the seventh inning of Game 6, I instantly recalled the Mets’ J.C. Martin, on his similarly misguided path to first base, being plunked by Pete Richert’s throw to first, and being called safe to win Game Four of the World Series … fifty years ago. This vivid, visual recapture of days past gave a Proustian pleasure to the moment, and in the moment.
Now that the World Series is behind us and the dark days between seasons has commenced, Game Three is what has stuck with me. I like baseball’s deliberate pace, even its slowness; I like less the frenetic quality of other sports that view themselves, in contrast, as providing continuous action, though none truly does. I know World Series games are slower than regular-season games, and not only because of the 50 seconds of additional time during commercial breaks, about which nothing can be done.
So what can be done? More than twenty years ago, analytics provided a strategic edge to the manager who instructed his batters to work the count and get the starting pitcher out after five innings rather than six, exposing the weak underbelly of any pitching staff, the middle relief corps. Today, with pitchers ready to resume their inexorable rise over batters, analytics may now offer a clue as to how the game might be sped up.
It’s simple, really. As Tom Tango tweeted this week, pitchers have become so awesome that the long-held notion that they must nibble at the plate’s borders may finally be put to rest, for all but the low-velocity stylists. His study of run values for pitches at varying spots in the strike zone — supported by graphs, charts, and statistical grids beyond your patience and perhaps mine* — concludes that “pitchers are getting good success even when throwing in the heart of the plate. Pitchers should challenge batters far more.”
Tango is still at work on this study, but if its product is to encourage pitchers to challenge hitters, disincentivizing both from waiting and thus reducing pitch counts, then count me in. “See the ball, hit the ball” is a Fourth Outcome I will applaud.
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- OK, here’s the Tango graph I could not present during the talk.
The Three True Outcomes, and a Possible Fourth was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.