The New Ballgame: Understanding Baseball Statistics for the Casual Fan by Glenn Guzzo Read Free Book Online Page A

Pitchers,
the authors date the slider roughly to 1936, but in their list of the "best sliders
of all-time," all of the top ten pitchers began their careers after World War II.
Among them are three Hall of Fame pitchers-Steve Carlton, Bob Gibson and
Bob Lemon and a fourth, Randy Johnson, who will surely be inducted.
    Hank Aaron, who knew something about hitting, predicted in the late
1960s that, because of the slider, there would never be another .400 hitter.
He's been right for going on 40 years.

High Strike/ Low Strike
    As helpful as it is to know who threw the pitches and what pitches they threw,
far more influential is where they were allowed to throw them. Nothing is
a better predictor of swollen or shrunken hitting statistics than the strike
zone's size and height. Periodic rule-tweaking has helped define baseball's
different eras.
    When the National League began play in 1876, the batter could demand
high pitches (shoulders to waist), low pitches (waist to one foot above the
ground) or "fair" ones (anywhere in between). But pitchers had all the other
advantages: Walks counted as a time at-bat, but back then it took nine balls to
earn one and the pitcher was only fifty feet away. Batters didn't get first base
when hit by a pitch.
    Batters could no longer dictate the strike zone beginning in 1887, and
the strike zone definition-from the shoulders to the knees-was remarkably
stable from 1887 through 1949. Changes in 1950, 1963 and 1969 influenced
statistics dramatically.
    When many of the game's brightest stars began going to war in 1941,
offense started to decline. By 1945, more than 100 big-leaguers were in military service. The level of baseball talent was in disrepair, and so was the quality of the baseballs they hit. From 1942 to 1945, Spud Chandler (1.64), Hal
Newhouser (1.81), Mort Cooper (1.77) and Howie Pollet (1.75) all won ERA
titles with marks below 2.00-the norm in the Dead Ball era, but achieved
only two other times since 1920. Even Joe DiMaggio, who had hit .381, .352
and .357 from 1939 to 1941, plummeted to a .305 average in 1942, at which
point he began three years in the military. In 1986, DiMaggio told Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter Frank Dolson that he enlisted, in part, because of what the poorly manufactured balls were doing to his batting average.

    After the war, the arrival of outfielder Ralph Kiner in Pittsburgh and the
development of New York Giants slugging first baseman Johnny Mize fueled
a National League power surge, but otherwise offense was stagnant-until
rule-makers shrank the strike zone in 1950. The new zone dropped from the
shoulders to the armpits and from "the knees" to the top of the knees. The
most difficult pitches to hit were now balls.
    Batting averages immediately returned to pre-war levels and home runs
shot up more than 17% in 1950. Home runs continued their ascent over the
next decade, but otherwise pitchers reasserted their control-players swinging for the fences struck out more, batting averages settled into a .255-.265
norm, and run production was not dramatically different.
    Until, that is, expansion arrived in 1961 and 1962. Roger Maris hit
his 61 home runs and Warren Spahn's 3.01 ERA was good enough to top
all NL pitchers in '61. Offense was even bigger in 1962, and Maury Wills
broke Ty Cobb's enduring record by stealing 104 bases. In these two seasons,
legitimate stars like Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Hank Aaron and Mickey
Mantle had huge seasons, but so did previously nondescript hitters like Norm
Cash and Jim Gentile.
    Two years of that was enough for the rule-makers, who in 1963 made
the strike zone bigger than ever: "between the top of the batter's shoulders
and his knees" (no longer top of the knees). That ushered in the best pitching
era since Dead Ball times.
    When most nostalgic fans talk about the period from 1963 to 1968, they
remember superstar hitters like Mays, Aaron, Robinson, Roberto Clemente
and Al Kaline.