“A lot of them don’t want to pitch any more, a lot of them don’t wanna pitch beyond the sixth inning.” This is Joe Morgan’s response to my thesis about changes in the way major-league baseball is played these days.
I had suggested that batters today don’t just want to get hits; they want to wear down the pitcher. They use new tactics to accomplish this: the intentional foul ball and, when possible, not swinging at pitches. These have become offensive weapons designed to force the starting pitcher to exceed his pitch count and to exit by the fifth inning, if not sooner.
When, on August 18th, the Red Sox and the Yankees played the longest nine-inning game ever, guess how many foul balls there were. An astounding 93! Yankee batters like Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu make a specialty of this, but other hitters, Yankees and the Red Sox, have adopted the practice.
Only in certain tense situations, however, do foul balls provide much excitement. Usually, they are time-consuming interruptions in the action. Foul balls are not the only factor, of course, in lengthening games. But they play a significant role in the additional hour that games now last, by contrast with games in 1940.
The Joe Morgan mentioned above (not to be confused with the Hall of Famer and broadcaster of the same name) became the manager of the Red Sox during the 1985 season and presided over the “Morgan miracle” when the team won 12 straight games.
“You know why they wear them out?” Morgan asks. “Because the pitchers don’t throw strikes.” And that, according to this old pro, has happened because of expansion. But, he adds, “thank God for all the Latin players.”
For Morgan, the best baseball ever played was in the pre-expansion era, when Jackie Robinson, followed by an influx of great black and Latino players, took the game to new heights. He says that current major leaguers are bigger and stronger, but lack staying power.
Now 75, this Walpole native shared his views with me before the 2006 Oldtime Baseball Game, an event promoted by Boston Herald sportswriter Steve Buckley and staged in Cambridge to benefit children with cerebral palsy or cystic fibrosis.
An older veteran, Johnny Pesky appeared in his Red Sox uniform, seeming remarkably trim and fit at age 86. To me, in bodily shape he looks little different from when I first saw him play in 1942. His only obvious defect is that he does not agree with my thesis about the most recent changes in the game.
“You’re wrong,” he says about my views “They try to hit every ball out of the ball park.”
Another veteran, Lenny Merullo, will be 90 next May. Dressed in a Chicago Cubs uniform, he, like Pesky, is physically and mentally vibrant. A native of the Orient Heights section of East Boston, he broke in with the Cubs in 1941 and played his whole career with that team.
A slick fielding shortstop, Merullo made himself indispensable, even though he was never a strong hitter. He boasts of holding the major league record for making the most errors in the same inning: four.
“We never heard of the term ‘pitch count’ in my day,” says this big leaguer. “Pitchers used to pace themselves so they could go nine innings – they don’t do that now.” But he, too, refuses to buy my explanation.
Fortunately for me, the three former major leaguers─Morgan, Pesky, and Merullo─were not the only baseball authorities present that evening. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was also at the field to throw out the first ball. She threw it with authority, like someone who has had a long familiarity with the game.
In complimenting her on this pitch, I told her that I would have fouled it off. By contrast with the three former players, Goodwin tended to agree with my thesis. As an old-time Brooklyn Dodger addict, she remembers the game as being very different and pitchers often going the nine inning route.
That the games at Ebbets Field were so much shorter than games today points to changes in their very structure, I claim, an explanation for which Goodwin shows sympathy.
As I see it, some forms of specialization have changed the structure of major league baseball, and not for the better. In particular, dividing pitchers into starters, middle relievers, closers, has broken the continuity of the game.
Bringing in someone to pitch to only one batter, quite often a lefty to face a left-handed hitter, does not add much to the game except time. The intentional foul ball and the needless accumulation of pitches contribute to this new tedium.
I’m glad to have a major league historian in sympathy with me. Granted, she and I never played ball in the big time. Why can’t those ancients who did─Morgan, Pesky, and Merullo─see it my way?
Richard Griffin