Whose On Third?

It is an axiom of organized competitive sports that the more difficult a feat, the more it is rewarded. In football a touchdown is more difficult to score than a field goal, and earns six points as compared to the field goal’s three. After a touchdown, a PAT kicked through the uprights nets one point, while the more difficult two-point conversion, in which a team must “punch it in” from the two-and-a-half yard line, is rewarded with twice what you get for the PAT. In basketball, a typical bucket gets you two points, while one from beyond the arc, or “downtown” if you are Brent Mustburger, is worth three. In figure skating a quadruple jump is judged superior to the triple. In darts you get more points for hitting the bullseye. We are drawn to sports because they are an island of logic in an otherwise irrational world, and that logic is precisely that the winning player or team is the one who is best at achieving what is most difficult within the given rules of a sport, i.e. would you rather be a birdie or an eagle?

And then there is baseball. Baseball is largely incoherent. Baseball starts off okay, as the easiest offensive feat, the single, is rewarded the least; it, of course, only gets you to first base. But the rewards for the other three possible base hits in baseball, the double, triple, and home run, make no sense at all, when judged based on their comparative difficulty. The best doubles hitters hit doubles at about the same rate that the best home run hitters “go yard.” From 1989 to 2009, the MLB league leaders in doubles hit anywhere from 40 to 59 doubles. These numbers are comparable to the range found for home run leaders during the same era, 35 to 73 (the somewhat broader range for home runs is explained by the “steroids era”; things seem to have gotten back to normal, as last year the MLB home run leader tallied a more human total of 47). In essence, a double is roughly as difficult to achieve as a home run. But the home run is rewarded with a tangible run, while a double only gets a player half way home, and merely affords a player an opportunity to score a run. Why should a double be so poorly rewarded if it is just as hard to hit as a home run?

Things come into even starker relief when we look at triples. From 1989 to 2009 the annual MLB league leaders in triples compiled anywhere from 9 to 23 triples, with most league leaders compiling triples in the low to mid teens. Triples are clearly more difficult to hit than home runs and doubles. But while you get closer to a run with a triple than a double, you still get less than a home run for your more significant accomplishment of hitting a triple. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

When I shared this insight with my friend Jason he looked at me as if I had suggested that humans regress to walking on all fours, i.e. he thought I was batshit crazy. Jason is both a baseball fanatic, (he is a near-genius practitioner of fantasy baseball, which empowers him to make and win fantasy baseball bets requiring the loser to engage in public acts of humiliation usually involving a combination of nudity and food) and a traditionalist. Like most traditionalists, a category which encompasses approximately 99.9% of baseball fans, he is blind to the irrational elements of baseball, a blindness resulting from acculturation to the baseball mythos, which for almost 150 years has regarded business as usual as perfectly normal. Which of course it isn’t. Baseball traditionalists freak out over obvious, yet relatively minor corrections to the game. Because it is boring to watch someone attempt to do something that they can’t, which is why the WNBA dunk contest doesn’t exist, some reasonable baseball folks came up with the designated hitter. Traditionalists acted as if this was the baseball equivalent of the Pope marrying Liberace. So imagine the traditionalist reaction to the suggestion that baseball’s entire scoring system is irredeemably flawed. To paraphrase baseball’s great Yogi Berra, Jason was 90% appalled, and the other half of him thought I must be joking.

Yet I am perfectly serious; we must fix baseball. But first, to Jason’s critique of my basic argument that the triple is more difficult to accomplish than the home run, and should be rewarded with an outcome commensurate with its degree of difficulty (it was only later through a painstaking 5 minute process of Google research when I learned that the double is just as hard to accomplish as the home run, so Jason’s critique focused on the triple). Jason’s primary argument is that the triple is a byproduct of luck or chance, that skill is not involved. Were this the case, however, one would expect to find different players atop the leader board of triples from year to year in the big leagues. Unless, of course, some players are inherently luckier than other players. Until we can isolate the good luck gene, however, we must accept that the repeated appearance of the same players atop the triples leader board reflects a specific skill set on the part of the players in question. And the last ten years of baseball history are enough to convince us that triples have little or nothing to do with luck: Carl Crawford lead the AL in triples for three consecutive years from 2004 through 2006, Curtis Granderson lead the AL in consecutive years in 2007 and 2008, Jimmy Rollins lead the NL in triples in 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2007, and Jose Reyes lead the NL in triples in 2005, 2006, and 2008. Ask any player of a game of chance and he or she will tell you that luck comes and goes. What we observe in the records of Crawford, Granderson, Rollins and Reyes is consistent excellence. If luck is in any way involved then it is in the form of the old cliché that you make your own luck.

So what are the skills involved in hitting a triple, the skill set that enabled Jimmy Rollins, for example, to lead the NL in triples four times? The first skill counters another of Jason’s arguments, that baseball players do not attempt to “place” the ball when they swing at a pitch. But there are a number of situations in baseball when “placing” the ball is exactly what a hitter is attempting to do. “Placing” the batted ball is a huge part of baseball strategy. To wit, when a runner is on second with less than two outs, a batter will often be instructed to hit towards the right side of the field, so that a ground ball hit in this direction will result in the runner being able to advance to third. Or, a batter will make every effort to hit a fly ball deep enough to allow a runner to tag up and advance , whether from second to third or from third to home. There is even an official baseball term for this “placing” of the ball, the sacrifice. The sacrifice is considered such an important skill that it is tracked as a statistic; e.g. in 2009 Bengie Molina lead the NL in sacrifice flies with 11. And don’t think for a minute that when it is contract negotiation time that Molina’s agent isn’t pushing for more money based on this particular skill in “placing” the ball. Being from Baltimore, Jason and I both know about the “Baltimore Chop”, a batting strategy propagated by Baltimore Orioles legendary manager Earl Weaver in which the batter purposely made contact with the ball in a chopping fashion such that the ball hopped up extremely high, allowing time for the runners on base to advance safely. The “Baltimore Chop” is textbook “placing” of the ball. And, of course, the bunt is nothing other than the strategic “placing” of the ball in the field of play. Just as a successful bunt or “Baltimore Chop” depends on the successful “placing” of the ball, so does the triple. As the great Willie Keeler put it, “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” That, in a nutshell, is the skill involved in the batter’s greatest art, the triple.

Which brings us to another of Jason’s arguments, that no one tries to hit triples. This rebuttal implies that players do attempt to hit home runs. But any baseball man (or woman) worth his salt will tell you that the surest way for a batter to enter a prolonged hitting slump is to go up to bat trying to hit home runs. Swinging for the fences will get you a lot closer to the Mendoza Line then to the warning track. Professional batters, then, generally take the approach of trying to make good contact. Baseball presumes that the best result of making good contact is the ball that flies the furthest in the air. But is this necessarily so? It is just as easy to make a case that the best result of making good contact is putting a ball in play that is the most difficult for the opposition to field. The home run’s dirty little secret is that it would never be a chore for a defense to field a power hitter’s long ball were it not for the well placed fence; power hitters just hit a lot of long fly balls, i.e the power hitter is simply the disguised master of the sacrifice fly. The triples hitter is the true master of “hitting ‘em where they ain’t”, i.e. the true master of hitting.

The home run hitter also benefits from another bias, the misguided belief that power trumps speed. Invariably, the most gifted triples hitters combine the art of hitting with preternatural speed. The home run hitter’s work is done once he wallops the ball; all that is left is to waddle around the bases. The triples hitter doubles the home run hitter’s accomplishment, as his work has just begun once he has “placed” the ball. He must then combine a track star’s speed with the courage of the poker player whose chips are all on the table. The triples hitter’s athleticism and derring-do lends him a panache inaccessible to the lumbering slugger.

The strange thing is that everyone already knows the triple is the most difficult hit to obtain in baseball (barring the inside-the-park-homerun, which we shall return to shortly). It is a baseball truism that the most difficult phase of hitting for the cycle (hitting a single, double, triple, and home run in one game) is getting the triple. Any time a player is getting close to hitting for the cycle the announcer will invariably either, a) point out that the hitter already has a triple, the most difficult part of the cycle, or b)note that the player has not yet hit a triple, the most difficult part of hitting for the cycle. And everyone accepts this as valid precisely because the triple is the most difficult hitting feat in baseball. The missing element in achieving one-year greatness in baseball hitting is referred to in the title of that very feat; by naming the act of leading the league in average, home runs, and RBI’s the “Triple Crown”, baseball is unconsciously acknowledging that the greatest player is not the one who leads in any of those (lesser) categories, but he who is the king of the triple.

With the preeminence of the triple now established, before we address the changes necessary to fix baseball, we must return to my earlier assertion that baseball must needs be fixed. Why bother? One might argue that in focusing on the difficulty of the triple I have overlooked the fact that the home run is judged most important because it accomplishes the object of the game, scoring runs. But this response is simply advancing the argument that since baseball has always had a flawed and illogical scoring system, than it must continue to do so. Which brings us to the core reason that baseball must be fixed, which is quite simply in order to save it. Baseball was the most popular team sport in America for at least the first half of the twentieth century, as along with horse racing and boxing it dominated the sports scene. This is largely because baseball is the perfect hybrid of individual and team competition. The showdown between pitcher and batter rivals the two greatest individual sports, boxing and tennis, for mano a mano thrills. But baseball, at the same time, offers everything that comes with great team sports, most importantly the beauty of watching men (or women) function as a unit and the joy inherent to participating and witnessing that unity in multiplicity. Despite these attractions, the illogical structuring of baseball’s scoring system puts it at odds with the driving force of sports as entertainment, which I touched upon at the beginning. People watch sports for many varied reasons, but the primary reason men (and some women) watch an ungodly number of hours of sports broadcasting is that sports holds the illusion of a world that makes sense. Unlike real life, which is largely irrational and incoherent, in sports there are clear rules with definitive winners and losers. Men deeply long for the world to be like this, although it obviously isn’t.

Baseball, with its rules that reward the easy over the difficult, is far too close to real life to hold our interest as we cope with the irrationality of a world that accelerates as rapidly as our technology advances. Football, the king of American sports, long since surpassed baseball in popularity. It did so in the 1960’s, as the world shifted, we landed on the moon, and things made less sense than they ever had before. Things continue to make less sense every year, which is why football, which makes perfect sense, grows in popularity every year. If baseball is to survive, it has to reverse the Talking Heads and start making sense.

So, how to fix baseball? A simple adjustment to the scoring system should suffice, leaving intact everything beautiful about the game. Home runs will still be rewarded with a run. Doubles will now also be worth a run. Triples will be worth one and a half runs. And, to prevent runners from stopping at third, and to reward the only feat more difficult than the triple, the inside-the park-homerun will now be worth two runs. These simple changes in baseball’s scoring system will give us back our national pastime. In Baltimore we used to yell out “O” as loud as we could during the “O say does that star spangled banner yet wave” line of the national anthem. We used to really care. We might not be able to make Peter Angelos sell the Orioles to Cal Ripken and save our team, but we can still save our sport.