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April's alter egos Pitching returns to the NL, but offense still reigns in the ALPosted: Tuesday May 07, 2002 1:14 PM
No one is pitching to Barry Bonds. The weather has been cold. The baseballs are soft. Umpires are calling more strikes. Great young pitchers are asserting themselves. The pitchers are ahead of the hitters. A rare alignment of five planets and the moon occurred in the middle of the month. Go ahead, just try to explain why old-school pitching is back in the National League, while the American League continues to slug away. Just don't pretend to have an easy answer. There is none. First, the numbers: So far, the NL has turned back the clock to 1992, the last year of normalcy before baseball expanded into Florida and Colorado, and offensive numbers soared a mile high. Another expansion in 1998 prolonged what has been the greatest sustained slugging era in history. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, through May 1 the NL was scoring 8.5 runs per game, down 12 percent from the same juncture last year. Also, compared to first-month figures from last year, home runs in the senior circuit are off 28 percent. Slugging percentage (down 35 points) and batting average (down eight points) fell significantly. What makes those numbers so odd is that the AL has continued to bomb away, with a slight boost in runs per game (five percent). Slugging (seven points) and batting average (six points) are also up. What gives? Don't blame it on the Bonds market. One batter isn't going to skew the stats for an entire league. Anyway, Bonds has done his fair share of damage, even while leading the league in walks. The weather? Not likely. It's always cold in April. The baseballs? They are, after all, the favorite suspect of conspiracy theorists. "Bernie [Williams] got a hit [last week] on a grounder up the middle and when they took the ball out of play, it was flat on one side,'' said Yankees third baseman Robin Ventura. "I mean flat. You can make whatever you want out of that, but I saw the ball and it was flat where he hit it.'' The Yankees, of course, play in the AL, but both leagues use the same ball, so that can't account for the clear disparity in scoring. More likely, Williams hit a rare lemon of a baseball. More strikes? I asked Sandy Alderson, baseball's executive vice president of operations, about the impact of the extended use of laser-guided tracking systems that have been installed in several ballparks to gauge how accurately umpires enforce the strike zone. "What we're seeing is the percentage of correct calls continues to go up,'' Alderson said. "The accuracy rate is over 90 percent, in the low 90s. Last year it was in the 80s, the high 80s.'' If that sounds like the smoking gun to you, forget it. "Don't assume more strikes are being called,'' Alderson said. "This doesn't mean the strike zone is larger. It is being reshaped in a way. That pitch off the plate that used to be called a strike is being called a ball more frequently. And the pitch that was called a ball down [at the knees] is being called a strike more often, as it should be. So, no, the strike zone is not larger. In fact, the number of pitches per game is up slightly.'' Through April 29, the average pitches per game was 284.5, up from 281.7 at the same point last year. "What we're looking for is a strike zone that conforms more to the rule book, not a so-called larger strike zone,'' Alderson said. "If they adjust to that pitchers should be pitching down -- up and down -- not in and out. My sense is it might affect offense.'' If you like pitchers' duels -- remember them? -- you're in luck. The NL threw 25 shutouts through May 1, putting it on pace to throw 151, which would be the most since the league went to 16 teams in 1998, and a nine percent increase from last year. If the balls, the weather and the number of called strikes haven't changed, you might think a crop of young pitchers would account for the better pitching. Check the top 50 ERA leaders. You can call 28-year-old Kazuhisa Ishii, a rookie, but the former star in Japan is a proven pro. Roy Oswalt, 24, A.J. Burnett, 25, Brian Lawrence, 25, and Josh Fogg, 25, have excelled. That's about it. Otherwise, there hasn't been a true breakout among the young starters. Actually, most of the surprise pitchers in the NL have been retreads and middle-of-the-rotation hurlers who have exceeded expectations. You can start with the Reds' high-mileage trio of Joey Hamilton, Elmer Dessens and Jose Rijo. Other April standouts who've been around the block include Omar Daal, Brett Tomko, Pedro Astacio, Jeff D'Amico, Dave Mlicki, Andy Ashby, Bobby Jones, Glendon Rusch, Kirk Rueter, and Livan Hernandez. Anybody want to bet those guys are still challenging for the ERA title come September? It would seem as if the emergence of many middling veterans as stabilizing influences in NL rotations have helped keep scoring down as much as anything, if not more so. But wait. Could it be that pitchers always are ahead of hitters at the start of a season? No, take last year, for instance. Teams combined for 9.59 runs per game through 335 games last season, or through April 29 -- almost an exact foreshadowing of the season mark of 9.58. The average hit its season high of 9.71 on July 8. Of course, there is one more scenario that is just as likely: It simply was an anomalous month. Only 17 percent of the season has been played. May could very well develop into a hitters' month. Yes, scoring is down in the NL, but let's wait before we call this a trend. Besides, what happened April 19 is as good an explanation as anything else. No, it wasn't that greybeard Darren Holmes, out of baseball last year because of back surgery, won his first game since 1999. And it wasn't that none of the 16 NL teams scored more than eight runs that night. It was that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and the moon aligned in the western sky across a distance that, as viewed from Earth, was no wider than a fist or two. Such an alignment won't happen again for more than three decades -- or about the time Jose Rijo makes another comeback. A whiff of the Horace Clarke eraLook out Horace Clarke, Jake Gibbs, Charlie Smith, Joe Pepitone and the rest of the forgettable 1967 Yankees; Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi and the rest of the most expensive team in history are hunting you down. These Yankees were supposed to compete with the '27 Yankees, but they've looked more like the '67 Yankees. That's because they are striking out at a record pace that, if sustained, would blow away the franchise mark set by Ralph Houk's men back in 1967. New York set about improving its on-base percentage over the winter, and has succeeded. Its .334 mark from last year is up to .354 this year. But what the Yankees didn't count on was not being able to advance all those extra baserunners. The Yankees entered play Tuesday leading the AL in punchouts and were on pace for 1,245 strikeouts. That would carry them way beyond the '67 Yanks' mark of 1,043. Jeter, Giambi, Ventura, Jorge Posada, Rondell White, Nick Johnson and Alfonso Soriano all were on pace to whiff 122 times or more. "If it continues it's a concern,'' manager Joe Torre said. "It's not something you like to see. You need to be able to move the runner. That's when it shows up. It's not always how many strikeouts but when.'' New York clearly has been a poor situational hitting team. Through May 1, the Yankees were striking out every 3.9 at-bats with runners in scoring position, as compared to every 4.5 at-bats in other spots. They ranked last in the league in sacrifice flies. Giambi has been one of the major culprits. The famously patient hitter frequently has chased poor pitches in his anxiousness to get off to a fast start with his new club. The first baseman struck out nine times in his first 32 at-bats with runners in scoring position. He has yet to hit a sacrifice fly. And just how bad were those '67 Yankees that these Bronx Bombers are channeling? They lost 90 games while hitting a league-low .225. They scored 522 runs, the third fewest of any Yankees team over a full season and the worst since 1918. Pepitone led the team with 64 RBIs. Clarke was its leading batter at .272. This is not exactly the company the '02 Yankees expected to keep. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci covers the baseball beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send a question to his Baseball Mailbag. |
