Can The Pitchers Stay On Top?

There was a time, little more than a year ago, when baseball's most dynamic symbol was the figure of a Mickey Mantle or a Stan Musial or a Willie Mays with a bat in his hands. But in the 1963 season the picture changed. Today the symbol is Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers (see cover), striking out 306 batters, pitching a no-hitter, winning 25 games. The pitchers dominated baseball last year and the success of Koufax' own team in winning the National League pennant and the World Series was in itself a season-long triumph for pitching. By the end of the year Connie Mack's old theory that "pitching is 75% of baseball" seemed to need an upward revision.

Even the statistics assumed a quality of unreality. The number of base hits decreased by 1,478 and runs by 1,681. As bases on balls dropped off 1,345, strikeouts rose by 1,206, and the list of 20-game winners climbed to 10, the highest in a dozen years. Seventeen percent of all games—275 games during the season—ended in shutouts. And only 15 hitters averaged .300, compared to 23 in 1962. Tommy Davis of the Los Angeles Dodgers won the National League batting championship with the second lowest average (.326) since 1919, while Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox won the American League title with the fourth lowest average (.321) since 1901.

Many explanations are advanced for this pitching phenomenon. Some experts, like former owner, showman and now full-time critic Bill Veeck, believe that the pitching looked so very, very good merely because the hitting was so very, very bad. "The hitters," says Veeck, "tried to knock everything out of the park instead of just meeting the ball." That delightful wandering minstrel, Satchel Paige, naturally has his own surrealistic explanation. He maintains that the pitching was not so much better in 1963 than it had been in previous years but that "today's hitters are not like the hitters we used to have. They are all tired and they get tired because they eat stuff out of hothouses and cans and freezers instead of right out of the ground."

Old Satch may be kidding—presumably pitchers use can openers, too—but three of the National League's more thoughtful citizens are deadly serious when they discuss the subject. Dick Groat of the Cardinals and Henry Aaron of the Braves—both former batting champions—agree with Manager Walt Alston of the Dodgers that pitching today is so good that it will continue to dominate the game for years. "Every time you look up," says Groat, "there is another strong young kid out on the mound throwing that ball exactly where he wants it and not where you want it."

Alston says, "During the last few seasons kids have been coming out of nowhere; kids that nobody ever heard of before. They are all fast, smart and can control not only a fast ball and curve, as pitchers did in the past, but many of them can handle the fast ball, curve, change, screwball and slider with some degree of proficiency. They study hard and learn quick, and most of them have a tremendous desire to make it to the top."

Aaron, the most devastating hitter in baseball, sighs when he says, "I just don't see how any hitter can possibly hit for an average as high as .350 anymore. When I first broke in 11 years ago it was virtually certain that one or two guys would hit .350 or .360. Those days are gone. Today's pitchers are better than any I've seen since I came to the big leagues. Every team has at least three top starters, and some have four. A manager can reach down into the bullpen and throw a relief pitcher at you who is just as tough, if not tougher, than the starter. In 1963 the so-called bad teams like Houston [ninth in the 10-team National League] had excellent pitching staffs, and they make it too tough for a hitter to hit for average."

The evidence to support Aaron's contention about the "so-called bad teams" is a comparison of the earned run averages of the last four teams in each league in 1953 and the last four in 1963:

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]

In all but one case, today's pitchers on the weaker teams are far superior to those of a decade ago.

A specific reason often cited for the improvement in pitching is that somehow, through evolution, riboflavin or dedication to Canadian air force exercise pamphlets, pitchers have grown bigger and stronger than everyone else in baseball. Actually, the hitters have grown bigger and stronger too, and the sole obvious reason why big-league games resembled Little League games last year was the sudden appearance of a new strike zone that gave pitchers a marked psychological advantage.