A Farewell To .300 Hitters

Quit boring the kid by telling him you saw the last of the .400 hitters. That's fossil, Dad. Take the boy out to see Tony Oliva or Richie Allen. Then maybe he can bore his kid by telling him he saw the last of the .300 hitters.

Circa 1980, when old Richie drags his 38-year-old bones up to the plate for one last swing, he may be hitting .261. And he may be leading the league. The .300 hitter is dying and the coroner's verdict will be suicide. The patient may linger, but the curve on his chart clearly indicates that he is a terminal case.

Oliva led the American League last year with a .321 average, easily drawing away from the AL's other two .300 hitters. In 1936 he would have been tied for 16th. Ancient history, you say. Different game in those days. O.K., throw out 1936.

How about 1956, when everything was up to date in Cincinnati and the Reds hit 221 home runs? On Labor Day this year Oliva was stroking .311 and about to take over the league lead. In 1956 he would barely have made the top 10.

In 1936 Johnny Allen of Cleveland, a 20-game winner, had the fourth best earned run average in the league, 3.44. Last year that would have given him a tie for 68th place with Harvey Haddix, who was 40 years old and won three games. But that was another era. Try 1956 again. That year there were three National League pitchers with earned run averages under 3.00; on Labor Day this year there were 27.

Have the hitters declined? Not really, but hitting has. Have the pitchers improved? Not that much, but pitching has. Baseball is indeed a different game, and it's getting differenter day by day, before your eyes.

"Every change that has taken place since I came into the league in 1956," grumbles Phillie First Baseman Bill White, who grumbles as articulately as anybody, "has favored the pitchers. Bigger strike zone, bigger ball parks...."

White's point is well taken (although it would be easier to take were he not, like all hitters, a co-conspirator against himself). By the 1950s the thinkers of baseball had faced the fact that their pitchers were not about to pitch more innings than necessary. The complete game, once a point of honor, had become almost an ostentation, like tearing telephone books in half. Jokes about two-headed pitchers named Gomez-Murphy and Reynolds-Page were out of vogue. The "younger, bigger, stronger, smarter, harder-throwing, better-instructed" pitchers that modern general managers boast of kept peeking over their shoulders for help. The modern managers—still regaling each other over their beer about the way Hubbell and Ruffing and Dean used to "hang in there"—kept sending help. Outfield grass and the tertiary fractions of linotype machines wore out as a continuous succession of younger, bigger, stronger, etc. bullpen pitchers made a hitter feel like a fighter who must face a new opponent each round. "You figure," says Yankee Batting Coach Wally Moses, who hit .345 for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1936 and finished seventh, "that if you face a guy the third time you'll hit him. But you don't see a guy three times in one game anymore."

By 1960 the deck had been pretty well stacked against the hitters. In the name of progress, the outfield fences gradually receded and the schedule inexorably closed in. The strike zone grew, and the gloves, once protective covering for human hands, were webbed and thonged to turn clowns into magicians. Sinker pitches plummeted as see-no-evil umpires inspected baseballs for alien substances and found none. Pitchers who couldn't throw a big-league curve to save their lives popped out of high school with sliders. "Anybody can throw it," says Atlanta Brave Pitching Coach Whitlow Wyatt, "and anybody can get it over." Still the younger, bigger, etc. pitchers seemed to need more help, so baseball's thinkers entered into a great cabal to frustrate the hitters. "To defense," a barbarism propounded in the 1950s by pro football thinkers who found fun and profit in making their game more complicated than necessary, became a part of the baseball lexicon.

It was a conspiracy that could not succeed without the cooperation of the hitters, but they have cooperated handsomely. "Defensing" is only one of the reasons the .300 hitter is dying, and it is not even the most important (the most important is the profit motive: there's no percentage in hitting for percentage). It merely is the one factor that the hitter can do something about—and doesn't.