Breaking Down Balls and Strikes
It's one thing to watch the game of baseball. Understanding the ins and outs of your typical major-league contest is something else: The more you see, the deeper and trickier it gets.
Explicating the strategy that results in balls and strikes, and how those balls and strikes in turn require strategic adjustments on the fly, is the focus of this detailed analysis of two Major League Baseball games played in June of 1993.
The book's co-author, Keith Hernandez, can't help but be a familiar name if you, like me, happen to be a New York Mets fan. Hernandez has had two major stints with the team, from 1983 to 1989 as a first baseman; and then from 2006 to the present as color commentator on team telecasts. As a player, he was quite probably the best first baseman the Mets ever had, a key figure in the team's only sustained period of glory, 1984-89. As a commentator, he may even be better, a snarky, engaging, candid, opinionated yet ever-cool analyst of what is going on in the field.
It's Hernandez the commentator you get here, even if at the time of the book's publication he was more than a decade removed from starting that part of his life. Along with co-author Mike Bryan, who also helped Hernandez with his player memoir of the 1985 season, If At First, Hernandez in Pure Baseball basically sits at your shoulder, detailing pitch-by-pitch what is happening in these two games, the first a National League contest between the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies, the other an American League game between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees.
"The best way to delve deeper into a ballgame and to find more to think about and enjoy, even if the score is 8-0 in favor of the despised visiting team, is to analyze the decision-making and the execution of the pitcher and the hitter on each individual pitch and then to watch and analyze the resulting play with this understanding," Hernandez and Bryan write.
If you know Hernandez from his recent telecasts, the author's voice of Pure Baseball will be immediately familiar, down to some of the key terms. "Cheese" means a high fastball the sharp batter can drive for extra bases, while "flip the coin" is his term for a manager taking charge of a game's direction by making a decision, any decision, even the wrong one. [Hernandez, as commentator as well as player, champions a proactive approach.] There is much focus on fundamentals, but at this stage of his career Hernandez hadn't yet introduced his pet phrase for them, "fundies," which could become the basis for a drinking game among his television viewers not driving anywhere or operating heavy machinery for a week.
The advantage of reading Hernandez becomes clear early on in Pure Baseball, as he delves into core subjects he would only cursorily cover on a telecast.
"The battle between the pitcher and the batter for control of the inside part of the plate is bedrock," Hernandez and Bryan write. "Nothing is more basic in baseball. The place is seventeen inches across, and the umpires often call a strike zone wider than that, maybe twenty inches. But the sweet spot on the bat is about ten inches long. Figure it out: about half the strike zone can be covered by this piece of the bat. You can get hits when you’re jammed on the hands or when you hit the ball near the end of the bat, but only these ten inches really drive the ball."
Much of Pure Baseball is concerned with the guy on the mound, the pitcher. Hernandez loves pitching; even though he made his career hitting pitchers for a solid career average and walking on them more regularly than almost anyone in his day, his sympathies and interests in this book lie almost exclusively with the pitcher. He likes to see a pitcher work the fastball early, not for "cheese" but to the corners and the knees, then finish off the batter with a sharp breaking ball.
The games Hernandez covers are decent examples of this. The starting pitchers in both games are not dominating, but they are cagey fighters with a knack for throwing the right pitch at the right times, at least during the early innings. Danny Jackson, the Phils' starter, had a long career and some great seasons, but by 1993 he was a middle-of-the-rotation starter with a fading fastball. The starting pitcher for the Braves, Pete Smith, had a long career, too, but lost 24 more games than he won. Smith got outpitched by Jackson here, but his performance kept the Braves in a game against a solid-hitting Philadelphia club that was by this point in the season rampaging its way through the National League.
The cool thing about the pitchers in the American League game, Mark Leiter of the Detroit Tigers and Scott Kamieniecki of the New York Yankees, is they both manage to go deep into games after giving up a combined five runs in the first inning. Here, Hernandez and Bryan have opportunity to elaborate on how a good pitcher doesn't give in during tight situations, such as when the bases are loaded or when the pitcher has a disadvantageous ball-and-strike count.
One recurring theme of the book is the critical nature of this count. You get the feeling a count of two strikes is less of a problem for a hitter than a count of two balls and one strike are for a pitcher. A batter knows in the latter case that a pitcher has to throw a strike if he doesn't want to give the batter an even meatier 3-1 pitch to swing at, and can start looking not only for the fastball but a fastball in the spot he wants. [Ironically, there may be less pressure on a pitcher with three balls and no strikes, as hitters are often taking in those situations.]
"Quite a few ball games every season turn on an at-bat in which the pitcher allows the count to move from 2-2 to 3-2 or from 2-1 to 3-1, also putting the runner in motion," Hernandez and Bryan write.
The drawback on Pure Baseball is how well it lives up to its subtitle, "Pitch by Pitch for the Advanced Fan." This is not a book for people with only a passing interest in the game. More engaged readers will find a lot of repetition as Hernandez makes many of the same points over and over.
The games seem to have been selected by random. Though I'm sure in fact Hernandez and Bryan found them useful in contrast from one another, they aren't the sort of games that people would remember for years, and you won't find MLBClassics repackaging them for YouTube. They are just nothing-special early-summer match-ups, related in a way that at times reminded me of a biologist at a Petri dish. Forget your Vin Scully, Ken Burns, or Roger Angell; Pure Baseball's style is more often reminiscent of Joe Friday.
"One of the things about baseball I’ve always liked is that it’s transparent," Hernandez and Bryan write. "There are no secret moves, no trick plays, no offensive set used for the first time in the season. Major league managers never trick other major league managers. Someone tells you that, don’t believe them for a moment. In any given situation, there’s no option that the manager of the offense is mulling that the manager of the defense is unaware of. Not one. Likewise, the defense can’t pull a single trick that the offense hasn’t thought about. The pitcher can fool the hitter, but this isn’t because the pitcher has pulled a brand-new pitch out of the hat… It’s cat-and-mouse out there, not hide-and-seek. Chess, not poker."
One aspect of Pure Baseball I really appreciated was something I might call, at risk of overgeneralizing, an anti-statistical approach. Sabermetrics have infiltrated the game to such an extent that games take on an aspect of predestination. It's not much fun.
If Pure Baseball has a message about stats, it is that they shouldn't be taken too seriously. Hernandez and Bryan offer a great example.
"As you know since you followed baseball over the last decade, the game has become almost overwhelmed by statistics," they write. "Many are worthwhile, others are bogus. For a while back in the early and mid-eighties, the ‘game-winning RBI’ became a focus of attention as the final word on clutch hitting, and I led that category for the half dozen or so years in which it was kept. In 1985 I set the major league record with 23. But I was also among the first to state that the statistic was meaningless. Batting third on the Mets, a pretty good team at the time, I often got an RBI in the first inning, maybe in the third. If that run gave us a lead we never lost, which often happened with our excellent pitching staff, it was considered the game-winner. In ‘85, the record-setting game-winner came on a sacrifice fly in the first inning of a game against the Phillies we won 7-1. Absurd!"
One's approach to baseball doesn't have to be too complicated, as long as you keep a focus on all its various aspects. The nice thing about Pure Baseball is how it explains those aspects, and when they come into play. I'd rather be watching Hernandez call a game than be reading him – his prose style is rather functional – but I put down Pure Baseball feeling I was receiving guidance from a true master, and appreciated the opportunity.
The book's co-author, Keith Hernandez, can't help but be a familiar name if you, like me, happen to be a New York Mets fan. Hernandez has had two major stints with the team, from 1983 to 1989 as a first baseman; and then from 2006 to the present as color commentator on team telecasts. As a player, he was quite probably the best first baseman the Mets ever had, a key figure in the team's only sustained period of glory, 1984-89. As a commentator, he may even be better, a snarky, engaging, candid, opinionated yet ever-cool analyst of what is going on in the field.
It's Hernandez the commentator you get here, even if at the time of the book's publication he was more than a decade removed from starting that part of his life. Along with co-author Mike Bryan, who also helped Hernandez with his player memoir of the 1985 season, If At First, Hernandez in Pure Baseball basically sits at your shoulder, detailing pitch-by-pitch what is happening in these two games, the first a National League contest between the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies, the other an American League game between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees.
"The best way to delve deeper into a ballgame and to find more to think about and enjoy, even if the score is 8-0 in favor of the despised visiting team, is to analyze the decision-making and the execution of the pitcher and the hitter on each individual pitch and then to watch and analyze the resulting play with this understanding," Hernandez and Bryan write.
If you know Hernandez from his recent telecasts, the author's voice of Pure Baseball will be immediately familiar, down to some of the key terms. "Cheese" means a high fastball the sharp batter can drive for extra bases, while "flip the coin" is his term for a manager taking charge of a game's direction by making a decision, any decision, even the wrong one. [Hernandez, as commentator as well as player, champions a proactive approach.] There is much focus on fundamentals, but at this stage of his career Hernandez hadn't yet introduced his pet phrase for them, "fundies," which could become the basis for a drinking game among his television viewers not driving anywhere or operating heavy machinery for a week.
The advantage of reading Hernandez becomes clear early on in Pure Baseball, as he delves into core subjects he would only cursorily cover on a telecast.
"The battle between the pitcher and the batter for control of the inside part of the plate is bedrock," Hernandez and Bryan write. "Nothing is more basic in baseball. The place is seventeen inches across, and the umpires often call a strike zone wider than that, maybe twenty inches. But the sweet spot on the bat is about ten inches long. Figure it out: about half the strike zone can be covered by this piece of the bat. You can get hits when you’re jammed on the hands or when you hit the ball near the end of the bat, but only these ten inches really drive the ball."
Much of Pure Baseball is concerned with the guy on the mound, the pitcher. Hernandez loves pitching; even though he made his career hitting pitchers for a solid career average and walking on them more regularly than almost anyone in his day, his sympathies and interests in this book lie almost exclusively with the pitcher. He likes to see a pitcher work the fastball early, not for "cheese" but to the corners and the knees, then finish off the batter with a sharp breaking ball.
The games Hernandez covers are decent examples of this. The starting pitchers in both games are not dominating, but they are cagey fighters with a knack for throwing the right pitch at the right times, at least during the early innings. Danny Jackson, the Phils' starter, had a long career and some great seasons, but by 1993 he was a middle-of-the-rotation starter with a fading fastball. The starting pitcher for the Braves, Pete Smith, had a long career, too, but lost 24 more games than he won. Smith got outpitched by Jackson here, but his performance kept the Braves in a game against a solid-hitting Philadelphia club that was by this point in the season rampaging its way through the National League.
The cool thing about the pitchers in the American League game, Mark Leiter of the Detroit Tigers and Scott Kamieniecki of the New York Yankees, is they both manage to go deep into games after giving up a combined five runs in the first inning. Here, Hernandez and Bryan have opportunity to elaborate on how a good pitcher doesn't give in during tight situations, such as when the bases are loaded or when the pitcher has a disadvantageous ball-and-strike count.
One recurring theme of the book is the critical nature of this count. You get the feeling a count of two strikes is less of a problem for a hitter than a count of two balls and one strike are for a pitcher. A batter knows in the latter case that a pitcher has to throw a strike if he doesn't want to give the batter an even meatier 3-1 pitch to swing at, and can start looking not only for the fastball but a fastball in the spot he wants. [Ironically, there may be less pressure on a pitcher with three balls and no strikes, as hitters are often taking in those situations.]
"Quite a few ball games every season turn on an at-bat in which the pitcher allows the count to move from 2-2 to 3-2 or from 2-1 to 3-1, also putting the runner in motion," Hernandez and Bryan write.
 |
| Keith Hernandez (right) poses with his New York Mets' broadcasting cohorts, Ron Darling (left) and Gary Cohen (center). In 2015, they celebrated ten years in the booth. Much of their success is based on their educated approach to the game, which is very much in evidence in Pure Baseball. [Image from nypost.com] |
The games seem to have been selected by random. Though I'm sure in fact Hernandez and Bryan found them useful in contrast from one another, they aren't the sort of games that people would remember for years, and you won't find MLBClassics repackaging them for YouTube. They are just nothing-special early-summer match-ups, related in a way that at times reminded me of a biologist at a Petri dish. Forget your Vin Scully, Ken Burns, or Roger Angell; Pure Baseball's style is more often reminiscent of Joe Friday.
"One of the things about baseball I’ve always liked is that it’s transparent," Hernandez and Bryan write. "There are no secret moves, no trick plays, no offensive set used for the first time in the season. Major league managers never trick other major league managers. Someone tells you that, don’t believe them for a moment. In any given situation, there’s no option that the manager of the offense is mulling that the manager of the defense is unaware of. Not one. Likewise, the defense can’t pull a single trick that the offense hasn’t thought about. The pitcher can fool the hitter, but this isn’t because the pitcher has pulled a brand-new pitch out of the hat… It’s cat-and-mouse out there, not hide-and-seek. Chess, not poker."
One aspect of Pure Baseball I really appreciated was something I might call, at risk of overgeneralizing, an anti-statistical approach. Sabermetrics have infiltrated the game to such an extent that games take on an aspect of predestination. It's not much fun.
If Pure Baseball has a message about stats, it is that they shouldn't be taken too seriously. Hernandez and Bryan offer a great example.
"As you know since you followed baseball over the last decade, the game has become almost overwhelmed by statistics," they write. "Many are worthwhile, others are bogus. For a while back in the early and mid-eighties, the ‘game-winning RBI’ became a focus of attention as the final word on clutch hitting, and I led that category for the half dozen or so years in which it was kept. In 1985 I set the major league record with 23. But I was also among the first to state that the statistic was meaningless. Batting third on the Mets, a pretty good team at the time, I often got an RBI in the first inning, maybe in the third. If that run gave us a lead we never lost, which often happened with our excellent pitching staff, it was considered the game-winner. In ‘85, the record-setting game-winner came on a sacrifice fly in the first inning of a game against the Phillies we won 7-1. Absurd!"
One's approach to baseball doesn't have to be too complicated, as long as you keep a focus on all its various aspects. The nice thing about Pure Baseball is how it explains those aspects, and when they come into play. I'd rather be watching Hernandez call a game than be reading him – his prose style is rather functional – but I put down Pure Baseball feeling I was receiving guidance from a true master, and appreciated the opportunity.
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