After seeing yet ANOTHER 4 homer game (Shawn Green, LA ) I’ve become even more disgusted. Through baseball history, it has only happened 12 times, and yet we have 2 additions to the feat this year.
Is it just me, or is the home run becoming a joke? All lifelong power numbers are being distorted by a golf ball masquerading as a baseball. I can’t even imagine what lifetime power numbers that the greats of yesterday would have if they were lucky enough to play now. Aaron, Ruth, Mays, Mantle, Stargell, etc…
I grow weary of seeing a 150 lb shortstop swinging with one hand and watching the ball fly out of the park. It makes me sick! I know home runs help sell the game, but come on owners… just admit to juicing the ball. Every home run record that broke Maris’ 61 should have an asterick. Hell, Sosa has broken it three times and never won the HR title! And when McGwire broke it by such a crazy number, who could believe that an aging 38 year old could pop 3 more 2 years later!?
I’m curious as to what the rest of you dopers think. It’s embarrassing to what’s left of the integrity of the game.
Personally, I hope they go on strike and stay out for 2 years. As an avid fan since I was 5, I just can’t stand to watch it anymore.
A man walks into a bar with a dog. The bartender says, “You can’t bring that dog in here.”
“You don’t understand,” says the man. “This is no regular dog, he can talk.”
“Listen, pal,” says the bartender. “If that dog can talk, I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”
The man puts the dog on a stool, and asks him, “What’s on top of a house?”
“Roof!”
“Right. And what’s on the outside of a tree?”
“Bark!”
“And who’s the greatest baseball player of all time?”
“Ruth!”
“I guess you’ve heard enough,” says the man. “I’ll take the hundred in twenties.”
The bartender is furious. “Listen, pal,” he says, “get out of here before I belt you.”
As soon as they’re on the street, the dog turns to the man and says, “Do you think I should have said ‘DiMaggio’?”
Times change. Players are bigger and stronger now than in the 1920’s and '30’s. Then, many players had part time jobs in the winter and didn’t stay in good physical condition. Now they stay in shape and weight train all winter. The pitchers throw harder and when a weight-lifter batter connects, the ball goes a long way. And after Babe Ruth, more and more batters started swinging for the long ball.
And, of course it isn’t only baseball. When I was young, baskeball was a low scoring game. 18-15 or scores like that in high school games were the usual result. There was a center jump after every basket (similar to the face-off after hockey goals). Then in about 1939 the center jump after scores was eliminated, the fast-break took over and scores skyrocketed to the point where an expert like Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points all by himself in a game.
Back in the '20’s and '30’s 250 yards was a great tee shot in golf. Now many of the tournament players regard any par 5 of less than about 550 yards as an eagle (two under par) opportunity because the tour average drive is somewhere around 275 yards. Players are now hitting a 7-iron (a club with relatively high loft) 180-190 yards where they used to get 150 max if they were real good.
In the 20’s and early '30’s football coaches had the philosophy that only three things can happen on a forward pass and two of them are bad. Then, the value of the pass was discovered when some exceptional passers like Otto Graham and Sid Luckman happened to team up with receivers who could really run and catch. Coaches started working with passers and receivers to perfect that play and football scores zoomed.
Excuse me while I hawk up some phlegm to spit contempuously on your shoes. If anything destroyed the integrity of the game, it was the strike, or rather, the strike was the sign that integrity had completely evaporated.
A few broken records aren’t the problem, since no serious fan is likely to forget Ruth or Maris. I’d be more concerned that baseball will turn into another Hollywood, driven by money rather than quality. At that stage, you pick and choose what movies or players/teams appeal to you, and write off the rest as just another load o’ crap.
You wrote what I should have appended to my post. IMHO professional and college athletes and increasingly High School as well are more and more nothing but a bunch of spoiled brats.
I guess when you identify a child of 10 as having exceptional athletic ability and treat them as special from then on, it would be astounding if many of them weren’t egotistical jerks by the time they are 21.
And professional team-owners, college coaches and administrations and most executives connected with the games of all kinds show little evidence of having an interest in the sport as a game.
Some college coaches seem to act as if having a team with most of the players on probation is a good thing. They have a probation officer to help them keep track of their team members.
People have been training and working out more efficiently, the harder, denser maple bats are starting to become popular, and the overall pitching isn’t all that great (with a few exceptions). Players who want to make a name for themselves make the extra effort to launch bombs, because they’ve realized that the home run is an easily accessible and identifiable achievement, and multiple homers are a ticket to instant reputation and an improved contract.
More perilous than the home run infestaion is the overall financial disparity between teams - the very richest at the top routinely taking it all, the poorest teams plugging along and going home in September. It’s almost become a cliche to say it, but it’s really quite true I think.
I mean, no offense, but what the hell does Shawn Green hitting four home runs have to do with the integrity of the game and a players’ strike? Nothing.
Yes, offensive levels have changed, especially in the area of home runs. It’s actually down a little this year, despite the 4-home-games fluke, but we’re seeing a historic number of home runs being hit.
But SO WHAT? Despite what you may remember, the statistical standards of major league baseball have never been consistent and they never will be. Prior to World War II it was common for players to make 40 errors a year, and before about 1920 sometimes 60+ errors a year. Before 1920 pitchers routinely won 25-35 games and went entire seasons giving up 2-3 homers; whole TEAMS sometimes his less than ten homers. From 1930 to 1960 players hardly ever stole bases. In 1968 a man won a batting title hitting .301. In 1930 a team scored 1000 runs and finished in last place. I don’t understand why the recent home run festival is any worse than the total lack of hitting in the late 60s, or the disappearance of basestealing in the 1950s, or any of the other statistical trends in baseball history. You may be under the mistaken impression that baseball’s statistical standards were more or less always the same prior to 1994; well, they weren’t.
More home runs are being hit today primarily because hitters have adopted strength training as a tool to increase their power. People seem to have already forgotten this, but prior to the 1980s major league players were pressured NOT to train with weights because of a (largely mythical) concern they would become more injury-prone. Players today are much, much stronger than they were just 25 years ago; infielders now are as buff as home run champions were in the 1970s. There are other reasons too; homer-happy new ballparks, the shrinking of the strike zone, a change in the way bats are made, non-enforcement of the batter’s box. But mostly it’s just because they’re stronger. I don’t see how that’s bad. It’s just an evolution of the game. There’s no issue of “integrity” here.
You are right, of course, in that Henry Aaron would probably have hit 850 home runs if he’d had a chance to play in a homer-happy era like this. And Roger Clemens would have won 400 career games if he’d pitched in the 1900s. Rickey Henderson would only have stolen 300-400 bases if he’d played in the 1940s and 1950s. (Of course, he would not have even been ALLOWED to play until 1947.) Sam Crawford would not have hit 300 triples, or even half that many, if he played in the 1970s and 1980s. Honus Wagner, if he’d played in the 1920s and 1930s, might have gotten 4500 hits. Nolan Ryan would not have struck out half as many men as he did if he’d pitched in the 1920 and 1930s. We can play that stupid game all day.
Look, I would agree that the game’s integrity has taken a serious blow since Fay Vincent was fired and Bud Selig became commissioner; the way MLB has handled itself since then has been appalling. But give me a break, guys. Baseball has always been run by crooks. The players have always had plenty of bad apples; I’ll take the spoiled brats, thanks you, over the rampant alcoholism of the 1950s and 1960s, when Casey Stengel sometimes had trouble finding nine sober men to take the field, or the rampant coke abuse of the 1970s and 1980s, or all the years prior to 1947 when black men weren’t welcome. It’s no worse than it ever was and in a LOT of respects it’s better, and us being in a high home run era has zip to do with integrity.
Well, more expansion teams mean more home runs, period. And more singles, and more strikeouts, and more ground outs, and more walks, and more double plays. More everything; there are more games played. But if you’re talking more home runs proportionately–cite?
That doesn’t make any sense. Baseball scouts are looking farther and farther to find good pitchers (and good hitters and fielders, too). The number of spots available has indeed increased, but the field of players to choose from has increased as well. We used to find players from a pool which included non-black men from the US. Then we began recruiting blacks. Then we began looking to South and Central America. Now we’ve expanded recruiting in all those places, and added Japan and Korea… and of course places like Australia and Canada have provided major league players.
Well here is something I wrote a couple of years ago about the overload of home runs. I pretty agree with the OP, but actually I think the jacked up offensive numbers are probably the least of baseball’s problems at this point.
Hey, Tretiak, I’m gonna view everything you say in a completely different light now! Thanks for that wonderful glimpse into your excellent sense of humor.
Years down the line I’m still not very good with baseball arcana. However, it has occured to me that there may be a sort of a probability streak which comes into play with the stand-swinging. The example I base my poorly-formed theory on is Kirk Gibson’s “miracle” in the '88 World Series. As amazing as it is, the probabilities appear to have been carefully managed by Tommy Lasorda to ensure that the highest possible low-odds were on his side.
Nowadays I wonder if a lot of those mid-season home runs aren’t part of a sort of continuation of Lasorda’s deception theory. I’m not competent enough to offer a theoretical example, but the upshot would be to make the pitcher go for the strikeout against the slugger, because he faces less favorable odds with the next batter. And, one out of eight or ten or twenty times, it pays off for the batter so big that it’s worth risking.
If, say, the pitcher wins nine times out of ten, it’s a safe bet for him to throw that heater. But the one time in ten that the slugger connects with that perfect pitch, it pays off with a minimum of one run. If a manager can finangle the situation to arise two times a game, he stands to score once every five games, using the figures that smell vaguely of my rectum. I don’t know, am I crazy? I’m not much of a baseball guy.
Ah, baseball. Twenty minutes worth of action packed into three hours.
Seriously, though, I still love the sport. This hot weather has me itching to go down to the ballpark every night. Go Phillies! Get out of that cellar!
Oh, back to the OP…home runs? We don’t see many of them at Vet’s Stadium. Love 'em when we get 'em. If increased training, physical enhancements and better understanding of physics in relation to sports brings more of them, then I won’t need a beer at the ballpark to make the game more exciting.
This makes sense only if you assume away its corollary.
If expansion means dilution of talent, why are you assuming it applied only to pitching? Expansion teams only need five starters and maybe five or six pitchers in the bullpen; they fill the rest of the 25-man roster with batters. That means for every new pitcher that joins the league, approx. 1.5 new hitters join.
If the surplus pitching brought into the league is sketchy, shouldn’t the surplus hitting be sketchy as well? Or are you arguing that new pitching is disproportionately less talented than new hitting?
And to follow pldennison’s point, Baseball Prospectus did a study in this year’s annual which showed that the percentage of older players in the major leagues is the highest, proportionally, that it’s been in a long while–which suggests, perhaps, that expansion allows marginal veterans (hitters or pitchers) to hang around longer, rather than causing teams to bring up players who aren’t ready.
In short: Max, call me when Rey Ordonez hits four home runs, and we’ll talk.
I preferred the joke to the discussion, but then I’m a foreigner. Can we have another one, to keep the foreigners reading? Baseball is a mystery to us, and the original title promised us a joke.
Fun game to play while watching baseball: The boys kiss the girls on the strikes, and…
'Course, if you’re a foreigner, you might not get that one. (Was that Daffy Dean, by the way?)
(Was that Daffy Dean, by the way?)