More serious baseball historians than I are invited to weigh in on this theory I’ve heard about about Babe Ruth (I won’t be at all surprised if serious baseball minds have discussed this for years before I ever even heard it).
The theory is that Babe Ruth was lucky to be a pitcher, initially. His swing was very unconventional for the dead ball era. If he’d been a position player, coaches and managers would have told the young Ruth, “You’re doing it all wrong- swing like THIS instead.” But since nobody cares much about the way pitchers hit (they’re usually weak hitters anyway), they let it slide. And when the live ball came into play, Ruth’s “wrong” swing was perfect for hitting the ball a mile.
And once everybody else started swinging Ruth’s way, they started catching up to him.
At the risk of derailing Babe Ruth chat, I wanted to address this…
For people who don’t watch much baseball, this might not be obvious: Pitchers are usually intending to aim right at the catcher’s glove, because it’s normally the catcher that calls the pitch type and placement, and they normally place the glove right where they want it to go as a visual guide. There are exceptions, but usually you can tell how pinpoint a pitcher is by watching where the catcher starts his glove, and where he moves it to when the ball arrives. If you watch a few games, you’ll get a sense of how the pitcher you’re watching is doing in this regard.
The question of “does a pitcher have that kind of control” is of course the question du jour for every pitcher when he takes the mound that day. Some guys have it consistently, some don’t. Sometimes a guy who normally has it just doesn’t have it at all one day. Frequently, he might start out great, but after 90 or so pitches he starts to lose it.
Now - for anyone who has trouble believing this level of accuracy, there’s an even more impressive throw you’ll see in baseball (in my view): when a catcher makes the throw to 2nd during a steal attempt. The catcher has to catch the pitch, jump into a throwing stance (from a crouch), and throw the ball over twice the distance a pitcher does (127 feet and a few inches, for the pedants). He is aiming for the exact point where the runner will attempt to slide into the bag, so it has to come slightly to the right of the base and juuuust off the ground (low enough so that it will be caught at the same time the runner slides into it). Decent catchers will hit that spot within 4-5 inches more times than not.
This is a pretty reasonable bet, yeah. Ruth had the advantages of being both a person who was disinclined to follow coaching advice anyway, AND being a pitcher whose hitting ability wasn’t of much interest to anyone. When he started drilling home runs, of course, no one was about to stop him at that point.
It’s worth nothing Ruth was blasting homers before the so-called “live ball” era began in 1920. In 1918 he hit 11 homers in just half a season’s worth of at bats, thereby leading the league. In 1919 he hit 29 homers, setting the major league record. It wasn’t the ball, it was Ruth. Whatever the lower standard of competition, Ruth was an outstanding baseball player and would have been just as elite today; his numbers would be different, but he had a gift that would not be denied.
Being able to catch a steal of second is also one of the purported reasons why there have been virtually no left handed catchers in MLB history. The common wisdom on why there are no lefty catchers involve various contorted arguments that don’t make sense–for example that a left handed catcher couldn’t throw to second when there was a right handed batter at the plate without hitting said batter in the head. If you think about it of course that makes no sense–because the converse would be true for a right handed catcher with a lefty at the plate. Other arguments have been that a left handed catcher would struggle to throw to third Benny Distefano who was an emergency catcher for a few games for the Pirates in 1989 and threw left handed said that’s not really the case as he just positioned his feet slightly different on pitches where there was a chance of a play on third. There’s also the good point that most steals of third are on the pitcher and not the catcher in any case.
I started off playing in little league as a left handed catcher and switched to being a pitcher by Junior High because even at that level they didn’t want a lefty catching the ball. I think the reason there have been virtually no left-handed catchers in MLB history is simply a strange tradition and little league coaches don’t want to be going against popular baseball wisdom. So kids who might start out playing the game as a left handed catcher get moved to some other position pretty quickly if they stick with the sport.
