Hi SD, it’s pianodave with four more baseball questions…looking for your expertise!
Say a team is winning 2-1 at home in the bottom of the fifth inning, and it starts to rain, heavily. I understand it’s not “official” until the top of the sixth. So would batters just swing at everything, no matter what the pitch, to get through the inning? I know it’s underhanded, but is this common? Would the opposing team throw balls to try and walk people to prolong the inning in an attempt to have a shot at calling the game?
When a batter hits a home run, is it a function of his bat strength or his location of pitches? Another way to put this is, do home runs happen because the player himself is stronger than his teammates, or do they happen because he just follows the ball better?
What is the hardest part about being a baseball announcer? Where is the talent on display in a typical game? Where can I audibly hear the expertise of the particular announcer that differentiates him from an amateur? Basically, why couldn’t I do it? Not saying I could, but what’s the showcase of a true professional? Is it their color commentary or their cadence? Conversely, how can you tell an amateur announcer?
I always thought being caught looking at strike three was humiliating. Is there an increased chance of a batter swinging with two strikes, especially in a pressure situation?
If it is raining heavily, they will not be playing, and swinging away,or throwing balls, they will be in clubhouse waiting for it to stop, if it doesn’t stop 4 1/2 innings are enough if home team has the lead.
Strength plays a big part in it… McGuire’s steroids did not help him see any better, but no matter how strong, you have to be able to hit it, so following the ball, and predicting location based on trajectory is still crucial.
Several things, knowledge of rules, and strategy is important, also knowing when io be quiet and let the action speak for itself. That part seems to be the toughest for the novice.
A light rain may make a team take chances or become defensive on the belief that it will begin raining harder. These days they’ll get a weather report and know pretty well how the weather will be for the next hour or so and make their decisions based on that, and the officials are doing the same.
Every batter will get caught looking at strike 3 many many times in their career. It’s one of the less humiliating things a baseball player can do. They may be signaled to take the pitch by a coach. All batters are affected by pressure, some more than others. There are a lot of arguments about the concept of clutch hitting, the idea that some hitters are better with the pressure on late in the game. Statistics show virtually all batters perform worse under such pressure, the clutch players just don’t degrade as much as others.
Current radar maps are available to anyone nowadays, anyway. The umpiring crew will delay a game for hours sometimes just to get the game in - opportunities to reschedule are heavily limited, and nobody wants to refund tickets either. That can also sometimes mean letting a game continue in heavier rain than they’d normally allow, if the game has not yet reached the point of the trailing team having batted for 5 full innings.
Tread touched on it, I’ll expand a bit. All this is from Robert Adair’s book The Physics Of Baseball.
Strength comes from the legs and torso, the arms serve to transfer the power to the bat. Similar to cracking a whip.
For the ideal square hit ball, you need to uppercut the ball, a level swing will produce a line drive that drops too soon to clear the fence even if hit as hard.
A heavier bat can drive the ball slightly farther but means a batter must start his swing earlier and increases the chance of misjudging a pitch.
(In the book, the example given is a 46 oz bat vs. a 32 with only an 8 foot difference)
You should check out Ted Williams’ hitting lessons on youtube.
I always prefer the guys who don’t show which team they’re rooting for. Unless it’s a local broadcast, in which case a certain level of homerism is acceptable. Otherwise, you need to intimately know the subject material. Baseball’s a tough one becuase there is a lot of filler time. Personally I like my filler time to include more subjective dialogue than listening to guys spew out hard stats. So, if you can contribute intelligent and entertaining baseball discussion, you can be a play by play announcer. But you can pretty much forget about being a color analyst unless you’re a former player.
Yes. Batters will shorten their swing and expand their zone with 2 strikes. However, a backwards K (striking out looking) is not more humiliating than any other strikeout. It happens. You want to avoid it as much as any other out.
It’s both, though strength is critical. If you ever read any scouting reports, you’ll often see scouts describe a players something like this “80 raw power, 60 in-game” or “power limited by hit tool”. That means that they can’t fully translate their raw strength (displayed in batting practice) into an actual game, or that they just can’t hit well enough to get a good enough swing on the ball to drive it out of the park. A player’s swing is also a big part of this - some players don’t hit the ball in the air enough to hit a lot of home runs, or their swings are tailored for line-drives rather than fly balls. Generally speaking, fly balls turn into outs more than ground balls; but of course its tough to hit a ground ball homer run…
In case the “80 Power” comment didn’t make sense - baseball scouts use a scale from 20-80 when describing the traditional five tools (hitting, defense, power, speed, and throwing). 20 is bad, 40 is average, 80 is the very best. It’s graded on a curve. Very few players have 80 tools. A player with multiple 60 tools is likely to be a star.
An example of a player with 80 power whose power tool may be limited by his hitting is Joey Gallo; he strikes out a ton, but when he connects it goes a really long ways. He’s a rookie who is in the minors right now but was up for a few weeks earlier in the year. Another young player with the same issue is Javier Baez of the Cubs. Going back a few years, Adam Dunn was a player who never quite managed to be as good as he might have been for similar reasons, though he ended up having a pretty long, valuable career regardless.
No, 50 is average (as in average for a major league player). Think of it terms of a bell curve (albeit one skewed toward the bottom) where 10 points equals one standard deviation. So if a player is a 70 in a category (and the categories go beyond the traditional five) he is two SD above average which puts him in elite company.
As has been noted already, a game is official after 4 1/2 innings if the home team is ahead.
This reminds me of a tournament game in what I think was the Pony League (it may have become the Cal Ripken youth league, I’m not quite sure - it definitely wasn’t Little League as they had not applied the rule to tournaments when this happened) where the visiting team went into the last inning with a sizable lead lead but one player not having batted yet, and the tournament had an “everybody has to bat at least once or your team forfeits the game” rule. For some reason, the manager was going to have him bat fourth in the inning (presumably after the leadoff player got on base), but the second batter got out and the third hit into a double play, so he never got into the game. The manager then told his pitcher to walk batters around so the game could be tied, but the other manager figured it out, had all of his batters strike out on purpose, then claim the win by forfeit. (Why a tournament has a must-play rule is beyond me - the rule is there so a manager in a league game won’t keep his worst players on the bench all of the time, but this was a tournament game with the best players from each league playing.)
Thanks everyone for the replies. I learn so much from you guys.
Has there ever been an instance where an outfielder intentionally misplays a ball in order to coax a baserunner to try for an extra base where he’s tagged out?..for example, trying to stretch a double into a triple. Tell me about other psychological tricks fielders use to try and fool baserunners.
If we can perhaps break this down a little bit more.
A home run happens because the ball it hit very hard AND hit at a certain angle. A ball hit very hard but into the ground is just a ground ball; a ball hit very hard but at too high an angle will be caught by an outfielder.
The power with which the ball is hit is a function of the speed of the bat at the moment of contact, in accordance, of course, with the law that force equals mass times half of velocity squared; in other words, the bigger the bat and the faster it is going, the harder you hit the ball. The speed of the ball also affects this but the ball is much smaller. (The mass of the bat also doesn’t matter a lot in Major League Baseball because there’s little variance in weight, and such variance as there is is slightly offset but the fact that you can swing a lighter bat a little faster) I am assuming here the ball is struck in the part of the bat meant for hitting it; hitting the ball off the handle is useless.
So a home run is a combination of striking the ball with a minimum amount of force AND doing so in a way that consistently drives the ball upwards at an angle of somewhere around 30 degrees. I know you’d think it’s 45 degrees but it’s not. It’s about 30.
It is plainly obvious if one examined a list of all time home run hitters that
Many of them were not really very big and strong. Some were monsters, like Barry Bonds or Jimmie Foxx, but Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Ted Williams weren’t huge guys, and
None are freaky big. Nobody’s ever hired a pro weightlifter to hit home runs.
If you’ve ever golfed you’ll know that imparting force to the ball is as much skill - probably MORE skill - than it is strength. I am a big, strong guy and cannot hit a golf ball anywhere near as far as a professional women’s player who weighs 130 pounds can. That’s because her swing is timed and designed correctly to maximize the speed of the clubhead at the moment of contact, and mine is not. Baseball swings are precisely the same problem; no matter how strong you are, errors in technique will reduce bat speed. And even if you are able to hit the ball incredible distances, errors in technique will mean that you miss the ball or hit it at the wrong angle.
Bo Jackson could hit a ball much, much further than Willie Mays could, but Willie hit many more home runs because he simply made solid contact so much more often.
Baseball announcing is a form of spoken word art. It’s INCREDIBLY hard to do well, as all performance art is.
Obviously, you need to know a great deal about baseball, but you must also have a tremendous command of how to work intelligent commentary in to the broadcast. The flow of the game will go in any number of directions; if it slows down you need to fill stuff in, and if it speeds up you need to stay out of the way. Commercial breaks and sponsorship comments must be seamlessly woven in, you have to work off your partner (announcing teams are usually duos) and on and on. You have to do this and SOUND great - “like,” “um,” “ah” and the other hallmarks of common speech must be minimized.
Tape yourself announcing an inning and have a listen. You’ll sound awful.
Baseball games are announced, usually, by two people; the play by play man, who is sort of the head of the team and whose primary job is stating what’s going on, and the color commentator, who is the backup to the play by play man and who usually offers more detailed insight as to the nature of baseball and how it is being played. Traditionally the play by play man is a broadcaster by trade and the color man is an ex player or coach, though it’s not always that way.
Being a color man is the easier job; shut up most of the time and tell the audience something they would otherwise not know about the game of baseball. Al Leiter is a very good color man; he always had something insightful to say, something where I found myself thinking “Well, how about that, I never would have noticed that.”
Being the play by play man is incredibly hard and some people are just born meant to do it. I don’t know how else to describe it. To announce a baseball game for three hours and sound friendly, knowledgeable, insightful, professional and avoid stumbling over your words is a skill not quickly learned, to say the least.
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5. Has there ever been an instance where an outfielder intentionally misplays a ball in order to coax a baserunner to try for an extra base where he’s tagged out?..for example, trying to stretch a double into a triple. Tell me about other psychological tricks fielders use to try and fool baserunners
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I am sure there has been but it is rare, and is generally a foolish idea. Executing the throw to the infield at the professional level looks routine but it’s not. You’re throwing a ball well over a hundred feet and if it’s not done right the runners advance and the inning is all screwed up. MLB outfielders are largely concerned with returning the ball to the correct person in the least risky manner possible.
Infielders are likelier to try such things; usually it involved either pretending to be able to catch an uncatchable ball to get a runner to hold up. Quite famously, in the 1991 World Series, Twins second baseman Chuck Knoblauch pretended to field a ball that actually has been hit well into the outfield gap. It fooled baserunner Lonnie Smith into hesitating, and Smith failed to score on a double that he thought was just a ground ball. Smith’s team, the Braves, would end up losing that game 1-0 and with it the World Series. (In fairness, Smith had already hit three home runs in the World Series, two of them in games his team won by one run, so they probably wouldn’t have even been in Game 7 without him, but it has haunted him ever since.)
Trivia fact: Had Smith not been decoyed he might well today be the only man to ever win the World Series with four different teams; he’d already won it with the Phillies, Cardinals, and Royals. He had two shots at it with the Braves and he played very well, but they came up short. As it is he’d tied with a bunch of other players for the record of winning it with three teams… one of whom is the guy who shut the Braves out in that fateful Game 7, Jack Morris.
Bryce Harper did this (or says he did) in Spring Training this year: Link to article, which includes video. It’s referred to as “deking” a runner, though deking refers to all kinds of fooling the other team - sometimes an infielder will try to act like they can catch a ball when they can’t to get a runner to hold up, etc.
Something like this actually happened when I was a kid in a game between St. Louis and Milwaukee. As I recall, St. Louis was ahead, and a thunderstorm was looming. Milwaukee tried to slow everything down, hoping the rain would stop things before the game became official. Lots of slow pitches, throws to first base, catcher and infielder conferences on the mound, etc. St. Louis countered by doing exactly what you suggested. At one point, a St. Louis player tried to get thrown out by attempting (rather slowly) to steal second. The Milwaukee catcher let him, and the St. Louis player actually got up from second and headed for third (where Milwaukee finally obliged by tagging him out.)
It didn’t matter. The rain held off, and the game went the full nine innings.
I will but the edit window is closing and I’ll have to come back later.
In the 1964 World Series Yankee great Mickey Mantle was on second base. In a prearranged play, Cardinal shortstop Dick Groat struck up a conversation with Mantle, while edging him farther and farther off the base. When Mantle got far enough off second, catcher Tim McCarver fired off a throw and Groat tagged Mantle out.
I guess Tom Verducci is technically color commentator in the booth for Fox baseball, but he’d never be the only color guy. I can’t ever remember not seeing a former player/coach/GM on a broadcast team.
As easy as you’d think being the color guy is, boy is Rick Sutcliffe bad at it. I remember one broadcast where he spent about a half inning making fun of how fat his partner, Jon Sciambi, was. Very awkward.
Being the color guy is easier than play by play but it’s not easy.
I’ve complained about him before but Toronto’s color man, Pat Tabler, is a waste of space. He never says anything insightful, just occasionally interjecting things like “the Jays could use a clutch hit here,” as if there’s ever a time you don’t want a hit. I’ve never heard him offer any sort of interesting analysis on a player’s technique. Tabler’s only insight in every game is that you need to get hits with men on base if you want to score runs, a fact I am sure most fans already know. He’ll never explain to you WHY Jose Bautista failed to get a hit. He’ll say “that ball’s gotta get caught” but not actually explain why Kevin Pillar gets to so many fly balls but Ezequiel Carrera does not. I mean, maybe I’m weird, but I find that stuff fascinating. Does Pillar react faster? Run faster? Is his path to the ball straighter? Is he better positioned?
Statistically, it is clear that Pillar is an absolutely outstanding defensive outfielder and pretty much everyone else the Jays have is not. But that fact is obvious and boring. I also know Josh Donaldson hits more home runs than Ryan Goins. It’s not hard to count, I don’t need at Tabler to tell me one number is higher than another. What a good color man will tell me is why. Why is Pillar so much better than almost anyone else at catching fly balls?
By comparison, Gregg Zaun, who is part of the “back in the studio” team, has something good to say in every game, and he’s not even talking one tenth as much as Tabler is. Zaun isn’t great, but he earns his pay.
