On The Flip Side

In baseball, sometimes the uniform becomes part of the player. It isn't something that announces itself. Often, it is the sort of thing that comes to light at the end of a long career. The first one that springs to mind is Babe Ruth.

In your mind, there he is, in pinstripes, with the overlapping NY on his chest. I can't imagine any more lasting image of the Babe. It's like he was a Yankee through and through. Born at home plate in New York. After all, Yankee Stadium was The House That Ruth Built. Of course, that picture is not really reflective of Ruth's career at all.

Six years in Boston at the beginning of his career, a dominant lefthander on the mound. Funny, but we rarely picture him that way. Maybe it makes sense, because Ruth rewrote the rules of hitting in those pinstripes. Odd, though, that the Red Sox spent almost a century breaking a 'curse' of a man rarely pictured in their uniform.

This is from flipflopflyball.com, which you, being a baseball fan, should have visited many times already.

The players of the past, through the late 1960's, became one with their uniforms by virtue of the way baseball conducted its business. The reserve clause dictated that players could be retained indefinitely by one team, and cheaply too! Great players were destined for long careers in one colour.
Musial in Cardinal Red, Koufax in Dodger Blue.  It is natural to us now, but maybe it would have been different in an era where changing teams came naturally when the highest bidder came calling. When baseball moved through the 1970, 80s and 90s, into collective bargaining and free agency, the thought of a player in one uniform and only one uniform became much, much rarer. Many players now seem to change teams like it's a contest to collect the most different shirts. Matt Stairs, Eric Hinske, Jim Thome, Octavio Dotel, I have no lasting impression of any logo or number on their backs.

1-3-6-2 Double Play, and Go Ahead Run- SB, E1

The New York Yankees are...

If I start a sentence with those words, and you are a baseball fan, there is some automatic filler you will end it with. It depends what kind of fan you are. If you are a Yankee fan, it likely ends with "...baseball's greatest team.", or something else overly self congratulatory. Even if you are not a Yankee fan, there is still, I am sure, a way you end that sentence, almost automatically. Why? Because the Yankees are an indelible part of baseball history. You can't be a baseball fan and not have thought about the Yankees, a lot. You have surely imagined your team beating them, because, except for a couple of seemingly brief periods in their history, they have always been the team to beat. If you have ever imagined your team winning it all, at some point, the New York Yankees were the team they had to go through to get there.

I am not a Yankee fan, not by a long shot, but I, too, have an automatic ending to that sentence. When I hear "The New York Yankees are...." my brain finishes "too good at baseball." That's all, if they were just like other teams, we could all laugh off the 200 million dollar payroll and the pinstripes. Sadly, we can't laugh at them, not in the long run, because they win.

Bottom of the 1st, June 28th 2012.

Stupid tricks, as a rule, do not work. That's what makes them stupid. In grade three, when the schoolyard clown pointed to your shirt, got you to look down, and flicked your nose on the way up, that was a stupid trick at work. You, (and I to be honest), tried to spot that trick as quickly as possible. It lacks sophistication, and when frequently attempted, it is easily thwarted.

There are lots of places in baseball to try a stupid trick. The middle infielders, as they make plays around the bag, make motions and noises to indicate they are going to be part of the play, when, in fact, the ball is traveling elsewhere. The catcher will pump-fake to second with runners on first and third, trying to trick the runner on third into a mistake. The pitcher has an entire section of the rulebook defining the limits of his trickery. If he gets too tricky, he is the only player with penalties outlined for his tricking transgressions. The balk rules are more nebulous than the trick plays they prevent.

But, like a dime-store magic trick, when applied properly, stupid tricks can pay off.

June 18th and June 29th, 2012

Baseball loves its records. We, the fans, are always exposed to a new record from Elias Sports Bureau (all those records in one desk!), or Stats Inc., or the local TV stats guy with google and a bunch of spare time on his hands. Records, were, at one time, pure things. For example, most home runs hit in one season. Ever. Period. When Babe Ruth hit 60 homers, that was a simple, pure record.

Not a lot of games had been played, so it was relatively easy to do something for the first time ever. Most hits in a season, most errors. First pitcher to throw 2 no-hitters, first hitter to get 6 hits in a game. As time has gone on, a whole lot of games have been played. It has become harder to set the definitive record. For example, Jose Bautista was having a very good month in June. He set a record for home runs in a month. He hit fourteen. Fourteen is a lot of home runs in one month. It is more home runs than any Blue Jay has ever hit in a month, and that makes it a record. It is not, however, the most home runs hit in the American League in one month. That record would be fifteen, held jointly by Babe Ruth, Bob Johnson and Roger Maris. It is also nowhere near the Major League record for homers in a month. Sammy Sosa had the discourtesy to hit twenty home runs in June of 1998, which means you will hear a lot about Ruth, Johnson, and Maris, and then a whole lot about Sosa, before you ever hear about anybody setting the record for homers in the month of June. In a way, I feel bad for Bautista, but it should be hard to have the best home run hitting month in history, and it is.

Which is why it's totally worth talking about this guy and what he did in the past week an a half.

Lying down on the job? Not exactly.

For those of you not familiar with the face, that's Aaron Hill, current Arizona Diamondbacks (and former Blue Jays) second baseman. He made himself a piece of baseball lore on June 29th 2012. He had a four hit game, and did something that is very unusual for a hitter. By collecting a single, double, triple, and home run, he did what is called 'hitting for the cycle'.

It isn't easy to hit for the cycle. It certainly doesn't represent the best night a batter can have, as I'm sure all of the players who have hit four home runs in one night will tell you. The funny thing about the cycle is that nobody is trying to do it. A hitter who has a homer and a triple in his first 2 at-bats can't stop at second base if he hits another homer. Hitters aren't really able to stretch a hard single into a double, even if they have the other three elements of the cycle already covered. So, the cycle is a curiosity, but stll requires the tools to hit the ball hard, and have good speed on the bases. Even the best hitters are at the mercy of Lady Luck when it comes to the cycle. Still, it is significant for its rarity.

As an example of the rarity of the cycle, I present the following: my favourite franchise is the Toronto Blue Jays. They have a 35 year history. They have played 5,267 games. Blue Jay players have hit for the cycle twice. That's once very 2633.5 games. Quite the wait if you wanted to see both. In all of MLB, the fraternity of cycle hitters has 246 members. Which, considering the number of plate appearances in baseball history, is a select group indeed.

Aaron Hill has hit for the cycle twice in his career, which represents some very intense negotiations with Lady Luck. Several players have hit for the cycle multiple times. This smaller brotherhood contains only 19 names, including Mr. Hill. He stands alone in one regard, however. He took only an 11 day pause between his two hit-for-the-cycle games. Since modern baseball began in 1901, with the American and National Leagues playing parrellel seasons, nobody has ever put their first and second cycle so close together.

When he retires, Hill can tell his kids that, yes, he does hold an all-time baseball record. He is the player who hit for the cycle twice, and took the shortest ever break between the two times he did it.

I think, in a watered down game, where we get told a team hasn't hit back to back homers "since 2010" ,(wow, 2 years, that's soooo rare), it's good to have a little of the wonder put back into things by a player doing something that has never been done before.

Baseball, you never know what you might see next.

Top of the 4th, Lineout SS

The play that led to this post is pretty great. With a man on first base, Brett Cecil delivers a pitch that gets ripped to the right of Yunel Escobar, and he makes a nifty little play to snag it on the fly.

You can hop to the MLB.com video of the play to see him in action.

27 Outs

Every baseball game is the same.

Each team seeks to record 27 outs against its opponent. It does this in 3 out bursts, seeking to prevent the other team from recording those outs in order. 

Every baseball game is different.

Every game brings players who are different from who they were the day before. Their batting averages have ticked up, or down. Sometimes they are hurt, or healed a little more. Each day hitters practice in a cage, tweaking and refining swings. Fielders take grounders and fly balls, teammates suggest methods and movements to improve. The starting pitcher's identity is, by definition, rotating around every day. Sometimes the fastball has extra pop. Sometimes a curve ball keeps hanging up. Legs tilt, knees bend, arms tire.

The same batter will find himself higher and lower in the lineup, one night seeing the bases full over and over again. On other nights, he will stand out on the bases, wondering why his teammates can't move him beyond first. Pitches bounce, runners scamper on wild pitches, balls kick into the stands, get snatched back from over the fence, deflected into the seats off of gloves (and heads), and spin fair and foul at the last millisecond.

Sometimes, if you are very lucky, you get to go to a game where almost nothing happens. When a pitcher allows no hits, and records 27 outs, he can put a 'no-hitter' on his calling card. When he allows no baserunners, and the same 27 out he can write the much more unusual 'perfect game'. It is the top of the mountain for a pitchign performance.

Every perfect game is the same.

One pitcher records 27 outs in perfect order. His solution to the challenge of 27 outs is to allow nothing to happen, except 27 outs. There is, in many ways of looking at it, only one way to pitch a perfect game.

Every perfect game is different.

Baseball is a game of stories. Because there is no clock, nothing pressing the game forward, there is time for a story between every action on the field. There does not have to be a story between every pitch, that would just be silly, but there is time for one. Every wince of a hitter who has fouled a ball off his own foot can be captured and mulled over. The look on a fielder's face when he has made an error, and is waiting for the next ball to be hit- to see if he will get a chance to redeem himself- can be read and mulled over in the moments between those pitches. Every time the ball is put into play, we, as fans, wait to see what it will add to the story.

Last night, baseball wrote a story called "Matt Cain's Perfect Game". Cain is lucky enough to pitch for the San Francisco Giants. I say lucky, not only because they were the underdog winners of the 2010 World Series, a team which Cain also belonged too, but for other reasons as well. The Giants have a wonderful stable of storytellers, many of them who put their work on the Internet. When good writers are able to write about a magic moment in the life of someone they love, about something they love, only good things can happen.

So, allow me to guide you to a few sources for the full story of Matt Cain, and his perfect game.

First the 2 highlights from MLB.com, to get you into the mood. First, Blanco's game saving catch in the 7th and the full game recap.

Here are all 27 outs:

Now, on to the stories:

Grant Brisbee wrote his reaction for the always high quality McCovey Chronicles.And he gives you 50 great things about the game, that's 50 stories in one, and there is room for them all.

Wendy Thurm seizes the keyboard at Fangraphs for this one.

Somebody noticed Ted Barrett was behind the plate, and thought that seemed familiar.

And last, the incomparable Joe Posnanski, with thoughts on the game, and the nature of the perfect game itself.

You can have a piece of this game, even if you weren't there. You, and I, for that matter, can share it now, through they eyes of others who experienced it in different ways. We, and our thought on Cain's moment of perfection, they become part of our own stories.

That is the magic. The ability to share a moment through a game, across time and space. I offer my congratulations to Mr. Matt Cain, and hope he enjoyed his magic moment as much as the rest of us did.

Two things I would have bet were impossible.

The super slow motion camera is a wonderful thing. I can remember nature shows that my father made me watch as a young child. There would be the hummingbird, slowly flapping its wings, suspended over a flower. Sometimes it would be an insect feeding, or a plant shooting pollen, but always in perfect, crisp detailed motion.

It turns out that it comes in just as handy for baseball games, if the camera is pointed in the right place. It can reveal that what I thought was impossible, has already happened.

Everything I have read about hitting, power is generated by a complex relationship of force and leverage. The result of carefully timed hip and shoulder turns, arm extensions and wrist tension is what makes hitting a ball out of the yard possible. If you had bet me that you could hit a home run by holding the knob of the bat with your thumb and forefinger slipping off of it, I would have bet against you in a second.

I will now send you to a GIF over at Getting Blanked. I don't want to steal that one, so go take a look and I'll be here when you get back.

Poor Jamie Moyer. He's been on the right side, and the wrong side of the magic forces lately.

That clip reminded me of somthing that I saw last year. A similar camera angle. From SBNation, this is Troy Tulowitzki getting the bat on the ball in an incredibly unusual way.

Yes, I would have bet that making contact a second time on the same stroke was impossible. I would have wagered quite a bit of money that you couldn't swing slow enough to hit it so softly that you were then swinging hard enough to catch up to the ball you just hit. Troy Twoquickhitzki. For reals.

I would have lost both bets, because I also sometimes forget that baseball is magic.