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Baseball Explained This page intentionally left blank Baseball Explained PHILLIP MAHONY McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina ISBN 978-0-7864-7964-1 (softcover : acid free paper) ♾ ISBN 978-1-4766-1587-5 (ebook) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE © 2014 Phillip Mahony. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Lobby card for the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson Story (Pathe Industries) Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com With all my love to Marya, my wife, and to our children, Patrick, Caroline, Phillip and William. For their help with this book, thank you to Jim Jerome, author and journalist, to Fred Berowski, formerly reference librarian with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, presently director of Library Services at Herkimer College, and to copy editor Kevin Murawinski of sluicebox- media. com. This page intentionally left blank Table of Contents Introduction 1 One. Preliminaries 5 Equipment: The Ball, the Bat and the Uniforms 5 The Field 15 The Pitcher’s Mound and Home Plate 16 The Infield 19 The Outfield 25 The Fielders 28 The Format of the Game 30 The Length of the Game: Nine Innings 30 Three Exceptions 31 The Lineup 35 The Lineup Card 35 The Designated Hitter 37 Changes to the Lineup: Position Players 38 Platooning 40 Changes to the Lineup 43 The Designated Hitter, Continued 48 Two. The Game 50 Objectives of the Defensive Team 50 Three Outs 50 Fly Ball Outs 50 Ground Ball Outs 51 Strikeouts 64 Objectives of the Offensive Team 77 Overview 77 Putting Runners on Base 78 Legally Advancing Runners Around the Bases 106 vii viii Table of Contents Other Defensive Strategies 151 Covering Bases and Backing Up Throws 151 Hitting the Cutoff Man and Relay Throws 152 Positioning the Outfielders 153 Calling It 153 Take Yourself Out to the Ball Game … Almost! 154 Three. Statistics 155 Basic Statistics 157 The Official Scorer 157 Hitting Statistics 157 Pitching Statistics 163 Fielding Statistics 169 The Quest for Better Statistics 170 The Lineup Revisited 173 The Box Score, the Scorecard and the Scoreboard 175 Four. Major League Baseball Overview 184 The Majors and the Minors 184 A Year in the Major Leagues 186 Five. Final Thoughts 200 Bibliography 203 Index 207 Introduction Two unlikely events led to the writing of this book. First, on October 15, 2008, on the 17th floor of the Citicorp Building on Manhattan’s East Side, the door to my office was suddenly darkened by the glum figures of not one, but two, of my firm’s highest rank ing partners. This isn’t good, I said to myself. It wasn’t. I was laid off, and it would be nearly a year before I was able to find work again in what would reveal itself to be the country’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Second, two and a half months later, on December 29, as the rain and the wet snow fell on Birmingham, England, and as the final seconds of a scoreless soccer game ticked away in Villa Stadium, and as 45,000 drenched Aston Villa fans chanted and sang and celebrated the imminent prospect of not losing to mighty Liverpool, from a tangle of players near mid- field Liverpool striker Fernando Torres suddenly broke free with the ball, raced down the muddy sideline, veered into the penalty area to the left of the Aston Villa goal and blasted the ball into the net for the win. I can explain. It was because I was unemployed that I spent a lot of time on my exercise bike that win- ter. It was because I spent a lot of time on my exercise bike while watching TV that, out of sheer boredom, and with the baseball season still a long way off, I started sneaking a peek at the occasional soccer game, a sport I had more or less loathed for my entire life. It was because I snuck a peek at that particular Liverpool game and saw Torres’ amazing goal that I suddenly, inexplicably, became hooked on soccer. (Within a few weeks I was watching three or four games a weekend and actually calling it “footie.”) It was because I became hooked that I began sending my cousins in England long emails asking questions about the Premier League teams and players and its confus ing plethora of side tournaments, called “Cups.” It was because I was asking them so many questions about soccer that they, in turn, finally asked me a question: Can you explain baseball to us? No problem, I thought. After all, I’d been a fan my whole life. I’ll just write them a few emails. But it was a problem. I wrote five or six emails before I gave up, all but the first begin- ning with “Forget everything I said in my last email; start with this one instead.” No matter where I started my explanation, other explanations were needed first. No matter where I began, I needed to back up and begin again. And again. And again. No problem, I thought. I’ll just find them a book. But, again, it was a problem. I hit the bookstores, and the Internet, and though I found a few books that seemed, from their titles, anyway, to be the basic explanatory book I was looking for, they weren’t because they 1 2 Introduction invariably assumed the reader had a great deal of knowledge about baseball even as they pro- fessed to be explaining it. I came to realize that the difficulty in explaining baseball lies in the fact that Americans learn the game like they learn their first language: not consciously, from an independent and unencumbered starting point (“OK, honey, sit the baby over here and let’s get started on the present tense!”) upon which subsequent learning builds, but through a passive and grad- ual seeping into the brain of many fragments from many sources over many years. Fine, but suppose you don’t have many years to learn baseball by osmosis. Suppose you are going to visit some cousins in the States and you’d like to know what all the commotion is about, or you are going there on business and you’d like to impress clients by knowing the difference between a ball and a strike. Or, even more urgently, suppose you already live in the States and don’t know a darn thing about baseball and you need a quick explanation before your colleagues and friends and neighbors find out the embarrassing truth. Where can you turn? The goal of this book is to be the book that you can turn to. Nearly six years after the challenge of explaining baseball was first presented to me, I believe I have written a book that someone with no knowledge of baseball can pick up, read in a couple of days and, after- ward, not only be able to enjoy a game of baseball but also understand how deeply the sport is ingrained in American history, culture and everyday life. Whether I am correct in my belief will, of course, be your call. Some points on how this book is set up: • Baseball, like many vocations in life, is all about the vocabulary. Stick your head into a discussion among bankruptcy attorneys and you’ll hear about cramdowns, claims and cash collateral. Do the same with a group of baseball fans and you’ll hear about signs, steals and sacrifices. Once you’re familiar with the vocabulary, in either case, you can join the discussion. Until then, you can’t. In this book I aim to familiarize you with all the baseball terms that you’ll need to learn the game and converse capably about it with knowledgeable fans. The first time I use a term, I bold it for emphasis and easy refer- ence. • Everyone knows you can’t drive down the highway backward using your feet to steer the car, but good luck trying to find the statute that forbids it. Likewise, there are many things about baseball that every fan knows to be true, and that have been true since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but good luck finding the sources. The three basic author- ities of the sport are the Official Baseball Rules, which provides the on- field rules of the game, the Major League Rules, which provides the off- field rules of the game, and the Basic Agreement, which is the collective bargaining agreement between team own- ers and players, renegotiated every five years or so, and which affects both. These are vital resources, and I will refer to them often, but their functions, individually and col- lectively, do not include offering an even remotely complete account of what goes on between the beginning and the end of a baseball game. By necessity, therefore, this book will also be based on what I’ve seen in front of me, while munching a hot dog and sipping a cold beverage, on many a field of dreams, on many a balmy summer eve. • Not counting this Introduction and a brief closing, this book is divided into four parts. We will start out with “Preliminaries,” which will explain those aspects of the game Introduction 3 that you need to be familiar with before approaching the game itself.