Full House (14 page)
If you doubted my explanation for shrinking variation at the upper end of the bell curve for batting averages—that as the mean moves toward the right wall, variation scrunches up into an ever smaller available space, and must therefore decrease—you will surely grant me the argument for fielding averages so close to an absolute wall. Even the 1870s didn’t provide much space, but fielders had a bit of breathing room for improvement between their first decadal best of 0.962 and the wall. And improve they did, and steadily. But now, with the five best averaging 0.9968, there just isn’t any more space, barring the construction of truly errorless robotic fielding machines.
As the mean moves toward the wall, variation must decrease. For absolute measures of fielding, high numbers persist and low values get axed. But for relative measures of hitting, the wall itself bears no number. The advancing mean retains the same value (as a balance between hitting and pitching), while both hitting and pitching move in lockstep toward their right walls of human limitation. Thus, 0.400 hitting disappears as the league mean of 0.260 marches steadily toward the wall. But the 0.400 hitters of yore are alive and well, probably more numerous than ever, and standing where they always have resided—just inches from the right wall. But their current best does not measure 0.400 anymore, because everyone else has improved so much, raising average play to a level where an unchanged (or even slightly improved) best can no longer soar so far above the norm.
The best hitters of early baseball could compile 0.400 averages by taking advantage of a standard in average play much lower than today’s premier batters encounter. Wade Boggs would hit 0.400 every year against the pitching and fielding of the 1890s, while Wee Willie Keeler would be lucky to crack 0.320 today. Since pitching and batting both feature relative records, and presumably exist in effective balance throughout the history of baseball, we should be able to detect similar phenomena in the statistics of pitching through time. The best pitchers of the past, legendary figures like Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Three Finger Brown, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, should be no better than their modern counterparts Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, and Nolan Ryan. But the old pitchers, standing next to their own right wall and facing much poorer average batting, should have racked up numbers that modern hurlers just can’t equal.
The fascinating and well-known history of minimal earned run averages provides our best illustration of symmetry between batting and pitching—another indication that these statistics record the general behavior of systems, not just a peculiarity of batting in baseball. As the best batters sacrificed their 0.400 averages because variation declined while average play improved, the best pitchers lost their earned run averages below 1.50 because ordinary hitters became too good.
The list of the hundred best seasonal ERAs shows a remarkable imbalance. More than 90 percent of the entries were achieved before 1920. Since then, only nine pitchers have obtained an earned run average in the top one hundred (and remember that the number of pitchers, hence the number of opportunities, has expanded dramatically, first with the introduction of the American League and later with expansion from an original eight to our current roster of fourteen teams per league). Moreover, of these nine modern values, seven rank in the lower half. If we consider the modern achievements, from the bottom up, we get a good sense of the obstacles that must face our superb contemporary pitchers.
Tied at number 100 are Sandy Koufax (1.74 in 1964) and Ron Guidry (1.74 in 1978). Koufax was, well, Koufax—by general agreement the greatest of modern pitchers, perhaps of all pitchers anywhere, anytime (he also holds the ninety-seventh spot at 1.73 for 1966). Guidry, a wonderful Yankee pitcher for a few years, compiled a stellar season in 1978 (with an unmatched combination of total victories and winning percentage of 25—3, for 0.893), and then threw his arm out. Nolan Ryan occupies eighty-seventh place at 1.69 for 1981. And Ryan was, well, Ryan. Nothing else need be said. Carl Hubbell, perhaps the premier pitcher of the 1930s (Lefty Grove was no slouch, either) turned in 1.66 in 1933 for seventy-sixth place and the only entry for his high-hitting decade. Dean Chance, a strictly okay pitcher of the last generation, posted an anomalous 1.65 for seventy-first place in 1964—and I can’t figure this one at all. Spud Chandler holds sixty-sixth place at 1.64 for 1943—a fine (if not fabulous) pitcher during the war years, when all decent hitters were blasting away at Germany or Japan instead. Luis Tiant, a damned fine pitcher but not among the greatest, holds sixtieth place at 1.60 for 1968—and I’ll return to him in a moment. Dwight Gooden had a fabulous sophomore season in 1985, with a 1.53 ERA that puts him in forty-second place as one of only two modern pitchers in the first half-hundred. He then fell victim to what the newspapers politely call "substance abuse."
We then come to what may be the finest record in modern sports— Bob Gibson’s truly incredible 1.12 ERA of 1968, for fourth place, surrounded by forty old-timers before we meet Doc Gooden at number forty-two. Gibson’s only superiors are Tim Keefe with 0.86 in 1880, Dutch Leonard at 0.96 for 1914, and Three Finger Brown at 1.04 for 1906. How could Gibson compile such a record—the only post-1920 value below 1.50, and way, way below at that—in our modern era of greatly improved average hitting?
I don’t want to take a thing away from Bob Gibson, who absolutely terrified me in the 1967 World Series, when he almost single-handedly beat the Red Sox by winning three games and casting a pall of inevitability over the whole proceedings. But, in slight mitigation, 1968 was a really funny year, as mentioned previously (see page 104). For some set of reasons that no one understands, pitching took a dramatic upper hand that year, capping a trend of several years’ duration. (As explained before, the rulemakers then restored the usual order by lowering the pitching mound and decreasing the strike zone; batting averages and ERAs rose appropriately in the 1969 season and have remained in balance ever since.) The 1968 season didn’t just belong to Gibson; in that year, low ERAs sprouted like dandelions in my garden. In most years of modern baseball, no pitcher in either league has posted an ERA lower than 2.00. Uniquely in 1968, all five leading American League pitchers bettered this mark, as Yastrzemski won the batting title with a paltry 0.301 (Tiant at 1.60, McDowell at 1.81, McNally at 1.95, McLain at 1.96—a banner year for Scotland—and John at 1.98. As I said, Tiant was a terrific pitcher and great fun to watch, but not one of the game’s greatest. If he could post 1.60 for 1968, baseball was really out of whack that year.) So Gibson certainly took maximal advantage of a weird year, but let’s not take anything away from him. No one, no matter how good, had any statistical right to post a value so much better than anything achieved for sixty years, especially when general improvement in play should have made such low ERAs effectively unobtainable. Gibson had one helluva year!
In quick summary of a long and detailed argument, symmetrically shrinking variation in batting averages must record general improvement of play (including hitting, of course) for two reasons—the first (expressed in terms of the history of institutions) because systems manned by best performers in competition, and working under the same rules through time, slowly discover optimal procedures and reduce their variation as all personnel learn and master the best ways; the second (expressed in terms of performers and human limits) because the mean moves toward the right wall, thus leaving less space for the spread of variation. Hitting 0.400 is not a thing, but the right tail of the full house for variation in batting averages. As variation shrinks because general play improves, 0.400 hitting disappears as a consequence of increasing excellence in play.
11
A Philosophical Conclusion
Some people regard this explanation as a sad story. One can scarcely decry a general improvement in play, but the increasing standardization thus engendered does seem to remove much of the fun and drama from sports. The "play" in play diminishes as activities become ever more "scientific" in the pejorative sense of operating like optimized clockwork. Perhaps no giants inhabited the earth during baseball’s early days, but the best then soared so far above the norm that their numbers seemed truly heroic and otherworldly, while our current champions cannot rise nearly so far above the vastly improved average.
But I suggest that we should rejoice in the shrinkage of variation and consequent elimination of 0.400 hitting. Yes, excellence in play does imply increasing precision and standardization, but what complaint can we lodge against repeated maximal beauty? I have now been a fan for fifty years. I have seen hundreds of perfectly executed double plays and brilliant pegs from outfield to home (that may or may not have beaten the runner charging from third)—the kind of beautifully orchestrated precision that probably occurred only rarely in baseball’s early years. I do not thrill any less with each repetition. The pinnacle of excellence is so rare, its productions so exquisite. Did we ever get bored with Caruso or Pavarotti in their prime? I would much rather have my expectation of excellence affirmed when I go to the ballpark or the opera house than to take potluck and hope for a rare glimpse of glory in a sea of mediocrity.
Moreover, the rise in general excellence and consequent shrinkage of variation does not remove the possibility of transcendence. In fact, I would argue that transcendence becomes all the more intriguing and exciting for the smaller space now allocated to such a possibility, and for the consequently greater struggle that must attend the achievement. When the norm stood miles from the right wall, records could be broken with relative ease. But when the average player can almost touch the wall, then transcendence of the mean marks a true outer limit for conceivable human achievement. (Again, I would make an analogy to musical performance. Do we not rejoice when every string in a symphony orchestra plays with exquisite beauty and consummate professionalism? And do we not thrill all the more when, in this context of superb general performance, a great soloist does something so special that only angels in heaven could have contemplated the possibility?) I would carry the argument even further and point out that a norm near the right wall pushes the very best to seek levels of greater accomplishment that otherwise might never have been conceptualized. I will speak in the final chapter about the heroic efforts, often with attendant accident and loss of life, that such "pushing of the envelope" imposes in the almost holy mania that infects the greatest performers in the circus arts and other dangerous activities. Call it foolish (and swear up and down that you would never so act yourself), but acknowledge that human greatness often forms a strange partnership with human obsession, and that the mix sometimes spells glory—or death.
The possibility of transcendence can never die, because this pinnacle of admiration in sports can be reached by several attainable routes. First of all, a kind of democracy infests individual games. When we go to the ballpark, we never know what we will witness. At any time, even the worst team may execute a thrilling play with awesome perfection. The event may occur only once a year (or much less often) on average, but the day of your attendance may feature a triple play, a steal of home, a rip-roaring, bench-clearing brawl (yes, as Homo ludens and Homo stupidus, we also root for this sort of rare nonsense from the underside of our complete lives), or an inside-the-park homer, with the runner just slipping under the catcher’s tag. You never know.
The enormous variability of individual performance guarantees that even a mediocre player can, for one day of glory, accomplish something never done before, or even dreamed of in baseball’s philosophy. Harvey Haddix was a fine pitcher, but not the greatest. Yet one day he hurled twelve innings of perfect ball-and then lost the game in the thirteenth (as the opposing pitcher had shut out Haddix’s side for the first twelve innings). Bobby Thomson was a better-than
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average outfielder for the New York Giants, but one day in 1951 he hit a home run, perfectly ordinary by the physics of distance, but meaningful beyond measure in baseball’s enclosed system, because this single blow won the pennant for the Giants against their archrivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, in the last inning of the last game of a play-off series culminating the greatest comeback in the history of baseball (the Giants had trailed the Dodgers by thirteen and a half games in August, and had entered this last inning with an apparently insurmountable three-run deficit). I was a ten-year-old Giants fan watching the game on our family’s first television set, and I have never been so thrilled in all my life (except for one other time).
Don Larsen was a truly mediocre pitcher for the Yankees, but he achieved baseball’s definition of perfection when it mattered most: twenty-seven Dodgers up, twenty-seven Bums down on October 8,1956, for a perfect game in the World Series (no one before or since had ever thrown a no-hitter of any kind in a World Series game). I was a fifteen-year-old Yankees fan (many New Yorkers rooted for two teams, one local club in each league), trying to persuade my French teacher to let us listen to the game’s end on the radio. I have never been so thrilled in all my life (except for one other time).
When we move to the statistics of seasonal or lifetime performance, this kind of democracy vanishes, and only the truly great can achieve transcendence. But some humans can push themselves, by an alchemy of inborn skill, happy fortuity, and maniacal dedication, to performances that just shouldn’t happen—and we revel when such a man reaches farther and actually touches the right wall. Bob Gibson had no business compiling an ERA of 1.12 in 1968. And I can show you with copious statistics that Joe DiMaggio should never have hit in fifty-six straight games in 1941 (see Gould, 1988). I delayed writing the last paragraph of this chapter for several days because I couldn’t bear not to share vicariously in a great moment of transcendence. So I am sitting at this old typewriter on September 6,1995, as Cal Ripken plays his 2131st consecutive game, eclipsing the "unbreakable" record of the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig.
No records lie beyond fracture (unless rules or practices have changed to make an old achievement unattainable in modern performance). Perhaps I have exaggerated by discussing the "extinction" of 0.400 hitting in this section. (I am a paleontologist and hate to avoid one of the favorite words in my trade.) But I meant extinction in the literal sense of snuffing out a candle that might be lit again, not in the evolutionary and ecological meaning of species death where, by an accurate motto of our times, extinction is truly forever.
I am not arguing that no one will ever hit 0.400 again. I do say that such a mark has become a consummate rarity, achieved perhaps once in a century like a hundred-year flood, and not the common pinnacle of baseball’s early years. The fifty-year drought since Ted Williams supports this view, and I think that this part has identified the reason by reconceptualizing 0.400 hitting as the right tail in a shrinking bell curve of batting averages with a stable mean—all as a necessary and predictable consequence of general improvement in play. But someday, someone will hit 0.400 again—though this time the achievement will be so much more difficult than ever before and therefore so much more worthy of honor. When the idiots on both sides in the great pissing contest of 1994 (otherwise known as a labor dispute) aborted the season and canceled the World Series, Tony Gwynn was batting 0.392 and on the rise. I believe that he would have succeeded had the season unfolded as history and propriety demanded. Someday, someone will join Ted Williams and touch the right wall against higher odds than ever before. Every season brings this possibility. Every season features the promise of transcendence.