UTK Special 4/11/24

Turn Down For What

Maybe the solution has been here all along.

Pitching injuries seem up, though we often see early season runs of pitching injuries and if there’s enough big names, it seems like an epidemic. Lots of words are typed and recorded, but not much is done. I don’t see Rob Manfred putting together a blue ribbon panel or having its Pitchsmart group take up the issue. There’s very little research being funded by MLB and if it was, it would take years to complete, let alone implement.

We’ve changed the ball, we’ve altered sticky stuff usage, we’ve added the pitch clock, and done everything short of Harrison Bergeron-ing pitchers in order to give hitters a fighting chance agains triple digit heat and double digit break.

So what we need is an immediate, cheap, and effective alteration that will help both pitchers and hitters. ‘Impossible!’ you say, but I’ve spoken with several people in the field, from scientists to coaches and even some current players and none gave me a good reason why this not only couldn’t work, but couldn’t be implemented immediately.

Let me caveat “immediately” because doing anything in the midst of a season is iffy. The sticky stuff crackdown showed the issue. Remember Tyler Glasnow? At least the damage wasn’t permanent for him. I think the decision could be made, the procedures and logistics set up, and having it in place for the 2025 season is very doable.

Let’s start with a quick history lesson. In the 1990’s, bats got hot. New compounds and techniques, not to mention some off-book changes and customizations, made it so check swing homers were real and that the game itself was being altered. The first standard that came in was BESR (bat exit speed rating) in 2003. That was supplanted by BBCOR in 2011, which is in place today for all NCAA bats and is used at lower levels as well. The system has worked relatively well. The NCAA game is doing well and no one’s complaining about the bats.

If you check your copy of The Science of Baseball, Chapter Two is all about bats. The person I used to discuss them was Keenan Long, the founder of Longball Labs. Long figured out that the composition and construction of bats made them very inconsistent, with the difference between the “best” and “worst” of a dozen bat batch amounting to as much as a 20 foot difference. Imagine the difference between someone like Andrew McCutchen hitting a ball to the warning track or into the seats for his 300th homer, not that this exact thing happened over the weekend.

Long and his company have been working with players and teams for several years to test the bats and find out which ones will work best for players. Longball makes its living helping players hit the ball farther, so Long was a bit surprised when I asked him a question: If Longball can determine which bats make the ball go farther, wasn’t he already figuring out which bats didn’t work as well? The answer was yes.

If Longball could easily determine which bats were on the deader side, a standard could be set for how good a bat could be. Anything under that could be used in game, taking distance and exit velocity off the table immediately. Longball’s testing is available now and could be easily scaled to test every single bat coming off the assembly line and into a ballpark. And yes, we’d have to spot check because baseball players will cheat. That’s very doable as well.

Let me be clear: Longball is a company designed to help batters pick the right bat, increasing performance rather than retarding it. However, their unique ability to measure the surprising inconsistencies of bats without damaging or changing the bats in any way makes this something that could be instituted immediately. This is my idea, not one that Longball even likes a lot.

The theory is that if batters, without changing anything but the particular piece of lumber in their hands, don’t have the same charge, then pitchers won’t have to go to the extremes they have to get swing-and-misses. Sure, they still could (and will), but it’s on them. The batters have no change cost. They’re already swinging good and bad bats in game, at least the players that aren’t Longball clients.

If we could get to a point where pitchers weren’t max effort - somewhere below the 95 mph where Sheehan’s Demon lives - studies show that the stresses go down pretty quickly. The landmark “Slowik” study done at ASMI proves this point out, but we can’t simply say “ease off, boys” without making it possible for pitchers to do so. Absent any other solutions, I’m willing to try things.

An MLB pitcher I texted with this week couldn’t poke holes in the theory. “It’s not that I wouldn’t have to throw the best stuff to [Mike] Trout or [Shohei] Ohtani, but that I could throw the B fastball to [Luis] Rengifo.”

Of course, this does rely on pitchers actually letting off the gas. I’m less sure of that than anything here, especially at lower levels. Velocity gets notice at showcases and travel tournaments, and data on spin and stuff is collected. Once a pitcher learns to throw harder or make the ball dance, would he stop? This ability to reduce the amount of times a max-effort pitch had to be made and offering “breathers” in the mix as well as “bear down” batters would bring the game back to an earlier time, one many might say was better.

Pitchers in the 1960’s and 70’s regularly pitched to contact to many players because they simply couldn’t hit the ball out of the ballpark. Look at the Big Red Machine - the ‘76 championship team had some boppers, but even George Foster and Joe Morgan only had 29 and 27 respectively. Cesar Geronimo (2) and Dave Concepcion (9) were there for their gloves, not their bats.

In his book Suds Series, my pal J Daniel wrote about Jim Palmer, then a neophyte broadcaster, being told about Mike Caldwell. “(Caldwell’s) biggest problem is that he tries to throw hard,” Palmer recalled [Milwaukee coach Larry] Haney telling him. “If he throws more than 84 miles-per-hour, he’s throwing too hard.” I highly recommend the book, as well.

A decade later, the 1985 Cardinals were about the same. Just a few years ahead of the so-called Steroid Era, the Cards went to the World Series without much power to support their speed and defense “Whitey-ball.” Jack Clark led the team with 22 and no other player had more than 13. Ozzie Smith had six in the regular season, so infrequent that when he hit one in the NLCS, Jack Buck was right to tell us to “go crazy folks!”

Forget the dead ball era, I’m suggesting that we start a dead bat era, or at least a controlled bat era. Nothing has to change - not the construction of the bats, the selection by the player of his specific brand and fit, not the swings he makes, and nothing for the pitcher at all. The change to the game would come solely through a backroom test that doesn’t damage or alter the bat in any way, aside from putting a sticker on it.

I do worry about what this might do to offense. Homers would be down, perhaps precipitously so. Outcomes on contact would be different, though it’s impossible to say how. Even looking back at the start of BESR and BBCOR don’t offer great insights. Homers dropped precipitously at first there, but adjustments came.

I asked a hitter about this concept and he didn’t like it. Why should he? But he was realistic as well. “If a change like that, something super simple could help the game and I don’t have to change anything to my swing or my bat, I wouldn’t be too angry. If relievers stop having to snap off nasty sweepers on me, I’m fine with that.”

So, here’s a possible solution that costs little, does much, and asks none of the stakeholders to make a serious change to their game, let alone one that might cause an injury. If the Lords of Baseball are ready to do something and aren’t willing to wait, I’ve got Keenan Long’s phone number right here.