TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Monday, April 12, 2004

It was just a matter of time at this point, but today Barry Bonds tied his Godfather Willie Mays at 660 dingers.

Over at ESPN, Rob Neyer is making the case that there is too much hype over this event. I don't think so. Neyer makes some cogent points - that nobody remembers when Teddy Ballgame rolled past Mel Ott for #3, or for that matter, nobody remembers last year when Bonds past Ruth for #2 on walks. But these aren't walks, these are homers, and this isn't Mel Ott, it's Willie Mays.

Let's get walks and other sundries out of the way first. I believe in the value of the walk. In fact, at the time I complained that the passing of Ruth wasn't getting more coverage. But let's face it, all props to Rickey, but being the greatest walker of all time is kind of like being the welterweight champion of the world. Who is that? I guess a quick web search could tell me, but I don't care enough to do it. People only open their eyes for the heavyweights, and the same is true for homeruns. Whether that is fair or not is open to question, but certain events simply have a much greater gravity in our culture. Home runs are one of them.

Now there is the matter of Willie Mays. Suppose that Jackie Robinson had failed, and that integration had to wait another ten. Suppose instead of the Sey Hey Kid we had Frank Robinson sitting in the three slot. Passing Frank would not have been nearly as big a deal. It's not the position, it's the man in the position. When I was growing up, the Giants used to have a promotion with an airline. If you showed up to the stadium on a special Friday with a packed suitcase, they entered you into a lottery and you could go to one of ten cities for the weekend, all expenses paid. Only about fifty people went for this each year, so the actual odds of getting a vacation weren't that bad. But the coolest thing was they let you walk on the field before the game. I remember being let in through the centerfield gate, and about a third of the way to the infield realizing "this is centerfield in Candlestick Park. This is where Willie Mays played!" It was like a surge of electricity shooting through your spine when you grasped that.

When interest in the Negro Leagues was hitting the mainstream ten years ago, one of the sayings was "Imagine baseball without Willie Mays." You couldn't. Willie was an icon. He made The Catch, he played stickball in Harlem, it was Willie, Mickey and the Duke. The only sports book ever to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize was his biography, Willie's Time. Willie transcended the sport. That's why what happened today is so important. Bonds didn't tie #3, he tied Willie Mays.

posted by David 3:35 PM

Sunday, April 11, 2004

Unwritten Rulebook Entry No. 1027

Just when I know I know everything about baseball, baseball comes back and makes a liar of me.

Somewhere in the back of my head is the following adage about bullpen management: when intending to intentionally walk a batter and then pull the pitcher, let the departing pitcher do the intentional walking. The theory, so the file in the back of my head told me, is that you (a) don't want the new reliever to have to break his warm-up motion with four wide ones, and (b) from a morale perspective, better to hang the walk on the guy who's leaving the game, presumably because he's been ineffective, than on the guy entering the game, who doesn't want to start out his apperance with a blot on his box score line.

Tonight the Giants and Padres were playing at Petco, and the following game situation came up:

Scott Linebrink is pitching for the Padres in the 8th inning, Padres leading 3-0. He gets Ray Durham to fly out. He walks JT Snow on four pitches. Marquis Grissom doubles, and it's now runnres on second and third, one out, Barry Bonds on deck.

It's a no-brainer to walk Bonds, of course. So with righty Linebrink out there, they bring in lefty Eddie Oropesa to deliver the intentional walk. Bear in mind the order tonight is Bonds (lefty) and AJ Pierzynski (lefty), Edgardo Alfonzo (righty).

Because the Rule, capital R, in the Written book is that any pitcher entering the game must pitch to at least one batter, but that an announced pinch hitter may be substituted for without taking the plate, of course we often see these wars of attrition on the bench late in the game where the managers force one another into a series of nearly always predictable moves to get the right platoon split and/or the right hitter to the plate.

So as soon as Bonds had taken his base and Pedro Feliz (righty) was announced as the pinch-hitter for Pierzynski, Bruce Bochy pulled poor Oropesa after his only role was to walk Bonds. If they'd waited for Pierzynski to be announced to relieve Linebrink, Oropesa would've been forced to pitch to the pinch-hitter against the platoon. Jay Witasick, no slouch, entered the game.

Now the conventionally-minded manager might've pulled his righty hitter for a lefty pinch-hitter, but Alou started with an unusually large number of lefties against Jake Peavy and had only Tony Torcato on the bench, who'd previously been used as a pinch-hitter. One would normally say this particular chess match had been won by Bochy, since he had the matchup he wanted -- fastballing righty against a righty prone to striking out.

Pedro Feliz did not cooperate with the scenario, and rapped a sharp single to center, scoring Snow and Grissom and sending Bonds to third.

Alfonzo (righty) is now in, and he also singles, tying the game. Now Mike Tucker is up, a left-handed batter with a reputation for not facing lefty pitchers with breaking stuff well. Eddie Oropesa would've come in handy at this moment. Bochy instead brings in Antonio Osuna, a righty, for reasons that are unclear to me -- perhaps he matched up against Tucker in the book a bit better. Tucker has an unusually good 10-pitch at-bat because he can get wood on Osuna's breaking pitches and Osuna isn't going to throw a dead fastball hitter anything close to the zone in this situation.

So now we have the bases loaded for Neifi Perez, who's had a somewhat unusually good start, and he punches a squib to right, scoring the go-ahead and insurance runs. One strongly suspects Perez got a little something to hit because Osuna wanted to be around the plate at this point in the awful Padres inning. With Neifi Perez, you might as well heave it in there, he was probably thinking.

Now all this backfired against the platoon, so maybe this isn't proving anything, but let me lay this on you: Eddie Oropesa is the only lefty in the San Diego bullpen. He was brought into the game to walk Barry Bonds and that's it. You can't play situational chess if you've only got one pawn.

So I learned two things tonight:

(1) there is at least one good reason for bringing in a reliever to pitch to only one batter whom you intend to walk intentionally, so I will add that to my Unwritten Rule Book list of rules, and

(2) there's utterly no point in doing this just to get the proper platoon match-ups if you no longer have any more relievers of that-handedness (you know, no more lefties, in this case) because there's no way you can win the chess match. That probably should be added to the Unwritten Rule Book list of rules as well if I can figure out how to state it a bit more concisely, or at least understandably.

In this case, all Bochy was left with was righties facing righties, and they tend to face one another a lot more than, say, lefties facing lefties. And with so many lefties scattered through the Giants' lineup at that point, the inevitability of a lefty getting an easy match-up against a righty pushed the geometry of the game against the Padres.

You could look it up.

- Crank

posted by The Crank 9:52 PM