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April 29, 2012

Holland and an imperfect game

I got my first chance to watch my nine-year-old nephew Holland play baseball on Friday. His game was, unsurprisingly, a very different experience from watching the big leaguers. I won't give all the gory details, but a short example from the third inning will show what made an impression on me.

Holland reached base on a 5-4 force-out. On the next pitch, the opposing catcher let strike one roll a couple feet away, and Holland swiped second. The next pitch, ball one, went in the dirt too, and Holland took third. Then, after a walk, the pitcher turned his back for a moment, and not only did Holland steal home, but in the confusion the runner on first got all the way to third.

From my rough scoring of the game (yes, I was scoring it), four and a half innings produced 18 instances of what in professional baseball would be judged wild pitches or passed balls. Nothing more need be said to illustrate the chasm between these kids and "real" ballplayers, right? The professional game, the true game, is on a plane of effective perfection, right?

Jump-cut to the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium that night. Game knotted at six, with Derek Jeter on first and Brayan Villarreal pitching to Curtis Granderson. The payoff pitch goes wild, and Jeter makes it all the way to third. Three pitches later, a slider goes off the end of catcher Alex Avila's glove, and Jeter beats the throw back to the plate to score the winning run.

This was a highly dramatic example, but not an isolated one. On that busy Friday night in major league baseball, there were four passed balls and 12 wild pitches (including two "dropped" third strikes) that led to 20 runners gaining extra bases. Ten of the 15 games on the schedule had at least one wild pitch or passed ball—and all five that didn't had at least one hit-by-pitch.

Maybe most interesting, one of those wild pitches led to that bizarre rarity: a four-strikeout inning. In the top of the eighth at Camden Yards, Oakland's Ryan Cook got the first two Orioles hacking, but strike nine to Adam Jones was a wild one that let Jones reach. Cook regrouped and threw strike 12 past Matt Wieters' bat to end the inning.

It was, according to MLB.com, the 59th four-K inning in history. (And the second one in four days. Who knew?)

So on a pretty ordinary day in baseball, arguably the two most interesting and memorable moments are defined by their imperfection, by someone goofing up. Kinda brings those multi-millionaire celebrities down to the level of nine-year-old boys playing for fun, right?

Well, no. Let's not get carried away. The pros are light-years in quality beyond those kids. But they aren't machines; they aren't infallible.

And thank God for that.

A flawless game is a sterile game. Tic-tac-toe holds no interest for anyone but kids, because adults can figure out the perfect strategy pretty easily and make a perpetual tie of it. Several years ago, computers solved the game of checkers, figuring out its optimum strategies, and the world of human tournament checkers has been reeling ever since. Once there's an equation for a game, the game is over. It's a solved puzzle, thrown out like a completed crossword in yesterday's paper.

It is the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of imperfection that makes the game what it is. The pitcher missing the outside corner; the batter getting under a fastball; the infielder's dive deflecting the hot-shot grounder. You can be perfect for a moment, or for a few at-bats. You might, like Philip Humber, be perfect for a whole game—but then there's the next game.

This should give us a bit of perspective. The players are going to keep striving for perfection, and we're going to keep rooting for our teams to exhibit it, and that's exactly as it should be. But the pursuit of that flawlessness is only interesting because it's so hard to achieve, even briefly, even for the best in the game. In baseball as in so many other endeavors, nobody's perfect.

Except for Holland's team, that is. They're 4-0 on the season so far—but there's still a lot of baseball left to be played.
Posted by: Shane Tourtellotte

April 23, 2012

Ivan Rodriguez career highlights

It was recently announced that veteran catcher and current unsigned free agent Ivan Rodriguez intends to officially retire in Texas on Monday.

When a great player like Rodriguez retires, it’s nice to look back over his career, what his highs and lows were, his career milestones, and the best (and oddest) games he ever participated in where. That’s what’s listed below, the career highlights of Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez.

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Posted by: Chris Jaffe

March 07, 2012

Carlos Guillen career highlights

On Tuesday, veteran major leaguer Carlos Guillen retired after 14 seasons. When a player retires, it makes sense to look back on his career, so let’s do that now.

Below is a list of his career highlights, presented in chronological order. They include the greatest and most important games he played in, his personal highs (and lows), and also some odds and ends along the way.
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Posted by: Chris Jaffe

October 31, 2011

Postseason predictions wrap-up

Twenty Hardball Times staffers made their predictions of how the 2011 postseason would play itself out. Some proved prescient, a few less so. Let's take a look at the rankings to see whose guesses came closest to, and shortest of, perfection.

Scoring was based on a 5-3-1 system similar to regular-season awards: If someone picked a Division Series correctly, that person received one point, choosing an LCS winner garnered three points, while being a fortune teller and predicting the World Series winner earned five points. (Nobody got those five points.)

Here are everyone's picks and the results, ranked by total points.
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Posted by: Greg Simons

October 18, 2011

LCS prediction results

With the World Series competitors set—and good luck to the Rangers and Cardinals—it's time to review how the Hardball Times' staff did in the League Championship Series and compare their picks to those of our readers' contest entries.

The champion picker among our readers—and the winner of a copy of The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012—is Eugene Douglas. He eliminated any need for a World Series-winner tiebreaker by being the only entrant to have a team actually in the World Series.

Eugene tied for the lead going into the League Championship Series by picking three Division Series winners—Detroit, Texas and Milwaukee. (Note Detroit: He's a Yankees fan.) So the Rangers won it for him, which is only proper because he works as a software programmer in Washington, D.C., where the Rangers once played....

The Annual, currently in production, will be available later this fall. We'll be sure to let you know on this site exactly when you can order yours.

There were a couple of mistakes in our previous article about Hardball Times staff picks, with "Prescient" Ben Pritchett already given credit for his pick of the Tigers winning the LDS, which put him in a three-way tie at that time. Additionally, Mat Kovach had correctly chosen the Cardinals over Philly, so he vaulted into a tie with Ben and Greg Simons with three LDS picked accurately.

In the LCS round, only Ben, Greg and Sam Hendrickson chose one of the World Series entrants correctly; Ben and Sam picked Texas, while Greg selected St. Louis.

Using a 1-3-5 scoring system, right now, Ben and Greg are tied with six points each. The only THT staffer who has a shot at getting another pick right is Sam, who chose Texas to win the Fall Classic. Check back after the World Series for the full results rundown.
Posted by: THT Staff


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