1.
On Aug. 10, an off day for the Reds, Joey Votto tweeted this perennial convo starter:
The replies divided, as you’d expect: There were the confident hitters (1+ hits) and the realistic hitters. There were the patient hitters (“never swing, draw six walks”) and the swing-away hitters. Surprisingly, though, there was also a big divide in the HBPs, between the brave hitters and the scared hitters. The brave hitters thought they’d get hit a lot. A lot of brave hitters, in fact, aspired to get hit a lot: “25 hbp. I'd go full protector gear. closed stance crowd of the plate. take obp through any means necessary,” one brave guy said. The scared hitters (of which I’m one) thought they’d quit immediately if they ever got hit even once. "I value being alive,” one wrote.
Players get hit all the time; few quit the sport over it. Are they just brave, or what? There were 50 batters hit by pitches that were thrown 96 mph or faster in August. I watched those 50 a few times apiece. I assessed their pain demonstrations (“Observed Pain,” scale of 1 to 10) and added a few other columns to a spreadsheet to see what I could learn about pain.
First: Getting hit doesn’t have to hurt, even when the pitch is 96 or 98 or 100 mph. I counted 21 of these HBPs that produced no outward signs of pain whatsoever. Some were glancing, some were off protective elbow pads, and some squarely found flesh but didn’t seem to bother the flesh in question. So almost half of these hit by pitches were painless, or almost half of ballplayers are good at faking it. There is some hope for us (which I will soon quash).
Second: The obvious variable that dictates pain is where on the body the batter got hit. But the non-obvious variable is the one that determines where the batter gets hit, and it is: How did the batter attempt to evade the pitch?
The batter could turn away from the pitch. He could turn into the pitch. He could scrunch up. Or he could fail to evade it at all—either freezing, or basically continuing to swing right into it.
If a batter turned away from the ball, he was usually fine: He’d get hit on a bicep, a thigh, a butt or his back. Those are pretty sturdy spots, relative to kidneys and ribs and the inside of the elbow and the front of the knee. Of the 50 HBPs, I counted 17 where the batter turned away from the pitch. And of those, only one rated higher than a 3 on my observed pain scale. It was this one, afflicting Matt Chapman, and even this I only scored a 4:
By contrast, all the other evasions exposed the batter’s front or hands to the ball, and—well, obviously, you can imagine getting hit in your front with a pitch. Pain. Here’s Ronald Acuña, getting hit by the exact same pitch that hit Chapman, same velo, same location—but, unlike Matt Chapman, he wasn’t able to turn away in time and could only scrunch from it, a partial protection at best. He thus took the pitch right to a rib and let out a howl:
Turning away from the ball is a great way to get hit on the outer part of the arm. This is the dream. Twenty-one players got hit on the outer part of the arm—not the hands, but anywhere on the arms above the hands—and the observed pain level I assigned was an average of 2. But four players were hit on the inner part of the arm; their observed pain averaged a 6.
Third: There is a modest correlation of observed pain to pitch velocity—but that’s probably more because, when a pitch faster than 98 mph is about to hit you, it is harder to turn away from it in time. Of the 11 HBPs that were over 98 mph, 10 struck batters who either scrunched or turned into or swung into the pitch. Of those 39 HBPs between 96 mph and 98 mph, only about half did.
Fourth: Most of this pain is just pain, passing, especially if you can avoid getting hit in the hands. What I mean is that, as far as I can tell, these 50 batters who were hit by exceptionally fast pitches missed a total of two games—two batters who were listed as “day to day” and sat out the next game. That’s true even of James McCann, who got hit in the hands so solidly that the pitcher tried to field the ball,
and Willi Castro, who got my highest observed pain rating:
Both stayed in the game1.
Joey Votto, for what it’s worth, seems to have a position on the reply divides: He doesn’t think we should be confident, he does think we could be patient, and he doesn’t think we would be brave:
Which is interesting, to me, because a couple days later Joey Votto got hit by a fastball, and he was—I don’t want to accuse him of anything, but—obviously trying to get hit by that fastball:
Indeed, earlier this year, Votto leaned in even more egregiously, one of only three HBPs in the majors this year on a pitch that was inside the strike zone (and, to my eye, the only one of the three that was intentional on the batter’s part):
So Votto doesn’t think we the people would try to get hit by pitches, but he’s totally confident getting hit by pitches himself. Is it just that he’s that much tougher?
I mean, sure, probably part of it. But, to finally get around to a point here: Getting hit by a pitch without getting hurt by a pitch is a skill. It involves identifying the pitch in time to try to evade it, or more realistically in time to avoid the worst of it. Major leaguers can do that, though the more they’re fooled by a pitch the more likely they are to identify the pitch late and turn their full torso right into its path. Joey Votto can get hit by pitches without getting crying for the same reason Joey Votto can lay off a nasty slider just off the plate or turn around a 96 mph fastball for a line drive down the right field line. His flesh is somewhat more resilient than yours, but it’s more that his eyes and brain know how to get the right flesh in front of the ball when it can’t otherwise be helped.
You and I couldn’t do that. If we got hit by a pitch, we would likely get hit square in the chest. If we somehow screwed up the nerve to try to get hit by a pitch, planned it out and everything, we would likely get hit… square in the chest. We could get hit by pitches, but we’re not good enough to get hit by pitches well.
So that’s what I learned watching 50 players get hit by 96 mph+ fastballs this month: It hurts if you do it wrong.
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Interlude.
I used to volunteer at a preschool. Kids would often scrape their knees, bump their heads, pinch their fingers, etc. They’d cry. I’d tell them, “There are hurts that get worse and hurts that get better. I think you have the kind that gets better. I think it’s getting better already. Can’t you feel it hurting less already?” Usually, they could.
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2.
As Shohei Ohtani walked off the mound for the final time this year, his arm no longer working properly, the baseball season about 30 percent less interesting, the most exciting experiment in decades potentially over, his glove was tucked under his arm. He grabbed it and strode toward the dugout, holding it at his side.
It struck me that he was carrying his glove with his right arm. He had just suffered an injury so catastrophic that hundreds of millions of dollars had evaporated with it. But it was also an injury so slight that it didn’t affect which arm he preferred to carry stuff with.
Did it hurt when Shohei Ohtani got hurt?
A few moments earlier, when Ohtani threw his final pitch of the season, which was fouled off, he got a new ball from the umpire. He immediately took the ball in his throwing hand and began rubbing it up. At the same time, he signaled with a headshake to the Angels’ dugout that he wasn’t feeling right, but he wasn’t favoring the right arm, just kept rubbing up the ball. The broadcasts showed replays of the final pitch and didn’t find any flinch on the throw. Here’s how Phil Nevin described the conversation Ohtani had on the mound just before he left: “He didn't say he had pain at the time, either, just knew that something wasn’t right.”
I once asked Jeremy Bruce—an orthopedic surgeon who has worked side-by-side with James Andrews—what it would be like if I tore my UCL. “You’d be sore for a week and then it’d settle down and you wouldn’t even notice it,” he told me. “It’s such a sports-specific effect.” This injury is not really a problem for anything except trying to do precisely what pitchers have to do. It almost feels like we’re losing these players to a technicality. Accidentally biting your lip while chewing might actually hurt more.
A few weeks into April, the Twins’ Tyler Mahle—coming back from shoulder issues last year—was having a strong comeback season. In his fifth start of the year, he had a perfect game through three innings. “Boy that breaking ball is better—this is the best one he’s had!” a Twins broadcaster said in the fourth inning. Mahle gave up two hits that inning, and the Twins thought they saw something funny on one (1!) of his pitches. After the inning they pulled him out of the game.
Mahle himself was surprised when, a week later, he was told he needed Tommy John surgery. He said “confused.” He said he didn’t feel any pain when he was in the throwing motion, just a pinch at the end of his delivery. His elbow wasn’t in pain. He hadn’t even torn his UCL. His UCL had merely destabilized, “putting more stress on other muscles in the area,” wrote MLB.com’s Do-Hyoung Park. And so, season over.
The next day, the Rangers’ Jacob deGrom had a perfect game going in the fourth. He was pumping in 100 mph fastballs. Here he is in the fourth, throwing a 92 mph slider for a strike on the black: Can you find the pain?
He allowed two baserunners that inning—a bad-call walk and an opposite-field single. “He did not clutch his arm. He did not scream in pain,” Andy McCullough wrote, but the Rangers’ trainer came out to check on him, and a couple minutes later his season was over.
There is an anxiety that hangs over baseball, because we know this danger is always there for half the players on the field. Every pitch could be the pitcher’s last of the season, or his last really good one, or even his last one ever. Worse, the danger simply lurks. We don’t see the pain. The pitcher might not even feel the pain. So he has to just be constantly vigilant for small sensations that feel not quite right, without knowing whether what he’s feeling is a trick of the brain or the end of a career. This, to me, would be the hardest part of playing baseball.
For the record, McCann was also listed as day to day, but I don’t think he missed a start.
I wrote down the wisdom in the interlude. Going to use that for my future kids. Love it
I feel the pain of everyone. And then I feel nothing...