1. This Month In Working The Ump
Something that surprised and stuck with me when I was in the dugout with the Stompers was what happened after every checked swing: If our team was hitting, everybody in our dugout would shout, with complete conviction, No He Didn’t! If our team was on the field, same thing, except the script in the dugout was Yes He Did! This shout was immediate. We would yell it even before the plate umpire had appealed to the base ump, even before the catcher had asked the plate umpire for the appeal.
This is what came to mind when Jorge Soler, on July 5th, took a 3-2 curveball from Steven Matz. At the same moment the pitch was landing in the catcher’s mitt, Soler yelled what sure sounds to me like the word “BALL!” About a half-second later, the umpire, in a flatter umpirey tone, confirmed, “ball four.”
So, yeah, I went ahead and watched every Jorge Soler two-strike take from the past six weeks. There are about 80 of them, and on at least 10 I hear—or think I hear—Soler giving his judgement on the pitch before the umpire has had a chance to. If you want to hear what these sound like:
On a June 22 fastball outside (it’s a bit more faint—sounds like “no strike”)
I can’t be totally sure what Soler is saying, or why he’s saying it. It usually sounds to me like “Ball” or “No” and sometimes like “Ball low” and in the one case like “no strike,” but it’s also possible I’m hearing what I’m primed to hear while he’s actually saying something totally different/in Spanish. In a couple cases, the pitch isn’t close, and he might be yelling to himself not to swing—the hitter equivalent of a pitcher grunting, maybe.
But I definitely lean toward the idea that he’s speaking to the umpire, preempting a possible strike call or a possible swing ruling, and I think this is pretty brilliant. Obviously, the umpire doesn’t consciously seek input before making the call. But there’s something about making the umpire not just call the pitch but actually contradict the batter, contradict spoken words; it’s like, instead of arguing with the umpire, Soler is making the umpire argue with him! Some people like to argue, but a lot of people really hate to, and by forcing the umpire to contradict him Soler is putting a little friction into the call. If nothing else, he might be priming the umpire to see it his way. This is not totally unlike a catcher who sticks a pitch on the black, communicating to the umpire that in his opinion the pitch was perfect.
If this is what he’s doing, Soler doesn’t abuse it. On borderline pitches that are in the strike zone, he says nothing (so far as I observed). He is, therefore, representing himself as an honest broker who is maybe even trying to save the umpire from making an embarrassing mistake that he’ll regret. He’s just being helpful.
2. This Month In Who’s Watching What
Max Kepler hit a ball down the right-field line and as he took off running he left his bat behind. But one of his feet clipped the bat, Kepler tripped, he stumbled, he did a tuck and roll and he got back up and he still made it to second. Good stuff:
When you trip, the first thing you worry about is whether anybody saw you. (The second thing you worry about is whether you are hurt in a way that, now that you’re old, you might never heal; and the third thing you worry about is whether you can still make it to second base.) I wondered about that, so I watched an alternate angle of the play to see whether anybody in the stands actually saw Kepler trip, or whether it was one of those glorious trips where he looked up and nobody was laughing at him. And here’s what I found, which became significant for unexpected reasons:
In those three pictures, we see 11 people alert to Kepler. Everybody else is alert to the ball, or they’re not alert to the game at all. What’s so striking is that, of the 11, at least five are kids—and kids overall make up a much, much smaller share of the audience. In fact, most kids who were watching the game were watching Kepler, while almost all adults were not:
This suggests that kids and adults are not interested in the same parts of a baseball game. I could theorize on what’s happening here; maybe children are still used to simpler narratives built around a single protagonist, while adults are trained by more complex narratives to follow the mechanics of plot (the ball). Or maybe kids just have a better sense of when somebody tripping is about to happen.
Or some other explanation. Either way, we should probably have two different broadcasts for every game: One for adults, one for kids. Let one kid’s attention dictate where the camera goes in the kids broadcast. Maybe a whole at-bat will pass with the camera on the left-fielder spitting sunflower seeds. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a freeway off in the distance and the kids broadcast will watch that for a while. I don’t know! Who can even say what cool freeway things kids might notice that we ball-obsessed adults miss?
3. This Month In [Answer Obscured To Give You The Chance To Guess Something]
Here’s my favorite fan-reaction tableau from the month, which I’m going to show to you and ask you: What sort of cool baseball achievement did these happy fans just see?
They’re so excited! The kid in the front row on the far left is giddy; two seats over, a kid is thumping the railing and losing his mind, and behind him a hairy dude waving an arm saying SICK and two spots over a man with broad shoulders raising a proud fist and two more over the man looks stunned and two in front of him a big silly grin and one spot back and one spot over someone yelling NO WAY and the next spot over a guy leaning back so satisfied and next to him a guy tilting his head back saying NAW and in front of him and one spot over the fan in sunglasses is slackjawed and finally in the front-right, a bearded eeeeYARG. This collective reaction is to…
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