Let's Go

It's emails, folks.

Last month there was a great New Yorker piece about the relief pitcher Daniel Bard, and his struggles with the yips, written by Louisa Thomas. Toward the end, a line stopped me cold, I spent a day thinking about it, and it goes like this:

I thought of something the cognitive scientist Sian Beilock, who has written about the yips and performance anxiety, told me: “We have to get away from the idea that the goal is to feel comfortable.”

“Uncomfortable” is a good description of me lately, and so that hit me. Except, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t know whether it means:

a) that feeling uncomfortable is often a motivator, a way for our body or brain to tell us to not be complacent, and a healthy part of the process of achieving excellence. Or

b) feeling comfortable is not realistic. Life is uncomfortable. Thrashing against that fact, or thinking that some discomfort means one is failing, only locks a person into a persistent reinforcing sense of dread.

Both of these seem like wise pieces of advice. But really they’re complete opposites! In one, comfort is not the goal because discomfort is actually good, and helps us succeed. In the other, discomfort is bad but inevitable, and not a signal that we’ve failed, and success is a warped concept anyway. One says strive, the other says accept. They can’t both be what Beilock meant, but they’re both speaking to me? It’s weird.

Anyway, it’s a reader engagement newsletter. Five questions answered:

1. Zach Minor actually is a great Immaculate Grid answer, if you have the chance; so is Todd Cunningham.

2. It’s been six years since the last successful [can you guess what goes here] in major league baseball!

3. Against originalism.

4. A rediscovered assessment of 2014 managering vis a vis Mike Trout

5. The optimal winning percentage and learning about “the pleasures of the hunt”

Let’s—

1. BILL ASKS!

I've been thinking today about why a game like Immaculate Grid is so satisfying. What makes it a compelling mix of challenging and fun? I wouldn't want it to be something easy like "name three Red Sox who've won a World Series," nor impossible like "name three players from the 1889 Cleveland Spiders born west of the Mississippi," but I take special pleasure in remembering that, say, Zach Miner went from the Tigers to the Phillies, and showing my friends my .07 percent score. 

SM: What I like about the Immaculate Grid experience is that it's a brain puzzle where the information is all already in your brain, and the only way to access it is by tunneling through your brain's architecture to find it. It's not like a riddle where you have to decode somebody else's brain; and it's not some trivia with a single correct answer. It's more like self-reflection. It's like if there was a scavenger hunt where each item required you to go through hundreds of old childhood photos of yourself.

I tend to glance at the board and then walk away from it, and think about it for a while as I'm doing chores. The effect is not remembering a guy, but remembering dozens of guys on the way to that guy. And then the guy you land on—that's yours! It's not the only right answer. The grid rewards you for having your own, very personal right answer.

2. HENRY ASKS!

[Expanding on our disappearing-pitchout conversation] 

I'm trying to think of other baseball things that have gone extinct (by natural causes, not rule changes) and I'm coming up blank.

SM: Do you realize it's been SIX YEARS since the last successful hidden ball trick in the majors? That’s based on a search of MLB.com’s highlights archives, which I’m fairly confident would turn up any successful hidden ball tricks. (They turn up various unsuccessful attempts, as well as successful hidden ball tricks in the minors/college baseball/college softball, as well as many archival HBTs.) There was one in spring training in 2019, but I’m not counting that. There’s also one from 2019 that MLB.com calls an “unintentional hidden ball trick,” but Andrelton Simmons wasn’t really hiding the ball, he just found himself next to a baserunner who wasn’t paying any attention to his surroundings.

Which means that the last true hidden ball trick could end up being performed by Ryan Goins, in 2017. Nicely done. And the last hidden ball trick victim could end up being Todd Frazier. Nice goin’. Even failed HBT attempts seem to have declined significantly since 2017, based on the mlb.com highlights. There was also a mini-burst of fake hidden-ball tricks around 2016-2017—the fielder would pretend to have the ball, just to freak the baserunner out, a reasonably amusing bit—and even those have dwindled.

There used to be as many as 10 successful hidden ball tricks per year, according to research by Bill Deane. You might have speculated that replay review would have led to a boost, because the cameras could catch baserunners’ disengagements more reliably than human umpires do. But that hasn’t happened.

But there’s a better answer to Henry’s question than hidden ball tricks, and Kevin Whitaker recently wrote a great Substack post about it: It’s the knuckleball, obviously. It’s hard for us to appreciate how common the knuckleball used to be. The Washington Senators in the mid-1940s had an all-knuckleball rotation, plus several relievers who threw the pitch. In the late 1970s, the best baseball player in the world—by WAR—was a knuckleballer. Tim Wakefield had more career wins than Felix Hernandez and Cole Hamels, and even that wasn’t so long ago; Wakefield was teammates with Daniel Bard.

But after years of decline, the knuckleball this decade appears, perhaps, finally, not in decline but dead. As Whitaker wrote, there have been only two knuckleballer pitchers in the majors in the 2020s—and both were sent back down after only one appearance.

I think Whitaker does a great job explaining this, beyond the “they’re too annoying to catch to bother developing in the minors” explanation. He writes:

For decades the knuckleball sat in an optimal range for fun: it was slightly less effective than normal pitches, so only a few pitchers threw it. If it was much less effective, nobody would ever throw it. And if it was more effective, most pitchers would throw it; it wouldn't be a novelty, it would just be what we think of as a normal pitch.

But that equilibrium was very fragile. Pitchers have used better technology and training methods to improve other pitches, leaving knuckleballs in the dust. (Another advantage of knuckleballs, that you can throw lots of them without tiring your arm, has been obsoleted by larger pitching staffs.) 

Kevin goes on:

Perhaps rules that severely limited the number of pitchers on a roster could help knuckleballers, who can pitch more innings without getting tired, but that seems unlikely to me, and in any case I don’t think there’s a strong pro-knuckleball lobby within the game. So enjoy the last few knuckleballs you see, because they might be the last.

They might have already been the last, in fact.

3. (DIFFERENT) KEVIN ASKS!

I've been trying to articulate a more compelling argument against the robo ump than, "I think it will be bad." Curious what you think about this:

The strike zone should be an imposition on the batter, not a target for the pitcher. 

I imagine the early intent of the strike zone was to more or less force batters to swing—penalizing them for not offering at a fair pitch, but not compelling them to swing at literally every pitch. Evolutions in both the definition and officiating of the strike zone began to shift our cultural understanding of the strike zone away from this. Additions of the K-Zone to every broadcast, and introduction of Statcast data have drastically accelerated a belief that the strike zone is a target. 

How we think about the fundamental intent of the strike zone—is it for the batter or the pitcher?—seems like a better entry point for a constructive conversation about the automated zone than speculation and aesthetics.

SM: The implications of your question go far and wide, but I’m going to just focus on this: “The strike zone should be an imposition on the batter, not a target for the pitcher,” based on “the early intent of the strike zone.”

Basically, yes, baseball started as tag, and the pitcher and the pitch were merely “a prelude to the fundamental conflict” between batter and fielders. The introduction of balls and strikes were supposed to speed action up (pitchers were wasting too many throws, like literally several hundred per game, and batters were taking too many) but it somewhat unwittingly created space for pitchers to insinuate themselves into that conflict. They gave pitchers a defined and sanctioned framework for being evasive and tricky. Pitchers could now thwart the tag game entirely by striking the batter out, or at least stack the deck against the batter by inducing him to hit a difficult pitch weakly. This turned baseball from tag to target practice, which, as you’re right to note, was not the original intent.

However! I think this is clearly a case where taking an originalist approach is unrealistic. The change from tag to target practice happened in stages, but it also began very, very early in the sport’s development—we’re talking early 1860s, when there were only a few thousand players and a few thousand fans in the whole world, but when the first pitching stars emerged. And this trajectory has never stopped getting more extreme, which suggests to some extent that baseball longs to be centered around the pitcher/hitter matchup. If we're appealing to the framers’ intent or what have you, I think we have to acknowledge that baseball as tag began to be rejected and replaced almost immediately, that there has since then been a consistent urge to make the pitcher a protagonist, and if we want to get to a time where the pitcher wasn’t a protagonist we basically have to go back to the first... oh, the first 5 percent of the baseball story, if you’re being generous, and the first 1/10th of 1 percent of the baseball story, if you’re not.

Now, that said: I like the tag parts of the game, and conventional wisdom these days is that the target practice parts (strikeouts and walks) are too static. It’s just that that argument is less about what baseball was intended to be 160 years ago and more about what we want it to be now.

4. LEWIE ASKS!

In retrospect, what is the timeframe in which it was reasonable for a knowledgeable baseball person to decide that Mike Trout was the best player in baseball? 

SM: Yes, I already answered this one, with a full post, and Lewie himself answered it with his own full post. But I recently came across a piece I wrote in July 2014 called Why Do Teams Pitch To Mike Trout, which explored the question of why Trout was woefully under-IBBd compared to other hitters of his skill level. (He had ONE intentional walk in the first half of 2014, behind 120 other players, and 15 behind the league leader.) The only conclusion, after much consideration, was that Trout was still underrated, that managers didn’t believe he was as good as his first-three-seasons numbers suggested, and that managers were essentially behaving like projection systems: Regressing Trout to something less extraordinary than he had demonstrated himself to be.

Two months after that piece, managers started intentionally walking him much more often, and over the next five years he would lead the majors in IBBs several times. Which suggests, to me, that the managers’ answer to Lewie’s question is “August 2014.”

5. MATTHEW ASKS!

I've been thinking a lot lately about how the good outcomes in baseball (and in life) are so satisfying only because they are unlikely or at least uncertain. This creates a paradox. In the moment, we wish for the good thing to happen. But if we were to get the good thing so often that we started knowing that it was going to happen, it would lose its luster.  I think the simplest way I can boil this down is the following question (you and I are both Giants fans so I'll use them as an example):

You're about to go see a Giants game in person. On the way to the game, you are given the opportunity to choose the percent likelihood that the Giants will win that game. You can, if you want, guarantee a win by choosing 100 percent. Or you can go see a true coin flip by choosing 50 percent, or make victory almost-but-not-quite certain by choosing 95 percent, or whatever. What percentage would you choose?

SM: I recently learned (from Hang Up and Listen) about Jackson-Reed High School in Washington, D.C., which has won 29 consecutive league titles in baseball and 270 consecutive league games. This year they outscored their league opponents 251-3. There is something startling about the fact that people presumably still go watch the games, that the Jackson-Reed players presumably enjoy playing in the games, etc., considering there is essentially no uncertainty about the outcome. Some players claim there's a burden to being part of this streak, because they're all stressed out about perhaps becoming the team to finally lose. But I suspect they love it. I think at heart we're all kind of insecure, we're all kind of bullies, and we would all LOVE to be so outrageously superior to our opponents that there is no chance (or practically no chance) of losing. Or even having to bear the humiliation of having to sweat it.

That said, I do agree with you that this is not the healthiest situation, it's not an enlarging state, and while we might selfishly choose it for ourselves I would not choose it for somebody I love. You’re right that satisfaction needs to feel harder than that.

I recently read a piece about anti-addiction drugs, which introduced me to this concept: There are, according to a quoted psychology and neuroscience professor, two primary types of pleasure: Wanting something (“feeling empowered and focused on getting what you desire”) and liking something (“the satisfaction and comfort of having achieved your goal.”) The piece goes on: “The psychiatrist Donald Klein eloquently distinguished the two joys as the ‘pleasures of the hunt’ and the ‘pleasures of the feast.’”

So the goal seems to be to desire something that is accessible (so that you can regularly achieve the pleasure of the feast) but also elusive (so that you never get so satiated that you lose the pleasure of the hunt). What winning percentage produces that middle ground?

I’m not super confident in my conclusions. But if I could pick a winning percentage to maximize happiness for a loved one, I’d start here: If my loved one attends 100 games in their life, with significant money and travel being expended, I'd set their team’s optimal winning percentage in those games at 80 percent.

If my loved one watches or listens to the same team, say, 5,000 times in their life on the radio or TV, rooting enthusiastically but with less tangible expense, I'd set the optimal winning percentage at about 55 percent. (Conveniently, a team that wins 55 percent of its games will have 89 or 90 wins, and under the current playoff rules that team would make the playoffs... about 80 percent of the time.)

That seems to be where I land: On small things, having things go your way a bit more than half the time makes you feel (and notice) that the universe is on your side. On bigger things, heavy disappointment should be rare but relatable—every fifth day is a Monday, basically.