Don’t get cheated up there.
Of all the advice my father gave me about playing baseball, that is the one line that sticks in my head some 17 years after I played my last organized game. That line, among all the other pointers and tips he gave me, is still in my head because it wasn’t ‘two hands’ or ‘know what you are doing if the ball comes to you.’ Stuff every kid hears.
This mantra isn’t one from when I first started, either. Nobody needs this one for tee-ball. I didn’t hear it when I was just learning how to play baseball with other kids still struggling to make contact with an object in motion, either.
This advice came at a time when I had a sound understanding of the game and, perhaps, at around the point in my life when I could do more than just listen to advice, but understand why it was being given to me.
I heard this line in Little League and then it followed me into my brief high school playing days. And, of course, this phrase – that I only remember ever hearing specifically from my dad and no other coach – sticks with me because it was advice that I wasn’t able to follow.
Good things happen when you put the ball in play.
That’s a mantra in Little League and another phrase I remember my father saying but was a baseball truism that even gets repeated by the big leaguers. But it is especially true when fielding batted balls is anything but assured.
Making contact is when baseball – a game built on anticipation but constantly stuck in stagnation – starts going.
Created to give people something to do to help consume the hot, long hours of summertime daylight, it was not meant to be fast-paced. There should be periods of inactivity to allow the players and spectators to feel the joy that comes from being outside on a nice afternoon and appreciate an occasional cool breeze.
The game is more about nothingness than anything else.
Every bit of action in the game begins with the pitcher looking toward the plate and the batter looking out at the pitcher, setting the scene for what might come to be. The wind-up is our first bit of motion as we are now shifting from potential to kinetic.
From there we get swings, when the series of what-ifs rotating through the heads of the base runners and fielders – the game is played more in the mind than on the field – flip into action in the form of: Foul balls easing everyone into a reset, swing and misses resulting in a quick exhale and a puffing of the cheeks (which side you are on determines if that reaction is one of dejection or satisfaction), and, most excitedly, batted balls put into play.
Of course, we also get balls and called strikes from the umpire on pitches the batter wisely allows to sail outside the zone or is too fooled to offer at inside it.
If you take a pitch, I’m going to make you run.
That’s the single quote I can remember from the assistant coach during my sophomore season playing junior varsity ball at Towson High School. He pulled me aside before a game and told me that.
It was a threat, not a pearl of old-time baseball wisdom: Just swing the bat, you’re a big kid just make contact with the ball and stop waiting for the right pitch.
We were playing at some school whose name I can’t remember. I can’t even remember the color of their uniforms or if it was cloudy or sunny or cold. I remember that they were bad and we were supposed to win (and we did). And I remember feeling like I was going to jump out of my skin when I got up to the plate, batting in the bottom half of the lineup.
I remember swinging wildly and awkwardly. I fouled the first pitch off meekly. I made more solid contact on the second pitch, I don’t remember if the ball went to the shortstop or third baseman, but I pulled it and I reached base because somebody on the left side of the field made an error. Good things happen…
That day may have been the last time I batted that season. It may have been the last time I played a competitive game, as that would be my final season of high school ball.
I rode the bench most of that year. A halfway decent first baseman with a reluctance to swing who knew how to keep score and could keep people in line in the dugout. That became my role on the team.
Rule 5.05 When the batter becomes a runner.
There are only a handful of outcomes that can come from a ball in play. That reads like a criticism of baseball, but in reality, that still gives the game a lot more outcomes on any given play than other more end-to-end action sports.
Yet, at the professional ranks, the game has become predictable in certain ways.
The batter knows where he wants to hit it. The pitcher knows how they want to counter him. And the fielders – backed by reams of data – know exactly how to position themselves to defend it. (Outfielders will keep index cards under their caps or in their back pockets to remind themselves of where exactly they ought to stand, because while baseball has evolved greatly thanks to computers and Sabermetrics, a piece of paper still has its place.)
As a result, we know how a large portion of at-bats will end. The “three true outcomes” – strikeout, walk, home run – have come to dominate the game. And recent tinkerings from the league office to increase the pace of the game with a pitch clock and ban wild shifts among the fielders haven’t arrested this trend.
Of the thirty-three summers of professional baseball played during my life, I have witnessed the top 31 seasons for the three true outcomes.
Last season, 33.8 percent of the 182,449 times a batter came up fans were treated to one of the three, the fifth highest for a season dating back to 1910, according to FanGraphs. Mercifully, that was down by 0.7 percent from the 2023 season.
Joey Gallo, a brawny left-handed hitter standing 6-foot-5 and weighing 250 pounds, has played in 939 games over the past 10 seasons. High numbers for an unremarkable player whose career batting average is a paltry .194.
Of his 3,403 career plate appearances he’s struck out 1,292 times, walked 497 times, and hit a homer 208 times. With a 58.7 percent rate, Gallo is baseball’s all-time three-true outcome king.
What do you mean you only want three crabs?
I’m my family’s keeper of details. It may not have happened to me, but if I was told the details, I remember them. I set a lot of stories straight, helping jog everyone else’s memory as to how things went.
I remember the little things. The throwaway lines from a funny story – The dude only had one arm! Or brief moments of embarrassment and shame – after a soccer game in fifth grade, I spit at something and was then met with two parents, horrified and livid, that my spit caught their daughter. I remember being frozen in my inability to express it was unintentional so I just denied doing it.
Memory is an unreliable source sometimes, but never when we want it to be. The ability to remember is a double-edged sword in that way.
I don’t know if this was the first time I heard my dad give that memorable piece of advice, but this is when I remember hearing it most distinctly.
We were in the car driving back from a Little League game in which parents had to take turns standing behind the pitcher’s mound to call balls and strikes as no umpire had shown up. Later in the game, it was my dad behind the mound when I came up. I remember the pause he took before he calmly said strike three.
I had to call it, he told me in the car.
Earl Weaver’s Third Law: The easiest way around the bases is with one swing of the bat.
Baseball is a game that can only exist if a batter’s failure remains the most likely outcome. Without a clock to stop an offense’s possession or govern the stopping point of a game, there would be no guarantee of making it through one inning let alone nine.
The game must have failure as the most likely outcome of all. And yet, of our truths, two-thirds are good outcomes for the batter. And one is the best outcome of all.
Aaron Judge, the game’s grandest slugger at 6-foot-7 and 280 pounds, came up to bat 704 times last year and delivered one of those three outcomes on 362 occasions. That brought his career rate – in 993 games and 4,323 plate appearances – to 51.3 percent, the seventh highest in history.
Last season, Judge hit 58 home runs and earned his second American League Most Valuable Player Award.
There’s value in reliability, but more in the long ball. Baseball is a game that is still played today because one of those outcomes became the greatest thing sports fans had ever witnessed to that point. The game changed, sports changed, and the country changed because of the ability of a man born in Baltimore to hit homers for a team in New York.
It made him America’s first sports superstar and the team he played for a worldwide brand. And he did it with a three true outcome rate 12.7 percent lower than Judge’s.
Earl Weaver’s Fourth Law: Your most precious possessions on offense are your twenty-seven outs
What causes a ballplayer to stop swinging the bat? What happened to my ability to play baseball? Why has this thought rattled around my brain for so long?
“I just realized it. Just now,” I wrote in a journal in May of 2018. “I failed as a baseball player… because I so convinced myself that I did not want to swing at a bad pitch.
“I convinced myself so completely that I stopped swinging. That is what killed me. I did not want to swing and miss when it might not be a strike. I was afraid of being embarrassed. That fear of embarrassment killed me. I was so terrified of failing that I stopped swinging entirely.”
It would be another three years before I read about the psychology of regret.
Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for work on decision-making, demonstrated people anticipate feeling regret when outcomes derive from actions they take, as opposed to consequences from when they decline to act.
He found the feeling of regret intensified when we choose to take action.
See the contact.
Memory, of course, is unreliable. That was my memory then, but that isn’t the truth.
The problem was that I developed the habit of being able to hit without seeing the ball all the way onto the bat. I went as far as I did without ever consistently doing what you are told to do when you start in tee-ball: Keep your eye on the ball.
Once the pitchers started throwing a bit harder and added some spin, I could not see the ball well enough to hit it or know when to swing because I wasn’t tracking the ball the last few feet as it reached the plate.
Practicing more would have solved this problem. I could have kicked the habit by working harder. My timing would have improved and mechanics would have been smoothed out by the confidence that is built by feeling that sweet sensation of hitting the ball flush off the barrel over and over.
But even in writing that, I can only reference the feeling and not the seeing. Baseball takes place in the mind, and I can only remember one of those things. Because that’s what happens when you cheat yourself up there.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.