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Thursday, April 10, 2008
Is there a hangover effect for hitters following a knuckler?
Editor’s Note: I’ve changed the name of this thread to better capture the exciting research that is appearing, starting at post 14. MGL’s original blog post appears after the jump, and the URL remains as it was in its original form.
I was listening to the the Tigers, Boston game on XM radio today. I don’t know who the announcers were, but they seemed like a couple of pretty intelligent and reasonable folk. Generally the radio announcers are MUCH better than the TV ones. Something happened which you see or hear happen all the time. The pitcher went into his windup and the umpire abruptly called time out. What do you think the announcers went on to say?
The obligatory, “Boy, that is an injury waiting to happen,” one guy said, or something like that. The other announcer followed with, “Yeah, that is really dangerous.” We’ve all heard those nearly exact words, or some such version, a hundred times, right? And it seems to make sense. I don’t know about you, but in 40 years of watching literally thousands of games, I have seen a pitcher actually get hurt on that sort of thing, let’s see, uh, about…
Zero times. yeah, that’s it. Zero times. Maybe I don’t recall it happening once. I’ll even grant you twice. I am sure that a pitcher COULD get injured doing that, but the fact is that it rarely if ever happens.
I don’t know about you, but when an someone goes on about something being dangerous, or an “injury waiting to happen,” that means, by definition, that an actual INJURY must occur more than once or twice over a 40 year span. (OK, I have not watched every MLB game over that span, but you know what I mean.)
This is one of my (many) bugaboos. Someone in the public domain (or private for that matter) saying something that COULD be true, SOUNDS like it should be true, but obviously isn’t. You just hear it said so many times, that you assume it must be true, and you just ignore it. It goes in one ear and quickly out the other. This is not one of those things that you have to be an “analyst” to know isn’t true, or you have to do research to prove it isn’t true. I am not talking about those kinds of things (of which there are many of course).
I’m talking about those things that if ANYONE stopped for just a second and thought, ‘Wait a minute, is that true?’ they would easily and quickly realize that it probably isn’t. I would love to stop those broadcasters and ask them, “So, how many times have you actually seen a pitcher get hurt (such that he had to come out of the game) after abruptly stopping his delivery like that? [pause] Oh, never. Hmmmm. So, how is that really dangerous and an injury waiting to happen? For something to be dangerous, if it happens lots of times, like hundreds or even thousands, someone has to get hurt more than occasionally, otherwise, by definition, it is NOT dangerous, right?”
Meanwhile…
Later on in the same broadcast, the same announcers said, “Now that the the Tigers have broken out of their slump, it is ironic (I’ll excuse the fact they are using the wrong word) that they have to face a knuckleballer tomorrow. That can easily put you right back in a slump.”
Besides wanting to slap them in the face, again, I’d love to ask them, “What the heck does that even mean? Facing Wakefield has more of a chance to put them in a ‘slump’ than facing Beckett, or Dice-K, or whomever? Uh, wouldn’t that HAVE TO mean that Wake was a better pitcher than those guys?”
I give up (not really).