THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, July 13, 2009

Joe Morgan and Jon Miller (or is it Joe Miller and Jon Morgan)…

Was watching the ESPN Sunday night game.  BTW, despite the wrath that Steve Phillips engenders whenever there is a Steve Phillips thread on BTF, and despite the fact that he would be one of the last persons I would interview for my team’s GM, I don’t think he is a bad commentator at all, as commentators go.  If you read those BTF threads, you would think that he were Hawk Harrelson and Rick Sutcliffe rolled into one.  I don’t think it is even close.  He occasionally says really stupid things, but so does every single baseball commentator I have ever heard, bar none.  (Last night, Joe Morgan actually said, “When you play deep as an infielder, you cut down on your range.")

Anyway, that was not the point of this thread.  I just thought I’d throw that Steve Phillips in - for no extra charge.

After Ryan Ludwick hit his first and then second 2-run homer last night, Morgan was going on an on about how the pitcher was supposed to make “adjustments,” such as after the first homer was hit on a high fastball over the plate (I doubt that was the pitcher’s intended location), he threw him inside fastballs, and then after he hit the inside fastball for a HR, he was supposed to throw him nothing but - or primarily - offspeed pitches.  And Phiilips was agreeing with him.  Later in the broadcast, I think Phillips said something like, “If a batter hits a home run on a fastball, there is no way you throw him fastballs on his next at bat.”

Miller, whom I like a lot, said to Joe, something like, “Yeah, but if the batter knows that is what you are going to do...” Morgan did not answer the question, which was a good one, in typical fashion.  He made a joke or went off on some irrelevant tangent.

Anyway, you hear this all the time - the idea of pitcher’s making “adjustments” (which was the word Morgan was using all night in reference to this situation) after a batter hits a home run or maybe gets a couple of hard hits.  The implication - and exactly what Morgan was droning about all game - is that if a batter hits a HR on a fastball, the next AB you don’t throw him many fastballs.  The other day, after a long foul ball on an inside fastball, the announcer said, “You can bet that he wont get another one of those (inside fastballs) this AB!”

Of course, Miller was right, and Morgan was being an idiot, as is often the case.  If it were true that the pitcher is supposed to drastically alter the type of pitches he throws to the batter based on the last AB, the batter would know that, and it would be a tremendous advantage to him.  As good a hitter as Morgan was, you would think he would know that the surprise element to pitching and the unpredictability of it is what makes pitching so difficult to hit.  If a batter has an idea what is coming, other than on obvious counts (like 3-0), no matter how good the pitcher’s stuff, it becomes much easier to be a good hitter (with some exceptions of course, like Rivera - and even he “mixes up” the location of his cutter and occasionally throws some other pitch).