December Days 08 - Pop Fly (The Nine of Mitts)

[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, there's still plenty of space. Leave a comment with a prompt. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

Once of the more common ways the defense records an out is by catching a batted ball before it makes contact with the ground. The highlight reels are peppered with catches from well-hit balls that require acrobatic maneuvers to collect, or require the fielder to cover what seems to be an impossible distance to make a catch at the last moment. Those are exciting outs that energize the fans and make for good television.

These are not those kinds of hits.

Fly balls are generally friendly things for the defense. There's enough time to get into place and await the recording of another out, barring losing it in the light, a mental distraction, or other such abnormalities that result in errors. Professionals rarely have this happen. Kids playing ball, however, and it's entirely possible.

I'm told that I tended to get out in the outfield when I was younger because I had sufficient focus to continue paying attention to the game even if there wasn't any actual action going on for the half-inning. Which is supposed to be a compliment, even if it doesn't sound like one to the kid in question. Although, they were right, as a double play of mine from center field (that's F-8, 8-6 for two outs on the score sheet) happened because I was paying attention and knew where to throw the ball after I had caught it, instead of celebrating the catch itself. Thankfully, the shortstop was covering second, and so was in the right position to receive the throw while the base runner was still admiring the catch. These were young kids, all of us, so that kind of thing is forgivable.

Mostly, though, the outfield, as a kid, can be boring, depending on how the pitching is going. Many kids in the younger ages can't hit the ball hard enough to get out into the outfield, so a lot of those kids are out there and have to wait for the one ball that gets through the infield or gets hit hard enough for them to have to do something about it.

Pop flies don't even make it out of the infield. So those kids who are getting no action don't even get the benefit of something coming their way. It's still an easy out, but it's not even had the benefit of getting all the way to the outfield. Most pop fly balls in the professional leagues spend eight to ten seconds in the air, a long testament to not quite hitting the ball right before ending in a catch. Many hopes and attempts at psychically including either the player or the ball itself happen on pop flies, if you're a fan of the losing team.

During many pop flies you will hear a lot of communication between the fielders as they negotiate who actually gets to catch the ball - infielders have priority over pitchers, and someone coming forward to the ball has priority over someone moving backwards or sideways to the ball, as they are much more likely to make the catch. So you may see three fielders converging on the same spot, but two of them will usually peel off and the third will actually make the catch when needed. If there's a doubt about who will catch the ball, the negotiations continue, often more strenuously, until all parties are satisfied. Or a collision happens, which is bad, because both players are looking at the ball and not each other.

The Tarot part says that the appearance of Pop Flies indicates things going well in a routine, easy way. In the same ways that singles are the building blocks to success at places where effort is needed, pop flies are indicators of success where things require less effort - at least, if you're the defense in this situation. If you're hitting a lot of pop flies, something's out of balance - a bad habit may have crept in, or you're not seeing the pitches coming in all the way to make contact with. Both of these situations say you should take a trip to batting practice with the hitting coach, so that you can return to a mechanically sound swing and follow pitches all the way in to contact. Back to basics.

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December Days 09 - XVII, Batting 1.000

[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, there's still plenty of space. Leave a comment with a prompt. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

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Nobody is perfect, and in baseball, especially not so over time. A 162-game season with at least three guaranteed appearances with a bat and nine innings of playing defense provides a multitude of opportunities for things to go off the rails. Since it is a contested sport between teams, at some point, even the most improbable streak of offense must end if the inning is to be completed. It is possible for the defense to obtain a perfect game (attributed to the pitcher rather than the defense as a whole) by retiring all twenty-seven required batters in the order they appear, without runs being scored, hits being recorded, errors made, walks delivered, or any batter reaching first base safely. This was a rare event, but it has been slowly getting more frequent over the last decade - this might be an indicator that the competitive balance for baseball is moving a bit too far in the direction of the defense, or that pitching is getting better than hitting at this particular point in time. This is in the middle of scandals with regard to performance-enhancing drugs and methods generating controversy about whether this ruins the game or is a natural evolution of the game's more recent focus on power hitting and home runs (since that excites casual fans and television audiences).

When the batter first moves from the on-deck circle to the batter's box, there are usually three statistical categories displayed on the screens, whether on television or at the ballpark. Two of them are important, and one isn't. Regrettably, the one that isn't is the one that usually gets the most focus. The three categories are the season's batting average, the count of home runs for the season, and the count of runs batted in (RBI) for the season. Any player who leads in all three categories at the end of the regular season has captured a baseball Triple Crown (Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers achieved this last in 2013).

Home runs are ultimately unimportant at the professional level, as each player, with the training and coaching they receive, is capable of hitting dingers. And with pitch speeds increasing over time, physics tells us the number of home runs will increase from season to season, as the extra velocity imparted by a swing will make the ball fly farther. They're great for excitement, good for television, and if there's a good home run chase going on, people who wouldn't normally tune in to baseball might watch a bit more. (The McGwire-Sosa duel of who would make it past Roger Maris' record mark of 61 home runs in a single season was great television, even with the allegations of steroids. Which would resurface with a bigger vengeance when Barry Bonds would embark on beating that mark only a few years later, successfully taking over the record himself.) But, in terms of who you send to the plate in a substitution situation ("pinch hitting"), choosing the person with the biggest HR count is not usually the best decision.

RBI is a better indicator of batter effectiveness, as RBI counts all runs scored, whether by base hits, sacrifice hits, balls that ended in the batter being put out, and basically any runs scored by this batter putting the ball in play - everything but walks, really. Sending up a player with a high RBI count in a pinch is a much better bet to get some runs out of the deal.

If you really want to know who's going to succeed in a pinch, though, you want the player with the highest batting average. The average is a percentage, expressed as a decimal to three significant digits between the values of 0.000 and 1.000. The zero before the decimal point is usually not shown. The percentage represents the likelihood that any given at-bat will result in the batter hitting safely for at least one base. Higher-average hitters are more likely to end up on base than lower-average.

The normal batting average hovers between .200 and .250 for any given season. "Hot" hitters will post averages above .250, and people having an exceptional year will flirt with .300 and possibly get over it. The single-season record is over .400, which in today's game is damn near impossible. (The is probably in the stash my parents keep, my first year's play statistics as a child, where our averages were all above .500. Considering the coaches were pitching to us, I should think we would do well.)

Which is a very long prelude to the actual card, Batting 1.000 (said "batting a thousand") - perfection at the plate, which is only really possible during a single game - to do it for a season would mean safe hitting hundreds of times against all different teams. For a career, that same season's improbability would be multiplied by the years spent in a career. Much like life, we cannot achieve perfection over a long term period, but we can do it in short bursts when everything aligns correctly.

That said, batting 1.000 is the same whether one has five at-bats or one. Average calculation only covers official at-bats. Which excludes any time to the plate where a player hits or bunts a sacrifice out of any sort, or any time where the player reaches base due to a walk, an error, or a defensive decision that pursues a different out but could have collected the batter instead ("fielder's choice"). So someone could take their minimum three trips to the plate, draw two walks and a single, and have bat 1.000 for the game (1 hit in 1 at-bat). Which makes the perfection sound less impressive, so when you hear someone recounting a player's at-bats, they will generally give you the fraction ("they went two [hits] for three [at-bats], with a double, a walk, a whiff, and a home run") instead of the percentage. So, no, not all perfection is equal, both in baseball and in life. But it's still with mentioning when it happens.

The Tarot equivalent here is The Star, which talks about the divine potential of each person, the ability to achieve the highest, even if only temporarily. Reaching for the stars, being made of starstuff, or, perhaps, in the vein of Messrs. deGrasse Tyson and Sagan, being able to step back and appreciate the incredible improbability that is humanity and the universe we live in.

I have people on my list who work with spacefaring craft and with the planet itself, and they both demonstrate, when they talk about their work, the things that people have learned through the power of science (SCIENCE!) that would be incredible if the proof wasn't there, in the pictures, in the rocks, in the instrumentation. If I were going to choose something to use as a thing to aspire to for humanity, it is that I hope we are always worthy of the best of our science.

And that our improbable batting scenarios in that regard start becoming more and more frequent.