October 26, 2014

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Last night’s improbable third game of this year’s World Series makes this a good time to include a number of baseball items. The Weekly Standard piece The War for Ninety Feet is a good look at the game inside the game.

… “I want to show you something really cool,” Ritchie says, as he moves to the chalkboard and draws a line down the middle.

“Oh, this is cool,” says one of his assistant coaches, Jon Tatum. “Since I’ve been here, this is one of the most important things I learned from coach.”

On the left side of the line, Ritchie writes +90, and -90 on the right.

“Sacrifice bunt,” says Ritchie. “Plus 90,” says Tatum, meaning it moves the runner another 90 feet closer to home and scoring a run. Ritchie writes it out in the left-hand column. “Double play,” he says next. “Another plus 90,” says Tatum, meaning the team in the field has won this skirmish by taking 90 feet away from the team at bat. That, too, goes in the left-hand column.

Minus 90s are failures to execute, in the field, at the plate, or on the mound.  For instance, a throw from the outfield that misses the cutoff man and allows the runner to take an extra base forfeits 90 feet. On the offensive side, failure to lay down a sacrifice bunt and move a runner closer to home is a minus 90. Bad at bats are those that make the job of the next hitter harder not easier. Those, too, are minus 90s on the offensive side.

There are dozens of possible plus and minus 90s, all of them the function of either executing team fundamentals properly, or failing to. He’s not loading up the left side of the margin with home runs for the offense and strike outs for the defense, but what lots of baseball commentators call—mistakenly, from Ritchie’s perspective—the “small things.” The way he sees it, this is baseball skill and it’s what decides outcomes. “The higher the ratio of plus 90s to minus 90s,” says Ritchie, “the more likely you are to win ballgames.” …

 

 

The Wall Street Journal weighs in with It’s Time to Play by National League Rules.

The Kansas City Royals are an anachronism in many ways, but one in particular stands out as the American League champions visit National League territory on Friday: This team has an old-school designated hitter.

You know the type—a lumbering slugger who anchors the middle of the order and hardly ever plays the field. Royals DH Billy Butler even has an appropriately beefy nickname: Country Breakfast. 

Few teams still employ a classic DH, but the Royals do. So as the World Series shifts to San Francisco, where the pitcher will be required to hit, Kansas City may feel the impact of NL rules in a way that other AL teams wouldn’t. Butler, who had two RBIs in the Royals’ Game 2 win, will go to the bench—a situation traditionally viewed as advantageous to NL teams, which aren’t built with a centerpiece DH in mind. 

“The American League team is going to have a DH,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. “They’re going to spend money on a DH. A guy that has that role, where we don’t do that in the National League. And then you go to our park and they don’t have that player available.” …

 

 

Thomas Boswell writes on this year’s crop of relief pitchers.

The World Series as bullpen war has never been fully explored, perhaps because no two pennant winners have arrived on this stage with so many lousy starting pitchers.

However, before this World Series ends, we will find out which bullpen, that of the San Francisco or the Kansas City Royals, has been pitched into a large pile of mush while the other celebrates a championship. This is a war of attrition, and until the shoulders, elbows, wrists or fingers of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, Greg Holland and, now, rookie Brandon Finnegan fall off or cease to function, the Royals are in precarious command of this unique and peculiar classic.

On Friday night in Game 3 in AT&TPark, the Royals used those four relievers to get the final 12 outs and present Jeremy Guthrie, one of those diligent veterans who lasted exactly five innings, the 3-2 victory. The fresh element was the appearance of Finnegan, who pitched in the College World Series for Texas Christian less than five months ago, to get the last two outs of the seventh inning after Herrera had thrown 26 of his 27 pitches 96-to-100 mph and looked a bit tuckered.

The Royals’ winning run was driven in, after an 11-pitch battle, by Eric Hosmer with a lined single to center field off — of course —a relief pitcher  …

 

 

Adam Kilgore, WaPo’s baseball writer, covered the game.

Kansas City Royals Manager Ned Yost grabbed the keys and took the wheel in the sixth inning Friday night. He swerved over the double yellow, glanced off the guard rail and just about hit a pedestrian. He might have clipped a couple mailboxes. And do you know what? At the end of Game 3 of the World Series, there the car sat, fender dented and headlight busted, safe and sound in the driveway.

Yost’s moves typically draw questions. The one that persisted Friday night is this: Was that dunce cap actually a wizard’s hat? In the Royals’ harrowing, 3-2 victory over the San Francisco Giants, Yost coaxed all 12 outs he needed from his bullpen in head-scratching, mind-bending, game-winning fashion. He rooted for his own hitter to make an out. He allowed a reliever to hit with a man on base in the seventh inning. He let a right-handed pitcher face a left-handed batter while a left-handed pitcher warmed up. He asked for a rookie who plied his trade this spring at TexasChristianUniversity to record the night’s biggest outs. The decisions led ultimately to the Royals taking a 2-1 lead in the 110th World Series.

“I’m getting really good at protecting a one-run lead,” Yost said, “because a lot of times that’s exactly what we have to deal with.”

The burden of decision shifted afterward to Bruce Bochy, the manager in the other dugout. In Saturday’s Game 4, down a game, would he start mountainous left-hander Madison Bumgarner? No, he confirmed afterward. The Giants will stick with journeyman Ryan Vogelsong and pitch Bumgarner with regular rest in Game 5. …

 

 

 

Now we’ll switch to football as a WSJ OpEd chronicles the football obsession of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

You don’t need to know about the literary backdrop of PrincetonUniversity football to take an interest in Saturday’s game against Harvard. For two years running this storied rivalry has produced thrillers that came down to the final seconds—last year in triple overtime. At stake once again is the Ivy League title.

It’s safe to say that this weekend’s game would have mattered a lot to F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a prep-school student in the stands for the 1911 installment of the rivalry, Fitzgerald watched Princeton pull off an improbable late victory. At that instant, his biographers say, he vowed to enroll at Princeton. Once there, he tried out for the team—but got cut on the first day, a well-chronicled disappointment that some scholars believe explains the sense of rejection that permeates his novels, especially “The Great Gatsby.”

But long overlooked evidence suggests that football didn’t just influence Fitzgerald: Fitzgerald himself may have exerted a decisive influence on the development of the game.

The evidence comes from a 1956 interview with Fritz Crisler, a man who unquestionably shaped the game of football. After becoming head coach at Michigan in 1938, Crisler established the practice of fielding distinct offensive and defensive units; previously, 11 men had played both sides of the ball for 60 minutes. This shift became Crisler’s legacy. His biography at the College Football Hall of Fame calls him “the father of two-platoon football.” …

 

 

Richard Brookhiser’s biography of Lincoln is reviewed in City Journal.

Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject’s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser’s compact, profound, and utterly absorbing new life of Abraham Lincoln, Founders’ Son, leaps straight to the heart of the matter. With searchlight intensity, it dazzlingly illuminates the great president’s evolving views of slavery and the extraordinary speeches in which he unfolded that vision, molding the American mind on the central conflict in American history and resolving, at heroic and tragic cost to the nation and himself, the contradiction that the Founding Fathers themselves could not resolve.

Of Lincoln’s youth, therefore, Brookhiser gives us only telling vignettes: his sense of close connection to the Founding through the Revolutionary War-veteran grandfather for whom he was named; the kindly stepmother who entered his hardscrabble life like a ray of sunshine and encouraged his love of reading and thinking, so that, after false starts as a riverboat man and a storekeeper, he could teach himself to be a lawyer by dogged solitary study; the rain-stained copy of Parson Weems’s biography of George Washington that fired his boyhood imagination with the momentous meaning of the American Founding, and that stoked (I would guess) the ambition, which he expressed almost in Washington’s very words, to “be truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem;” the passionate belief in “a man’s right to own the fruits of his own labor,” bred not only by having to work as an unpaid field hand for his dirt-farmer father but also by his father’s hiring him out to other farmers and pocketing his wages; his related belief, also conceived in servitude, and later strengthened by the Hamiltonian vision of Henry Clay, that the purpose of American liberty was, as Brookhiser puts it, “to make men—to develop the talents of individual Americans;” …