"Get your eyes checked, Blue!"

My brother in law, the Texan and Rangers fan, is famous all over the ballpark at Arlington.

He's The Blue Guy.

As in "Get your eyes checked, Blue!"

And "Who's paying your salary, Blue?"

And "Take your nap at home, Blue!"

Blue being his old-timey designation for the guys down on the field in the blue shirts, the umps.

My brother-in-law has a deep, resonant voice that he can make boom.  When he calls to Blue, Blue hears him.  So does everybody else in the park and small children, finding themselves in his neighborhood in the stands and hearing him begin his game-long conversation with the umpires, have been overheard (by my sister) turning to their parents to say, "Mommy, Daddy, it's the Blue Guy!"

So far, though, no one's asked for his autograph.

My brother-in-law is a true and knowledgeable baseball fan so he doesn't blame the umpires for everything.  But if you judged by his running commentary you'd think it was entirely Blue's fault that no one's ever seen hide or hair of the Texas Rangers on a ball field in late October.

Turns out, though, it has been Blue's fault.

Sort of.

It was Blue's fault that during the 90s pitchers were suffering an epidemic of whiplash as they had to jerk around five or six times an inning to watch yet another ball disappear into the stratosphere and it's been Blue's fault that since 2001 batters have been stirring up more harmless breezes and doing more impressions of wooden Indians at the plate.

Couple of sports historians---yes, it's a real field of study, and why shouldn't it be?---have looked things over and concluded it wasn't bulked-up batters but a slimmed-down strike zone that was responsible for the home run barrages of the 1990s:

Benjamin G. Rader and Kenneth J. Winkle wanted to understand the hitting trends for the 1969 to 2006 seasons. The era following 1994-2000, which they call Baseball's Great Hitting Barrage of the 90s, has been the puzzling one. What cooled down the wild hitting bubble, with its home-run rallies and record-breaking performances?

Was it drugs that pumped up those figures and then drug testing, which began in 2003 (although anxiety, trial tests and awareness of being caught started years earlier) that brought them back down a bit? Some have concluded this from many reports, including Ken Caminiti's confession in 2002 to Sports Illustrated that he used steroids in the mid-90s and stated that it was "no secret" that at least half of all players were using steroids.

Numerous other players testified in more recent years that they used either steroids or human growth hormone, or they were implicated. And more were caught in various drug screening programs.

Actually, the historians say, it is umps that have brought the Giambis and Sheffields of Major League Baseball back under control more than drug bans and testing.

Bans and testing for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs have played a big role in lowering batting statistics, but the bigger factor is that league officials have pushed umpires to expand the strike zone, making it harder for hitters to connect. That's what a statistical analysis shows, anyway, but the analysis has shortcomings, most notably that it's not possible to know who used drugs or when they started and stopped.

In an earlier study that looked at offensive stats through 2002, Rader and Winkle thought it might be tightly wound balls that fly faster off bats, the belief that ballparks were smaller or the added teams (league expansion) that diluted the quality of pitching. Maybe it was lighter bats, stronger hitters or a new style of hitting that yielded more hits.

Their latest research showed that the strike zone factor had the strongest correlation with the change in offensive statistics, including aggregate major league batting average, runs per game, home runs per game and on-base percentage plus slugging percentage...

Since 2001, Major League Baseball officials have been working at making umpires call games as if the strike zone's what the rule book says it ought to be.

I think it's common knowledge that sometime in the late 1980s the umps began to compact their strike zones.  Dwight Gooden's killer pitch, the one he put batters away with after boggling their minds with his Lord Charles, his gorgeous, otherwordly curveball, was a fastball that came in high at the top of the letters and when Blue began calling that a ball they took that away from him and he went from a great pitcher to a pretty good one to a frustrated one to a desperate one to a mediocre one, his career fizzling out at about the time he should have been coming into his prime.

The drug problem didn't help.

Makes sense---and I have to be careful here.  Sabremetrics has shown that a lot of what "makes sense" about baseball doesn't really happen out on the field---that a smaller strike zone's going to take a toll on pitchers physically, psychically, and professionally.  With less room to make mistakes in, a pitcher's best shot is to rear back and try to blow it right by the batter, increasing the odds he's going to groove one.

Seems like this will cause teams to groom a lot of big, strong pitchers who will strike out a lot of batters, give up a lot of home runs and deep line drives, run out of gas in the middle-innings, and blow out their arms in a couple of seasons.

Open up the strike zone, give pitchers room to play around in, and 95 mile an hour fastballs don't have to be an important feature of every good pitcher's repertoire.  The result should be that teams can send out to the mound smaller, wirier, cagier pitchers who can work more innings on fewer days' rest with less risk of season-ending arm problems, the good news for fans, particularly National League fans, being that we don't have to sit through endless pitching changes in the middle and late innings of a game.

And at this point I'm beginning to remind myself of the absolute worst poem ever written about baseball.  It's called "The Old-Fashioned Pitcher," and it's twelve lines of rosy-eyed, cheaply-rhymed, nostalgia-infused bilge water, but it's still catchy:

How dear to my heart was the old-fashioned hurler
Who labored all day on the old village green.
He did not resemble the up-to-date twirler
Who pitches four innings and ducks from the scene.
The up-to-date twirler I’m not very strong for;
He has a queer habit of pulling up lame.
And that is the reason I hanker and long for
The pitcher who started and finished the game.

The old-fashioned pitcher,
The iron-armed pitcher,
The stout-hearted pitcher,
Who finished the game.

That's one of the beautifully consistent truths about baseball.  In every era the players were better when the gray-haired guy next to you in the bleachers was kid.

"The Old-Fashioned Pitcher" was written by a newspaperman named George Phair who covered the New York Giants for the New York American in the the middle decades of the last century.

He probably wrote it daydreaming about Christy Mathewson while he was watching Carl Hubbell square off against Dizzy Dean.

Comments

[Ian Gray]

Lance, have you read Tom Verducci's article about moonlighting as a spring training ump? I thought it was interesting and well done. Anyway, he cites a statistic saying that balls and strikes aside, the umps got all of 100 calls wrong last year, across all of Major League Baseball, which is pretty good.

That said, that leaves balls and strikes out of it, and that's where umps drive me nuts. The study you cite notwithstanding, I could swear they're still squeezing the pitchers, though more on the corners than at the top and bottom of the strike zone. There's nothing quite so aggrazating as a baseball fan as seeing a pitch on the black for strike three called a ball, and then the batter working either a walk or a hit out of it, and it seems to me I've seen a lot of it already in the barely-started season.

That said, I'm just excited that the season's here, and that the Jays are playing well. Your Mets look good as well-I still root for Carlos Delgado to do well.

[Chris Quinones]

Re: Doc Gooden, I also recall how Mel Stottlemyre and Davey Johnson wanted to alter Doc's pitching motion after his Cy Young season in '85, ostensibly to preserve his arm. Why on earth would you want to tinker with a 21-year-old superstar's pitching motion?

I've never forgiven Johnson and Stottlemyre for that. Think what a starting staff they had, how they all accomplished less than their potential seemed to promise, and what could have been if someone of the caliber of Leo Mazzone were coaching them.

Sorry, I feel kinda strongly about the whole thing. (And I was in school in Boston in the fall of '96 and rooted for the Sox!)

[Linkmeister]

George Phair would undoubtedly not have been on the same side Marvin Miller was on.

For a while in the 90s I concluded that Koufax would have been mediocre because the letter-high fastball he relied on became a ball.

[Bill Altreuter]

Heckling the officials is bush. Heckle players all you want, but booing the ump is out of bounds.

I realize that there is a long tradition of it, and no sport reveres tradition more than rounders, but it is nevertheless true that the surest way to spot a rube at the ballpark is to look for the guy who is on the umpire's case.