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The Daily Dose/November 7, 2007
By Gaylon Kent
The Writer's Shack
   
Notes from around the human experience, including the weekly steroid in sports story, the usual call to legalize whatever athletes want to put in their bodies, a long, more or less interesting treatise on why pitching in the major leagues isn't what it was, On This Date, plus the Column Four Foto, an all dolled up Helena Bonham-Carter.
HERE WE GO AGAIN: The San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday that Seattle Mariners outfielder Jose Guillen bought over $19,000 of steroids and human growth hormone from a Florida anti-aging clinic.
Yawn: We're not even going to bother with the details on this one. This certainly isn't an isolated incident and we're kidding ourselves if it we think it is going to be the last. Track, cycling, baseball, it doesn't matter; they're all on the juice and rules and laws and modern testing techniques aren't stopping them. Hitters on the juice hit more home runs. Hitters who hit more home runs make more money. Professional athletes play for money. We've said it here before: they are paid to enhance their performance so what do you expect them to take, Kool-Aid?
Something Else We've Said Before: Honestly, we'd probably prefer a clean game, mainly because outside of some pro wrestling deaths, the long term effects of steroid use isn't really known, and it really isn't fair to tell athletes look, you have to put these things into your body in order to keep pace.
But collective bargaining agreements and testing aside, they're still taking them. So, screw it, we say let them. The Writer's Shack reiterates its call to stop this madness and let athletes put whatever they want into their bodies. They're doing it anyway.
Listen Up: And it's not as if the fans care, because they don't. They might say they do, but really, they don't: they like home runs. They've shown that with their wallet. They achieved and maintained a state of arousal when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battled it out in 1998 and they still came to the ballpark when Barry Bonds broke both the single season and career home run marks, even though they may not have liked Bonds himself all that much.
Out In The Cold: Purists who like good pitching and 3-2 games can go and, well, they really have no options because baseball isn't played like that anymore and it's not going to be again. Some like to blame the lack of quality pitching in the major leagues, and they're right, but for the wrong reasons. It is popular to say expansion has diluted the talent pool, but we don't buy that argument here at the Writer's Shack.
Consider this: In 1950 there were 16 major league baseball teams, and, roughly, 150 million people in the US. Fifty-seven years later we have doubled the population and almost doubled the number of major league teams. So that ratio is about the same. Plus, in 1950 the game was still mostly white; blacks and Hispanics had yet to really impact the game like they do now. There are more than enough quality ballplayers on this planet to staff the thirty current major league teams, plus maybe a couple of more.
The problem is not talent per se; the problem is that talent simply is not as developed like it was in the past. (We are seeing this in basketball, too, where kids can fly through the air, catch a pass, flip over and dunk but can't make a free throw or block out, but that's another story.) Pitching is not what it used to be because kids simply are not pitching as much as they used to because they do not play pickup games anymore. For the last generation or two the only pitching kids do is in an organized league, where how much a kid throws is usually regulated.
Old Days: Long gone are the days when kids would play ball in a park, in the street or in a vacant lot until dinnertime. There are reasons for this. One, this country isn't the rural country it used to be. Back in the early 1900's, even before the Cubs last won the World Series, there were no shortage of country boys in the big leagues. In fact, it was not uncommon to hear a player say he played in the first big league game he ever saw and, outside of high school, his first minor league team was probably the first truly organized team he played on. These kids were accustomed, after their chores were done, of course, going out and playing ball with their friends. They pitched, a lot, and never worried about pitch counts.
But we're not a nation of farms anymore; we're a nation of cities and suburbs but even that doesn't completely explain it because city boys played stickball in the streets or pickup ball wherever they could find a field.
The Seed Is Planted: Little League got it started with its pitching limits restricting youngsters to a mere six innings a week. Six innings! There was a time when kids got the week going by throwing six innings at the park before dinner, and now that's their week's work. (In 2007 Little League did away with the inning limitations and went to pitch counts to determine how much rest a pitcher gets between pitching appearances.)
Little League's biggest influence was off the field. It wasn't long before other youth leagues formed, as well independent and travel ball teams, and, this has meant that kids play virtually all of their baseball with organized teams, under adult supervision, with pitching limits, and arms are simply not as built up as they used to be. And they aren't going to be built up in college and minor leagues either because gone are the days when pitchers were expected to go nine. Now, just get your team into the sixth - the sixth! - reasonably close and you've earned your keep for the next four days. In fact, if you go six and give up no more than three runs, some will credit you with a quality start.
The effects have been felt in the big leagues for about a generation now. Starters seldom go nine anymore. Toronto's Roy Halladay led the majors with seven complete games this past season and no one has had more than nine in a single year this decade.
The End Of AN Era: The change really started being felt in the 1980's, because pitchers were still going nine in the seventies. In fact, three pitchers, Ferguson Jenkins, Steve Carlton and Catfish Hunter each had seasons where they completed thirty games. Rick Langford kept pace to start off the 80's, completing 28 games, but after that, the effects of this country's kids not playing sandlot ball caught up. For the rest of the decade the 20-complete game mark would be eclipsed just three times and in 1989 Bret Saberhagen led the major leagues with just twelve complete games.
This trend continued in the 90's when no league leader had more than 15 complete games the last pitcher to lead the major leagues with more than ten complete games was Randy Johnson in 1999 with twelve.
ON THIS DATE: On 11/7/91 Magic Johnson announces he has HIV and retires as a player with the Los Angeles Lakers. He would be selected to, and play in, the NBA All-Star game later that season, play in the 1992 Olympics, coach the Lakers for 16 games in the 1993-94 season, own a portion of the Lakers, and return for 36 games in the second half of the 1995-96 season.
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