Baseball: Past and Present

What he did: I’ve written a couple of times recently about Case, an outfielder for the Washington Senators and Cleveland Indians from 1937-1947 who shot 8 mm color footage of his career. I didn’t know of Case before first hearing from his son George Case III, but his stolen bases totals impressed me.

In an era before speedsters like Maury Wills, Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson helped revolutionize base stealing, Case averaged over 40 stolen bases in six seasons of leading the American League. Imagine what Case could have done in an era where stealing was encouraged and coached for.

Era he might have thrived in: The 1980s, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Why: Perhaps no team stole as well as the 1985 Cardinals, who swiped 314 bases and had five men with more than 30 steals. Case stole a career-high 61 bases for the Senators in 1943; the stat converter on Baseball-Reference says Case would have 70 steals on the ’85 Cardinals, second-most on the team behind rookie Vince Coleman who had 110.

Maybe there are certain intangibles a machine can’t compute. I ran track all four years of high school, and I remember that as our team attracted more good runners, I got better. I think a lot of things in life are like that. People thrive on competition. We learn from others who best us, receiving encouragement from their feats that the seemingly impossible can be done.

Case didn’t have many peers to draw from. Wally Moses finished just behind him in 1943 with 56 steals, though no other American League player had 30. In fact, Case fell just shy of stealing at least 10 percent of the bases in his league that year. Looking over Baseball-Reference, I found seven men in the modern era who have done this:

• Luis Aparicio in 1959 and 1964
• Lou Brock in 1966
• Bill Bruton in 1954
• Willie Mays in 1956
• Jackie Robinson in 1949
• Snuffy Stirnweiss in 1944
• Maury Wills in 1962 and 1965

For reference, Ty Cobb didn’t steal 10 percent of the bases in his league when he swiped 96 bags in 1915, Brock fell short of the 10 percent mark when he had 118 in 1974, and Henderson’s record-setting 130 steals in 1982 accounted for 9.33% of the 1,394 stolen bases in the American League that year.

With the glut of expansion and nearly twice as many teams now playing in each league than they did in Case’s era, stealing 10 percent of the bases in one’s circuit has become almost impossible. Consider that Jose Reyes’ 78 steals in 2007 were less than 5 percent of the 1,564 steals in the National League that year. Still, I think Case’s totals for his era are impressive.

Curious, I emailed Case III. He wrote back, “My father often said, that if he had played in another era, he probably could have stolen at least 100 bases in a season.  My dad never ran when the team was behind by more than three runs and never tried to steal third with two outs – it just wasn’t done when my dad played.”

There’s one more thing worth mentioning. Case died in 1989 at 73 from emphysema. When I interviewed Case III by phone two weeks ago, I asked if his dad had smoked during his career. Case III told me his dad started smoking when he was 10. If he’d come of age in an era where this was frowned upon, who knows what his stolen base totals could have been.

Any player/Any era is a Thursday feature here that looks at how a player might have done in an era besides his own.

This week’s guest post from Joe Guzzardi, a regular Wednesday contributor here, looks at the practice in recent years of limiting pitch counts.

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When Nolan Ryan took over as the Texas Rangers’ president, one of the first things he did was announce that throughout the organization he would banish the use of the pitch count to determine how long a pitcher stays in the game. Ryan wants his pitchers to go deep instead of being pulled when they reach an arbitrary number like 100.

At the start of the season, Ryan summed his philosophy up to the Dallas Morning News about what he expects to from starters: “The dedication and work ethic that it takes to pitch an entire season…as a starting pitcher and the discipline to continue to maintain his routine all year. And he wants the ball every fifth day, and he’s going to go out there with the intent of pitching late into games and not complaining.”

Speaking from his own experience, Ryan added that he “had to develop stamina because my intent was to pitch a lot of innings.” That message is being sent loud and clear to the Texas starters.

The pitch count debate has picked up over the last couple of years. And not a moment too soon, if you ask me. When you’re brought up as a baseball fan in the era of pitchers like Warren Spahn, Bob Friend and Robin Roberts who finished what they started, it’s hard to listen to a barrage of pitch count statistics from the broadcast booth.

During last night’s game in Arlington between the Rangers and the Pittsburgh Pirates, two divergent pitching philosophies went head-to-head with Ryan emerging as the clear winner—and not just on the scoreboard where Texas won 6-3.

At the center of it all is yesterday’s Pirate starter Ross Ohlendorf.

In August 2009, the Pirates manager John Russell (a former major league catcher) and pitching coach Joe Kerrigan (once a major league pitcher) decided to “shut down” Ohlendorf, their best starter, who had an 11-10 record in 176 innings. The premise was that the Pirates wanted to save Ohlendorf’s arm for the next season.

In an interview with Pirate announcer and former pitching great Steve Blass, Kerrigan justified his move by claiming that it’s a proven that once young pitchers go over a certain number of innings, their likelihood of injury increases dramatically.

But Ohlendorf isn’t young; he’s 27. And, at 6’5” and 245, he’s not a frail rookie. Like Ryan, he’s a Texas-born cattle rancher. And, finally, Olendorf wasn’t about to exert himself during the off-season. He’d committed to an internship at the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. where he’d be in a coat and tie working in a cubicle all winter.

Things haven’t worked out as Russell and Kerrigan planned. Ohlendorf hasn’t won a game since he was yanked from the rotation. Last night, the Rangers shelled him in the fifth. Another Pirate announcer and one-time starting pitcher Bob Walk said that after four innings, Ohlendorf had “nothing.” Ohlendorf’s 2010 line: 0-6; 5.43 ERA

By the way, Blass, Walk and all-time relief great Kent Tekulve who does the Pirates post-game analysis are all pitch count skeptics.

Bob Feller, Tim McCarver and other pitchers and catchers with impeccable credentials are among the multitudes who agree with Ryan, Blass, Walk and Tekulve: let pitchers pitch.

By the way, during the 1946 season when Feller was Ohlendorf’s exact age of 27, he pitched 372 innings and won 26 games with a 2.18 ERA.

Then there’s Ryan’s case.

In his 26 year career, Ryan averaged 262 innings per year. In 19 of those years, Ryan exceeded Ohlendorf’s 170-180 inning “shut down” total. When he was 44, Ryan pitched 173 innings (and compiled a 12-6, 2.61 ERA season).

All of baseball is watching the Rangers. Baltimore Orioles’ president Lee MacPhail thinks it will take years to know if Ryan’s experiment works. Said MacPhail: “We need to see if the pitchers under the Texas system remain durable and how many more innings they pitch over an extended time. That’s how we will gauge the results.”

In the meantime, Ryan and MacPhail can point to Ohlendorf as Exhibit 1 of pitch count folly.

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Joe Guzzardi is a writer and member of the Society for American Baseball Research. Email him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

What he did: Rose has the career record for hits with 4,256, as well as most games played, plate appearances, at-bats, outs and, I’m guessing, money bet on baseball. The latter feat helped get him barred for life from the game in 1989. I consider Pete Rose the greatest baseball player not in the Hall of Fame, I align myself with those who say his ban is cruel and unusual punishment, and I believe baseball should grant an amnesty to Rose and another banished great, Joe Jackson. I say enough is enough, but it’s not my decision.

Era he might have thrived in: The Deadball Era

Why: Rose’s problem is not that he got caught up in illicit activity. It’s that he played 60 years too late.

As the Ken Burns Baseball book recounts, baseball suppressed a betting scandal in 1926 involving future Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis permitted both players to quietly retire (and later let them play again) while American League President Ban Johnson paid $25,000 to have information destroyed that Cobb and Speaker bet on a game of the 1919 World Series they knew to be fixed. Rose is not known to have done anything approaching this yet he’s long gone from baseball.

Gambling was endemic in baseball from 1900-1920, the height of the Deadball Era, with many players being barred for fixing games or betting on them including Heinie Zimmerman, Hal Chase and the eight Chicago White Sox players, including Jackson, who threw the 1919 World Series. But there hasn’t been anything substantiated that Rose ever threw a game. Rose finally admitted to betting on games where he was a manager, after years of lying about it, but he maintains that he always played to win. Assuming that’s true, it’s far different than conspiring with underworld figures to rig a game.

Evidence shows that Rose was a compulsive gambler, and addictive behavior can rear its head in any generation or environment. Rose may have gambled on baseball no matter the era. But in the early days, long before free agency or seven-figure contracts, Rose would have had a fraction of the money to gamble with. He also would have had baseball’s brass on his side — rather than being directly responsible for his exile — had his transgressions become public.

There are other reasons Rose would have thrived in an earlier era. His style of play always suggested he was plucked from another generation, a scrappy throwback who gave his all, earning the nickname Charlie Hustle. Rose’s gregarious, roughhouse character also would have been perfect in an era where players scarcely ranked above street criminals in the social hierarchy.

Needless to say, had Rose played in the Deadball Era, I think he’d be in the Hall of Fame.

Any player/Any era is a Thursday feature here that looks at how a ballplayer might have done in a different era than his own. The feature debuted June 3, 2010 under the name “Different player/Different era.” I’m changing the name, effective this week, because the first one is confusing.