Bat Issue: When in Doubt, Use Chain Saw

Joe Schultz, the man who managed the Seattle Pilots before they became the Milwaukee Brewers, was attempting to explain the art of hitting to some of his players one day, and tried to keep it simple. “Well, boys, it’s a round ball and a round bat, and you got to hit it square,” he said.

Pete Rose still likes to tell hitters the same thing, to this day. Round ball. Round bat. Simple.

Except it ain’t.

To quote another old-timer, Ted Williams, hitting a baseball is the toughest thing there is to do in sports.

A golf ball never moves. A tennis ball is soft. A football is large, and somebody hands it or flips it into your hands. A basketball hoop is stationary. A boxer’s target is right there in front of him, easy to see, easy to hit.

A baseball, though, is small, and can hurt you if it hits you, and it comes at you at great speeds, and it dips and bends and bobs and weaves.

You can argue the point all night, but the fact remains, hitting a baseball is hard to do.

Maybe this explains the behavior of today’s players.

Sometimes, when a batter swings at the ball and misses, he asks the umpire to check the ball. He occasionally even asks the umpire to check the pitcher. Mike Scott of the Astros gets frisked more often than half of Houston’s convicted burglars.

Batters insist that pitchers such as Scott will “scuff” the baseball, nicking it with a fingernail or a thumb tack, or smudging it until the ball is somehow capable of unnatural movement.

There was a “Tank McNamara” comic strip the other day in which a four-sided curtain was placed around a pitching mound, inside of which an undressing pitcher was telling the men searching him: “Come on, guys, this is really embarrassing.”

But there are even more embarrassing things than being suspected of doctoring the baseball. For most of this season, pitchers have seen their pitches pounded over the fence and out of the lot. Home runs are being hit at a record rate. Some rookie from Oakland is even threatening to become the new Roger Maris.

There has been a lot of babble about a “lively” ball, but the fact is, there has been a lot more talk lately about the declining quality of pitching in major league baseball.

The reason the National League still has 12 teams to the American League’s 14, some say, is that there are so few good pitchers to go around, it’s tough enough to fill 26 pitching staffs, much less 28. Sorry about that, Denver and Tampa. How can we talk about expansion when contending teams such as the California Angels are forced to use guys who get released by other teams?

Well, the pitchers are tired of being the scapegoats. They are tired of giving up home runs by the bunches, and tired of doing something illegal every time they strike somebody out.

It was only a matter of time before somebody struck back.

Pedro Guerrero of the Dodgers has been a hitting fool lately. His batting average zoomed right up there behind Tony Gwynn’s, and his home run count has been rising steadily.

Nobody doubts that Guerrero can hit, but after one at-bat last Saturday, the Chicago Cubs confiscated his bat and asked the umpires to impound it. The bat should be sent to the league office to be sliced, diced, lopped, chopped and checked for cork, they said.

Guerrero, naturally, was indignant. “I don’t need (cork) to hit,” he said. “Man, when you can hit, you can hit with anything. Wade Boggs can hit with a chicken bone.”

Well, we shall see. It was four years ago Friday that the New York Yankees protested a bat used by the Kansas City Royals’ George Brett that had pine tar smeared all over it, up as high as the trademark. The bat was, indeed, judged illegal, and what would have been a game-winning, two-run home run was taken away from Brett. However, that decision was later overturned by then-American League President Lee MacPhail, requiring that the last part of the game eventually be replayed.

If Guerrero’s bat, which was a gift from Jeffrey Leonard of the San Francisco Giants, had anything inside of it--a rabbit, maybe--the Cubs would have a case.

And, by the way, anytime Leonard hits one hard during the Dodger-Giant series this week at Dodger Stadium, what the heck, we might as well check. Get a chain saw and cut that sucker open.

From now on, that’s the way it will have to be. When a batter swings and misses, check the ball. When a batter swings and connects, check the bat.

As for advice from the manager, well, always remember what Schultz said, and remember also what Washington Senator Manager Bucky Harris once said to his team before going out to face the fastballs of Bob Feller.

“Fellas, go up and hit what you see,” he said. “And, if you don’t see it, come on back.”