Can’t Hit What They Can’t See

Ted Williams used to say the hardest thing to do in the world of sport was hit the curveball.

Maybe. A 2-iron out of a buried lie is no day at the beach either.

But, if Williams was right, what do you think he would have to say about hitting a fastball at, say, quarter to six on a fall evening?

Williams, of course, could probably hit a fastball in a dark cellar. But, if you’ve been paying attention to the league championship series in baseball, you’ll note that most people can’t hit it in the twilight.

I would say a 95-mph fastball thrown from 60 feet away is the hardest thing in nature to see.

When you don’t see it except for the last 15 or 20 feet, it becomes impossible.

Baseball is a game of statistics. They are the lifeblood of the sport. Winning or losing sometimes becomes secondary to a man hitting 60 homers, batting successfully in 56 consecutive games, stealing 104 bases. Once when the bard of baseball, Leonard Koppet, showed up in a press box lugging a small valise, someone asked writer Jimmy Cannon what he thought was in Lenny’s suitcase.

Cannon didn’t even look up. “Decimal points,” he sneered.

When you schedule a playoff game at 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon, you are tampering with baseball’s beloved decimal points.

Take Game 3 of the Indian-Oriole series. The Orioles’ Mike Mussina struck out 15 Cleveland batters. In seven innings!

It tied for the second-highest strikeout total in a postseason game. Bob Gibson struck out 17 in a 1968 World Series game. And Sandy Koufax struck out 15 Yankees in the 1963 fall classic.

But Gibson and Koufax were pitching in bright sunlight in early afternoon. The batters got a real good look at their stuff.

Mussina was throwing in the crepuscular light of a fading day. Just about the time when the lights had to be turned on but really hadn’t kicked in yet.

How much did the twilight conditions help Mussina? Well, look at it this way: When Koufax struck out 15 in ‘63, he was coming off a season in which he had struck out 306 batters, won 25 games and had a 1.88 earned-run average. Mussina was coming off a year in which he struck out 218 batters, won 15 games and had an ERA of 3.20.

Baseball probably can be played by kerosene or at 2 in the morning on a diamond lit by a circle of cars with their brights on. That’s not the point.

But even night games have blurred the record book. It is, perhaps, significant to note that Johnny Vander Meer, who died last week, threw the second of his consecutive no-hitters in the first night game played at Ebbets Field in 1938. It’s not unfair to think the incandescence that inaugural year played a part.

The effect of fading light was brought home to this observer in the 1967 All-Star game at Anaheim. It was scheduled at 6 o’clock for televising to the East in prime time. Thirty (30!) batters struck out, the most in All-Star history. Of course, the game went 15 innings, but bear in mind these were the best batters in the game, some of the best in history.

Of course, the conditions are the same for each side. The outcome of the game is not at issue here. It’s the records. They should have an asterisk on them.

It’s not only the pitches they can’t see. It’s the ball generally. The Baltimore Orioles have managed to look like Little Leaguers around home plate. On one squeeze play, not only did the batter miss the ball, so did the catcher. The message? In the twilight, you can’t see it, hit it or catch it. Marquis Grissom, one of the league’s best center fielders, couldn’t even locate a routine fly ball in one game.

The carnage to records is total. The game may be lucky Roger Clemens didn’t get in the postseason. We may have had the first 27-strikeout game. Ask yourself this: What if Koufax could have teed it up in the half-light of a late-autumn day? Bob Feller? If guys refuse to bat against Randy Johnson at 1 in the afternoon, what about at 5:30? It would give new meaning to the term “guess hitter.”

No one should be surprised that Game 6 was another semi-blindfold epic that went 11 innings before anyone could score. This one started in gloom and overcast in late afternoon, and Cleveland groped its way into the World Series, 1-0, on a home run by the banjo-hitting Tony Fernandez. The pitchers, meanwhile, all looked like Walter Johnson.

Much is made of the fact the game doesn’t have a commissioner. But, of course, it does: TV. It’s TV that dictates the start of games. It has no interest in the sanctity of records or the holiness of decimal points. Only in the blessedness of rating points.

They can light up the night. But twilight still belongs to the gods. And the pitchers.