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By George F. Will
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THIS TIME, THE HAPPY HAITIAN THEORY CANNOT BE offered as an explanation. In 1987, the last time baseball experienced a power surge comparable to this year's barrage of home runs and high scores, a baseball thinker, who may have been kidding but you never can be sure about baseball thinkers, offered a hypothesis: The major league's baseballs are made in Haiti. Haitians are so happy about the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, they are working with extra pep and vim, winding the cord in the balls tighter, making them livelier. But nowadays the balls are made in placid, democratic Costa Rica by placid Costa Ricans who cannot be blamed for the suffering of major league pitchers, or given credit for the ecstasy of fans who think slugging is a good thing and agree with Mae West that too much of a good thing is wonderful.
In 1987, two American appetites -- for conspiracy theories and populist rhetoric -- combined to produce the idea of a scandal called Rawlingsgate. The thought was that the plutocratic owners in their unslakable avarice tried to spur attendance by secretly ""juicing'' the ole horsehide (which is made by Rawlings and has been covered by cowhide since 1975). In 1996 it seems that America is growing up: there is an agreeable scarcity of the Oliver Stoneish, ""The-guy-on-the-grassy-knoll-did-it!'' kind of suspicion occasioned by the fact that so many baseballs are caroming off and rocketing over outfield fences.
Granted, the owners are not indifferent to their customers' preferences. Back when the pathetic Washington Senators gave rise to the jest ""Washington -- first in war, first in peace and last in the American League,'' their owner said: ""Fans like home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff to please our fans.'' After the 1968 season, when pitchers were oppressively proficient (21 percent of all games were shutouts; the major league batting average was .237, the lowest ever; Carl Yastrzemski's .301 led the American League), the owners lopped five inches off the pitchers mound and shrank the strike zone, and five teams moved their fences in.
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Pitchers, who were cultivating the status of victims long before it became fashionable, saw this solicitude for fans as pure persecution. Granted, pitchers are paranoiacs. But as Freud said, even paranoiacs can have real enemies. Pitchers have three categories of enemies -- owners, umpires and batters. Owners like scoring. Umpires have produced the incredible shrinking strike zone, so pitchers find themselves throwing more pitches, pitching behind in the count more often and pitching more often from the stretch, with runners on base. And batters have become behemoths.
Because of many factors, from better nutrition to antibiotics, Americans in general are becoming bigger and healthier. But batters are increasingly built like linebackers. The guy the Orioles have at shortstop -- a position that used to be played by people with nicknames like Scooter and Pee Wee -- is not only more durable than Lou Gehrig, he is bigger than Babe Ruth. The increased power of batters is, to a significant extent, because batters have discovered weight training and teams have hired strength coaches. Put these bulked-up batters in some of the new, more intimate ballparks. And put one of those parks in the thin air of Denver. Then don a hard hat before entering the outfield bleachers.
Not only are batters stronger than they used to be, pitchers' arms are less strong than they used to be, partly because childhood is not what it used to be. Time was, before childhood became over organized, children had time to kill and many did so by playing baseball from dawn to dusk on the vacant lot down the block. They developed strong arms the only way such arms can be developed -- by constant throwing. They grew up to furnish the major leagues with an abundance of what is now a scarcity -- pitchers who could consistently throw 90-plus mph fastballs. Today there are few vacant lots in the suburbs where children, when they are not at home developing flaccid bodies and barren minds by playing Nintendo, spend too much time in station wagons, being schlepped to and from soccer or hockey or lacrosse practices. And by the time the few who become serious baseball players get to high school, the pitchers, confronted by one of the horrors of modern life, aluminum bats, become defensive, throwing breaking balls, not fastballs.
Back in America's more rough-and-tumble past, when it was not considered a casus belli if a pitcher knocked down a batter to spread wholesome insecurity, and when the strike zone was bigger than a basketball (and, not coincidentally, when games were commonly 45 minutes shorter than today's games), back then pitchers commonly pitched complete games and did so throwing fewer than 100 pitches. This year, in one inning in Texas, Orioles' pitchers (and an infielder pressed into service as a pitcher) threw 99 pitches while 16 Rangers scored. Sports Illustrated's Tim Kurkjian notes that as of last Friday, teams in the American League (the league with the designated hitter and the most hitter-friendly parks) had scored 10 or more runs 96 times, and seven times a team had scored 10 runs and lost. Peter Gammons notes in Baseball America that no team's pitching staff has had a season ERA over 6.00 since the 1939 Browns, but as of Friday, the Tigers' ERA was 6.92. The major leagues are averaging 10.14 runs per game, the most since the 10.38 average in 1936, and not far behind the 11.1 average of the strange year of 1930, when the entire National League's batting average was .303.
And all this may be the relative calm before the real storm breaks. In 1998 two expansion teams, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, begin play. So baseball will need, but will not have, 20 more major league-caliber pitching arms. The record Roger Maris set in 1961, of 61 home runs in a season, has survived 34 seasons -- longer than Ruth's 1927 record of 60 survived. Maris's record may be broken this year, and the new record may last only two years. Records are made to be broken, but perhaps not so promiscuously.
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