certainly take better care of their bodies than any predecessor ever contemplated in the good old days of drinking, chewing, and womanizing.
The second, and more serious, approach tries to identify a constellation of factors that has made batting more difficult in modern times, and therefore caused the drop-off in leading averages. I shall argue that, while several of these explanations correctly identify new impediments to hitting, the premise of the entire argument—that disappearance of 0.400 hitting can only be tracking the decline of batting skills (either absolute or only relative)—is flat wrong. The extinction of 0.400 hitting measures the general improvement of play.
The Genesis Myth finds greatest support, unsurprisingly, among the best hitters of a more disciplined (and less remunerative) age who must suffer the self-aggrandizing antics of their modern, but now multimillionaire, counterparts. Ted Williams, the last 0.400 hitter, told reporters why his feat will not be soon repeated (USA Today, February 21, 1992): "Modern players are stronger, bigger, faster and their bodies are a little better than those of thirty years ago. But there is one thing I’m sure of and that is the average hitter of today doesn’t know the little game of the pitcher and the hitter that you have to play. I don’t think today there are as many smart hitters."
In his 1986 book, The Science of Hitting, Williams made the same claim, and explicitly embraced the key postulate of the Genesis Myth by stating that, since baseball hadn’t altered in any other way, the decline of high hitting must record an absolute deterioration of batting skills among the best:
After four years of managing ... the one big impression I got was that the game hadn’t changed.... It’s basically the same as it was when I played. I see the same type pitchers, the same type hitters. But after fifty years of watching it I’m more convinced than ever that there aren’t as many good hitters in the game.... There are plenty of guys with power, guys who hit the ball a long way, but I see so many who lack finesse, who should hit for average but don’t. The answers are not all that hard to figure. They talked for years about the ball being dead. The ball isn’t dead, the hitters are, from the neck up.
In 1975, Stan Musial, Williams’s greatest contemporary from the National League, echoed similar thoughts about declining smarts in an article titled "Why the .400 Hitter Is Extinct" (in Durslag, 1975). "In order to be successful ... batters must have a quality that isn’t too common today. They must be able to go to the opposite field. Somehow, this art hasn’t been mastered by too many of today’s players."
And lest one wrongly conclude that such thoughts circulate only among dyspeptic old warriors, consider a journalist’s opinion written in 1992, as Toronto’s John Olerud made a credible bid, but fell short (Kevin Paul Dupont in the Boston Globe): "Too few smart hitters. Too many guys looking for the baddest pair of wraparound sunglasses rather than sharpening the shrewdest hitting eye."
The more reasonable, and partly correct, second category—the claim that changes in play have made batting more difficult (the Genesis Myth, on the contrary, holds that the game is the same, but that batters have gotten soft)—includes two distinct styles of argument among its numerous versions. I shall call these two styles "external" and "internal." The external versions maintain that commercial realities of modern baseball have imposed new impediments upon performance. 3 This theory of "tougher conditions" features three common arguments, always fervently advocated when this greatest of all statistical puzzles hits the hot-stove league: too much travel within too grueling schedules; too many night games; and too much publicity and constant prying from the press (particularly when a player threatens to reach a plateau like 0.400 hitting).
The internal argument
The second, and more serious, approach tries to identify a constellation of factors that has made batting more difficult in modern times, and therefore caused the drop-off in leading averages. I shall argue that, while several of these explanations correctly identify new impediments to hitting, the premise of the entire argument—that disappearance of 0.400 hitting can only be tracking the decline of batting skills (either absolute or only relative)—is flat wrong. The extinction of 0.400 hitting measures the general improvement of play.
The Genesis Myth finds greatest support, unsurprisingly, among the best hitters of a more disciplined (and less remunerative) age who must suffer the self-aggrandizing antics of their modern, but now multimillionaire, counterparts. Ted Williams, the last 0.400 hitter, told reporters why his feat will not be soon repeated (USA Today, February 21, 1992): "Modern players are stronger, bigger, faster and their bodies are a little better than those of thirty years ago. But there is one thing I’m sure of and that is the average hitter of today doesn’t know the little game of the pitcher and the hitter that you have to play. I don’t think today there are as many smart hitters."
In his 1986 book, The Science of Hitting, Williams made the same claim, and explicitly embraced the key postulate of the Genesis Myth by stating that, since baseball hadn’t altered in any other way, the decline of high hitting must record an absolute deterioration of batting skills among the best:
After four years of managing ... the one big impression I got was that the game hadn’t changed.... It’s basically the same as it was when I played. I see the same type pitchers, the same type hitters. But after fifty years of watching it I’m more convinced than ever that there aren’t as many good hitters in the game.... There are plenty of guys with power, guys who hit the ball a long way, but I see so many who lack finesse, who should hit for average but don’t. The answers are not all that hard to figure. They talked for years about the ball being dead. The ball isn’t dead, the hitters are, from the neck up.
In 1975, Stan Musial, Williams’s greatest contemporary from the National League, echoed similar thoughts about declining smarts in an article titled "Why the .400 Hitter Is Extinct" (in Durslag, 1975). "In order to be successful ... batters must have a quality that isn’t too common today. They must be able to go to the opposite field. Somehow, this art hasn’t been mastered by too many of today’s players."
And lest one wrongly conclude that such thoughts circulate only among dyspeptic old warriors, consider a journalist’s opinion written in 1992, as Toronto’s John Olerud made a credible bid, but fell short (Kevin Paul Dupont in the Boston Globe): "Too few smart hitters. Too many guys looking for the baddest pair of wraparound sunglasses rather than sharpening the shrewdest hitting eye."
The more reasonable, and partly correct, second category—the claim that changes in play have made batting more difficult (the Genesis Myth, on the contrary, holds that the game is the same, but that batters have gotten soft)—includes two distinct styles of argument among its numerous versions. I shall call these two styles "external" and "internal." The external versions maintain that commercial realities of modern baseball have imposed new impediments upon performance. 3 This theory of "tougher conditions" features three common arguments, always fervently advocated when this greatest of all statistical puzzles hits the hot-stove league: too much travel within too grueling schedules; too many night games; and too much publicity and constant prying from the press (particularly when a player threatens to reach a plateau like 0.400 hitting).
The internal argument
Similar Books
