Or how I learned to smell a Baggypants Moskowitz quote with one clogged naris tied behind my back.
Dear Sir: Don’t you think that too many teams today concentrate on hitting home runs when they should be more focused on playing small ball, doing the little things to build runs, like moving runners along with timely outs and bunting in critical situations?
A few years back, ESPN introduced a statistic called the “Productive Out,” to support a contention that enjoyed popularity in some circles, the notion that teams overly reliant on the longball for scoring runs invariably finished behind clubs that played “smallball” by stealing bases and advancing runners with sacrifice bunts, hit-and-run plays, and what ESPN designated as “productive outs,” any out that moved a runner at least one base.
This creation received much attention at the time and some baseball writers frequently still cite it to explain the success or failure of various offenses. Last year, I heard Yankee radio announcers bemoan their team’s inability to play “ABC ball” (a strange acronym for small ball) and one of the announcers continually praised Jose Molina, the terrible hitting Yankees backup catcher, for how his knack of moving runners over with groundball outs, as if that were some sort of skill, when it was merely a demonstration of Mr. Molina’s inadequate hitting skills.
Most “small ball” devotees fail to notice that, season after season, teams that composed the top five in Productive Outs or, that other ESPN creation, Productive Outs Percentage, are usually among the lowest scoring, least successful clubs in baseball. Conversely, high-scoring juggernauts like the Boston Red Sox annually finish at or near the bottom of the Productive Out rankings.
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1. John M. Perkins Posted: November 17, 2008 at 04:42 PM (#3010648)But how many times when hitting to the right side, does the hitter hit into a double play? If you try to hit to the right side, does it lower your On base chances?
Hitting to the right side, except on hit and run attempts, is pretty exclusively a runner on second nobody out strategy, so the DP is not an issue. If it occurs with a runner on first, it probably wasn't intentional.
I disagree. When I played, I often tried to go to the right side with a runner on first. With the second baseman cheating toward second for the double play and the first baseman playing on the bag to hold the runner, it left a big gap that was damn hard to resist if they gave me a pitch on the outside corner.
I've never heard of anyone in MLB doing that. If a big leaguer had that kind of ability to direct the ball, rather than the generic "right side of the infield," he ought to be able to hit .450.
Derek Jeter? He is one player who is notable for hitting toward RF (even perfecting the inside-out swing). Whether that's a tactic he developed to specifically take advantage of the 2nd-base hole is debatable.
Joe Garagiola (quoted from memory, but you get the gist)
They're just doing a promo for their station.
Another thing announcers praise excessively is the hit and run and how it keeps teams out of a DP. But they never mention that sometimes it forces a batter to swing at a pitch (to protect the runner) he otherwise might not have. IOW, it sometimes creates an out that might not have happened.
Baggypants Moskowitz must talk up this "ABC baseball" about 2-3 times a game (especially when the Yanks are losing by a run or two and have left men on base)...it got so bad last year that even plank-headed Michael Kay started saying it.
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