A couple of revealing points emerged from the festivities at baseball’s All-Star Game.
The Home Run Derby competition showed that today’s hitters are stronger than ever, to a freakish degree, and that in even the most innocuous of competitions every molehill is a potential mountain.
Washington’s Bryce Harper hit 18 home runs — including a finishing stretch of nine in 10 cuts — en route to a close win over Chicago’s Kyle Schwarber that delighted fans at Nationals Park.
An ensuing mini-controversy bubbled over the rate at which Harper hit his winning taters. The derby was a timed event, with each hitter getting four minutes in which to smash as many over the fence as possible.
The pitchers for each hitter had to wait until each hit ball hit the ground or the seats before throwing the next pitch. Harper’s pitcher was his father, who appeared to have thrown a few too early.
That was enough for some Cubs fans to take to social media and decry the “cheating” that enabled Harper’s win. Schwarber threw water on that silly pout, remarking only on how much fun the whole thing was.
Home Run Derby whining obscured the bigger point on display in the actual All-Star Game, which is that baseball itself is becoming a home run derby, wrapped in a blanket of K’s.
Half of the 20 hits in the American League’s 8-6, 10-inning victory were home runs, and 25 of the 60 outs were strikeouts.
Pitchers have become too dominant. In the same vein as college golfers who now routinely hit 300-yard drives, today’s pitchers are outgrowing the dimensions of their arena.
In April and June of this season, there were more strikeouts than hits — a first in the history of Major League Baseball. Teams have all broken club records for strikeouts in each of the past 11 seasons. Twenty-three pitchers throw harder than the fastest pitcher in the league did 10 years ago. The aggregate batting average throughout the league is .247, the lowest in a non-strike season since 1968.
That year, pitchers so thoroughly dominated the game that in order to give hitters a chance in 1969 they shrunk the strike zone and lopped off one-third of the mound. The bump went from 15 inches to 10 and the zone shriveled closer to the hand-towel proportions of today.
With attendance falling at a concerning rate, Major League Baseball will probably get around to addressing the whiff-or-homer dichotomy. Only problem is that there’s only so much mound to bulldoze, and to really level things off pitchers may have to throw from a sinkhole.
Another inconvenient reality underscored at the All-Star break is that social media is a valuable instrument for sharing info with a wide readership about that lunch you just scarfed down, or how your guy got jobbed in the Home Run Derby.
It’s also a spot to vent ideologies, irrespective of how thoughtless and mean-spirited, and it’s permanent record. Words posted years ago can come back and bite a careless poster.
Milwaukee Brewers pitcher relief Josh Hader endured a rough outing in his All-Star debut, allowing four hits in 1/3 of an inning, including a three-run homer that put the American League ahead 5-2 in the eighth.
The shaky outing on the mound, regrettably, was the least of his worries. Racist and gay-bashing tweets written by Hader seven years ago came to light, leaving the 24-year-old lefty scrambling in damage control mode.
A contrite Hader said he’s deeply sorry for the vile tweets — what else is he going to say — while fellow Brewers All-Star Lorenzo Cain, who is black, took the high road, professing support for his teammate and writing off the slurs to immaturity.
Hader and the Brewers got lucky with the league’s announcement that he wouldn’t be suspended, and hopefully his teammates will be as forgiving as Cain.
For a Brewers team that’s lost six in a row and looking to come together for a strong second-half push, this is not called a good start.