Let me start out small and easy, in preparation for a larger and more difficult argument I’m trying to put together: in researching this bigger argument, I came to realize how much the maintenance of big-league infields has improved over our lifetimes, without our paying the slightest attention to any of these improvements. And since our lifetimes are a fraction of the years big-league ball has been played, groundskeeping probably has improved by even greater leaps and bounds in the century before any of us saw our first big-league game. The prevailing logic has been, of course, that these grounds-keeping improvements happen in every big-league ballpark, more or less simultaneously, so there’s no individual or team advantage to them.  If all players and teams improve about the same amount at the same time, how or why would we even notice it?

My larger, more difficult argument concerns other types of improvements that we take for granted: like this one about inventions and discoveries and innovations and practices in one small area of grounds-keeping, nobody pays attention to any of these new developments, but they happen all the time.  When was the last time you heard a groundskeeper discussing some new dirt-smoothing machine his crew had gotten, or the increased number of assistants he was able to hire this year, or the upgrade in professionalism or training of his staff members? Even if you did hear a groundskeeper being interviewed (I never have), he was probably discussing recent developments, over the course of months or years rather than decades or centuries, and it certainly wasn’t someone who spoke for all MLB groundskeepers, so the scope of any such discussion was bound to be very tightly focused on the here and now.

In the SABR-bio of Les Rohr, an extremely minor pitcher with the 1960s Mets (fewer than 25 career IP), http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/7ed496e5 , one such development in infield maintenance was mentioned in passing, and if I hadn’t been coincidentally thinking about infield maintenance as I read the bio, and how it’s been improving unnoticed over time, I probably wouldn’t have paid it any mind. 

Rohr lost a heart-breaker, very early in the 1968 season, in the bottom of the 24^th inning on a play that  influenced the frequency with which the infield must be dragged in an extra-inning game: the Astros beat the Mets 1-0 in that famous 24-inning game, the sole run scoring off a bad-hop grounder. "The bad hop on that play led to a change where ground crews would drag the infield every seven innings, regardless of how long the game lasted," says the SABR-bio author, my friend Jon Springer, a diligent and wily researcher.  (Jon, btw, just published Once Upon a Team, a book on the 1884 Wilmington Quicksteps, possibly the worst team ever to play professional baseball. Mostly Jon writes about the Mets, but if you’ve ever wondered about "The Only Nolan," other than Gary or Arenado or Ryan, his new book is the place to go.) This 24-inning contest has taken on almost legendary status in Mets’ history.

This monstrous game has stuck in my memory for half a century by now, though I’m sure I didn’t stay up past 2 AM on a schoolnight to hear its conclusion:  I remember it because the newly-acquired Tommie Agee was batting .313 when I went to bed but by the time I woke up, he was batting .192, having gone 0-for-10 in the process of starting a nightmarish season-long slump. (I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes, thinking "Oh, my God! I’m a full-time leadoff hitter batting below .180 in mid-August!") But I never heard before about the game causing any change in how often the infield must be dragged. I’m pretty sure the grounds crew comes out even more frequently nowadays than every seven innings in marathon games, and I’m even surer that the whole concept of dragging the infield, even once, during the game had to have been invented at some point. (Certainly the mechanics of some gigantic sweeping machine designed to manicure the infield quickly between innings is a late development.) There have been incremental improvements in the upkeep of the infield dirt throughout baseball history, and every one of these improvements has done something to reduce bad hops.

Why is the reduction of bad hops important? Well, it’s not necessarily earth-shattering in and of itself, but what it does is to raise the level of play by increasing competition, which is the larger subject I’ve been thinking about (and which I’ll explain in my next piece).  Let’s go back several steps before April 15, 1968. Let’s go back to the 1960 World Series, which turned on a bad hop off Forbes Field’s poorly maintained infield, causing an otherwise easy-out groundball to strike Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat, sending Kubek to the hospital and sending the Pirates to a ticker-tape parade. There were plenty of other famous, dramatic, historic moments in this game, but it seems to me that this bad-hop grounder gets lost in the welter of key moments, not least because "bad hops are just a part of the game."

That’s how I was taught, anyway. Pebbles in the infield dirt, even in the 7^th game of the World Series, were a normal part of baseball. It was just one of those bad breaks. Certainly it was an everyday phenomenon on the infields I played on growing up, making the Forbes Field infield seem meticulously cared for in comparison, because it was. Pebbles, stones, rocks, puddles, clumps of unmowable grass, all just a part of life—I’ll bet I’ve played in ballgames where there wasn’t an inning that went by where some groundball didn’t take a crazy hop that bedeviled some luckless infielder. Probably half my hits growing up owed something to the wretched state of the playing field.  And the condition of boyhood fields was much worse earlier. From the SABR-bio of 1900s-era shortstop Al Bridwell (about whom, more later): "A shortage of level ground in Portsmouth meant games were often played on dry riverbeds. A flash flood interrupted one game, forcing the players and umpire to swim to shore." Just part of the game.

But in my lifetime, crazy hops, pebbles in the infield dirt, easy 4-3s suddenly scored as infield singles became drastically reduced on the major league level. A little bit of it was due to that obscure rule change after April 15^th 1968, but most of it was due to other changes occurring equally unnoticed at other random points over the years: before the concept of regularly dragging the infield at all during the game was introduced, groundskeepers might have raked or swept the infield dirt on a daily, or perhaps weekly, basis before games. I’m sure there were long periods when any infield maintenance was performed by the players themselves, before "grounds-keeping" was a thing.

By the way, one of the causes for the unconscionably long time I’ve spent writing this picayune article is my getting sidetracked down several rabbit-holes, including the oddities of that April 15^th game in 1968. It was played, of course, in the Astrodome, the 8^th Wonder of the World, and no little deal was made at the time of the innovation of Astroturf, which was supposed to eliminate bad hops entirely. It didn’t, of course— it introduced a new kind of bad hops, those caused by seams in the carpeting or other modern substitutes for dirt, grass, and pebbles. I wonder what exactly the grounds crew was supposed to be dragging in the Astrodome infield, and what caused that ball to hop over or under Mets shortstop Al Weis’s normally reliable glove in that 24^th inning. But Astroturf, and its later iterations, certainly reduced the overall total of bad hops considerably.

A different rabbit-hole was Les Rohr, whom I vaguely remember as a hot-shot Mets pitching prospect,  a former #2 overall pick in the first amateur draft (#1 was trivia-answer Rick Monday).  According to Springer, Rohr’s career was ruined by that 24-inning game: the lefty had thrown batting practice earlier, pretty much wearing out his arm for the day, and was not supposed to throw any more pitches, but when you’ve used up Tom Seaver (10 shutout innings) and six relievers (11 shutout innings), you gotta find someone to go out there and pitch the bottom of the 22^nd, so Rohr was it. His elbow swelled up after the game, and his career was finished as a result.

Tantalizingly, Rohr’s previous MLB appearance was the penultimate game of the 1967 season, facing Don Drysdale and the still-league-champion Dodgers. Rohr had beaten the Dodgers in his big league debut earlier that month, but in this game, he pitched an even shinier gem, beating them 5-0, giving up six singles and striking out seven. His next game was the 24-inning job in Houston where he blew out his arm. His best and worst moments in baseball, in other words, occurred in consecutive games, separated by the 1967-68 off-season.

The last rabbit-hole I want to dig my way out of here is the way baseball-reference.com refers to "DR" (Days of Rest, the number of days off since a pitcher’s previous appearance). For a pitcher’s first appearance of the season, bbref.com designates it as "99," meaning he hasn’t pitched since last season, which seems to me a kinda obvious stat. Yes, yes, we understand that baseball-reference can’t be tracking down every appearance in spring training to derive an accurate figure for a pitcher’s first regular season appearance, but why do we want to know a player’s last appearance anyway? To gauge whether he’s starting on short rest or regular rest or long rest, or whatever, of course, for which "99" is information as useful as tits on a runway model. I’d much prefer a "—" or a blank space to appear there, if tracking down his last Spring Training game is impracticable. It’s of even less use in post-season stats, which also start the clock at "99," when there is an obvious (and far more meaningful) alternative: the number of games that have elapsed since a pitcher’s last regular-season game. I was looking at Ron Guidry’s post-season record (yet another rabbit hole) where I found his first post-season starts designated as "99," meaning that it had been a long time since his previous post-season start, which gets filed under "D-uh?" If it were up to me, I’d just start the post-season clock with his final regular-season appearance.

Anyway, how do improvements in infield maintenance affect the level of MLB competition? Well, I’ll ask you to imagine a time when your typical major league infield was maintained at just about the standards of the field you first played baseball on: pebbles, puddles, flash floods, etc. Let’s go back to the first games that can arguably be described as MLB, just after the Civil War, when every hop was a potential bad hop, and when potential was achieved several times per game. A grounder taking a predictable path into an infielder’s glove was probably the exception, not the rule, but that was just a condition of the game and (important to my larger thesis) equal for both teams. As long as such improvements as better-maintained infields affect both sides equally, nobody is going to notice how much the game itself improves by better competition, which comes out as "luck" factors are eliminated in favor of "skill" factors.

If groundballs slowly evolve from haphazard events that have a high likelihood of putting the batter on base to almost automatic sure-thing outs, we are going to change our expectations of infielders’ skills.  You always want skilled fielders, of course, but in the 1860s, whether you’ve got Ozzie Smith or Kate Smith playing shortstop, there are still going to be a lot of groundballs that don’t get handled cleanly. By the 1960s, though, infields are maintained well enough that a Tony Kubek- or Al Weis-type mishap has become a relative rarity, and by 2010, when grounds-keeping, unnoticed by most observers, has become an art-form, and bad hops have become less frequent every season, it makes a huge difference which Smith is playing shortstop for your team.  Every play has become a skill play by the 21^st century, and luck plays have almost disappeared.

This small illustration of the disappearance of random events in MLB shows how athletic ability, and skill in general, is at a premium today, and will be at a higher premium tomorrow. Ozzie is going to win the shortstop job over Kate every single time today, whereas maybe Kate would have beaten Ozzie out one time in a hundred in 1960, and three or four times in 1860, when fielding was subject to many, many more random factors than it is today.

I’m being hyperbolic here, in an attempt to be funny, but my point is serious:  if you have many, many more bad hops in an 1860 contest, then sometimes a less-skilled fielder will seem comparable to a more-skilled fielder. Occasionally, lesser athletes will get playing time over better athletes.

Why? Because we make poor choices when we lack enough reliable data and rely instead on random factors in making our decisions. Even now, our best thinkers will occasionally screw up by going with their gut instincts. A few weeks ago, Bill was asked (2/22/2018 "Hey Bill") if the Dodgers really did have an inordinate number of Rookies-of-the-Year who had disappointing careers. His first response was to say that Yes, he felt that they did, but then he did some research and found that, No, the Dodgers had a perfectly normal number of disappointing ROTYs. I, too, felt instinctively the answer was an obvious "Yes," and I suspect many of you did, too—it just turned out not to be so. That’s fine, and all to Bill’s credit, but what jumped out at me was the reason most of us had that misperception: the best Dodger ROTY careers were Jackie Robinson’s, Frank Howard’s, and Mike Piazza’s, but the ones who broke in between 1965 and 1982, including the four straight from 1979-82, had mostly lackluster careers.  Speaking only for myself here, I certainly had the thought, a dumb one as it happens, that the Dodgers seemed to turn out ROTYs with disappointing careers as often as KFC turns out greasy chicken. The only way I got this notion into my head, as many of you got it into yours, was the exceptionally high incidence of ROTYs in that brief period of time, with the two HoFers, Robinson and Piazza, occurring outside of that period. It was just that streak of four straight ROTYs who all had disappointing careers, that made such an impression on us—just dumb luck, really, and contrary to the truth. When something occurs with unusual frequency in a short period of time, even if by blind chance, it’s going to seem causal to us.

The analogy would be to some unlucky rookie infielder, let’s call him Ted Sizeless, who gets a lot of bad-hop grounders early or critically in his career—you’re not going to conclude "Wow, this guy is very unlucky the last few games, let’s clean up those pebbles, hey" but rather "This guy sucks, let’s move him to an easier position," especially if you have no access to actual data about streakiness, random distributions, and such stuff. Sizeless (maybe I should have called him Steve Sux?) might not have even made the team his rookie season, given a streak of unlucky hops in spring training. Or maybe he would have been shifted to left field where his bat will make him a part-time player. Even the smartest of us sometimes get convinced that we’ve seen something real when it’s just bad luck that we’re observing. Without Bill’s research, I would have gone to my grave insisting Dodger ROTYs bite.

One more quick Dodger-related example of the phenomenon I’m trying to describe: I’ve often commented on Sandy Koufax’s outsized fame, considering his modest 165 career wins total. (And please remember that I consider myself his biggest fan.)  Without going into all the strong reasons for Koufax’s reputation as an Inner-Circle Hall of Famer, it seems to me that his reputation gets a boost it doesn’t quite deserve because we had just started giving out Cy Young Awards. If we had been giving out CYAs for fifty or sixty years by Koufax’s time, other pitchers—Roberts, Spahn, Feller, Hubbell, Grove, Alexander, Johnson, Mathewson, even CY himself—might have won three or four (or more) of them, and we wouldn’t have been as blown away by Koufax as we were.

He was good, but he was also lucky. When he’d won his third CYA, in 1966, only eleven CYAs had been awarded and no one else had ever won more than one, making his achievement seem practically super-human. After 1966, Roger Clemens won 7 CYAs, and Randy Johnson 5, while Steve Carlton and Greg Maddux have out-CYAed Koufax by one, and Martinez, Seaver, Palmer, Kershaw, and Scherzer have matched him. (Kershaw and Scherzer aren’t quite done yet, of course.) Nine others have won two apiece since 1966. Each league began awarding separate CYAs in 1967, so Koufax did win his awards against a broader field, and his early retirement suggests he might have won some more CYAs with better health, but his CYA record, fixed in my memory, still wasn’t quite as other-worldly as it would have been in a wider historical context. If he had won three awards in a context where others had won multiple awards and others would go on to win them, that might take a little shine off his glory, but because he won multiple CYAs at the one moment when no one else had, he seems maybe a little more dominating than he actually was.

In any event, luck does play its part in how we form our impressions of players, but less and less so over time. Bad hops, which I’m using as a kind of shorthand for "bad luck," get rarer as infield grounds-keeping improves, and they’re only one tiny example of the kind of improvement in major league play I’m talking about. Let me give you one more tiny example, tangentially related to bad hops, before I get to my larger argument: like grounds-keeping, scouting has gotten better (for every team): more systematic, more extensive, better staffed, better coordinated—just flat-out better. Mostly, MLB has learned from its shortcomings and its mistakes in scouting.

I was reading THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES recently, and one of the things that really jumped out at me was the haphazard way most of the old-time players described their entrance into professional ball, or their promotion to the big leagues.  Al Bridwell, the Ozzie Smith of the 1900s, tells a story that’s typical of several of the players in that book: when he was in the minor leagues in 1904, he says (p. 120),

"the owner of the Cincinnati Reds dropped by to watch a game, interested in buying our third baseman, Bill Friel. As it happened that day, Bill didn’t have a very good day, but I had a crackerjack of one. So instead of buying him, he bought me. And that’s how I got to the Big Leagues.

"You see, the way it was then it was pretty much an accident whether you got into professional ball at all, and if you did, there was still a lot of luck involved in getting up to the Big Leagues. Now they have scouts who watch a man for weeks to see what he can really do, but back then there were no scouts or anything like that." 

"Now," of course, is the 1960s, when Bridwell was interviewed, but real, thorough scouting didn’t just pop up overnight—it had evolved slowly over the previous sixty years, and I’m pretty sure it has gotten much more sophisticated  and professional and accurate in the fifty years after Bridwell was interviewed. What this means, of course, is that we have a higher quality of player at the lowest levels of professional ball. By systematically weeding out the part that luck plays in who gets an entry-level contract and who doesn’t, we’ve upped the level of competition, with an exponential effect on the deserving players getting promoted and the undeserving ones getting released,  raising the quality of play throughout baseball.

Pebbles and lucky breaks are two almost entirely separate areas in which baseball has improved steadily and significantly since 1860. I say "almost entirely separate" because there is a small causal relationship between the two: more extensive scouting means young players are less likely to get rejected based on one or two muffed grounders caused by a poorly maintained field, and better maintained fields means that scouts can judge fielders’ talents more accurately. But I didn’t choose these two small areas of improvement because they’re connected. I chose them because they were handy: any two areas will likely have some causal relationship, and my larger thesis explores what happens if a dozen or a hundred such small areas of improvement ALL have a relationship to each other.

That thesis argues that baseball will improve in a big way, in a gigantic way, from year to year, although we will be unable to see hardly any of this massive improvement in the game because it will be happening all throughout baseball at the same time. Not precisely equally, of course: some teams will surge ahead, others will fall behind, from year to year, while the overall game grows more competitive on a constant basis. I’ll illustrate some of these other small, tiny, seemingly insignificant, picayune areas of improvement in my next piece.