Part I—Shakespeare

            The population of Topeka, Kansas, today is roughly the same as the population of London in the time of Shakespeare, and the population of Kansas now is roughly the same as the population of England at that time.  London at the time of Shakespeare had not only Shakespeare—whoever he was—but also Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and various other men of letters who are still read today.     I doubt that Topeka today has quite the same collection of distinguished writers.

Why is this?

            There are two theories that present themselves.   One is that the talent that assembled in Shakespeare’s London was a random cluster, an act of God to locate in this one place and time a very unusual pile of literary talent.   The other theory is that there is talent everywhere; it is merely that some societies are good at developing it, and other societies not so good.

            You may choose which side of this argument you wish to squat upon, but I am on the (b) side; it is my very strong belief that there is talent everywhere and all the time, but that London at that time was very, very good at calling out the literary talent of its citizenry, whereas most places and most times are not nearly so effective along this line.   I believe that there is a Shakespeare in Topeka, Kansas, today, that there is a Ben Jonson, that there is a Marlowe and there is a Bacon, most likely, but that we are unlikely ever to know who these people are because our society does not encourage excellence in literature.   That’s my opinion.

            This observation is nowhere near as gloomy as it might seem.   Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius.    We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills—better than we are, really, at almost anything else.   We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.   We are pretty good at developing the skills necessary to run a small business—a fast-food restaurant, for example.   We’re really, really good at teaching people how to drive automobiles, and how to find a coffee shop.

            We are not so good at developing great writers, it is true, but why is this?   It is simply because we don’t need them.   We still have Shakespeare.   We still have Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson; their books are still around.   We don’t genuinely need more literary geniuses.   One can only read so many books in a lifetime.   We need new athletes all the time, because we need new games every day, fudging just a little on the definition of the word “need”.   We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.   We have gotten to be very, very good at developing the same.

            There are people who believe that when baseball leagues expand, this leads inevitably to a decline in the quality of talent.    In my view, this is preposterous.   Talent—like stupidity—lies all around us in great heaps, talent that is undeveloped because of a shortage of opportunity, talent that is undeveloped because of laziness and inertia, talent that is undeveloped because there is no genuine need for it.   When baseball leagues expand, that simply creates a need for more talent, which creates more opportunity, which leads—in a society like ours, which is brilliant at developing athletic ability—leads in very quick order to the development of more players.

            Baseball could expand so rapidly that it outpaces the available latent talent, true—if it expanded too rapidly, or if it expanded to, let us say, 5,000 major league teams.   There probably is not enough talent to stock 5,000 major league teams in a place the size of North America without some small slippage in ability, even if the transition from 30 teams to 5,000 was carefully managed.    If we went from 30 teams to 300, carefully managing the expansion, it would make no difference whatsoever in the quality of talent.    That’s my view.

Part II—Verlander

            Justin Verlander is a magnificent pitcher.   Watching him pitch this afternoon against Clay Buchholz, I was struck by how many outstanding young pitchers there are in baseball today.    Jon Lester of the Red Sox is a tremendous pitcher.   Is he better than Greinke or better than Lincecum or better than Felix Hernandez or David Price or Ubaldo Jimenez?   Well, no—but he’s just as good. 

            I have been a baseball fan for 50 years, and I have never seen the game so flush with tremendous young pitchers.   We had a fling of great pitchers in the 1960s, yes, and another very impressive collection of pitchers in the mid-1970s—Seaver and Palmer and Catfish Hunter and Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan and all those guys.   I’ve never seen the depth of quality young pitching that we have now.

            So is it a random cluster, or is it a rational response to need?

            It’s a random cluster. . .or, at least, I think it is.

            You can’t make rules for the Almighty.   Suppose that you create 100 great young pitchers, and you sprinkle them randomly across history.   Will you get one coming along every year or two, or will you get clusters?

            Obviously, you’ll get clusters.   After Seaver and Palmer and Catfish Hunter and Carlton there were no outstanding young pitchers for ten years, then there was another wave of them, Clemens and Saberhagen and Dwight Gooden and David Cone and others.     We’re at the crest now of another wave—the biggest wave of my lifetime, I believe.

Part III—Technical

            I was thinking, while watching Verlander work, that there is something very unusual here, which is this.   When Verlander was a rookie in 2006, he won 17 games, but he struck out only 124 batters.    Last year he struck out 269 batters.    That’s got to be very unusual, right, to have that kind of an increase in strikeouts after having been successful without strikeouts?  

            When Verlander was a rookie he just basically threw fastballs.   He threw 100 MPH fastballs, so this was effective, and he had a changeup and a curve, which basically he could get by with throwing because his fastball was so good.    Now, his curve is outstanding and he cuts the fastball sometimes so that it, too, has become a strikeout pitch.   It is unusual to see a pitcher improve that much after he is already successful.   The normal pattern is that when a player is successful, he continues to do what he is doing until it is no longer successful.

            I identified all pitchers in history who

            a)  were rookies,

            b)  pitched 140 or more innings, and

            c)  had strikeout rates below the league norm.

            There were 600 such pitchers—an even 600, which we could call the Verlander group, except that to form a true Verlander group, we would need a fourth criterion:  that the pitcher be successful as a rookie.

            Anyway, Verlander last year was +86 strikeouts—86 strikeouts more than an average American League pitcher in the same number of innings.   What I was wondering was, has there ever before been a pitcher who started out below average in strikeouts, and then had a season in which he was almost 100 strikeouts above average?

            Hardie Henderson was below the league average in strikeouts as a rookie in 1883 and then, in 1884, struck out 346 batters in 439 innings, which was 208 strikeouts above average.   This, however, was 1884, and 1884 doesn’t really count.   Two things happened in 1884 which make it peculiar.   First, there was an extremely rapid expansion of immature leagues, which caused a precipitous drop in the quality of talent.  Second, 1884 was the season in which baseball more or less abandoned its efforts to enforce the rule that pitchers were required to throw underhanded.   There was a rapid switch from throwing underhanded to throwing overhand.   Thus, when we draw up a list of the largest “+ strikeout seasons” by pitchers who began their careers with below-average strikeout rates, the top nine pitchers on the list are from 1884, 1884, 1884, 1884, 1883, 1884, 1885, 1932 and 1884.

            Nineteenth century baseball has few of the characteristics of major league baseball, so let’s drop the 19^th century pitchers from the list.   When we drop the 19^th century pitchers from the list, we get the following list of “plus strikeout seasons” by pitchers who had below-average strikeout rates as rookies:

            One can argue that Verlander is unique, however, because he was successful as a rookie.   Ruffing as a rookie was 9-18, the following year 6-15, the following year 5-13.  One can understand that a pitcher of that quality would tinker with his stuff, trying to learn new pitches.   Ben Sheets as a rookie was 11-10, but with a 4.76 ERA, and, in his next season, 11-16 with a 4.15.   Naturally he would try some other pitches.

            The closest parallel to Verlander, actually, is Rick Sutcliffe.   As a rookie in 1979 Sutcliffe was 17-10 with a 3.46 ERA, 117 strikeouts—very similar to Verlander.   After that season he had some injuries and also some very serious conflicts with his manager, Tommy Lasorda, and got traded a couple of times before re-emerging as a quality pitcher.   He might be more like Greinke than Verlander.

            Clay Kirby, who was a real hard thrower like Verlander, was 7-20 as a rookie although he had a good ERA.   He increased his strikeouts in two years from 113 to 231 and was a good pitcher, although he always had some control issues.

            Verlander just started out good and then got better, which is pretty unique, but then, everybody is unique in one way or another, I guess.   Other pitchers who started out with low K rates and then had big strikeout increases include Darryl Kile, Esteban Loaiza, Daniel Cabrera, Ricky Nolaso and Jeremy Bonderman.

            There clearly are far more of these pitchers in recent years than in any other period in baseball history, which may be trying to tell us something about how pitchers are developed now.  Pitchers in the 1930s/1940s were expected to be able to throw every pitch when they got to the majors, and also were expected to be able to drop down and throw sidearm.   That was one extreme; we may be at the other end now.  Now, if a pitcher throws really hard, we don’t want him to try to do too much in the minor leagues.   Just gain command of the delivery and a couple of pitches to keep the hitter from sitting on your fastball, then we’ll bring you to the majors and you can expand your repertoire once you’re established in the majors.

            A couple of incidental things I learned while doing the study.   Kirk Rueter in 2004 struck out 56 batters in 190.1 innings.   The National League norm in 2004 was 6.74 strikeouts per nine innings, so Rueter was 86 strikeouts below the league norm (actually, 86.45).

            The -86 ties the major league (post-1900) record; a couple of 19^th century guys had bigger numbers.    Anyway, Nate Cornejo (2003), Steve Kline (1972), Lew Burdette (1960) and Joe Niekro (1969) were all at -86, although Rueter actually has the biggest number if you carry out the decimals.  I always knew there was something very unusual about Kirk Rueter, as a pitcher.

            Second, Cy Young in 1901 was 33-10, in 1902 32-11, 1903 28-9, 1904 26-16.   In 1905 he was just 18-19, a losing pitcher, but had a career high in strikeouts, with 210.   He was also 61 strikeouts above the league average that year, which was also a career high—61 strikeouts better than average, 58 walks better than average, but he had a losing record.   That’s tough.

            That reminded me of something that I discovered in 1979, leafing through the old Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia. ..no idea whether this is still true.   I was wondering if there was any pitcher ever who led his league in both strikeouts per nine innings and fewest walks per nine innings.

            The only pitcher who had ever done this, I concluded, was Walter Johnson—but he did it in his worst season.  The only season between 1910 and 1925 that Johnson didn’t have a winning record was 1920, when he was 8-10—but led the league in both strikeouts per nine innings (4.89) and fewest walks (1.69).

Shakespeare and Verlander

            American society could and should take lessons from the world of sports as to how to develop talent.    How is it that we have become so phenomenally good, in our society, at developing athletes?

            First, we give them the opportunity to compete at a young age. 

            Second, we recognize and identify ability at a young age.

            Third, we celebrate their success constantly.   We show up at their games and cheer.   We give them trophies.   When they get to be teenagers, if they’re still good, we put their names in the newspaper once in awhile. 

            Fourth, we pay them for potential, rather than simply paying them once they get to be among the best in the world.

            Every city the size of Topeka produces a major league player every ten or fifteen years.   If we did the same things for young writers, every city would produce a Shakespeare or a Dickens or at least a Graham Greene every ten or fifteen years.    Instead, we tell the young writers that they should work on their craft for twenty or twenty-five years, get to be really, really good, among the best in the world, and then we’ll give them a little bit of recognition.

            The sporting world, meanwhile, gets criticized constantly for what we do so well.   People get squeamish about young people being “too competitive”, as if somehow this would damage their tender souls, and complain about the “undue attention” that is focused on young athletes.   The grossest example is on the issue of race.

People in the sporting world in 1950 were just as racist as people in other parts of society—but people in the sporting world got over it a hell of a lot faster, because we cared more about winning than we did about discriminating.   Because the sporting world was always ahead of the rest of the world in breaking racial barriers, black kids came to perceive sports as being the pathway out of poverty.   For this we are now harshly and routinely criticized—as if it was our fault that the rest of society hasn’t kept up.    Some jackass PhD ex-athlete pops up on my TV two or three times a year claiming that a young black kid has a better chance of being hit by lightning than of becoming a millionaire athlete.  This is nonsense as well as being a rational hash.

Look, it’s not our fault that the rest of the world hasn’t kept up.   It’s not our fault that there are still barriers to black kids becoming doctors and lawyers and airline pilots.  Black kids regard the athletic world as a pathway out of poverty because it is.  The sporting world should be praised and honored for that.   Instead, we are more often criticized because the pathway is so narrow.

Which, I agree, is a real problem. I would never encourage my children to be athletes—first, because my children are not athletes, and second, because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that a hundred people are crushed for every one who breaks through.   This is unfortunate.   We are very good at producing athletes, and we are too good at producing athletes.   Sometimes the cost is too high.   We should do more to develop the next Shakespeare, and less to develop the next Justin Verlander.

But this is not a failing of the sporting world.   Rather, it is that the rest of society has been too proud to follow our lead.