Baseball Recoils From Pursuit of Glory
In the name of analytics, the sport is curtailing its ambition. In deference to weathering a long season, it is abdicating its fidelity to the arc of the game’s future. For an algorithm, it is willing to sacrifice a perfect game.
Imagine being so close to immortality that you could touch it with your fingertips, and instead having your hand pulled back at the last moment. Picture Moses at the brink of the Promised Land, holding a God-given entry visa, and being told that he must remain in the desolate desert.
Such fraught scenarios bring to mind the state of baseball in 2022.
In the name of analytics, the sport is curtailing its ambition. In deference to weathering a long season, it is abdicating its fidelity to the arc of the game’s future. For an algorithm, it is willing to sacrifice a perfect game.
Consider the case of Clayton Kershaw, one of baseball’s greatest hurlers of any age. A lifelong Los Angeles Dodger, Mr. Kershaw is a towering southpaw with a flowing mane and a buzzsaw slider unleashed from a crouched delivery. His excellence is such that his ticket to the Hall of Fame is already printed, his only analog in Dodger blue being one Sanford Koufax, whose left arm was thought to be divine.
In “The Baseball 100,” Joseph Posnanski relates how Dodgers broadcaster Vincent Scully, who spent 67 seasons calling the team’s games in both their Brooklyn and Los Angeles iterations, would occasionally in error call Kershaw Koufax. That is about as complimentary a mixup as can be imagined from the famously fastidious Mr. Scully.
Mr. Kershaw is a lion in winter, as sport’s cruel calculus insists that a man 34 years of age is closer to the end than the beginning of a career in which he has won 100 more games than he has lost. He notched another win on Wednesday, but it could have been so much more.
The ace was pulled as he stood just six outs from a perfect game, baseball lingo for a full nine-inning effort with no walks, hits, or hit batters allowed by the pitcher and no errors committed by his team. There have been only 23 of them in hundreds of thousands of games during the 146 years of major league baseball.
Mr. Kershaw had tallied 13 strikeouts on just 80 pitches, a model of efficiency. He was sent to the showers by his manager, David Roberts, right when things should have turned electric, each pitch historic. In justifying his decision to pull Mr. Kershaw, Mr. Roberts acknowledged that “fans want to see great moments” but that he couldn’t “manage a ballclub and players with my fan cap on.” The pitcher seemed to agree, averring “at the end of the day, in the moment, it felt like the right decision,” though he added: “I can’t go back now.”
In assessing his star’s equanimity, Mr. Roberts reflected, “Clayton has grown immensely, as a ballplayer, as a man,” insinuating that in his headstrong youth Mr. Kershaw would not have abided being given the hook while so close to history.
More importantly, in baseball’s earlier days, such a thing would have been unimaginable. In 2021, three men paced the league with three complete games. In 1965, Mr. Koufax alone threw 27.
The numbers paint a picture of a sport that has changed almost beyond recognition. In 2021, Zachary Wheeler led baseball with 213 innings pitched. In 1972, Steve Carlton threw 346 frames.
The move has been away from yeoman effort by starting pitchers and toward specialization, limited innings, and general micromanaging based on matchups and statistics rather than savvy.
Nobody denies that baseball’s 162-game season is more marathon than sprint, and that excesses in April might yield to scarcity and regret as the weather cools and the more meaningful autumn contests approach. Still, yanking Mr. Kershaw, who threw a no-hitter that was one error away from a perfect game in 2014, is particularly perplexing. He almost retired before the season, and is on a one-year contract. This is his swan song.
The trend goes beyond Mr. Kershaw. According to FanGraphs, managers last year pulled a starter who’d thrown at least five no-hit innings 14 times, which surpassed the record of 11 times, set in 2018. When confronted with a choice between keeping the proverbial powder dry or shooting for the stars, managers are dispiritingly opting for the former.
When baseball fans worry about the sport’s future, they often lay blame at its inability to adjust. Its games are too long, they indict. It doesn’t market its stars like the NBA does, or dominate television like the NFL.
The affaire d’Kershaw suggests, however, that baseball has changed not too little but too much. In banishing the pursuit of glory in favor of persnickety prudence, baseball distances itself from the passions that fuel the pastime, for all time.