- 2 days ago
Ready for the main event? Here's Ryan vs. Ventura: https://www.patreon.com/SecretBase/posts/full-episode-vs-165598615
Hey again, I'm Jon, and we've hit the seventh-inning stretch. This is a special, super-sized episode of The History of Charging the Mound, and unlike the others, it's not about any particular mound-charging. Instead, I decided to call an intermission and take inventory of other once-hallowed baseball institutions that have faded from relevance like mound-charging has.
Hey again, I'm Jon, and we've hit the seventh-inning stretch. This is a special, super-sized episode of The History of Charging the Mound, and unlike the others, it's not about any particular mound-charging. Instead, I decided to call an intermission and take inventory of other once-hallowed baseball institutions that have faded from relevance like mound-charging has.
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SportsTranscript
00:00The 2020s are more than halfway over
00:02and there's been one stinkin' mound charging all decade.
00:05The rhubarbs, fracases, and Donnie Brooks of my youth
00:08are nowhere to be seen now.
00:09How come?
00:14Folks on SecretBase's Patreon have floated
00:16all kinds of theories that I think are worth consideration.
00:18Matt points out that for modern players,
00:20the baseball pipeline starts very early in life
00:22and discourages any behavior
00:23that's competitively suboptimal.
00:25In other words, stuff like fighting
00:26that could get you injured or suspended.
00:29MissingTexture suspects there's a sabermetric component
00:31at play here.
00:32And Swaggy adds that this pipeline has encouraged
00:34the cultivation of a lot of long time friendships
00:36between guys who don't really want to fight each other.
00:39LDL floats that modern ball players
00:40are actively encouraged to go to therapy,
00:42which it's safe to say players of past generations were not.
00:45Lancelot Link notes that the unwritten rules of baseball,
00:48such as the rules that encourage a pitcher
00:50to throw at a batter and even for a batter to charge a pitcher,
00:52aren't observed as faithfully as they used to be.
00:55Jim describes a tendency of modern athletes
00:57to sand down their rough edges to increase their marketability,
00:59something we have definitely seen not only in modern athletes,
01:02but their organizations and leagues.
01:04Now, a lot of members of our Patreon point to the lead crime hypothesis.
01:08Since the 90s, a drop in violent crime has been observed
01:10that some attribute to stricter controls on lead contamination.
01:13I am personally not convinced I think that phenomenon is too broad and inexact
01:18to directly explain something as specific and sophisticated as mound charging.
01:22I'm personally more of a fan of sociological observations,
01:24like DK382's invocation of Reagan-era individualism,
01:28even if those don't necessarily offer us a complete explanation either.
01:32I'm not yet ready to offer a comprehensive set of reasons for the decline of mound charging,
01:36and I might never be, but I find its extinction no less fascinating.
01:40This question was sort of floating around in the periphery,
01:43as I began to write out the story of George Brett,
01:46who charged Milt Wilcox despite being smack in the middle of a 1980 campaign
01:49that had completely captured America's attention.
01:52Brett was threatening to finish the year with a 400 batting average,
01:55something no one had done since Ted Williams nearly 40 years prior.
01:59In order to illustrate the significance of this,
02:01I rounded up every hitter since Williams to bat anywhere close to 400
02:04over the course of a full season.
02:05Plenty of guys hit at least .350 in the decades to follow, but then,
02:09about 15 years ago, it's like somebody shut off the faucet.
02:13Immediately, this trend of hitting for super high batting averages just stopped.
02:17Luisa Reyes, who barely hit .350 in 2023,
02:21serves as the exception that proves the rule.
02:23By no means am I the first person to notice this, but I stopped,
02:27and I stared at it for a minute, and then I looked up,
02:30and then I looked over here, and I looked at the last 15 years here as well,
02:35and I said, huh, I decided it was time for an intermission.
02:47.
02:54Were it not for this project, I'm not sure I ever would have noticed
02:57that mound chargings had dropped off to such an extent, but this is not an anomaly.
03:01Many baseball institutions in my childhood have evaporated without ceremony, and I thought it'd
03:06be interesting to take stock of what else is no longer here, what's no longer really talked about.
03:10If you're around my age or older, which is to say at least 40, you might find this interesting,
03:14and even a little bit surprising. If you're a younger fan, you can make fun of me forever
03:18caring about any of this dumb crap at all, so hopefully everybody's gonna have some fun here.
03:23I've identified a non-exhaustive collection of 14 statistical records, achievements, milestones,
03:28what have you, that used to be very big deals when I was a kid. Most of them no longer
03:32are,
03:32thanks to a variety of reasons, all of which I find pretty interesting.
03:38.
03:39First, let's talk about a couple items that are still a very big deal today.
03:43One is the single-season home run record. Here you see a plot of every instance in baseball
03:48history of a player hitting at least 60 home runs. Every one of the six best showings fall between 1998
03:53and 2001. This explosion around the turn of the millennium can be explained, of course,
03:58by the anticipation and release of Coldplay's Parachutes, a contemplative yet uplifting debut album
04:03that put a real jolt into everybody for a while there. I recognize that this is controversial,
04:08okay? Detractors dismiss Coldplay's music as easy-listening radio rock that's more at home in
04:12a grab-and-go rack in a Starbucks than the shelf of a crate-diving aficionado. I get that, but
04:17they
04:17put out some pop rock that's excellent for what it is, particularly in their first couple of albums.
04:21Now, artists can quite often innovate themselves out of what you liked about them in the first place,
04:27and while they have every right to do so, I find that their later offerings are simply not for me.
04:31Similarly, nobody's been able to hit 63 homers in the last near quarter century,
04:35so the idea of topping the 73 hit by Barry Bonds in 2001 is pretty daunting. But over the last
04:41couple
04:42years, Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh have demonstrated that we still have at least a puncher's chance,
04:46and while Judge was already established as a top-tier home run hitter, Raleigh's 60 homers seem to come
04:51out of nowhere, suggesting that the pool of guys who might go nuts in any given season is larger than
04:55we
04:56might have thought. A serious threat to this record would capture everybody's attention, and while I wouldn't
05:00describe it as likely, it feels possible, this one matters. If I had to bet on any one guy playing
05:06today to break that record, it would be Shohei Otani. This leads us to the next category, which is
05:11defined as whatever Shohei Otani decides he wants to try to do. This guy has single-handedly invented
05:17new statistical curiosities, and his footprint in the record books is so unfamiliar and frankly baffling
05:23that it invites us to stake out new curiosities of our own. Ever since he arrived in the States in
05:272018,
05:28we, and by we I mean fans, observers, baseball journalists, YouTubers, everybody, have found
05:34countless ways to frame how one-of-a-kind he is because he just keeps giving us new material.
05:38You know what? I'm gonna make a game out of it. My goal here will be to plot Shohei
05:42Otani on a chart as far away from everyone else as possible.
05:50In 2024, Shohei stole 59 bases, right? Which is a whole lot. It was the second most in baseball that
05:56year.
05:56Here you see every player in baseball history who's stolen at least 20. Steals are on the x-axis,
06:02number of times caught stealing are on the y-axis, and this is what makes Shohei's season so special.
06:06He was only caught four times against those 59 successful steals. No other player has ever
06:13stolen that many while being caught that few times, and this is enormously important. Getting thrown out
06:18stealing is way more bad than successfully stealing is good because while stealing a base merely improves
06:23your chance of scoring being thrown out completely destroys them. In fact, Fangraphs has found that
06:27a stolen base adds about .17 runs to a team's expected total, and being caught subtracts about .39,
06:34more than twice as much. So I ran this same sample of about 2,700 guys through that math to
06:38find their
06:39total runs added or subtracted across that particular season. Sitting anywhere below zero here indicates
06:44that your team probably would have been better off if you'd never tried to steal any bases at all,
06:48so it's really funny that about 25% of these guys are below zero. Base stealers in the 1910s and
06:5420s
06:54look especially bad here. Fangraphs' math would suggest that if nobody had ever even tried to
06:59seal a base in those years, thousands of more runs would have been scored. But you know who looks
07:04really good here? Shohei Otani, whose uniquely efficient base running added more than eight expected
07:10runs in 2024. That is 15th best in history and second best this century. Shohei Otani has demonstrated an
07:17ability to be far and away the most effective base stealer in the game. That largely went unnoticed
07:22though, and he mostly only cared that he stole 50 plus bases to begin with because Shohei also hit
07:27more than 50 home runs, thereby becoming the first and only member of the 50-50 club. Let's reshuffle
07:34this same deck of guys once again so that the x-axis reflects their estimated base stealing runs added
07:39or subtracted, and the y-axis reflects their home run totals that season. Our man Shohei is now the most
07:44distant outlier by miles. In that 24th season, he both stole bases with near-perfect efficiency
07:51and socked dingers at an enormous volume. No one else can do anything like that. No one else has
07:56ever done anything like that. Now, what do the skills of base stealing and home run hitting have to do
08:03with one another? Nothing. And that's what we love about these combos. I mean, it's why we love Bo
08:08Jackson. It's why we love Quincy Jones for producing both Thriller and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It's just
08:13flat out incredible to see one person master two very different disciplines. In fact, the concept of
08:19the 40-40 club was an object of some fascination many years before anybody actually did it. In 1973,
08:26Bobby Bonds was expected to complete the seemingly impossible feat of hitting 40 home runs and stealing
08:3040 bags, but he fell just one home run short. His son Barry, along with a select few others, would
08:36eventually pull it off. 50-50 though. Jose Canseco, the first ever 40-40 guy, once insisted he would go
08:4250-50
08:43one day. But if we remove people from the sample who have claimed that aliens have offered to teach
08:47us how to travel through time, but we can't learn because we refuse to become cyborgs and they tried
08:51to do a workaround by making animal cyborgs, but it didn't work because the aliens couldn't figure out
08:55how to teach the animals how to travel through time, pretty much nobody had seriously discussed the
09:00possibility of hitting 50 homers and stealing 50 bases in the same season. And then Shohei Otani went and did
09:06it,
09:07comfortably clearing both benchmarks. So Shohei Otani is not only a prolific base dealer, but for a
09:13season at least, one of the most genuinely skilled base dealers ever. And he's not only those things,
09:19but one of the very best hitters in baseball. Every magic trick consists of three acts, which of course
09:24are the prestige, the prestige, and the prestige. So having revealed the prestige and the prestige,
09:29it's now finally time for the prestige. Hey folks, any of you guys ever tried pitching? The answer is
09:37that yes. Of the 2,720 seasons within this sample, 225 of them belong to 73 players who made at
09:44least
09:44one appearance as a pitcher. Almost all of them did so in a one-off emergency capacity,
09:50so let's measure them by the easy-to-handle statistical category of strikeouts and plot their
09:54career totals on the z-axis. Most of them unsurprisingly struck out nobody, and some you see
09:59bumped up just slightly because they struck out literally one guy, and a few of them struck out a
10:04small handful of guys over the course of their careers. These spikes come courtesy of Ben Chapman
10:09and George Sisler, two guys who were well-rounded enough to hit some homers at the plate, steal plenty
10:13of bags on the base paths, and strike out about 60 guys from the mound. But we had to reach
10:17all the
10:17way back to the 1920s and 30s to find them. Nobody does this now. Except, and here's the big reveal
10:23that you saw coming from a mile off Shohei Ohtani. Shohei has struck out 670 batters,
10:30an order of magnitude more than anybody else in this sample.
10:39Since arriving stateside, Shohei has stood as one of the best pound-for-pound strikeout pitchers in
10:44all of baseball. Entering the 26th season, he had a terrific career ERA of three flat. He's received
10:50Cy Young votes. If he were allowed to pitch full-time, his stats would probably stand toe-to-toe with
10:55those
10:55of anybody else in the game. So when we consider all three dimensions, as a base stealer, as a homerun
11:00hitter, and as a strikeout artist, Shohei Ohtani isn't even in the same solar system. He doesn't share
11:06an orbit with anybody else. He is his own distant star. I think Shohei Ohtani is the only Shohei Ohtani
11:12we're ever going to get in our lifetimes, but exercises like this one offer a blueprint for telling
11:17ourselves statistical fables in the years ahead. In order to find the next frontier of numerical
11:21obsessions, we're gonna need to get under the floorboards and between the walls, because the
11:26old standbys, the ones we used to rely on, have suddenly become irrelevant, unreachable, or undesirable.
11:37Let's now examine a category of achievement that is still very doable and happens regularly, but
11:43you'll see what I mean. Hitting for the cycle is a stupid concept, and I think we all kind of
11:47know
11:48it's stupid. It's defined as hitting a single, double, triple, and homerun in the same game.
11:52The earliest mention of the term I can find is from 1920, kicking off more than a century of sort
11:57of caring about a goofy, mostly irrelevant curiosity that's pretty rare but reliably happens at least a
12:02couple times a year. You can see what they were going for. You know that multidisciplinary magic we
12:07were just talking about? This is a stab in that direction. You know, you got the good old meat and
12:11potatoes
12:12hitting at the single, the gap hitting at the double, the speed and ambition to stretch that
12:15double into a triple, and the pure power of the homerun. But the way it shakes out, this thing
12:20disproportionately hinges upon whether or not you hit a triple, by far the rarest type of hit.
12:24Now you can adjust your hitting approach according to whether you're trying to hit a single,
12:28double, or homerun, but there's really no such thing as swinging for a triple. You basically just
12:32swing for a double and then you're either extra lucky, extra fast, or extra careless. And you should
12:37never make the first or third out at third base, meaning that you often shouldn't even try for a
12:41triple unless you can easily make it standing up. For these reasons, I've previously described the
12:46triple as the $2 bill. It's rare, but it's not nearly as valuable as its rarity would imply.
12:51What I find silliest about hitting for the cycle is that you can turn in a single game hitting
12:55performance that's objectively better than hitting for the cycle, but won't receive the recognition.
12:59If you hit a single, double, triple, and homer, that is 10 total bases, right? This century,
13:04we've seen it 105 times. There have been six times that many performances with more total bases,
13:10but they did not include a triple and therefore didn't get the fancy title. In fact, it's slightly
13:14more common to hit for 13 total bases, but lack a triple, than it is to hit for the cycle.
13:19Three more bases, a whole extra triple's worth of hitting, and you still don't get the shine.
13:24Surely it's not that much shine though, right? Surely teams and players don't actually care
13:29that much about hitting for the cycle, right? Meet the 2001 Toronto Blue Jays and their light hitting
13:35utility player Jeff Frye. On August 17th of that year, Frye hits a triple, then a double,
13:41and then is lucky enough to bat while Rangers pitcher Pat Mahomes is experiencing what could
13:45fairly be described as the worst outing in the history of relief pitching. Mahomes faces just
13:50five batters and gives up four home runs, which is something no one else has ever done, and here Frye
13:55barely sneaks one over the wall to account for one of those four. Then in the seventh, Frye socks what
14:00is
14:00pretty much the most double-looking double you will ever see in your life, but he needs a single
14:05to complete the cycle. If he hits a double, it won't count. So, as he rounds first, he stops and
14:11sorta homer in the bushes his way back to first. Wow, what a wonderful tribute to his teammate. Frye,
14:18who only had a few games left in his career, probably didn't care about padding his numbers,
14:21and since the Jays were up 11-2, didn't really matter. Nonetheless, what we have here is a guy who
14:27decided to objectively diminish his team's chances of winning for the sake of an enterprise that has
14:32absolutely nothing to do with winning a baseball game. But if I complained about that, well,
14:38that would make me a hypocrite, wouldn't it?
14:46Next, we have a trio of records that are not relevant these days because they're just too high
14:51up on the shelf. First up, career home runs. Unlike the single season mark, which would only take one
14:56magical year to take down, this thing is a 20-year project. This chart illustrates the active career
15:02home runs leader in every season of baseball history. It primarily tells the story of three
15:06guys, Babe Ruth, Henry Aaron, and Barry Bonds, and the three interregnums that follow. Yeah, that's
15:13right, your man picked up a new vocabulary word in the last episode, and now I won't stop saying it.
15:18Anyway, the first interregnum began when Ruth retired and passed the title of active career
15:23home run leader to teammate Lou Gehrig. I've used the z-axis here to illustrate a hitter's age.
15:28Taller is younger, and it steadily diminishes as the player approaches age 40. Past 40, it flattens
15:33out entirely, as we see with Ted Williams here, because once you pass 40, you're basically playing
15:38with house money. Williams had a good run, as did Willie Mays, but both lost some time to military
15:42service. In 1974, Aaron finally surpassed Ruth. His retirement ushered in a handful of active home run
15:49leaders, all of whom would become Hall of Famers, but none of whom seriously threatened the record.
15:53The third ascent was kicked off by Mark McGuire, and the job was seen through by Bonds, who still
15:58holds the title today. This third interregnum took a little while to begin in earnest, as it looked
16:02like Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols stood an outside chance of taking Bonds down. They did not,
16:07and today our active home run leader is Giancarlo Stanton, who as I write this is playing in his age
16:1236
16:13season. Who knows if he'll even make it to 500 homers, let alone the 763 he'd need to break the
16:18record. He is not our guy. But it's okay if he's not, right? This third interregnum looks a lot like
16:23the first two. There's a cool down period of 30 years or so, then somebody climbs the mountain again.
16:28Am I being a prisoner of the moment when I describe this record as too high on the shelf?
16:32I don't think so. This time it's different. I scooped up the top 50 active home run hitters entering 2026.
16:39In white, you see their current totals. Only two guys, Stanton and Mike Trout, are even halfway there.
16:44But just for fun, I decided to project what these guys' home run titles would be if they were to
16:49maintain their current pace all the way to age 42, which was Barry Bonds' age in his final season.
16:54You see those projected numbers in gray here. Of course, this is a shameless and irresponsible
16:59misuse of statistics on my part. It's ridiculous to imagine any of these guys maintaining peak level
17:04production well into their 40s, but even this ludicrous Fantasyland scenario only produces
17:09one guy, Juan Soto, who's on pace to even tie the mark. Pete Alonzo, Shohei Ohtani, and Aaron
17:14Judge come close. No one else really does. It's pretty clear to me that no one playing in the major
17:19leagues today is gonna break the record. Is the next home run champ in the minor leagues right now?
17:24Is he in high school? Has he even been born yet? Not so sure, for one. While Ruth began his
17:30career at
17:30age 19, Aaron at 20, and Bonds at 21, most players today, including a lot of guys in this chart,
17:35don't enter the majors until they're around 24. That alone almost completely slams the door shut,
17:41since even Bonds had to wring out every last drop of longevity to get where he did. And for another,
17:46I think we'll be disappointed if we hold out hope for the sort of one-of-a-kind home run
17:50explosion we
17:50saw with McGuire, Bonds, Rodriguez, and Pujols. Coldplay has announced a limit of just two more album
17:56releases that might take us into the early 2030s at the latest, and then they're done.
18:06Filling out the too-high-on-the-shelf category are two stolen base records, and in the spirit of the
18:10enterprise we can move through them pretty quickly. The reality is that the human race has granted one
18:15Ricky Henderson every 500 years or so. He did not shatter the ceiling because that would imply that he
18:21paved the way for others. He didn't. He teleported. No one else will ever come close in the game of
18:25baseball as we understand it. The active leaders these days are just older guys who are mall-walking
18:31through one or two final seasons before vacating the title to somebody else. Just for fun though,
18:36let's imagine that our top active base dealers maintain their present pace until they one day
18:40break Ricky's record of 1,406 stolen bases. Eli Dela Cruz will need to play until age 60, Starling Marte,
18:47the current leader, will need to play until he is 80 years old, and Christian Jelic will finally be
18:52permitted to retire at age 108. The single season mark is at least as hopeless. Interestingly,
18:58we have seen a modest resurgence in high volume base stealing recently, but there's high volume,
19:04and then there's this. Ricky's 130 stolen bases in 1982. To get here, it's not enough to simply be
19:12far and away the best base stealer ever born. You also have to have a manager who is so completely
19:18nuts,
19:18that he will allow you to try to steal 172 bases, as Ricky did. Ricky only got on base 261
19:26times,
19:26which means that if he got on base, it was weird if he did not try to steal. The element
19:32of surprise
19:32was completely conceded, and yet his manager just kept giving him the green light anyway.
19:37Who was this man? How'd you guess? Billy Martin signed off on each and every one of those steal
19:43attempts. He even told Ricky to steal home five times. So to pull this off requires both a Ricky
19:49Henderson and a Billy Martin in the same place at the same time. Look out for this record to be
19:54broken at some point in the 944th century. Next, a selection of achievements that are less likely
20:00today because teams prioritize rest and workload management a lot more carefully than they used to.
20:05Nolan Ryan became the all-time strikeouts leader at age 37, and then he just kept on going until
20:10a ligament tear finally forced his retirement at age 46. Once he passed 5,000 strikeouts,
20:16everybody kind of agreed that whatever number he ended up with would be damn near unbreakable.
20:20Now it seems completely unbreakable within modern baseball as we know it. Ryan pitched four ever,
20:26and throughout that enormous sample he maintained a strikeout rate that ranks in the top 20 all time.
20:31A lot of the guys on this leaderboard are still active today, so let's add their progressive
20:35strikeout totals to this chart. So whenever we ask the question, can active player A break retired
20:41player B's record? The big question is typically longevity, as it is here. But usually if we're
20:46even asking the question in the first place, it's because player A is at least on a pace strong enough
20:50to make us hopeful. Well, on this chart there is exactly one point in which exactly one guy,
20:56Chris Sale, was just barely ahead of Ryan. At age 24, Sale was ahead by about 30 strikeouts.
21:02After that, smell you later nerds. Every single one of these guys has a higher strikeout per
21:07inning rate than Ryan, who, and this is a guarantee, will leave every single one of them in the dust.
21:13The reason, of course, is a difference in workload, not only in terms of number of seasons,
21:17but innings pitched per season, and that pulls us over here. Ignoring all the records from the 19th
21:22century when hitters batted with salad forks instead of baseball bats, Nolan Ryan is also the modern
21:27single-season strikeouts leader. In 73, he totaled 383 strikeouts over 326 innings. Now,
21:34over here we have Garrett Cole, who in 2019 threw an incredible 326 over just 212 innings.
21:40If they had let him loose and he maintained that strikeout rate, he'd have been on pace for literally
21:45500 strikeouts. Even accounting for an invariable drop-off, he'd have been a virtual lock to break
21:51the record barring injury. But they were obviously never gonna let him loose like that. There are
21:55more stories than we can count of a team riding a brilliant pitcher so hard that his arm gave out
21:59and his career ended long before it should've. Neither the pitcher, nor his team, nor his fans
22:03want that. There's always a chance that Cole would prove to have godlike durability like Ryan did,
22:08but it's highly unlikely and there's no good reason to find out. Nobody will break these records.
22:13That is a good thing. It's also fine that nobody's ever gonna break Cal Ripken's record of 2,632
22:19consecutive games played. His streak nearly ended before he set the new record thanks to a mound
22:24charging of all things. I hope we get to that story eventually because it's a good one. Anyway,
22:28he put some ice on it and kept on rolling with a streak so unsurpassable that it feels ridiculous
22:33to even seriously discuss. I'll just, uh, let you look at that for a sec. We good? Cool. Moving on.
22:41Three of the four achievements in this category are pretty much fine to wave goodbye to. The fourth would be
22:46tragic.
22:51We don't have to say goodbye. Not at all. Not yet. This decade we've seen 23 no-hitters entering 2026,
22:57so there are just about as many now as there have always been, but there is reason to worry. I
23:02find a
23:02no-hitter, particularly a solo no-hitter, to be one of the most gripping spectacles in all of sports.
23:08It comes around about once every 800 games. One guy takes on an entire lineup and for one day,
23:13renders all of their bats completely useless. The batters don't really get tired, but the pitcher does,
23:19stacking the deck further and further against him the deeper he goes into the game. Once the stakes
23:23begin to make themselves clear, some forgettable game on any given Tuesday night becomes a white
23:28knuckle bomb diffusion. If you actually pull it off, your name is etched in the holy book. If you're lucky
23:34enough to see one in person, you'll talk about it the rest of your life. Hell, even if you watch
23:38one on
23:38TV, it feels like you were part of something. That's what it felt like for me when I watched the
23:42most
23:42exhilarating variant of the no-hitter, the perfect game, in which you cannot allow any batter to get
23:47on base for any reason. On the afternoon of August 15th, 2012, people were tweeting that Felix Hernandez
23:53had thrown five perfect innings, so not expecting too much, I pulled up a stream just in time to see
23:59him strike out eight of the next 12 batters. There have only been 24 perfect games throughout all of
24:04baseball history, so on average, we see one about every seven years or so. And yet, when Felix finally
24:10earned that final punch out, my first thought was, of course, how could he not?
24:20I can see a future in which we don't get these much anymore.
24:29Throughout most of baseball history, it was unthinkable to pull a pitcher from a game while he
24:33was actively nurturing a no-hitter through six innings. That's two-thirds of the way. At least
24:37let him keep going until he gives up a hit, right? In the early 20th century, it was only ever
24:41done
24:41out of necessity. Either the pitcher suffered an injury, or was at risk of losing despite the no-hitter
24:46because he lost control and couldn't stop walking guys around the bases. In 1962, we hear the first
24:51ever voice of reason in these matters. Hall of Famer Whitey Ford threw seven no-hit innings,
24:55but tore a muscle somewhere along the way. He asked to be taken out of the game.
24:59It isn't worth risking your career to pitch a no-hitter, he said. In the 70s, manager Preston
25:04Gomez infuriated crowds not once but twice when he had pitchers take no-hitters into the eighth
25:08inning but decided to lift him for pinch hitters. Beginning in the 90s, combined no-hitters became
25:13a little bit more common with the starter being yanked in favor of one or more relievers who completed
25:17the no-hitter. While combined no-nos are impressive, they're just not as cool. They don't tell the same
25:22story of a single guy entering the crucible and emerging in total victory. I think it's more a story of
25:28a
25:28hapless batting order than of two or three or four pitchers who excelled under manageable workloads.
25:33These combined no-hitters hint at the real story, which is that beginning in the 90s,
25:37managers are beginning to exercise a little more caution when their pitches are at least six
25:41innings into a no-hitter. I've stacked an extra one on top here to account for David Cohn,
25:45who in 96 had actually taken a no-no through seven innings, not just six. Manager Joe Torrey pulled him
25:50for a good reason, as it was Cohn's first start after shoulder surgery. Even in the 2000s,
25:55guys deep into no-hitters were only pulled for a variety of special circumstances. Damian Moss
26:00couldn't find the strike zone. Phil Hughes suffered an injury. Sean Markham was a reliever making an
26:04emergency start. Jared Weaver was losing despite the no-hitter, and with his team desperate for a
26:08run, he was lifted for a pinch hitter. Greg Maddox, who on paper always seemed more likely to throw a
26:13no-hitter than anybody alive, came closest to throwing one in 2006. Then a thunderstorm rolled in and ruined
26:19his plans. I wanted to go through each of these item by item to carefully line up my point,
26:23which is that as late as the aughts, guys with a good chance of throwing a no-hitter were only
26:28ever taken out under extenuating circumstances. Now, what does charging the mound have to do with
26:34throwing no-hitters? Nothing, except for this. Out here, even if you just eyeball it, you can see that
26:40batters still charge the mound fairly often in the aughts, and then, as though somebody flipped a
26:45switch around 2010, they sharply dropped off. So remember that, and look at this. In the 2010s,
26:5224 potential no-hitters through at least six innings were called off due to a manager's decision.
26:57It's the most immediate and dramatic statistical change of any kind on this chart. The split here
27:02reflects that of those, 16 were ended after six no-hit innings, and the other eight after at least
27:07seven innings of no-hit ball. This spike can be explained by a rapid shift in organizational priorities.
27:12Not all innings are created equal, and adding even a couple more innings of workload to a tired arm
27:17ramps up the risk of injury in the short and long term. It jeopardizes the player's ability to produce
27:22value for the team. And in the standings, a no-hitter counts the same as any other win. Of course,
27:27this was always true, but in the 2010s, teams finally started to make decisions accordingly.
27:32Now, in the 2020s, 43 promising solo no-hitter attempts have been canceled. Add the seven times the
27:39bullpen was able to preserve the no-hitter, and we've gotten even 50 times that a guy with a no
27:44-hitter
27:44through six-plus innings was shut down. That's against just 16 completed solo no-hitters,
27:50and we're barely halfway through this decade. I think individual no-hitters are phasing out.
27:55Even though we're not seeing it yet, we are seeing the normalization of the logic that'll hasten their
28:00decline. I think it'll be like mount charging. It'll still happen, but much more rarely than anybody
28:05would have guessed. And what's challenging about this for me, as a huge fan of these one-man odysseys,
28:10is that I cannot argue with the logic. It protects the team's bottom line, sure, I don't care about
28:17that. But it also protects the physical health and the future earning potential of the pitchers
28:21themselves. They deserve that. And in fact, I get the impression that they're good with it.
28:27In 2022, Max Scherzer pitches six perfect innings for the Mets, then they yank him. It's his first start
28:33after spending some time on the injured list. Still, this is Mad Max we're talking about. He is
28:37infamous for his temper. We've seen him completely lose it on his managers for having the gall to
28:42take him out of the game. He's gonna have a complete meltdown, right? Nope, not at all. He's smiling,
28:48slapping high fives, happy as the rest of us would be to clog out early. So what right do I
28:53have to lament
28:54the potential extinction of the pure no-hitter? What would I ask them to do? Nine innings of intense
28:58throwing against modern-day batters invariably takes a toll on a guy's health,
29:02and it always did. Baseball asked the human body to do something it was badly designed to do.
29:08There's really no way around it.
29:14These remaining four achievements are compromised to some degree or another because we
29:19ate from the tree of knowledge. They all concern, directly or indirectly, the base hit.
29:24Let's talk about total career hits. I could have placed this in the too high on the shelf category,
29:28because Pete Rose's record of 4,256 is basically unreachable in today's game. I also could have
29:35placed this in the still-relevant category because Rose's record actually isn't the achievement people
29:39talk about here. It is joining the 3,000-hit club. This one is still a big deal, and it
29:44is within reach.
29:45These lines illustrate the progressive career hit totals by age of all 33 guys who reached 3,000 hits.
29:51And here you see every currently active hitter with at least 500 hits plotted by their age in total hits.
29:57By the end of 2025, Freddie Freeman and Jose Altuve were both just over 500 hits from paydirt at age
30:0335.
30:04The last few hundred hits are the toughest, but as you can see, their totals are pretty consistent with
30:08those of your average 300-hit club member of that age. They got a good shot, and behind them are
30:12a
30:12handful of guys who have a lot longer to go, but are keeping a decent pace so far. The thing
30:17is,
30:17while admissions to the 3,000-hit club remain open, they are closing to a specific type of hitter,
30:24the guy who doesn't really hit home runs. You might notice that every single one of the guys
30:28listed here is a respectable home run hitter, if not one of the best. So at the bare minimum,
30:33you're gonna need at least 10,000 career plate appearances to have a shot at 3,000 hits.
30:38Here you see every player who's made even half that many, 5,000. They're plotted on the x-axis by
30:43the
30:43final or most recent season of their career, and on the y-axis by their career home run total.
30:48Members of the 3,000-hit club are these big guys in yellow. You can see that historically,
30:53this club has taken in hitters from all across the home run spectrum, from an all-time champ like
30:57Hank Aaron to some who never even hit 200. And it's those guys who were especially compelling to me,
31:02most recently Wade Boggs, Tony Gwynn, and Ichiro Suzuki. It was so much fun to watch them hit.
31:07Instead of just socking dingers, they approached hitting with a degree of resourcefulness and cunning that
31:11was just plain different. They were craftsmen. They wouldn't just hit the ball, they would slap it
31:16through second and third, pull it in the other direction, loop it into the outfield. It's like
31:20they were batting with a billiards cue. I think all three of those guys, and many others like him,
31:25could have hit way more home runs if they wanted to. They didn't want to.
31:28It takes an eccentric soul to approach the game like this, the kind that grinds through endless hours
31:33of tape in a sport where that is typically not done, practices approximately 83 superstitions a day,
31:38and personally carries his bats in specialized cases from town to town like they're the nuclear football.
31:43This kind of hitter is now being fed into a buzzsaw.
31:49You see this triangle that begins in, wouldn't you know it, the early 2010s?
31:53I'm calling it Escobar's Corner because Alcides Escobar is the one and only guy in it.
31:58He's there by virtue of nurturing a long career of at least 5,000 play appearances into the 2020s,
32:03despite hitting very few home runs. I don't know why exactly. I choose to believe it's because
32:07he hit an inside the park home run to lead off a World Series. If you do that,
32:11you should be able to play as long as you want. Anyway, throughout baseball history,
32:15from the dead ball era all the way to the early 2010s, the game has provided safe harbor for
32:20longtime vets with little to no home run hitting ability. And then they started parting ways with
32:24players who had fewer than 50 career home runs before they could reach that 5,000 played appearance
32:29threshold. Then they shed such players with fewer than 100 career homers. Now, in 2026,
32:34you gotta have at least 150 career homers to keep a career going this long.
32:38Multiple factors seem to be at play here. Although the shift isn't a new invention,
32:42teams now more frequently shift their infielders to where the batter is historically more likely to
32:46hit the ball. Despite league efforts to reign in this practice, slap hit singles are now tougher.
32:51And simply slapping the ball where the fielders are not is both more difficult and less rewarding than
32:56it might seem. But you can't shift against the home run, which, as it happens, modern sabermetrics
33:01value more than ever. The next Boggs, Gwynn, or Ichiro might be in his developmental years right now,
33:07but his managers and hitting coaches and whatnot are trying to steer him clear of the teeth of this
33:11buzzsaw by discouraging that particular brand of contact hitting. And he'll end up somewhere up here.
33:18He'll probably still be great. He's just gonna be the same kind of great as everybody else. And
33:23that is how an entire genre of baseball star can go extinct.
33:31I know I'm disrespecting the art of the walk when I say this, but I mean,
33:35all you gotta do is stand there. It's also way less fun than a single because when you hit a
33:40ball with
33:40a bat, stuff happens. All the same, it is objectively true that the walk is about as valuable as the
33:45single, which only has a slight advantage because it allows runners to advance without a force.
33:50Teams and players have now fully internalized this, rendering the single, baseball's most
33:54common type of hit by far, somewhat devalued and less emphasized. Seems to me like a suboptimal
33:59development for the sport of baseball. Specifically, it's a bummer for any pursuit that relies upon the
34:04single, like the 3,000 hit mark and the hitting streak, a heralded baseball achievement that was
34:09already pretty rickety to begin with. Joe DiMaggio's streak of 56 consecutive games with at least one base
34:15hit remains one of the most revered records in baseball. In the 85 years since, nobody's come
34:20within 10 games of that and everyone's acknowledged that the name of the game is really just to get on
34:24base by hook or by crook. If we expand the definition of this to a get on base streak, we
34:29see that DiMaggio's
34:30mark has been eclipsed 15 times, including by DiMaggio himself during a concurrent longer streak.
34:35These streaks are kind of silly anyway, and just as with the cycle, I think most of us kind of
34:39understand
34:39that it's silly. DiMaggio totaled 91 hits during this hitting streak, resulting in a batting average
34:44of 408. That is incredibly valuable, but there's essentially nothing advantageous about an individual
34:50batter just happening to distribute those hits this evenly. A baseball season is not a waffle,
34:55you don't need to get syrup in every square. I mean, suppose he collected zero hits on June 15th
35:00and two on the 16th. This streak would have been broken into two smaller streaks that would have been
35:04quickly forgotten, and yet his performance in this span would have been 100% as good. Hitting
35:09streaks are curiosities, and not much more than that. To support this argument, I'd like to do a
35:14little bit of cherry picking here. The longest hitting streak of the last near 20 years belongs
35:18to Dan Ugla, who collected a base hit in 33 straight games while with the Braves in 2011.
35:24Dan Ugla was a good baseball player. Dan Ugla was nonetheless so astronomically unlikely to string
35:30together a hitting streak of significant length, it was though the baseball gods sent him forth to
35:34single-handedly invalidate the very concept of a hitting streak. Here you see a plot of
35:39every baseball player ever to make at least 5,000 plate appearances. They're plotted by the year
35:44they entered the bigs and their career batting average, which as far as hitting streaks are
35:48concerned is highly relevant. Of these 1,064 players, Ugla's career batting average ranks 1,040th,
35:56so among all such tenured batters, he is among the bottom 25 worst base hitters ever. During
36:02Ugla's hitting streak, which lasted between July 5th and August 13th of 2011, he hit 377, which of course is
36:09excellent. But when he began this streak, he was hitting a nightmarish 173 on the year. Despite
36:14being in the first year of a huge five-year contract, he was probably worried about being
36:18demoted to the minors. Once the streak ended, he finished out the year hitting 237, which is not
36:23as bad, but also pretty bad. If we extract Ugla's hitting streak and combine the before and after
36:28chunks, we get a batting average of 194. Not only that, we get 526 plate appearances, which is more than
36:35the
36:35502 required to constitute what is defined as a full season. That detail allows us to have a little
36:40bit of fun at Ugla's expense. Mr. Ugla, if you're watching, no disrespect is intended here. Again,
36:46you are a good ball player, and advanced metrics agree with that. Onward? Here is every batting average
36:52in every full season every player has ever had in Major League Baseball history. You are looking at
36:5713,862 seasons total. If we add Ugla's cobbled together 2011 minus the hitting streak he sits at
37:05194, this ranks 11th worst on a list of nearly 14,000 seasons. It would barely even be possible
37:13to choose or even invent a more cosmically unlikely guy to piece together any kind of hitting streak.
37:19And of course, Ugla's hitting streak was not merely any kind of hitting streak, it is the longest
37:23hitting streak we have seen in decades. If anyone ever makes a serious run at DiMaggio's 56 game
37:29streak, it'll be exciting, it'll be fun, we'll all be invested, I'll watch closely, it won't mean anything.
37:38To win the Triple Crown is to lead the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in,
37:43or RBI. By now we're familiar with how devalued batting average has become. Home runs are, if anything,
37:48a bigger deal than they used to be, but RBI is a pretty shaky stat. It is, of course,
37:53good and the point of baseball to drive in runs, but so much of it is so circumstantial and beyond
37:58the batter's control that we really shouldn't ascribe a ton of meaning to it. So what we've got
38:02then is a statistical achievement that is two-thirds obsolete. I still really care about the Triple Crown,
38:07and although that is in part because I am an old idiot, I think there really is something to be
38:12said
38:12for its celebration of loading up the bag with as much raw production as possible. RBI and home runs
38:17are good things that you can count. Batting average reflects an ability to get on base because you have
38:22put the bat on the ball. Now you'd think that since RBI and homers are counting stats, they'd have
38:27opted for hits instead of batting average. That they didn't suggest to me that the original intent
38:31really was to construct an end-all be-all expression of a batter's total dominance of the league.
38:36Things like OPS and wins above replacement are much handier for that. The Triple Crown is more about
38:41lighting up the scoreboard and making something shake. By the time the 90s rolled around and I was old
38:45enough to understand what a Triple Crown was, nobody had pulled it off in 25 years. But it was held
38:50in such regard that it was
38:51still discussed pretty often. I was sure Frank Thomas was going to do it eventually, but the 90s and
38:56odds passed with no Triple Crown winner. Finally, in 2012, the way was over. The great Miguel Cabrera hit
39:02330 with 44 home runs and 139 RBI to lead the American League in all three categories and become
39:09baseball's first Triple Crown winner in 45 years. And I was unprepared for how little people seem to care.
39:17I don't want to make it seem like nobody cared. It was celebrated, just not nearly as much as I
39:22would have
39:22thought. I have distinct memories of some baseball writers going out of their way to call it stupid.
39:27The more even-handed new school baseball writers correctly pointed out that the Triple Crown just
39:31didn't quite say what the baseball authorities of yesteryear used to think it did. Because I mean,
39:36hey, if your job depends on correctly assessing a batter's value, batting average and RBI are way down the list
39:41of
39:41things you want to look at, if you even look at them at all.
39:48And finally, back to the anomaly that kicked off this whole adventure. From the jump, I think any
39:53discussion of hitting 400 would be incomplete without an acknowledgement of Josh Gibson, who hit better
39:58than 400 in the Negro Leagues three times. This included a staggering 466 mark in 1943. Because Negro
40:06League seasons were shorter, Gibson only made 302 plate appearances that year, well short of the benchmark of
40:11502 necessary for a batting title eligible season. Consider this though, if Gibson had added 200 more
40:17at bats and struck out every single time to go 0 for 200, he still would have hit 258 on
40:23the year,
40:24which would make him an above average hitter today. That's astounding. Anyway, in baseball's earlier
40:29decades it was not at all surprising to see a batter hit 350. In more recent decades it was less
40:34common,
40:35but it was still a safe bet that at least one guy would clear 350 in any given year. This
40:39trend did not
40:40taper off gradually. In exactly 2011, it ended immediately, and to this day almost entirely
40:46without exception. Many factors are at play here. If you're interested, I'd recommend checking out
40:51Charlie Pavitt's two-part article investigating why batting averages have fallen more generally.
40:55Among other things, Pavitt cites infield and outfield shifts. Pitching is getting way better,
41:00with basically every type of pitch now significantly faster than it used to be. In response, batters seem
41:05inclined to emphasize power over contact to make the most of the hittable pitches they get. They're
41:09understandably a little less inclined to try to slap hit directly into these increasing headwinds.
41:14Now, as a mountain-charging aficionado, I can't help but love this protracted, long-term batter-pitcher
41:20chess match that plays out on the macro scale. Both sides are now armed with a wealth of advanced
41:25metrics that allow them to deploy optimal strategies and allow us to understand the game better.
41:29It's fun to read about. Less so to actually watch. When you're in the business of optimizing, you have
41:35to chuck everything non-essential out the window. Chasing the 400 mark, or the batting average
41:40dependent triple crown, or the singles dependent hitting streak and 3000 hit club is going to cost
41:45you opportunities that you are paid to use more efficiently. Charging the mound will get you
41:49suspended. There is less and less room and patience for these silly preoccupations with each passing year.
41:55I don't like it. I don't prefer the baseball we've got right now. But I do think some humility is
42:01in
42:01order. This game does not belong to me. And besides, I think to declare baseball's latest evolution as
42:07complete and final would be to get considerably out over my skis. I think baseball is in a period of
42:12change, not stasis. It's still run by human beings who are prone to fooling around with the rules of the
42:17game, sometimes wisely, often unwisely, but usually in a way that's interesting. And it's still played by
42:22human beings who, no matter how homogenized their pipelines become and how seldom they throw haymakers
42:27at each other, will always have the capacity to surprise us. So I'm going to pull back the curtain
42:33for just a sec here. This is the piece of script I just finished reading, right? We'll always have
42:39the capacity to surprise us, blah, blah, blah. I wrote this segment on the afternoon of April 7th,
42:442026 at about 530 p.m. When I wrote that baseball will always have the capacity to surprise us,
42:50I was speaking broadly in general terms. That night I flipped on the Braves Angels game because it just
42:57happened to be on TV and I was kind of half watching it while writing the rest of this script
43:02and
43:02then I heard the crowd pop.
43:06I looked up. The crowd was going nuts while the broadcast was showing a replay. Whatever they were
43:12reacting to, it was definitely extracurricular. That's when I knew.
43:23The Angels' Jorge Soler, who'd previously been hit by Braves pitcher Ronaldo Lopez earlier in the
43:29evening, had exploded out of the box moments after another inside pitch. And I was treated not only to
43:35the first mound charging I had ever been lucky enough to watch live, but the first qualified mound
43:40charging in nearly four years, it only receives a two out of five on the charger-pitcher scale because
43:45neither really landed a good blow, and the same score in the group project category since the
43:49surrounding fight was limited to pushing and shoving. Who cares? The longest mound charging drought of the
43:55last 76 years is now over. Are...are we back? It's much too soon to say. We'll see.
44:08To attempt to fully sanitize baseball is to try to hose down a tornado. It might not always appear
44:14that way, especially when the game sheds some of the things we thought were its definitional qualities.
44:18But as those are sanded down, I think new rough edges will emerge. There will be fresh imperfections
44:24and disasters and petty miracles for us to obsess over and joke about. I mean, listen. The object of the
44:29game is to complete a 360-foot journey to step on something you are standing one foot away from.
44:36That's stupid. That's baseball. It was built broken and will never be fixed. Thank God for that.
45:02I know.
45:28It's beautiful.
45:29I know.
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