- 1 day ago
Hey, it's Jon again, and I've got Episode 8 of The History of Charging the Mound for you. It concerns the 1980 mound-charging between George Brett and Milt Wilcox, and as I divulge early in the episode, I do not have any video of the fight to show you, as it appears to not exist. As such, it was a fairly risky choice to make it the subject of its own episode, but I went forward with it for two reasons. First, these guys gave me excuses to wander off on several fun tangents, and I love tangents.
Second, it offered me a lot of insight into one of the big questions that's propelled this entire project forward: why do batters charge the mound? Within this episode, I think George Brett demonstrates just how sophisticated this business can really be. Sometimes you're furious and you don't fight somebody. Sometimes you're not, and you do. And quite often, batters run up on a pitcher not because they want to, but because they feel they have to.
Second, it offered me a lot of insight into one of the big questions that's propelled this entire project forward: why do batters charge the mound? Within this episode, I think George Brett demonstrates just how sophisticated this business can really be. Sometimes you're furious and you don't fight somebody. Sometimes you're not, and you do. And quite often, batters run up on a pitcher not because they want to, but because they feel they have to.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:04Very few things are more thrilling than when a 43 year old man on the internet complains about
00:09baseball and in the last episode I delivered in spades. I'd spent some time taking a long hard
00:14look at this yawning years-long drought in which not a single batter charged the mound. I was
00:20sitting on my couch typing up my script with about a hundred words to go when I looked up
00:23the TV and watched live as Jorge Soler charged Ronaldo Lopez. Drought over. Wow. Good thing I
00:30didn't just write a 45-minute episode on the impermanence of baseball trends. That hilariously
00:35time-mount charging didn't compromise my argument but it did rattle the foundations a little bit.
00:40My argument was that many of baseball's once hallowed institutions are fading away if they
00:44haven't already and that these changes are at least partially explained by a shift toward optimization.
00:49For instance, hitting for a batting average of 400 is of course still desirable but doing
00:53so would probably require you to slap a ton of singles and that is an approach to hitting that
00:57will pull you away from things like walks and home runs which advanced metrics have sparked a new
01:02appreciation for. It goes a long way toward explaining why only one man has even hit as
01:06high as 350 in the last 15 years and counting. In this episode we return to a time when batters
01:11charged the mound a couple times a month rather than once per Summer Olympics. When batters did charge
01:16toward that 400 mark as hard as they could. And when Kansas City Royals third baseman George Brett
01:21was perhaps the most celebrated athlete in America because on August 5th 1980 in Detroit Michigan
01:27as Brett steps into the batter's box in the top of the sixth he carries a 385 batting average with
01:33him. It's higher than almost anyone has hit since the legendary Ted Williams nearly 40 years prior
01:37and Brett would probably be surprised to learn that in the 45 years to follow nobody else will come
01:43this close. The difference between 385 and 400 is a handful of hits. With less than two months to go
01:49in the
01:49season every single at-bat matters, Brett must make the most of every last trip to the plate including this
01:55one.
01:56It's on this occasion that Brett charges the mound to fight Detroit Tigers pitcher Milt Wilcox.
02:10I should make you aware at the outset that I will not be able to show you any video of
02:15this fight as the game was not televised.
02:16Somehow somebody did get their hands on some footage in the immediate aftermath although I'd guess it's long gone by
02:22now.
02:22So as we examine this encounter we're gonna take the scenic route and explore a few side stories that aren't
02:27really related but are pretty fun.
02:29So I picked out this photo of George Brett last year before I realized he was gonna be the co
02:33-star of an episode just because I thought it was funny
02:35and now that we're here I guess I need to take a minute and explain why I think it's funny.
02:40In the summer of 1980 Brett is ascending from established baseball star to one of the most famous people in
02:45America thanks in large part to his pursuit of 400.
02:48Neither fans nor the media will leave him alone and it's starting to bother him.
02:52So much has been written about me why can't you guys just read the stories and rewrite them in your
02:56own words.
02:57Now Dick Schaap wants to take a shit with me for three weeks and film it.
03:00I know that sounds like a weird thing to say but George is given to unexpected and evocative fits of
03:04fecal poetry.
03:05More on that later.
03:07Anyway around this time President Jimmy Carter's campaign comes calling.
03:11With the Democrat a few points behind Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential race they're hoping Brett can swing by
03:15a campaign event and give him a boost.
03:17Despite his exhaustion with the media Brett says anything for my president and shows up to offer his implicit endorsement.
03:24The Secret Service notices that Brett is considerably more popular than Carter who winds up losing to Reagan in a
03:29landslide.
03:30Now it's possible that Brett is a vanishingly rare type of American.
03:34A presidentialist. A person who's a big fan of anybody who was or is a president.
03:38Here's a signed bat he gifted to Richard Nixon in the 80s thanking him for his leadership.
03:42Here he is having breakfast with George W. Bush. Here he is posing with Barack Obama at the White House.
03:46As far as I can tell though he didn't join another president for a campaign event until 2018 when he
03:51showed up with Donald Trump for a GOP midterm rally.
03:54He tweeted a little bit of support for him during Trump 1. He seems to have gotten quiet during Trump
03:582.
03:59Couldn't tell you where he's at these days regardless.
04:01How does a man get from here to here?
04:04It's not my job to care.
04:07Unless the story is interesting. Which I do think it is in this particular case.
04:12Not long after that campaign appearance with Jimmy Carter, Brett emerged from the 1980 media circus as a guy who
04:17wanted to turn down the volume and create a little bit of space between himself and the press.
04:22In particular there was an obscure low level employee in the Kansas City Royals front office who helped him do
04:27just that.
04:28His name was Rush Limbaugh whose official title was director of group sales and special events but who really just
04:33did whatever needed doing.
04:35Whether that was picking out stadium music or swimming by Brett's house to help him set up his VCR.
04:40Limbaugh generally had trouble connecting with people but he and Brett found themselves talking to each other all the time
04:45about anything and everything including presumably politics.
04:48An arena of discussion in which Rush seemed to have left an impression on George.
04:52They just clicked. Maybe they were one another's missing piece.
04:55Brett had attracted enormous fame and attention and did not want it. Limbaugh very much did crave that fame and
05:01attention but could not get it.
05:03The guy had broken into the radio business as a DJ under the alias Rusty Sharp, then Jeff Christie, then
05:08landed his own talk show, a venture that went so badly that he was fired a few weeks in and
05:12left radio entirely.
05:13And now, around age 30, Limbaugh had hit a dead end. His dreams of becoming a radio star had been
05:19dashed, he'd recently divorced.
05:21He loved potato chips but was in such dire financial straits that he could only buy them at places that
05:25accepted credit cards.
05:26He actually tried to get a job as a potato chips salesman and couldn't even land that gig.
05:30He felt like his life was going nowhere.
05:33But Limbaugh found inspiration in his pal George. In 1980, he witnessed his pursuit of hitting 400 up close.
05:39He was enamored with Brett's ability to stubbornly, even obstinately, rise above all the noise, all the critics, all the
05:45haters, to achieve excellence before an audience of millions.
05:49And Limbaugh thought to himself, maybe, just maybe, that can be me one day.
05:54Now, if you're not from America, or you're too young to remember Rush Limbaugh, um...
06:00Hey, whoa! Over there! Look, it's a baseball video! Come on, gang! Let's check it out!
06:10At the plate, there is no Rush Limbaugh to politely usher inside fastballs away from George Brett, which in 1980
06:15is a problem for him,
06:16because American League pitchers aren't giving him any more room to breathe than the media is.
06:20His reputation and his batting average precede him wherever he goes.
06:24Here on August 5th and the top of the 4th, he stands in against Tigers starter, Milt Wilcox.
06:28I think this chart will soon illustrate the agony of pitching pretty well. It illustrates what Stat Head refers to
06:34as win expectancy,
06:35basically a team's estimated chances of winning after every single plate appearance.
06:39Wilcox had been perfect through the team's first three innings, which nudged the Tigers' chances of winning,
06:44which you see in orange here, just a little bit over 50-50.
06:46Now, though, Wilcox has put men on first and second to open the fourth, which has the computer gods a
06:51little nervous about his chances,
06:52especially because the next batter up is George Brett.
06:55So, how should one pitch to the best and most frustrating hitter in all of baseball?
07:00Secret base legend Dave Steeb, arguably the best pitcher of the 1980s, faced Brett nearly a hundred times.
07:06He says the only plan is to have no plan, because if there is a plan, Brett will figure it
07:11out.
07:11If he's really on top of his game, Steeb says, just cut your losses and walk the guy.
07:16The bad news is that these days, George Brett is pretty much more on top of his game than any
07:20baseball player has ever been.
07:22The worst news is that there are guys on first and second, so Walkingham would load the bases with nobody
07:26out.
07:27With no way around but through, Wilcox bears down.
07:30He gets two quick strikes on Brett, giving him tons of leverage.
07:33Now, Brett has to protect the plate, which might compel him to swing at a pitch down in the zone,
07:37a great recipe for a ground ball double play that could get Wilcox most of the way out of the
07:41inning.
07:41Brett does protect the plate, except he won't put the ball in play.
07:45He fights off pitch after pitch after pitch with foul ball after foul ball.
07:50To get elementary for just a sec, foul balls automatically count as strikes, except for strike three.
07:55In other words, if you have two strikes, you could foul the next 300 pitches in a row into the
07:59stands and you will not strike out.
08:01But even hardcore baseball fans might be surprised to learn that back in the day, foul balls didn't even count
08:06for strike one or strike two.
08:07This rule change was necessitated by Roy Thomas, who played for the Phillies around the turn of the 20th century.
08:12Despite his weak hitting, Thomas was better at getting on base than almost anybody, leading the league in walks seven
08:18times.
08:18He was able to work the count so well because he was maybe the greatest foul ball hitter ever born
08:23in a time when foul balls did not count as strikes.
08:26Thomas would exhaust and infuriate pitchers by deftly swatting pitches foul until they finally gave up and started throwing out
08:32of the zone.
08:33On one occasion, he reportedly hit 28 foul balls in a single plate appearance that probably lasted 10 or 15
08:39minutes.
08:39Pitcher Bill Phillips finally said, listen, if you foul off one more pitch, I'm gonna beat your ass.
08:45Thomas did, and Phillips charged the plate.
08:47I do count plate chargings as mound chargings because they are consistent with the spirit of the enterprise.
08:52There are actually a couple of plate chargings hiding within this sample, I hope to get to them eventually.
08:57This particular incident is not recorded here as it occurred some 50 years prior to the beginning of our sample,
09:02but it does handily illustrate just how irritating an endless volley of foul balls can be.
09:07Who knows how many Brett hits here? Maybe half a dozen?
09:11Along the way, he takes three balls to come all the way back from 0-2 and work the count
09:15full.
09:15Wilcox, whose hard earned leverage has now evaporated, finally serves up a pitch to Brett's liking,
09:21and Brett crushes it into the stands for a three-run homer.
09:24A moment ago, this was anybody's game.
09:27Brett's homer, in addition to bumping his batting average to .385,
09:30has now jacked up the Royals' win probability north of 80%.
09:33Wilcox understands this, more or less.
09:35He figures he'll probably go down as the losing pitcher, which he will.
09:39He has a full couple of innings to stew over these things before facing Brett again in the sixth,
09:43and he's decided well beforehand that he's gonna knock Brett down with an inside fastball.
09:48By Wilcox's own admission, it's not as though Brett crowds the play to invite such a pitch.
09:52He actually stands kinda far back. Who cares?
09:55On the second pitch, he throws high and tight.
09:57Brett staggers out of harm's way, falls into the dirt,
10:00picks himself up, and stands in for the next pitch.
10:03But this is not over.
10:04Although he doesn't say so, I think Wilcox has been put on till by how many pitches
10:08Brett made him throw in that last at-bat, all in the service of giving up a homerun at the
10:12end of it.
10:13He probably had to throw upwards of 10 pitches to one guy,
10:15and given that an entire outing comprises 100 pitches or so, that is pretty expensive.
10:20Especially for a guy like Wilcox, whose arm has been through it.
10:28A lot has happened since we last checked in on Milt in 1974,
10:31when he tried to throw up and in on Lenny Randall,
10:34but was so inexperienced with brushbacks that he actually threw it all the way behind him,
10:38which compelled Randall to fight him, which incited a brawl,
10:40which in turn incited the most infamous drunken riot in baseball history.
10:44For one, between then and now, Milt has learned how to properly throw a brushback pitch, and good for him.
10:49More impressive, frankly, is that Milt Wilcox is still out here at all.
10:52His career very nearly ended years ago thanks to a tear in his rotator cuff,
10:56which is the group of muscles that hold the shoulder together and allow it to move.
11:00There are degrees of severity, maybe the muscles are frayed,
11:03or the tendons have partially torn off the bone, or they've completely torn off.
11:07Maybe the injury precludes you from pitching at all,
11:09maybe it's a nagging annoyance that doesn't impact your pitching ability much in the short term,
11:13or worst of all, it's somewhere in between.
11:15Hall of Fame pitcher Don Drysdale described the experience of pitching through a major tear like this,
11:20your arms just shaking and twitching, it's like that for a day, a day and a half after you throw.
11:24It's like you're torturing yourself.
11:26Really, it's guaranteed hell.
11:28It certainly was for Wilcox, who had to rely so heavily on cortisone shots to dole the pain
11:32that he developed severe withdrawal symptoms when he didn't get them.
11:35And he would try to hide those symptoms from everybody so he could continue to get the cortisone shots
11:40so that his career would not end.
11:42Torn rotator cuffs had surely ended countless pitching careers before they ended Drysdale's,
11:46but doctors would just shrug and say,
11:48well, you got a dead arm, what are you gonna do?
11:50And that was that.
11:51As late as the 1960s, there are virtually no mentions in newspaper stories of the term rotator cuff in the
11:57baseball context.
11:58Forget actually knowing how to treat it, people in baseball circles seem to not even know what a rotator cuff
12:03was.
12:04When Drysdale became likely the first high-profile player to be diagnosed with a tear,
12:08some outlets incorrectly called it a rotor cuff or rotary cuff.
12:12In fact, Wilcox doesn't even know for certain that he'd torn his.
12:15He just guesses so in retrospect.
12:16One particular quote from his Sabre Bio Project entry written by Maxwell Cates caught my eye.
12:21That was before anyone knew what that was.
12:24Just 20 years later, when I was growing up as a baseball fan in the 90s,
12:27it was so well understood that I heard the term once a week.
12:30Today, a raft of team physicians and specialists are at a pitcher's disposal
12:34who know exactly how to surgically repair a rotator cuff and manage its recovery.
12:39Instead, though, it was left to Wilcox's family doctor to come up with a solution, which was, I don't know,
12:44try bowling.
12:45And he did. And it worked.
12:48After nearly two years out of Major League Baseball, Wilcox returned in 1977 and pitched for 10 more years.
12:54You remember when Bruce Keeson, the most injured man of all time, was so hard up for solutions
12:59that he soaked his fingers in cow urine because a fan wrote in and said it was a good idea?
13:03Even after the moon landing, this was the state of things in sports medicine.
13:07Cow urine and both.
13:13So, as we return to the top of the sixth, I think we now do so with a new appreciation
13:17of how upset Milt must be
13:19over George making his poor shoulder throw a ton of pitches for no good reason.
13:23Brett, for his part, also seems plenty upset over getting knocked down, but he does not charge the mound.
13:29He gets up and stands back in the box.
13:31As though to encourage Brett to let his guard back down, Wilcox throws pitch number three right over the middle,
13:36and then Wilcox fires pitch number four high and tight, sending Brett's butt on the dirt again.
13:42Not the first time Brett has gotten his pants dirty, obviously.
13:46Neither will it be the last.
14:00Many years into the future, in 2005, George Brett, now a retired Hall of Famer, is present at Royal Spring
14:05Training in some official capacity.
14:07It doesn't really matter which capacity.
14:10Because George is the Royals, and always will be.
14:12He belongs to a pantheon that includes the likes of Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, and Steph Curry,
14:17as a player who defines his franchise far more comprehensively than anyone else who has ever worn the uniform.
14:22He is a demigod here.
14:24When he speaks, the ground trembles.
14:26What wisdom does he have to offer us this morning?
14:29Pardon?
14:29To the left side!
14:30I shit my pants last night.
14:31I did.
14:32This begins the epistle I promised you earlier.
14:35I'm good twice a year for that.
14:36This certainly sounds like a conversation he should be saving for his doctor.
14:40When was the last time you shit your pants?
14:42Me?
14:42Yeah.
14:43Been a while?
14:43But he has found the perfect captive audience.
14:46This unfortunate soul has no outs here.
14:48He's in the middle of stretching.
14:49What's he supposed to say?
14:50See ya?
14:51I gotta go stretch in the outfield for some reason?
14:53No.
14:54No.
14:54No.
14:55He's along for this ride.
14:56And there is no getting off.
15:06I was in Vegas a couple years ago.
15:08Just an honest to God true story.
15:10Staying at the Bellagio.
15:11I went over to Mirage for dinner and met some friends of mine over there.
15:16Went to Kokomo's, a great little steakhouse.
15:19The guy brings out some fresh crab legs.
15:21These just came in.
15:22I gotta give them to you guys.
15:23If you want to receive free stuff from Vegas area business owners,
15:26there is virtually no better type of person to be than a 1980s sports icon.
15:30George Brett may as well have been grown in a lab to appeal to this specific demographic.
15:34I'd be surprised if he ever has to sign a check for anything.
15:37Which is not to say that there is not a price to pay.
15:40The fates are certain, one way or another, to collect what is owed.
15:45I'm eating them.
15:46Then we go play gamble a little bit.
15:48I had a tea time early in the morning.
15:50So I said, look, I gotta get going.
15:52I'm walking back to the hotel.
15:53I get three quarters of the way out of the lobby and all of a sudden I go,
15:55oh fuck.
15:57And I'm standing here like this.
15:58I got my butt pinched so fucked.
16:00I'm fucked.
16:01I can't move.
16:02The lobby of the now defunct mirage was a gorgeous round atrium furnished with tropical
16:06flora and flowing waterfalls.
16:08I offer no such accommodations in this reconstruction.
16:11There is only isolation, stasis and diarrheal terror.
16:15All of a sudden, you know, felt alright.
16:18I went just like this.
16:21Water.
16:21It is fluid, which means it will not only be smelled, but seen.
16:25And I'm just standing there and it's just running down my leg.
16:28I got jeans on, black bucks, no socks.
16:32And I just start fucking walking.
16:34Every time I'm walking, something's coming out.
16:36It's water.
16:37Straight fucking water.
16:38George Brett, who just moments ago was the man whose life was the envy of the rest of us,
16:43is now the very last person in the world he should want to be.
16:46Imagine the terror of being a very famous individual who will inevitably be recognized if he stands still for long,
16:52but will just as inevitably open the floodgates with every step.
16:57He resolves to at least get himself outdoors where the stench can be dissipated somewhat.
17:01But a solution this is not, because his hotel room is in the Bellagio, a 15 minute walk south.
17:06Then I'm standing outside and I got on my cell phone and I called the guy.
17:10I said, Larry, you won't believe this.
17:10I'm standing outside the fucking Bellagio.
17:12I believe he's misspeaking here as he's standing just outside the Mirage on his way to the Bellagio.
17:17I can't move. I got shit everywhere. I shit all over myself.
17:21And Larry's about a 48 waist.
17:23So he brings me over a pair of pants and some towels and some towels.
17:27Brett must rely here on Larry for reconnaissance.
17:29He cannot take a single step that is not deliberate and absolutely necessary.
17:33He is Jim Lovell aboard Apollo 13 with very little fuel to burn.
17:38And like Apollo 13's necessary loop around the moon, a circumvention is necessary.
17:42He finds the closest bathroom.
17:44When you go up the escalator, you go into the...
17:46I can't get in the elevator.
17:47Brett's escalator ascent is aided by a brilliant act of deception on Larry's part.
17:51And then I get in the escalator and he kind of pretends like he dropped something so no one gets
17:55behind me.
17:56Brett makes it to the restroom and leaves a disaster in his wake.
17:59He goes and gets the towel all wet for me, throws it over the fucking stall.
18:03I take off all my fucking clothes, just wipe off, leave my shoes, left my shoes, my pants, everything right
18:09there.
18:10The towels right there in the stall.
18:11And I'm walking barefoot with my shirt and his pants that are 48 waist through the lobby like this.
18:16It's midnight.
18:18The extraction is successful.
18:19Brett makes it to the Bellagio.
18:21He has survived the crucible.
18:23And the fates reward him.
18:25Got up in the morning, took the most perfect double tapered shit I've ever had in my life.
18:29True story.
18:30Who's the pitchers in this game?
18:41This story has absolutely nothing to do with anything we have been talking about.
18:55Back in the sixth inning on August 5th, 1980, Brett picks himself up off the ground with every reason to
19:00fight Milt Wilcox.
19:01The man's put him on the ground twice now.
19:03Brett does some glowering, but even now, he does not charge the mound.
19:07It's not because Brett is incapable of getting sufficiently angry.
19:11Alongside the casino poop disaster, the other moment he's best known for is the pine tar incident of 1983,
19:17in which he hits a pivotal two-run homer off the hated Yankees only for the umps to knock it
19:21off the board
19:22because he just happened to apply pine tar just barely higher on the bat than is allowed by rule.
19:27Yankees manager Billy Martin, what I tell you guys everywhere, noticed this hours prior,
19:32but sat on the information until pointing it out would present the greatest strategic advantage.
19:36Now, by this point in my research, I have reviewed hundreds of reports of mound chargings.
19:41I've seen video of dozens upon dozens of them.
19:43And let me tell you, in not a single one of them does anyone appear even half as angry as
19:49George Brett does here upon being called out.
19:51This is the maddest I have ever seen anybody on a baseball diamond.
19:54You know how the most brutally cold winter days are always sunny because it is too cold for clouds to
19:58form?
19:58I think that's what's going on here.
20:00He doesn't actually fight anybody here because he is too mad to fight.
20:03So, dispassion is not the issue here, but the stakes of this plate appearance just might be.
20:09A couple months from now, after Brett leads the Royals to their first ever World Series,
20:13he stands in against the Phillies Dickie Knowles in Game 4.
20:16Knowles is a guy I've wanted to talk about since Episode 1.
20:18Let's just say that his reputation is such that when he throws a fastball at Brett's face,
20:23there's reason to doubt him when he claims it's an accident.
20:25This is beyond the pale.
20:27Even when pitchers say, yeah, I hit that guy on purpose, they often say,
20:30it's not like I threw at his head, I would never do that.
20:32When Knowles does do that and Brett hits the deck,
20:35manager Jim Fry actually runs out there and has to be held back from fighting.
20:38Brett himself stares daggers at Knowles.
20:41If he were to charge here, it would be of enormous consequence to us.
20:44Consider the Galarraga system, which we have yet to visit in detail,
20:47but I promise we will get to it.
20:49It houses Dickie Knowles, so by charging him,
20:51Brett would marry these two constellations into a mammoth superstructure without equal.
20:56I'd have to build an unprecedented fourth story just to accommodate it.
20:59Instead, Brett gets up and resumes the abet.
21:02He doesn't want to get thrown out of the game,
21:04thereby depriving his team of the best hitter in baseball in the middle of a World Series.
21:09Similar story back here in August, although the stakes are different.
21:11You see, as Brett mounts his historic campaign to hit 400, he needs to keep his eye on two gauges.
21:17One is batting average, and the other is plate appearances.
21:20Brett missed some time due to injury earlier this season,
21:22which has left him very little breathing room to reach the 502 plate appearances necessary
21:27to win the batting title and officially hit 400.
21:29As it happens, he is gonna make it there, but only barely,
21:33so here and now he is right to worry that it's gonna be tight.
21:36He needs to rack up every last plate appearance,
21:38and if he charges the mound right now and gets thrown out of the game,
21:42this plate appearance will not count.
21:44In fact, Brett will later reveal that this is exactly why he doesn't charge right now.
21:48I got a question for you, though.
21:50If he did, do you think it would accomplish anything?
21:58At the outset of this series, I characterized a lot of these incidents as impulsive fits of anger,
22:03but I also argued that charging a mound could be a relatively rational act, a tool of deterrence,
22:08a making good on the threat that if a pitcher throws too far inside on a batter too often or
22:13too aggressively,
22:14there will be consequences.
22:15It's pretty fun to think of this business as a sort of collective action taken by this noble brotherhood of
22:20batters
22:21to beat back the scourge of brushbacks and knockdowns.
22:24But even in years like 1980, when mound charging was at its peak,
22:27we're only talking about 13 total.
22:29There were upwards of 160,000 plate appearances that season,
22:32meaning pitchers got charged once every 12,000 batters or so.
22:36That is not nearly often enough to scare pitchers or make them rethink their approach.
22:40But I thought maybe, if we narrow the scope to the battles between an individual batter and pitcher,
22:46that specific batter could make that specific pitcher think twice about how he threw to him in the future.
22:50In order to test this theory, I compiled splits.
22:53We're going to look at a few key stats in the portion of the batter-pitcher history before the charge
22:57and after the charge.
22:59We're not going to count the plate appearance of the charge itself,
23:02because by its very nature, it's quite often a beanball that skews the sample in a way that is not
23:06very helpful.
23:08So, after a batter charged a pitcher, did he earn more favorable pitch locations?
23:12Was he able to more confidently lean into the plate?
23:15If so, sure doesn't show up in the batting average.
23:18It's actually three point worse after the charge, although I don't really think that's statistically significant.
23:23Slugging percentage is almost the exact same story, same with on-base percentage.
23:27And that means that on-base plus slugging, or OPS, the very most telltale stat of a batter's ability to
23:33produce at the plate,
23:34is so similar before and after a mound charging that I can't find any meaning in the difference.
23:40My finding, then, is that in aggregate, charging a pitcher has no meaningful impact on how that batter will perform
23:46against that pitcher in the future.
23:48Charging the mound does nothing to help you win a game.
23:51If anything, it helps you lose a game because you're likely to get ejected or even suspended,
23:55which presumably will elevate a less effective player to take the place.
23:59So this is not a baseball tactic.
24:01It is a piece of business settled from man to man, from private citizen to private citizen.
24:09Indeed, it turns out that there is a third gauge on George Brett's console.
24:14He's tracking his batting average, he's tracking his plate appearances, he is tracking his dignity.
24:19Wilcox has now sent him Pratt falling into the dirt twice.
24:22To just stand there and take it would be humiliating.
24:25But to charge him would be to sign away a valuable plate appearance,
24:28and an even more valuable chance to collect a hit.
24:31So what does he do?
24:32He stands back in there, swings at the 3-1 pitch, and pops it to center field, thereby securing the
24:38plate appearance.
24:39As he jogs to first, he watches the center fielder intently, and as expected, the ball lands in his glove,
24:44denying Brett a hit and lowering his batting average from 385 to 383.
24:49And now, with all other important business settled, he then rounds first, points a finger at Wilcox, then charges him.
24:57Again, we lack video documentation of this encounter, but I doubt it would tell us much anyway.
25:01An account from the Detroit Free Press describes a few seconds of evenly distributed punches landed before the two are
25:07enveloped in a scrum of teammates.
25:08No winner is declared.
25:14Milt Wilcox injured his shoulder in the brawl and missed his next start.
25:18Thankfully, it was not the shoulder with a rotator cuff injury, and he continued to pitch for many more years
25:22before retiring at age 36.
25:24George Barrett maintained a batting average of 400 as late as September 19th, but by the end of the month,
25:30he conceded defeat upon watching it drop to 387.
25:33He finished at 390, which still towers well above anything anyone's been able to accomplish in our time.
25:39Unless something fundamentally changes about the way hitters approach hitting, we probably won't see that again in our lifetimes.
25:45It's been quite an experience, he said.
25:48I haven't enjoyed it at all.
25:49Might be because he'll soon reveal that he's been dealing with hemorrhoids.
25:53Obviously it was a butt thing.
25:54And obviously he had a one-liner ready to go.
25:57As for the fight itself, no hard feelings.
25:59Brett describes it as a fun time.
26:01He plans to smooth things over tomorrow with Wilcox, who says,
26:04Both he and I know that's a part of baseball.
26:08It isn't baseball, not really.
26:10But it's baseball.
26:12That make any sense?
26:16I just don't know where it comes in.
26:19No way.
26:22Yeah.
26:34I do.
26:40I know, you like this,
Comments