Baseball, the year of the pitcher

When is it just a bit outside, Mr. Uecker?

The year of the pitcher is full swing. Although it must be noted, aside from the number of no-hitters, most of the early season hype was overclaim. The Rockies Ubaldo Jimenez is not going to win 30 or even 25. Nobody is coming anywhere near Bob Gibson's legendary 1.12 ERA. It is nevertheless a pitching centric year. Team ERAs are down across the board, run scoring is at a nearly two decade low. Home runs titles are back to the forty dinger neighborhood.

The question that has reverberated around the game is why. We know steroids and PEDs have been on the run for the last couple of years. So why the quantum leap for pitching this year? The whispered wisdom in the clubhouse is that is the lack of "Greenies," or amphetamines that were so popular in baseball for many years. Baseball's rulers have finally eliminated the use of Greenies. Players, whose schedules include tons of travel and games twenty-nine out of thirty days at times, have long used amphetamines to aid in rapid recovery, especially for a day game after a night game. No more. They miss them.

The other equally significant factor is the extension of the outside corner. Umpires are calling the outside strike this year like they haven't in ages. Students of the game will recall that this was the initial response to PEDs. When the umpires realized that Bud Selig and the powers that be were going to look the other way on performance enhancers, they took matters into their own hands in the early 90's. Gradually, things got so far out of wack that when the Atlanta Braves of the Glavine era took on the Kevin Brown led Florida Marlins in the 1997 NLCS that strikes were being called literally a foot off of the plate. Things are nowhere that ridiculous this year, but there is a determined and consistent effort to expand the outside corner. Even an inch or two off the corners of the plate, if given repeatedly, makes a tremendous difference to the pitcher's benefit. The Clarion Content has watched a ton of baseball this year and most assuredly the umps are giving the pitchers that extra inch or two. Consequently, ERAs are down, run scoring is down, homers are down, slugging is down. In our view, games are more fun, they have more tension and filled with subtleties and nuance.

While it is not 1968 (again baseball mimics and parallels real life; things are topsy-turvy, but it is not 1968) the year of the pitcher is in full effect.