Article: Do We Need More Irrationality on the Diamond?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Not all efficiency is desirable. Sometimes, if you want a sport to feel substantial and valuable, there needs to be human error—and lots of it.

Image courtesy of © Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

Have you ever looked at the leaderboard for career double plays turned by outfielders? I have. I do it probably once a month, not because it changes that much, but because it hasn't changed since I first stumbled upon it, and it probably never will again. I circle back to it because there's something to learn about baseball, I think, from looking at it over and over.

Above the actual lists on such pages, Baseball Reference puts photos of the 24 players atop the board. Here's that array for career double plays by outfielders (mostly, of course, plays on which the fielder caught the ball and threw out a runner either trying to advance or scrambling back to the base on which they started, but this also includes the fistful of unassisted double plays turned by, say, Tris Speaker). 

Yes, that's Speaker right at the top of the list, with 38 more than the guy in second place—who, yes, is Ty Cobb. The point, though, is all of that black-and-white. This leaderboard is one of my favorite ways to meditate on the greatness of Willie Mays, because you could add another half-dozen pictures to this list and he'd still be the only one whose photo stands out. The next picture that wouldn't look like 23 of these look would be that of Jesse Barfield, who's tied for 34th place on the list. After him, the next would be Richie Ashburn and Ken Griffey, Jr., tied for 53rd. Mays turned 60 double plays in his career. Barfield turned 49. Ashburn and Griffey turned 43.

I return to it, too, though, because whenever I read about baseball games (and about the growth of the sport in general) in the first half of the 20th century, what jumps out to me is how much of what was celebrated then would be denigrated—what has, in fact, been run out of the game altogether—now. At the dawn of the 20th century, when people talked about what was great about baseball, they emphasized daring, physicality, and tenacity. Looking back, it's easy to dismiss that as puffery or propaganda, but when you come across a leaderboard like this, you realize that it wasn't.

The game was really once played in a way that demanded and rewarded the widely articulated American virtues of the time. In an American era defined by Teddy Roosevelt and his worldview, baseball emerged as the national pastime by trying hard to engender the same attitudes and actions Roosevelt himself would—although, ironically, Roosevelt himself disliked the game. It wasn't just about unapologetic violence, either, like Cobb's sharpened spikes and beanballs that actually knocked out batters who looked too comfortable in the box. There was a culture of aggressiveness on the bases. In a game relatively light on home runs, teams tried to create runs by relentlessly pushing their luck, and running into outs on the bases was part of the bargain. Everyone was fine with that.

I don't long for most of that. Even at the time, Cobb's misanthropy was a point of criticism. Nowadays, we cringe whenever a pitch plunks a batter above the belt, even though they wear helmets made of materials that were nonexistent when Frank Chance was out there letting his merely hatted head take the brunt of pitches in order to gain 90 feet of progress. Takeout slides and other forms of brinksmanship didn't build character; they just showed a disregard for other people. 

However, I do think something was lost when people stopped foolishly pushing the envelope on the bases. Underneath some of the mythmaking and morality that dominated conversations about the game 120 years ago laid something real. Baseball can be instructive, and it can be edifying. I don't think it manages that, though, when we treat it like a video game. This isn't a critique of modern analytics. As that photo array above reminds us, the change has come slowly over many decades, not all at once since the dawn of the internet age. In fact, here are the average number of outs made on the bases per team in select seasons, going as far back as reliable everyday data on this can take us.

Season	Outs on Bases per Team
1953	79
1963	74
1973	72
1983	69
1993	67
2003	57
2013	53
2023	45

No, what I'm talking about is a change that happened because home runs became more frequent, and because teams started to realize there might be more value in stringing together hits and avoiding outs than in pushing the limits. Remember when you would get the latest version of a video game and set about trying to beat it? You'd be systematic about it. You'd learn from each mistake. If turning left got you killed, the next time you tried the level, you'd turn right. Through trial and error, you felt your way to the ruthless efficiency that finally resulted in solving the whole game. Eventually, you'd just come down the court in Double Dribble and hoist that corner 3, because you'd found a glitch and now you had the game by the short hairs. Long before sabermetrics, baseball teams started learning from their mistakes and stopped running wild. It's a sound strategical choice. I'm just not convinced it's good for the game, as we want the game to be.

Sport, which is either a sibling or a cousin of the arts, is most valuable when it imitates life. Video games don't imitate life at all. Life isn't a closed system, and it doesn't repeat itself. You can't just learn from one experience and apply the lesson (unthinkingly, without modification) to the next similar experience. There will be important, even crucial differences between the new experience and the one from which you're trying to learn.

To imitate life and not a video game, then, baseball needs what no video game can ever have: unpredictable irrationality. Sometimes, we need players to make what have to be called bad decisions, out of an overweaning eagerness to press an advantage or out of desperation to make up for a mistake. We need guys who give in to a certain arrogant instinct and guys who simply lose focus. Those aren't good things to have happen, but because they happen all the time in real life, they should happen in baseball, too, so we can better feel connected to (and better learn from) the game.

These things happen in baseball, even now, because the game is played by people, not computers. As teams try harder to program and educate their players with each passing year, though, we just aren't seeing enough of those instances. Baseball isn't without random error and the unpredictability and excitement that come with it, but it's gotten too close to being without it. We need more screw-ups.

Obviously, though, it always feels miserable when it's your team making the mistakes. The Cubs ran into a bunch of bad outs on the bases in September, often out of those same couple of motives I named above. That made their collapse especially maddening. It wasn't good for Cubs fans. Still, maybe it was good for baseball, insofar as baseball is meant to be good for us.

No one will voluntarily start making outs on the bases just to make the game more reflective of human nature. That's why rules and physical changes (especially the pitch timer and the bigger bases) we've seen implemented lately are extra valuable. More random errors happen in football and basketball than in baseball, because there's a ticking clock (two of them, really) in each sport to force action and limit preparation for that action. The pitch timer brings that to baseball. It limits the ability of everyone involved, including baserunners and fielders, to think all the way through each pitch before it happens and receive instructions from the dugout.

There might still be more ways to encourage irrationality on the field, but for now, it's worth waiting to see how these rules continue to reintroduce some chaos into the contest. The changes didn't increase outs on the bases in 2023, but they did engender more aggressiveness, in addition to a faster pace. Hopefully, those trends continue in 2024.

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[CubinNY]

Good work! I don’t necessarily think running into outs is always bad. I love the idea of forcing action. 

[chopsx9]

Is there any sort of stat for any extra bases taken/advanced?

[Bertz]

Yeah I'd love for the team to have some 80 SB monster.  I miss the days when those guys existed.  One of my baseball hot takes is that there was some hidden value to those guys.  It was overstated by the Ozzie Guillens of the world but I think it exists.

Another belief I have, that doesn't tie into baserunning but does tie into irrationality, is that we need more "nose to toes" type hitters.  Everyone wants a lineup with like 9 Juan Soto/Mookie Betts types but I'm convinced 6-7 Juan Sotos and 2-3 Javy Baez/Pablo Sandoval/Vlad Guerrero types is actually the optimal mix.

[Stratos]

I don't have an issue with rationality but aggressiveness on the bases is good.  They improved it with the new news last year creating more SB attempts.