Baseball and MPH
by Bud Malmsten

My brain went into overload on Intentional Misunderstanding this month, so we are going to discuss a very important matter concerning baseball.

However, I do not want to deprive you of your biweekly fix, so here is your prescription. Simply listen to any statement made by any Democrat about any Republican. What you are hearing is definitely intentional and definitely misunderstanding. It has been going on from gavel to gavel all month long.

If you are a glutton for punishment, reverse the process. Anything Republicans say about Democrats is just as intentional and just as misunderstanding. If that doesn't satisfy your craving, move on to any "third" party member talking about anyone but himself, and that should do it. By the way, have you noticed that Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader are reading off the same script? You know, "The two major parties are like two peas in a pod", etc. Only in America!?!?!

And, speaking of Joe Lieberman, next time we may discuss how his selection has reminded us that Christians are the most tolerant and least tolerated identifiable group on earth.

But now, the really important stuff.

As long as grown men have been swinging hickory sticks at horsehide covered spheres, other grown men have been trying to throw those spheres past them. This is the essence of baseball. Even though there is an infinite variety of conclusions, every play starts the very same way. The pitcher throws the ball to the catcher, and the batter tries to keep the catcher from catching it.

An observation: Good pitching will prevail over good hitting, while mediocre hitting will clobber mediocre pitching. Just in case you wondered why the expansion of major league franchises always results in batting records being shattered, that's why.

Through the decades of baseball history some overwhelming pitchers stand out. Walter Johnson [Washington Senators - now Minnesota Twins], Christy Matthewson [New York - now San Francisco Giants], and Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals are among those who always seemed strike awe in opposing batters.

But it was Bob Feller [Cleveland Indians] who brought on one of my pet peeves. While he was in his prime in the early fifties, someone figured that he could throw a fast ball about 100 miles an hour - a tricky calculation using a hand held stop watch and a slide rule!

Sometime later brilliant inventors came up with the radar gun, and the highway patrol had a new method for nabbing speedy drivers. It was inevitable that some sports guru would try aiming that gun at a baseball, and a new "science" was born.

At first some announcers would mention once in a while that the previous pitch was clocked at so many miles an hour. NOW, the TV broadcasts of games have a little box in the corner of the screen that marks the "MPH" of every pitch.

Why is this so annoying? Perhaps it is just old age catching up with me, but I don't want to believe that. I think it has to do with the ridiculous combination of baseball and miles and hours in the same sentence. No play in baseball ever covers even one mile. Neither does a play ever take an hour. The achievement itself is demeaned by talking in those terms.

Think about another sport where speed matters, namely track. Can you imagine cheering wildly for a runner who had just completed a 22.159 MPH one hundred meter dash? That would be ten seconds! AND doesn't a four minute mile sound better than a fifteen MPH mile? For sure.

So why not bring the stats on pitching into the realm of baseball?  Here is how it would work - it is a simple formula. One mile per hour equals 1.47 feet per second. If you are into rounding off, you can just multiply the MPH by one and a half to be very close to measuring feet per second.

Does this help you understand the terror in the hearts of batters as they came up to face the young Nolan Ryan? That he holds a nearly unapproachable career record for strikeouts [well over 5,000 - second place on this list is about 3,500] is no secret. He notched about 300 K's per year for nearly twenty years.

What you may not remember is that he walked about 400 batters  in each of his early years, not to mention leading the majors in hit batters.  Bluntly, he was wild! Even the catcher wondered where each pitch would come. Did I mention he threw the ball about 105 MPH?

Now translate that to feet per second [154] and note that the distance between the pitcher's plate and home plate is sixty feet, six inches.  No batter ever "dug in" when N.R. was on the mound! That ball arrived in the vicinity of the batter in less than four - tenths of a second.

You may want to use this chart next time you watch a game: [rounded to whole number]

Now, a modest proposal: Would any baseball announcer be brave enough to take a chart like this into the broadcast booth and try this revolutionary way of reporting this part of the game? I'd like that.

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