IF YOU GET CAUGHT, pummeled by security police, and hauled before Commissioner Kuhn like a common Finley, don’t say I told you this was legal. All I’m saying is that if you’re very discreet and act like you know what you’re doing, you can probably get away with it. Pick a nice unspectacular weeknight game. Get to the park early, at least two hours before game time. Buy a field-level ticket, avoid ushers once you’re inside the park, stride purposefully past your seat to one of those little gates in the fence near the dugout, walk right onto the field, proceed to the batting cage and lean against it.
Now remember, you’re not out there to solicit autographs, cop baseballs or broach business propositions. Try any of that stuff and you deserve pummeling. You are out there as a student of the game who can’t really nurture his feel for it without a close-up view of batting practice.
Often batting practice at close range is more impressive than the game. In bad weather at home the Reds hit in a small netted enclosure under the stands. Just a pitching machine, a bunch of baseballs, sixty feet six inches, a home plate, and Morgan and Bench and Rose and all those guys, one after the other, swinging away. Deep in the cellarlike bowels of Riverfront Stadium. It’s dark under there. FOOP of the machine, hiss of the offering, grunt of the Red, ineffable sound (Crack will have to do) of sweet vicious contact, CLONK or THWOP or SSNK of the ball stopped by metal, pad, or netting. FOOP sss unh Crack CLONK. FOOP sss mf Crack THWOP SSNK. (Sometimes the ball bounces off the pad and into the net and you get both a THWOP and a SSNK.) Stadium mice dig deeper into their holes and the concrete walls resound. Vulcan at his forge doesn’t touch it. It is like Joan Sutherland singing in the shower.
Normal outdoor live-pitching batting practice (or b.p., as players call it) is airier and more social. Journeyman outfielder Jim Gosger used to do an imitation of Babe Ruth. He would put batting helmets in his shirt to simulate the belly, and he’d take mammoth swings and little prancing pigeon-toed steps. Once in Yankee Stadium the Angels’ late Chico Ruiz, a light hitter, drove a b.p. pitch over the fence. Immediately he dropped his bat, ran into the right-field corner, vaulted into the stands, and wrote his name and the date on the seat where the ball had landed. When humorist ex-catcher Bob Uecker threw batting practice for the Braves he would do his impressions of various odd-looking pitchers around the league. “Dick Hall!” Braves around the cage would cry, and Uecker would give them Hall’s strange turkey-neck delivery.
Even outdoors, however, b.p. is not just whimsy. Standing behind the cage you appreciate the force of a pitch, even a relatively easy one. The lower half of the batting cage is covered with canvas. When a pitch strikes that canvas it makes a loud FOMP! On television the ball is a thin white streak. In the cage it is not only sudden but strong. It puts up resistance. Getting into a high inside fastball and pulling it for distance is like snatching an outboard motor off your chest and horsing it up onto a chin-high truck bed in one smooth move.
Not that heft is all. To see the young whippy wrist-hitting Henry Aaron flick his bat out to arrest a ball’s momentum and convert it into a long carrying streak in the opposite direction was to see a form of power. … Well, to me power has negative connotations—armaments, bossism, throwing weight around, Michael Korda. The young Aaron’s power was fine like dancing.
But fiercer. “Rip city,” you might hear a crowd of on looking hitters cry in admiration of a b.p. cut that produces a savage line drive. The ball a batter slashes into is something that under game conditions might come at him and fracture his head.
Some players don’t like batting practice. The Dodgers’ John Roseboro thought it was bad for his timing, the Mets’ Art Shamsky was bothered by it in cold weather (“You hit a ball on your fists and it stings, then you go into the game psyched”), Richie Allen disapproved of it because “your body is just like a bar of soap—it gradually wears down from repeated use.”
But most hitters eat b.p. up. One will say to another, “Go long ball with you,” and then they will see who can hit farthest. Willie Mays would ride one way up into the seats and younger Giants would whoop, “Are you that strong? Are you really that strong?” Not many people in this country regularly get to whang away at something as hard as they can with a good stick. The hitters jump in quickly when it’s their turn so as not to waste a second. They accuse each other of taking too many swings. They berate the pitcher when he doesn’t get the ball over the plate. They keep looking anxiously over at the nearest coach and asking, “How much time?”—meaning when will the groundkeepers come to roll the cage away. The coach, dumpy and aged, says, “Pretty soon.”
B.p. is also a boon to the fan. Even from the stands you can watch the batters moving around like horses in the paddock. Dave Kingman may strike out four times in the game, but in b.p. he is bound to hit one several miles. Once in Montreal I watched Ron Hunt, a distinguished bat-control man, take b.p. one-handed, holding the bat with his left hand in a right-handed stance, and rap out fairly sharp, though quickly dying, little grounders. Once in Vero Beach, Florida, at the Dodgers’ spring training camp I watched Jim Lefebvre work on the all-but-lost art of place hitting. Tom Lasorda, then a coach, would say “Harrelson” or “Kessinger” or “Beckett” or “Tito Fuentes” just before the pitch reached the plate and Lefebvre would try to hit the ball toward the position—shortstop or second base—played by that man. Dixie Walker, another Dodger coach, was also giving Lefebvre advice. As he was leaving the cage Lefebvre said, “I enjoyed that, Dixie. I got a lot out of it.”
Dixie said, “Well, you don’t just swing your head off. You take batting practice.”
An old lady who used to live in Brooklyn watched all this with me. “You know, in Ebbets Field, Dixie Walker hit a foul ball that hit my late husband. Oh, yes,” she said.
“Who was pitching?” I asked her.
“Howie Pollet.”
The best thing of all about b.p. is that it can be a participant sport. B.p. is available to the civilian. I don’t know whether there is a batting cage near you, but there is one fairly near me, which is the main thing I care about, if you want to know the truth. There should be one nearer me, though. I have to drive forty-five minutes. But it’s worth it. B.p. is the only sport I can engage in at the highest level.
That’s right. I hit the big-league machine. The place I go to is on U.S. 7 just south of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Batting Cage has three compartments, three machines. The slow machine is for Little Leaguers. The medium machine is about high-school level. The fast machine can bring it.
“That thing throws eighty-five miles an hour and it’ll put you in the hospital!” the lady who was supervising the Batting Cage told me on my first visit. “You put that helmet on.”
“Actually it’ll get up into the nineties,” says Bill Mickle, whose wife owns the Batting Cage. Mickle never played professional ball himself, which is a shame. He and somebody named Claude Dine could have been scrappy little guys batting first and second. Their manager could have said of their opponents, “We’re going to Mickle and Dine ’em to death.”
Up into the nineties! Think of that! That’s a good deal faster than Randy Jones and only ten m.p.h. off Nolan Ryan. Put a quarter in the machine and you get ten approximating-major-league fastballs. I spend about five minutes working out on the medium machine, just to make up for all the high-school pitching I didn’t hit while in high school, and then I put in a chaw of Red Man, spit out, tp, tp, two little flakes that have gotten on my tongue, and then I head for the big time.
Because I can get around on the ball. I am not going to knock down many fences but I am going to make contact. The day they put down the rubber three feet too close to the plate and Kent Shalibo, the fastest guy in intramural Softball, was hurling, I was the only person in the entire Sigma Chi lineup who fouled a ball off. Finally after three innings and nine Sigma Chi strikeouts somebody realized that the rubber was too close, so we will never know whether I might actually have grounded to the second baseman off that incredible speed. I did some calculations after the game. I figured that fouling off Kent Shalibo from that close was the equivalent of hitting .180 for three weeks in Class D professional ball. And I was out of shape.
Well, I’m going to tell you the truth. At the Batting Cage I don’t wear out the big-league machine right off the bat. I’m into it fifty cents by the time I’m hitting anything fair. But this is something I am willing to put some time and effort into. I’m there for six, seven, eight dollars’ worth of pitches. That’s what, over three hundred cuts?
That means blisters. And the blisters break. And the ball is past me and I’m just kind of dabbing at it, it’s taking the bat out of my hands. The planes and vectors of hitting are more real and terrible even than under Riverfront Stadium.
And then I pop one. Not a blister, a pitch. Now I’m getting some of my weight into the ball. It’s like I’ve been trying to bang a dull splintery stake into hard ground and all of a sudden I’m driving a clean blue nail into a soft pine board.
Then I start figuring my batting average. I count every swing except fouls as a time at bat. Out of the last hundred at bats I generally get thirty-one, thirty-two clean hits. Some of them bloopers, yes. Certain bloopers do fall in. But no leg hits. Let’s face it, I never got a leg hit in Little League, why should I start getting them in the majors? When I’m going good, I don’t need them. Thirty-two hits in one hundred at bats is .320. Joe DiMaggio’s lifetime average was .325.
All right. I know what you’re saying. There’s a big difference between hitting .320 in a batting cage, at however advanced a level, and hitting .320 against real major-league pitching. I know that. I am willing to adjust for that.
The pitching machine doesn’t throw breaking balls. I figure that’s worth a hundred points—now I’m down to .220. Doesn’t change speeds. Down another fifty. But then the machine does throw crazy wild pretty often. Goes for your head, your feet. And in the big leagues every twelfth ball doesn’t have a split cover. So put twenty points back. Then there’s the ATRBDEJOB, or A Three-month-old Rubber-coated Ball Doesn’t Exactly Jump Off the Bat, factor. Give myself twenty more points for that.
A number of other factors enter in. If I were really in the big leagues I’d probably be writing a book about it, and the other players would forever be worrying about what I was going to disclose about them. They’d call time every now and then to ask me, and that would probably affect my hitting. Of course it would probably affect the pitchers, too.
So it isn’t easy to figure, but I’ve spent a lot of time on it. I figure, give or take thirty points, I would be hitting .117 right now in the major leagues. In the American League, anyway. If I could run and field well enough to play.
At thirty-five that’s not bad. In my prime, around ’71 or ’72, I possibly would have hit .195. I can live with that. Of course I’ve lost out on a lot of intangible benefits, passing up a career in baseball. But some of them I can get at the Batting Cage. Leaning against the screen watching other fast-machine guys hit, waiting for my turn, comparing notes with other guys who’re watching.
“Thing git to be an addiction.”
“Eah.”
“Machine’ll cross you up. Move it around on you.”
“Thing’ll bad-ball you.”
“Th’ew one behind me.”
“Hit on one in Rhode Island. Christ, that thing caught me right on the wrist!”
Then, wups, the machine lets fly with a duster. Guy in the cage doesn’t hang in there too well. He goes down, bat flies, the machine is inexorably pitching on, he’s thrashing around on the ground, people are scurrying around to pull him away.
As he leaves the cage disgruntled, his last pitch is thrown. WHANG it goes against the screen. “Scuse me,” I say to the writer who is interviewing me for this column. “I got to go hit.”