I thought I was done posting for the day, but I couldn't resist. Back when Omni was on a different platform (and under a different name) in which readers could vote "Yes" and "No" about whether they liked an individual post (ouch!), my baseball posts were invariably the least popular ones I did. But no matter. One of the most promising sports books of the fall (along with the Andre Agassi memoir I keep hearing such good things about) is Sixty Feet, Six Inches, a book on the art and science of pitching and hitting, set up as a conversation between two mystique-saturated Hall of Famers, Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson. Based on how fun it is in its early pages, I'm sure I'll be posting more on it later, but I just opened to a page (it's sitting here on my desk, and I needed a break!) and came across a lovely little passage. Much of the fun of the book is in the little details of strategy Reggie and Gibson share back and forth, but a fair amount of the pleasure is just hearing two guys who were never lacking in confidence in their playing days still enjoying what badasses they were. Here's a little bit from Gibson, who might have brought more style and intensity to the mound than any pitcher ever, that evokes how a ruthlessly competitive all-time great thought about his journeyman peers:
Even the good pitchers make bad pitches, and plenty of them. I couldn't count how many bad pitches I'd make in the course of a game. I'd guess maybe twenty, twenty-five a game, and that's not counting the ones that are so wild and far out of the strike zone that nobody can get the bat on them anyway.
Now, of those twenty-five, it's really hard to say how many will actually get hit hard. Some you get away with, some you don't. It depends on who you're missing to. The bad hitters, the guys who hit .250, are the ones who come in and say, "Aw, man, I just missed that!" It was a bad pitch and he missed it. He was given a better chance than he had any reason to believe he'd get, and he comes in complaining that he missed it, like he almost had me. He'll get a ball that he's supposed to hit 400 feet and he'll hit it 320, nice and easy, right to the left fielder, and come back to the dugout and make a little scene and swear he just missed it. He'll do that a lot.
As with the Joe Pernice quote I celebrated yesterday, it's the last line that really kills me. Sixty Feet, Six Inches comes out on September 22. --Tom
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