Batting Titles Still Matter

I used to think, just a few years ago, that one day I would try to write an essay about Sammy Sosa in the vein of John Updike’s famous essay about Ted Williams for The New Yorker. There can be no argument that Updike’s essay, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” stands atop the collection of literary baseball journalism. To write this way is to freeze a moment that stands on its own merits but is yet framed -- enhanced -- by its place in baseball’s tradition. It is to be aware of when a moment is soon to become part of History, and as such to dwell on it longer than usual while it remains fresh.

First from Updike, the History:

“For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers' dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.”

Then, the moment:

“Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.



Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.



Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”

Updike writes in such a way that we feel as though this moment is fiction because it would take an author in control of a world to orchestrate such a hit. For Williams to execute his final at-bat so perfectly defied the odds, and baseball is nothing if it is not a game of odds -- “dispassionate mathematics,” Updike calls them. More than this though, Updike’s essay demonstrates how much our thinking about the game of baseball has changed.



Updike does not have to sensationalize, exaggerate, or in any other way treat the moment in the manner that I imagine today’s sports media would. It is not compared to any other moments, and is not said to have any larger ramifications of any sort. It is not part of a feature about the "Ten Greatest Final At-bats in Baseball History." Updike simply captures a hit as it was, having given us its context with respect to Williams career, and then he leaves it to stand on its own merits as "one of the times" that something like this will happen. Very few individual sports achievements are treated this way nowadays.



I bring this up because almost half way into the season, Derrek Lee has positioned himself to win a batting title. In my version of being a Cubs fan, this is a bigger deal than when Sosa won a homerun title. In fact, winning a batting title still means more to me than any other title a hitter can achieve. Figuring a triple-crown is impossible because RBI opportunities don’t appear often enough for him, I would rather see Lee take the batting crown than any of the other categories. Yet, I have yet to hear anyone talk about the batting title in its own right.



I get the impression that most people -- I mean, sophisticated baseball fans -- think that batting average is overrated. In the middle of the pack, I can’t disagree. Among the middle 90% of batting averages (excepting the 5% at either fringe), other statistics like on-base percentage and slugging percentage probably do better gauge a player’s value. Yet, on the outer edge, I think batting average still represents who is the best among the best hitters.



In the last few years, championships have become the most important thing to the players, at least if you believe the way that they talk. Players join teams in order to win a championship, this being the paramount accomplishment. This worked for guys like Schilling and a team like the Red Sox. I wonder if the progression is such that now that players are so exceptionally wealthy, wealth no longer helps them distinguish themselves from each other. Records or statistics fail to help them judge because we hear people inquire as to what good stats are if they don’t help your team win the championship. (Robert Horry is the most recent guy to cash in on a corollary to this line of thinking to become bigger than he should.) A championship matters most. Moreover, the sensationalist media perpetuates this idea, playing to what they realize attracts our attention.



In other words, what’s so big about a batting crown, if your team doesn’t win the championship?



It comes down to this: “the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.” One cannot win a batting title without taking care to try to hit as well as possible every at-bat. It still matters. It’s an individual achievement, and thus a mark of an excellent individual.



I wonder whether championship glorification is sustainable in baseball because if fans accept its premise they will not follow a team for 162 games if they do not have a chance to win a pennant. Yet, already Major League Baseball continues to take steps to try to help perpetuate the idea that any team (other than perhaps the Royals) can win one of these years. MLB has helped develop the premise that championships matter most, and that parity in the league affords every team an opportunity -- it's not impossible -- even if opportunities are somewhat unequal.



That the premise is already deeply accepted among fans is evident in the general approval of the Wild Card, that great democratic idea -- everyone gets a chance! -- imposed on a meritocratic institution. As Wild Card teams continue to win the World Series, hope spreads laterally across wider fan bases in August. Similarly, on an individual level, fans don’t care as much about strikeouts. If only championships matter, huge strikeout totals don’t matter as long as a hitter still helps a team win. We judge players and teams alike only by ends that teams achieve through whatever methods work.



When we read Updike’s essay, we see that it wasn’t always like this.



I don’t mean to suggest that championships don’t matter. There’s nothing in baseball that I would like more than to see the Cubs win the World Series -- much more than to see Lee win a batting crown. It’s just that the gap is not so wide for me as it seems to be for other fans. I can’t shake the impression that we can best celebrate a championship if it’s captured by players like Lee who approach every at-bat with supreme concentration and ability, and seem to do so because they enjoy doing it for its own sake. I don’t suppose we’ll ever see so pure a championship team as that, but having even a few guys like this on your team helps you remember that the right approach still matters. It’s about more than a championship being special because of the exceptional players who win it, though. Appreciating baseball itself depends on appreciating these players when they have such a season.



Plenty of players say that they would play for free because they love the game that much, but very few demeanors bear this out. Yet, when you look at the players who have won batting titles in the era of huge salaries, playing as well as possible for its own sake is the common trait that distinguishes them. Excepting perhaps Barry Bonds in recent years, these guys do seem to love their craft -- hitting -- as much as possible. That’s why I still care about the batting title, because it helps us identify those few guys who excel at something they care about so passionately for an entire season. No other hitting statistic does this. Last September, I saw Ichiro Suzuki get 5 hits in a game at U.S. Cellular Field. You could tell that Ichiro was concentrating as much as he would if the Mariners (or the White Sox) were playing a game that mattered in the ‘postseason’ sense. Batting title winners play as though every game matters. In this, combined with their ability, they are rare, and they are exceptional.



I thought early this season that we were seeing something special unwind with Derrek Lee in 2005. He started out on a hot streak, but he didn’t act like a hitter on a streak. Hitters on a streak appear anxious to hit presumably because they want to ride the streak as quickly as they can. Lee acted like a hitter who was ready every at-bat rather than anxious. He still does, which is why I’m excited for his batting crown chase.



I hope Lee helps the Cubs catch the Cardinals, win the pennant, and win the World Series. If the Cubs do not, though, I hope Lee continues hitting successfully with his approach because if he does, then he will enable me to remember this season as the first season in my recollection where the best hitter in the league played for the Cubs. Championship or no, that counts for something. And if it's part of a championship, even better.