My Friend Ron: Baseball Memories

by Samuel Hux (December 2017)

 

I have a radical theory in support of a conservative view of a game. Aware that this journal is out of both Nashville, Tennessee and London, England, I alert the Brits and others of the Empire and the erstwhile colonies that the game I speak of is not that incomprehensible phenomenon called cricket, but rather The Game, baseball that is. If some of the terminology, rules, and names I discuss are unfamiliar to you non-American culturally deprived, then join the likes of me as when a dear Jamaican pal talks about that thing you do with a wicket.

 

Most baseball purists claim that the Designated Hitter rule instituted by the American League in 1973 is an abomination because one of the nine, the pitcher, does not bat, thus radically altering the game as it was designed by its wise founders and allowed to evolve. This is nonsense. When the professional game began in 1876, the standard batting average was around .260 (including the pitchers’). That .260 or so has remained consistent ever since, no matter the occasional explosive season—for position players that is! Pitchers’ batting averages, however, began to fall, noticeably and then drastically: .224 by 1893, .177 by 1913, and by 1972, the year before the DH rule, .148. Why? My theory which I call “precedential expectation” holds that players learn to do what they are expected to do (given athletic talent and within physical possibility), and that progressively pitchers were allowed to become defensive specialists and not expected to be good hitters and eventually therefore became lousy hitters. (This radical notion is explained at probably exhaustive depth in another essay, and very convincingly I modestly assert.)

 

  

  

I met Ron during the 1970s. When my sister and brother-in-law moved from Long Island to Florida at the end of the decade, and I moved briefly to Spain and then to Connecticut, the connection was broken, although my sister and her husband kept in touch with Ron and his wife Donna until the end. The details of his death, slim though they be, I got from Donna by way of my sister. Heart trouble and other attendant horrors drove Ron to the hospital for treatments and ultimately for hospice-like care. There is some suggestion from my sister of medical carelessness, about which I cannot draw any educated conclusions except to note that my sister says that one physician “cursed the hospital out” for Ron’s quick and then irreversible decline. In any case, the physician finally told the family that Ron, in a great deal of pain mental and physical, was alive without any hope because he seemed to be hanging on for all he was worth—that it would be best for him if he could just let go. A sister-in-law, with Ron’s wife’s approval, entered his room and whispered to him something like “Ron honey, you have been a fighter all your life, but it is time to relax and let it happen, time to let go.” I’m not sure whether she was merely thinking out loud or expected to be heard. In any case, Ron opened his eyes, said “Bull shit!” and died. The way I put it is that he died like a Yankee.

  

For over thirty years (I don’t know why I never told him this), Ron was a “character” in a lecture I gave whenever I offered a particular philosophy course in which one session was devoted to the human effort to overcome the impossible (or at any rate what is judged to be a statistical impossibility). As an example, I talked about Joe DiMaggio’s 1941 streak of hitting safely in 56 straight ballgames, knowing I would have the attention of some students. About how hitting a baseball—which seems such a normal thing to do given the fact (which once upon a time was a fact) that all American boys, and some girls, did it—was perhaps the hardest feat to accomplish in sports with any real consistency, since even the best hitters will fail 70% of the time. (In basketball, for instance, a player who sank only 30% of his shots would not be considered one of the best shooters, indeed would be kicked off the squad.) About how the task is even harder if one is trying to hit major league pitching. About how given these truths, DiMaggios’s streak was an overcoming of the statistically impossible, and so on. And to cap things off, to give some authoritative heft to my lecture, I let the students know that I know what I am talking about because (with personal details) I used to catch the ex-Yankee pitcher, Ron Klimkowski, and “I can tell you that a major league fastball is one hell of a missile.”

  

  

His won-lost record of 8-12 is irrelevant for a reliever. And in any case the W-L can be misleading, depending as it often does on luck—meaning presence or absence of offensive and/or defensive support. (In 1936 Van Lingle Mungo with the Brooklyn Dodgers led the league with 238 strike outs and won 18 while losing 19.) Ron’s ERA tells the truer story: 2.90. For the Yankees, it was 2.76. But even ERA can have its limitations as a measurement: scatter enough base hits or walks over nine innings (hell, let’s say 10 or 12) in such a dispersal that rarely is a runner in scoring position, and you’re home free.
 

But there is one statistic that cannot mislead, one which surprisingly is not often talked about, but which I think is the best measure of a pitcher’s effectiveness: Assume a pitcher is not generous with bases on balls (and Ron walked a man only about once every third inning), how often was he hit? What was the collective batting average against him (AVG or BAA)? The league’s batting average against Ron Klimkowski was a puny .224. Two twenty four! Let me put this in context. There are over 70 pitchers in the Hall of fame. Only six have lower AVGs than Ron: Addie Joss by one point, Nolan Ryan at .204, Sandy Koufax at .205, Hoyt Wilhelm at .216, Ed Walsh at .218, and (wouldn’t you know it!?!) Babe Ruth at .220. With slightly higher AVGs than Ron were Tom Seaver at .226, Walter Johnson at .227, and Bob Gibson, Goose Gossage, and Rube Waddell at .228. You could look it up. (And you would be surprised at how many greats were in the .250s and even higher.)

 

My beloved Yankees let him go too soon. Of course .224 in only four years is not definitive, but if your head is screwed on right you don’t say “His .224 is only for four years [assuming you’ve noticed it at all] so let’s let him go.” My damned Yankees let him go too soon. I wish I had asked Ron whose decision it was. General Manager Lee McPhail? Manager Ralph Houk? It’s hard to believe an old catcher would be oblivious to a pitcher’s strengths. I’d like to think it was a move by Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, man of erratic opinions, who justified the trade of Jay Buhner to Seattle for Ken Phelps in 1988 by explaining that Phelps could play a little first base (where Don Mattingly was installed) and DH (the Yanks had Jack Clark for that task) and besides could spell Willie Randolph at second (Phelps was left handed!). I prefer it that the ridiculous perform the ridiculous.      

 

Of course it could also be said that Ron was damaged goods by the end of his time in New York . . . with a bum knee. But a knee—given orthopedic technology—need not be fatal to a pitcher, who after all would not be running bases. His arm, his right arm, was still a canon. I know.

 

My mitt is chest high. Ron winds up. The ball is in the pocket of the mitt. I never saw it. Only a blur. Three or four inches either way it might have killed me. Shaken, but covering it up, I toss the mitt to Ron. “That’s enough for today old buddy. Let’s have a beer.”

  

I would like to claim a terrible irony in the Yankees letting Ron go with the coming of the DH on the grounds that he could swing a bat. His first year in Class A ball he hit a productive .269 with 5 doubles and 7 runs-batted-in in 52 at-bats. Once in Triple A he hit .286. But—you know what I’m going to tell you—he learned how not to. With New York and Oakland he batted .091. So my late friend Ron—whom the Yankees never should have let go as a pitcher—provides an argument for the DH. For the installation of the DH rule, I mean, not a justification for the release of Ron Klimkowski, who as a pitcher was—the statistics do not lie—exceptionally hard for batters to touch. I wish sports historians had a proper sense of who and what my old friend was. My God!—.224. Did no one know?

 

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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.
 

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