About one of every six pitches is hit out of play—inert, a do-over, a mentally discarded blip as the ball shanked foul is discarded into the stands. No other sport includes this regular pileup of outcomes empty of conclusive results.Another unique element: when a foul ball reaches the seats, the game breaks the fourth wall. Only in baseball does the action penetrate the crowd so routinely. And it is no easy action: catching a foul pop-up barehanded stings, and a screaming line drive into the seats can kill you. Most people at Durham Bulls Athletic Park don’t pay much attention to the game, at their own risk.
I recently started taking more notice of foul balls, tracking them on my score sheet along with all the other subparticulars I habitually tally: balls and strikes; first-pitch strikes; total pitches thrown per inning and per pitcher, broken down by balls and strikes; total swings; and swings-and-misses. There are plenty of reasons for this extensive annotation, but mainly it keeps me tuned into the action, pitch by pitch. (...)
Foul balls require more than just extra pitches; they also make pitchers expend more mental energy. When a hitter fouls off a pitch, he disrupts the rhythm of the pitcher, who has to watch and wait out the flight of the ball into the blurry periphery, and then wait again for the umpire to give him a new one—which he has to inspect, rub up, and so on. Pitchers can be finicky about the ball itself and will sometimes reject the one they’re given. (...)
From a wider perspective, fouls can help explain a pitcher’s overall work. Steve Geltz relieved Colome and threw a nine-pitch seventh inning. There were three foul balls—a high proportion, but not for him. Among Bulls pitchers, Geltz’s foul-ball rate is the highest, 23 percent. In the roughly average four-pitch at-bat, one of his pitches will be hit foul. Geltz relies on a fastball that seems to rise as it approaches the plate, partially because he’s short and doesn’t generate much downward plane. The high fastball is one of the easiest pitches for hitters to read: it stays at eye level longer and it’s very inviting to swing at. But located correctly, up at the top of the strike zone or just above it, it’s very hard to hit solidly. (“Chocolate mousse,” a Durham Bulls hitter once called them, because “it looks so good but it’s so bad for you.”) The result is a high rate of balls fouled up in the air, straight back or into the bleachers. Although Geltz doesn’t throw anywhere near as hard as Colome does, he gets even more strikeouts, not by pitch velocity or movement but by forcing hitters to foul off those tempting, almost taunting, high fastballs until finally they just miss one—which they are likely to do eventually if Geltz hits his target. (He’s kind of like the guy sitting in the dunking machine at the fair, daring you to sink him from sixty feet away.) Foul balls are probably not a deliberate part of Geltz’s strategy, but they are nonetheless essential to his success.
by Adam Sobsey, Paris Review | Read more:
Photo by Kate Joyce.
