Thursday, August 11, 2022

60 YEARS AGO/111: THE MAN YOU HIT MIGHT COME BACK TO BITE YOU...

Don Drysdale (1936-1993) is in the Hall of Fame in part due to his pitching accomplishments--209 wins, a Cy Young Award season in '62 (the very year we're profiling), a strikeout pitcher (six years with 200+, three years leading the league)--and in part due to the afterglow of the Koufax Dodgers and their three NL pennants in four years (1963, 1965, 1966). 

It should be noted that "second-generation" sabermetricians (the ones we've called neo-sabes...) were mostly united in their hostility to Koufax, whose short career didn't accumulate enough of the type of counting stats they fetishized, while many were partial to Drysdale, in part because Big D was an excellent hitting pitcher, which fed into their predilections.

A look at the Hall of Fame voting history shows that Don also benefitted from a lull in strong candidates at the time he was on the ballot (beginning in 1975). Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford had gone in together the year before, and the only other strong candidates on the ballot that year were Robin Roberts (third year, just missing induction with 73% of the vote, enshrined in '76) and Eddie Mathews (second year, with 41%, elected in '78 after Ernie Banks had gone in on the first try in '77).

In 1977 Don reached 51% of the vote, and he would plateau in the 50s-low 60s for the next five years, as players with more juice (Willie Mays in '79, Al Kaline in '80, Bob Gibson in '81, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson in '82, and Brooks Robinson and Juan Marichal in '83) pushed past him into the Hall. (All of these player were first-year inductees save for Marichal, who went in on the third try.) In '83 Don's percentage went up to 65%, placing him behind Harmon Killebrew (72%) and Luis Aparicio (67%), and dead even with Hoyt Wilhelm, the first relief pitcher to gain serious consideration for enshrinement. 

And, in 1984, there were no new candidates at all for the Hall of Fame. There was no shiny new face to distract the voters, so they cleared the decks and inducted Killebrew, Aparicio and Drysdale, with Wilhelm and Lou Brock (first time on the ballot) following them in 1985. 

It's odd to note that Drysdale got the fewest votes of the three '84 inductees--and odder to note that it was Aparicio who got the highest percentage. All of which suggests some tidal pull from the mid-60s Dodger mythos: after all, who else was there to put into the Hall from that team? (Some folks now have the idea that Willie Davis is a viable candidate; he did amass a lot of hits. But to paraphrase Bill James, if Willie is a Hall of Famer, then we are all bags of Purina Dog Chow.) The "Koufax and Drysdale" tandem clearly was first and foremost in the team's success...and Drysdale looked like a Hall of Famer out there, big and affable--but also surly when he needed to be, and--now we will unbury our lede--willing to knock as many guys down as necessary to claim home plate for himself. (The voters may have been slightly worried that if they snubbed him for fifteen years, he might round them all up, push them into the batters box and then knock them down, one by one.)

So--finally--we slip out of the Hall and out into the jungle, where the headhunters live. Just how much of a headhunter was Big D, anyway? He and Jim Bunning were the prime hunters of the 60s, far ahead of anyone else: Don led the league in his first four years in Los Angeles (possibly showing off a bit for his hometown fans) and reached double figures in hit batsmen ten times out of his twelve full seasons. 

But we need another type of measure to zero in on intent: some pitchers hit pitchers because they're just wild. So we've devised a new ratio from pitcher stats to help us measure that--it involves taking hit batsmen and walks and putting them into the same statistical continuum. We do that by adjusting them to the rate of 100 IP--so, instead of looking at walks per nine innings, we look at walks (and hit batsmen) per 100 IP.

Then we have them in the same proportion, and we can divide one ratio by the other ratio. The higher the percentage of HBP/100 IP to BB/100 IP we find, the more fierce the headhunter is, because the guy with better control is clearly capable of putting the ball exactly where he wants to go--or, at least, is able to do so with a lot more precision. Which doesn't prove intent, but it brings it right into the same zip code.

This "headhunter" list (above right) lists the pitchers with the highest HBP 100/BB 100 ratios (a minimum of 1500 lifetime IP required--we want headhunters with staying power). It's an intriguing list, because it includes pitchers from the deadball era up to the present, including the possibly astonishing discovery that Chris Sale and Charlie Morton could've been a deadly duo for a franchise overly imbued with machismo. (It's also interesting to see Pedro Martinez high on this list.)

By this measure, Big D comes in at #14, a fact that is not surprising but might be disappointing for some, such as Don himself, and good old Joe P., who just finished mythologizing about Drysdale's penchant for the brushback/knockdown in yet another glibber-than-glib blog post. (While Joe can prowl through the records at Forman et fils with the best of 'em, the question still boils down to intent--are we educating, or titillating? For reasons that he probably can't quite explain even in full faux-confessional mode, Joe just can't quite figure out where one leaves off and the other begins.)

What's educational about this, in fact, actually applies to an actual game that actually mattered in an actual pennant race--and that actually happened in (you guessed it...) 1962. And actually happened on August 11, 1962, in San Francisco, when the Dodgers (with Big D on the mound) were embroiled in a showdown game with a team chasing them for the pennant.

In the first inning, the Dodgers scored three runs on a homer from Tommy Davis that followed a HBP (little Billy Pierce hitting Willie Davis). The Dodgers and Drysdale worked hard to hold that lead, but the Giants were a relentless bunch at the plate; in the fourth, Willie Mays doubled to lead off the inning. Drysdale went to throwing heat, with intermittent results: he fanned Orlando Cepeda, but he left a 1-1 pitch to Felipe Alou out over the plate; Alou singled in Mays. Big D then struck out Tom Haller, but his 2-2-2 pitch to Jim Davenport was too fat and the Giants' third baseman smacked it up the right-center gap to the wall for a double, scoring Alou. Drysdale stomped around on the mound a bit, walked Jose Pagan on four pitches, and then fanned Pierce to end the inning--but the Giants had cut the lead to 3-2.

Fast forward to the bottom of the sixth (a deadly inning for the Dodgers the night before) with the score unchanged. Felipe Alou doubled to lead off the inning. After fanning Haller again, Drysdale's 0-1 pitch hits Davenport. (Was Big D paying back Davenport for his double in the fourth? Did he figure that putting him on base that way simply created a force at any base?) 

Davenport was injured seriously enough that he not only left the game at that point, but missed the next couple of weeks as a result. When he came back later in the month, he wasn't the same hitter he'd been up to that point. He never had another season even close to what he'd been doing up that point in 1962. Of course, we'll never really know if Drysdale intended to hit Davenport, but a headhunter does what a headhunter must. (Contrast this, though, to Sandy Koufax, a pitcher notoriously wild in his early days, who hit 18 batters in his career, as opposed to Drysdale's total of 154.)

But actions--and hit batsmen--have consequences. That extra man on base permitted Giants manager Al Dark to bat for his pitcher in the inning with two on and two out. The man that came up to the plate, after Jose Pagan had struck out, was Willie McCovey--who hit a 3-2 pitch from Drysdale over the right-field fence for a three-run homer. (Final score: Giants 5, Dodgers 4.)

SEASON RECORDS: LAD 79-39, SFG 75-42