It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt
In the movie “Moneyball,” Peter Brand, a baseball analyst played by Jonah Hill, has a mantra for the type of player his team covets. “He gets on base,” Brand says when his boss points at him.
The movie, like the Michael Lewis book upon which it is based, is about the rise of sabermetrics in Major League Baseball. It is the story of a group of outsiders who take on the baseball establishment by following a core belief rooted in an expression you can hear at any Little League game: A walk is as good as a hit.
But what if they did not go far enough? If a walk is as good as a hit, and a hit-by-pitch is essentially a one-pitch walk — a base on ball, if you will — then it stands to reason that a hit-by-pitch is as good as a hit, with a little danger mixed in to spice things up.
The math of the strategy is easy enough to explain. But it can be hard to sell the idea to players who are risking their health — and their livelihoods — every time they stand in the way of a 96-mile-per-hour fastball. Just ask Pete Alonso, the Mets first baseman, who is leading the majors in home runs but was placed on the injured list on Friday with a bone bruise he sustained by taking a heater from Charlie Morton off his left wrist during a game last week.
Source: The New York Times
