In perusing old magazines ferreting unusual sports stories that might be topics on my Tip-Off sports radio show, I found an interesting quote from the New York Mets’ recently hired hitting coach, Kevin Long.
Mind you now, Long had yet to be released by the Yankees and hired by the Mets when he made his comments to Tom Verducci in a piece the noted baseball journalist penned for Sports Illustrated. Even so, Long’s quote got me wondering if we might see some some nuances to the Mets batting philosophy once Long begins to work with Met hitters altering a hitting approach that has generated much heated debate in recent years.
The main theme in Verducci’s piece was the impact a horde of young flame throwing relief pitchers had on the game of baseball during the regular season in 2014 and predicting how that impact might even be more pronounced in the post season. With that backdrop, here’s what Long had to say.
“You really have to rethink you’re hitting philosophy. It used to be that you wanted to take pitches and get the starter’s pitch count up so you could get into the other team’s bullpen. Now if you do that, chances are you’re going to see a better arm coming out of the bullpen, and it’s one after another. I mean look at Andrew Miller. Wow. He’s so nasty, do you want to see him? It seems every team has two, three, four guys with nasty stuff they can go to.”
The ‘used to be’ philosophy Long was referring to sounds an awful lot like the prevailing hitting ideology in Flushing over the last few years. Will Long espouse a different outlook this Spring with the Mets? Is it possible the Mets might turn their hitters loose early in the count in certain situations or with certain batters at the plate in the early innings of contests? Could driving in runs rather than on-base-philosophy become a new standard in the batting approach Long brings to the Mets?
It’s food for thought that lends support to an evolving hitting approach. Verducci packs his piece with pitching and batting stats from 2014 that demonstrate the dominance the guys on the hill had over the boys at the plate. Here are a few.
- Getting a base hit was more difficult in 2014 than in any previous year since 1972.
- Runs per game reached lows not seen since before 1976.
- For the ninth year in a row this year’s strikeouts total reached a record high.
- Complete games happened rarely, only once in every 41.2 starts. The ratio last year for the Mets was one complete game per every 162 contests with Zack Wheeler recording the only complete game of the season.
You get the picture. It was not difficult for Verducci to build a case that the way teams are using pitchers in the modern game has changed dramatically, thus altering the balance between pitchers and batters with pitchers becoming more and more dominant every baseball campaign.
With flame throwing relief pitchers now a major part of today’s pitching dominance, should teams adapt their hitting philosophies as Kevin Long suggests? We’ll see.
