Baseball's Worst Cliché

When I am king, one of my first acts will be to create a law that permanently eradicates the expression "a good piece of hitting" from the baseball announcer's lexicon. Millions of Americans who now can't watch baseball games on television without hurling heavy items toward the screen will, under my gentle reign, find themselves able to watch without committing acts of violence. My line will rule for a thousand years.

Until I ascend to the throne, I will have to content myself with trying to puzzle out the unwritten criteria that differentiate a good piece of hitting from one that is not. I imagine the whole thing is like a piece of very basic computer software, the kind I was taught how to program in grade school, essentially a flowchart dependent on a variety of binary conditionals.

If you think about it at all, for instance, you immediately recognize that Derek Jeter is capable of a good piece of hitting, while Alex Rodriguez is not. David Wright rips off good pieces of hitting like a neighborhood godfather peeling $20 bills off his bankroll to hand to kids making bodega runs for him, but Carlos Delgado has rarely, if ever, been accused of having committed a good piece of hitting. It's probably possible to work backward from the sort of player capable of a good piece of hitting to arrive at a definition of the thing itself, but it might be better to work forward — difficult as it is to extricate the player from the act.

A good piece of hitting cannot be a home run or a solidly hit double down the line. It cannot be a bouncer, bleeder, trickler, or any other sort of hit that has eyes or relies on the misadventures of the defense. It must be hit well, but not too well, and preferably it should go the opposite field.

It isn't just the character of the hit itself that defines a good piece of hitting, though, as the game situation plays its role as well. No hitting done by someone whose team is up by 10 runs will ever be said to be a good piece; the game should ideally be tight in order for the piece of hitting to be good. On the other hand, it's possible to imagine a piece hit by someone whose team is down by 10 runs being hit well, although probably only if there are no outs and he's at the front end of a rally. "That was a good piece of hitting," the announcer will say, while we watch the player taking off his gloves at first, clapping his hands, and exhorting his teammates to keep on with the charge.

Even granting the right outcome, the right situation, and the right sort of at-bat, though, it does need to be the right sort of hitter for a baseball announcer to bestow the desirable label on a hit. He obviously can't be a pure power hitter; Jason Giambi's pieces of hitting have been good dozens if not hundreds of times in his years with the Yankees, but his batting average is just too low for anyone to characterize the pieces as good. A bit less obviously, he ideally can't be too good a hitter; Jeter and Wright are eminently capable of the solid piece, but Luis Castillo and Mark DeRosa are far more capable than either. The hitter does have to be at least a solid hitter, preferably a good regular with a reputation for heady play, though as with all rules there are exceptions. A utility infielder who never hits a home run but keeps his average above .270 might be capable of the good piece of hitting, but one who hit .220 with a lot of home runs will certainly not be. Catchers generally are completely incapable of the solid piece.

All of these conditionals are, I think, unassailably true. Given a list of two dozen players, any serious baseball fan could class them within five minutes into those capable of a good piece of hitting and those not. Just picture several Seattle Mariners, and call to mind the dulcet tone of a baseball announcer. Between Ichiro Suzuki, Adrian Beltre, Richie Sexson, and Jose Vidro, whose hits are most likely to be solid pieces? Whose are least likely? You know the answer; you don't even have to consider it.

If you think about these patterns at all, they make complete sense, and even fulfill a strict need. There are 750 players on major league rosters; given the turnover in the bottom fifth of most of them, there are more like 900 players a fan or broadcaster needs to keep track of at any given time. No one can do that. It's hard enough to keep track of one team. (Quick, Mets fans, tell me three interesting things about David Newhan.) What we do, then, is classify everyone at a glance into dozens of discrete yet overlapping categories: scrappy white guys, journeymen, faded stars, take and rake sluggers, crafty lefties, and so on.

What's interesting about the good piece of hitting is that it's an act of which, theoretically, anyone should be capable, but which is only attributed to players who fit into a few of these categories that we keep handy so as to impose some order on the confusing welter of hundreds of ballplayers we know nothing about. Categories don't only define people; they define acts. We see, or don't see, what actually happens on the field based on large part on completely unexamined preconceptions.

Baseball's color commentators may annoy, they may drive to distraction, they may at the worst of times give off the impression that they are not men but rather walking automatons reacting in a preprogrammed way to exact conditions — but they do so for reasons with which anyone can sympathize. They may need to never, ever again utter a certain phrase; but they still can't be entirely blamed for what they do.

tmarchman@nysun.com