The reunion of the class of 1965 was May 29 at the VFW in downtown Lincoln and inside, the first person I saw was Royce Oppliger. In the early ’60s, he was a standout pitcher in Kansas K-18 Cookie baseball, and later a star left-hander on our American Legion team.
Royce’s power was leveraged with intelligence. Tall, lanky, and deceptively slope-shouldered, he stood on the mound with a curious air of sadness and futility, as though something terrible had happened and he couldn’t talk about it. He had two basic pitches, curve and fastball, and he threw them with precision and shrewdness, his mission more to outwit the hitter than overpower him.
At our reunions, he is always quiet, stoic, ever tall and fit. He has lived for years on productive farm land west of Lincoln.
We talked of our baseball years. “Did you ever lose a game?” I asked him.
He put his eyes down, paused: “I don’t think so.”
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A week later, on June 5, TV had a game between the Mets and Padres, teams at the top of their national league divisions. The opposing pitchers were the Mets’ Jacob deGrom with baseball’s lowest ERA (0.62) and the Padres’ Joe Musgrove, who had thrown the season’s first no-hitter.
Musgrove, whose power doesn’t quite match deGrom’s, baffled the Mets; deGrom began with 100 mph fastballs and never let up. At the end of three innings the game was scoreless. The pitchers’ duel began to end in the 5th inning. Mets hitters began to time their swings to Musgrove’s pitches; deGrom struck out 11 over seven innings, allowed just one walk and three hits. The Mets won, 5-2.
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The professional baseball game has devolved into two acts. The first opens with ritual feuding that lasts until the starting pitchers fade in the fifth or sixth inning at their 90 or 100-pitch limit. Relievers are summoned from the bullpen, one after another, for act II: the battle between power hurlers and power hitters.
Dave Sheinin, a Washington Post sports reporter, believes the game has lost refinement. “It’s always been a game of nuance,” he says. “You’re losing things like the stolen base, the bunt, the hit and run play. A lot of strategy and nuance is lost from the game when it’s only power versus power.”
Power pitch vs. power swat. In April there were 1092 more strikeouts than hits, the largest monthly gap in major league history.
In the 1980s, the game averaged nine strikeouts per game. Now there are 18 or 20. This year deGrom threw a record 48 strikeouts in his first four starts, then tied Nolan Ryan’s record of 59 for the first five starts. On May 13, The Brewers’ Corbin Burnes set another record, striking out 58 hitters between walks.
Aroldis Chapman, the Yankees’ closer, struck out 29 in the first 12 innings he pitched this year.
Hitters are groomed to hit homers and no longer care if they strike out. The baseball industry encourages this.
Velocity? Through mid-May, more than 400 pitches had been recorded at 100-plus miles an hour. In all of the 2008 season – the first year of tracking pitch speeds – there were 214. In ten years the average fastball speed has increased by five mph, to 94.
The game is about brawn, not brains.
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To experience something like a professional fastball, find a local tennis star. Stand at the end of the court with a bat and try to hit a 95 or 100 mph serve.
Striking out was once a mark of shame. It carried the specter of failure, embarrassment, disappointment. Today, Mighty Casey is apt to whiff or take a third one over the plate, then walk away calmly, as though someone in the dugout had announced dinner was ready.
In 2014 the Orioles’ Chris Davis, a power hitter, struck out 100 times in 64 games, a record for the fewest games needed to get 100 strikeouts. Five years later, in 2019 ( the last full 162-game season), 171 major leaguers struck out 100 times.
Hitters once wanted only to put the ball in play. So did pitchers. Only a few hitters then – Aaron, McCovey and Stargell, and later the Jacksons (Reggie and Bo) came to the plate with homers first in mind. For others, the home run was a bonus.
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Royce Oppliger did not throw a 100 mph fastball, but he could knock a can off a fence post at 80 or 85. It was thrilling to watch his pitches slicing up the plate, hitters swatting at his elusive pellets. Nuance? Oppliger’s catcher, Jimmy Pierce, could throw no-look darts to first base, picking off careless runners. This was baseball not for power, but for fun.
