The Year of the Pitcher

Dead ball? Atomic testing? Some subtle, seven-year cycle? Explanations whiz in like so many screwballs, but the fact remains: it's a pitcher's year. Latter-day Fellers are joining the 20-game Winners Club as if it were the Kiwanis, and what used to be a charmed circle is turning into a vast roundup. Last week four more pitchers followed the Los Angeles Dodgers' Sandy Koufax, this year's charter member, into the club,*and at least eight others are about to ask for membership cards.

With three weeks of the regular season still to go, the year of the pitcher is already so well established that most fans follow the gloomy batting averages and the paltry home-run statistics with little more than morbid fascination. Only four batters in the American League are hitting over .300, not a single Yankee is among the top ten, and guess who's leading the Yankee-eclipsed league in home runs? Somebody named Dick Stuart of the Boston Red Sox, with 36. The team batting average of the National League-leading Dodgers this year is .251; last year at this time it was 21 points higher.

Even serious baseball men have tak en to blaming it all on the weather. "The flags have been blowing inwards here at Cleveland Stadium," moans the Indians' President Gabe Paul. "And it's the same in other ball parks. When the pitcher has the breeze at his back, he figures he doesn't have to hold back, and he doesn't walk so many men." There are the old arguments about light and dark ("too many night games"; "too many day games") that seem to cancel each other out, and the usual deprecation of younger-generation hitters, which loses force when recent home-run binges are recalled.

Most to the point is the simple fact that the strike zone this year is bigger than last. Pitchers trained to hit the bull's-eye can now hit the first ring and still have it count; umpires have had to liberalize their standards for called strikes. "The batter," says Cincinnati Pitcher Jim O'Toole, "doesn't take as many pitches, and he's swinging at more bad ones, so there are fewer walks."

Chances are the pitchers will not have it all their own way for long. After this season of adjustment, batters should adapt to the new strike zone; and when its novelty wears off, pitchers will probably find it just as hard to hit as the old one. The ball could liven up, the nuclear test ban could clear the air, the wind might shift, and 1964 could be the year of the batter.

*Chicago Cubs' Dick Ellsworth, New York Yankees' Whitey Ford, Cincinnati Reds' Jim Maloney and San Francisco Giants' Juan Marichal.

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