One At-Bat, 100 Years of Baseball

It is the ninth inning of Friday night’s Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park, and Boston leads 1-0, and the brilliant Garrett Crochet has thrown 100 pitches. The Yankees have not threatened against him all day.

Aroldis Chapman, who still throws 103 mph at age 37, is warm in the bullpen.

Red Sox manager Alex Cora decides to stay with Crochet. Thirty years ago, this move would have felt obvious. Fifty years ago, this would have felt like the only choice.

Today, it feels like a risk.

On July 27, 1965, in Cocoa, Florida, baseball changed forever.

OK, that sounds a lot more dramatic than it needs to be, and it’s not entirely true, but it’s sort of dramatic and sort of true. A Cocoa Astros pitcher named Bruce Von Hoff was pitching a no-hitter against Miami in a Florida State League game when suddenly and shockingly, Cocoa’s manager, Billy Goodman, sent Von Hoff to the showers.

Von Hoff had just thrown his 110th pitch of the game.

Nobody quite knew what to make of this. Who the hell counted pitches?

Answer: Paul Richards counted pitches.

Paul Richards was a former catcher and manager, and a lifelong baseball man, and he was running the Houston Astros organization. He had this notion, a notion deep inside, that young pitchers should have pitch limits placed on them to save their arms. Back in the 1950s, when he managed the Orioles, he insisted that promising teenagers Milt Pappas and Jerry Walker NEVER throw more than 100 pitches in a game.

Pappas, in particular, hated it. But there was nothing he could do about it.

When Richards took over the expansion Houston Colt 45s in 1962 — renamed the Astros three years later — he made that 100-pitch limit for young pitchers an organization-wide law. In fact, he was not happy that Billy Goodman even let Bruce Von Hoff throw those extra 10 pitches to finish off the eighth inning.

Richards’ most famous test case was that of teenage phenom Larry Dierker, who pitched his first big-league game on his 18th birthday. Richards went to great lengths to make sure that Dierker never threw more than 100 pitches. This confused and amused baseball people everywhere.

“When Larry Dierker started pitching for Houston,” Stan Hochman wrote in the Philadelphia Daily News, “they had a guy sitting in the dugout counting his pitches. He’d get to 95, and then 96-97-98-99-bam, out he’d come. It could be the fifth inning or the seventh inning. The score could be 1-1 or 6-2 or 7-3. Out he’d come.”

You can hear the incredulity in Hochman’s words. Most people in the game thought Richards was nuts.

“Hummph!” Gene Mauch harumphed. “Pitchers are ruined by being pampered. Then, when they’re asked to throw hard and throw often in their later years, they’re looking around for help.”

For 30 or so years after the Von Hoff Affair, Mauch’s philosophy mostly won out. There were a few pitch-limit advocates like Whitey Herzog, and all teams did start counting pitches — pitch count became an official MLB stat in 1988 — but for the most part starters kept pitching until they ran out of gas. On October 1, 1989 — in a meaningless late-season game between a bad Dodgers team and an even worse Braves team — Orel Hershiser pitched 11 innings and threw 169 pitches. Hershiser had not won a game in more than two months, and his manager, Tommy Lasorda, really wanted him to get a win to boost his spirits going into the offseason.

That was a lot more important than pitch count in 1989.

But all that changed in the 1990s. In 1996, a survey conducted by the American Sports Medicine Institute recommended that Little League pitchers be limited to around 80 pitches per game. Around that same time, Dr. James Andrews recommended a 100-pitch limit for big-league pitchers. In 2001, Baseball Prospectus’ Rany Jazayerli introduced PAP — Pitcher Abuse Points — to highlight the risk of arm injuries for pitchers who threw too many pitches. And so on. And so on.

And now, of course, the pitch count is everything. A manager MIGHT let a pitcher throw that 101st pitch, but it won’t go much longer than that. In 1998, 498 pitchers threw 120 pitches in a game. In the last two seasons, exactly zero pitchers have.

All of which is why it feels like such a shock when Garrett Crochet stays in the game after throwing his 100th pitch. Crochet is 26 years old, has had Tommy John surgery, and is probably the most important player on the Boston Red Sox. If this was in the playoffs, there’s no way Alex Cora would let him go on. If this was a September game with postseason implications, I doubt Alex Cora would let him go on.

But it’s a Friday night in June, Yankees-Red Sox, full house, and Crochet is just a few pitches away from his first big-league shutout — heck, his first big-league complete game. Cora lets him keep going.

Aaron Judge steps to the plate. He is hitting .387 on the season, which is his lowest batting average since late April. He is on pace for 60 home runs. He has faced Crochet three times today, and he struck out all three times. Judge almost never gets to face a pitcher for the fourth time in a single game; he’s not had this opportunity since 2023.

The question on everybody’s mind: Will Crochet pitch to him?

About 100 years ago, it was widely accepted that the intentional walk was invented by a combative 19th-century baseball character named Patsy Tebeau. There does not seem to be any actual proof of this, and the details of the story could not be much vaguer, but back in those days, anybody could write pretty much anything about the past, and readers would say, “Huh, I guess that’s how that was invented.”

You’ll remember that back in those days, everybody believed that a future Civil War hero, off the top of his head, scraped the rules of baseball in the Cooperstown dirt with a stick.

The Tebeau story may be fuzzy, but it’s also delightful. Ol’ Patsy was a character. Oliver Tebeau was not actually Irish, but he grew up in a hardscrabble Irish neighborhood in St. Louis, and the construction workers took a shine to him and called him Patsy. He was famous in baseball for his willingness — heck, his eagerness — to defy any rule and break any convention in order to win ballgames. He constantly got into fights, including a brutal one with a Cleveland reporter.

Here’s the story: Patsy was managing the Cleveland Spiders at some point in the 1890s, and just about all of his pitchers were hurt, basically making them the Gilded Age Dodgers. However, unlike Dave Roberts, Patsy had one pitcher who could pick up the slack and pitch every day if necessary. That was Cyclone Young.

And on the fateful day, the Spiders’ opponent (unnamed) put a couple of runners on base, and the opponent’s best hitter (also unnamed) came to the plate and Tebeau walked out to the pitcher’s box and told the struggling Cy Young, “Throw him four wide ones and let him go to first.”

Young was confused. “What?”

“Your arm isn’t in good shape today,” Patsy explained. “This fellow is liable to knock the ball out of the lot. You can’t fool him when you are right, so why even try when your arm is bad? Throw four wide ones, so wide that he can’t hit the ball, and take a chance on the next dude.”

That’s right. As the story goes, Patsy called the next batter “dude.”

Then comes my favorite part of the story. The maneuver backfired. The next batter hit a long single that scored two runs. The Cleveland fans booed and hissed, and it seemed that the intentional walk was meant to die before it was even born.

But no, Patsy Tebeau was a stubborn man, and later in the game, the Spiders faced a similar situation, and Tebeau ordered Cy Young to intentionally walk the same hitter. This time, the next batter grounded into a double play, and the fans cheered appreciatively, and soon, in the words of America’s Foremost Sport Writer Frank G. Menke, “the intentional pass became a universal baseball strategy.”

A few years ago, Major League Baseball changed the rule so that a pitcher can now intentionally walk a batter without throwing a pitch. The rule was implemented to save time, which tells you just how bereft of ideas MLB was before the pitch timer.

The consequence of the rule is that fans don’t even get to boo during intentional walks. It happens instantly, silently — the batter just goes to first base before anyone in the stands can react. Stadiums used to be FILLED with boos as the pitcher threw the four wide pitches. It was kind of wonderful.

But now, Crochet doesn’t have to throw a single pitch to Judge. He can just wave Judge on and face Cody Bellinger. He wouldn’t face the boos anyway, because this is Fenway Park. There is no doubt some fans (most fans) hoping he intentionally walks Judge.

But Red Sox catcher Carlos Narváez gets into his crouch.

Crochet is going to pitch to him!

The intentional walk was almost eradicated in 1920. That was our chance! The momentum for getting rid of the IBB was started by an influential and popular umpire named Billy Evans — he’s in the Hall of Fame! — who wrote a widely circulated article "deploring the evil of the intentional pass.”

Evans was only picking up where others had left off. There had been talk for years about ridding baseball of the intentional pass “scourge.” The founder of the American League, Ban Johnson himself, so loathed the IBB that he put together a committee to come up with ways to do away with it. Unfortunately, none of the ideas appealed to him.

“No one has suggested a good method of detecting the intentional walk,” he wrote in 1913.

Seven years later, Evans issued a call to fans: “There is a niche in baseball fame for the person who can offer a real solution for the intentional pass,” he wrote. “There’s no denying the intentional pass robs the game of much of its interest. If you have any thoughts on the matter, Mr. Fan, come fort with them. I’ll be a willing listener.”

Ideas poured in, hundreds of them. Here are a few:

On February 9, 1920, baseball officials from five different leagues met in Chicago in what one wire service called “one of the most notable baseball meetings in sport history.” In all, nineteen rules were amended that day, most of them minor. Two of them were considered major, though, as you can see in these headlines:

Yes, that was the day they outlawed the spitball, which baseball historians have used to mark the end of the Deadball Era. The ending of Deadball is a bit more complicated than that, but certainly the spitball rule played a role.

But, at the time, most people thought the new Intentional Pass rule would be just as consequential. The rule didn’t go nearly as far as the fans’ suggestions to Billy Evans, but the framers felt pretty sure it would end the intentional walk forever.

“It shall be illegal for the catcher to leave his natural position immediately and directly back of the plate for the purpose of aiding the pitcher to intentionally give a base on balls to the batter. If the catcher shall move out of position prior to the time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, all base runners shall be entitled to advance one base.”

That’ll show ‘em!

Nobody had any idea what this rule meant. Some thought it meant that the umpires would have the discretion, based on the catcher’s movement, to stop the intentional walk for good. Others took it much more literally and thought it just meant that catchers had to be behind the plate when the ball was thrown.

And the people who took the rule literally won out. Those of you old enough to remember when pitchers had to throw the IBB pitches will recall that catchers would indeed stand behind home plate with their arms out and not step out until after the pitch was thrown.

So, no, the new rule didn’t do anything.

This infuriated many, including a big galoot who was intentionally walked more than anyone else: Babe Ruth. He “authored” a delightful article under the headline “Ruth Claims It’s A Raw Deal to the Fans to Allow the Intentional Pass.”

“This year, the rule makers gave us a new law which was intended to prevent pitchers from intentionally walking heavy hitters,” he wrote. “But the rule hasn’t worked because the umpires, being human, cannot tell beyond a doubt whether the pitcher is merely wild or is heaving the ball wide with the clear intention of passing the slugger.”

I love every single thing about Ruth’s article. Remember, this was 1920, and Ruth was mashing home runs like no one ever had before.

“You know the fans hold their breath when a slugger comes up to bat with the game on the bags,” Ruth wrote. “The fans want to see an honest test between the pitcher and the hitter. Even if the slugger belongs to the visiting team, the rooters would prefer to have him go down the line to a square conclusion — I have noticed this in every park on the circuit. The St. Louis fans booed their own pitcher for not pitching baseball, and one of the city’s newspapers came out with a headline which said, ‘Pay a Dollar to See Babe Ruth Walk,’” or something like that.”

Ruth railed against the pitchers, who he said already have a two-to-one advantage over even a .300 hitter. “Why should he look for a bigger cinch than that? What more does he want?” he bellowed.

And then he wrote a paragraph so perfect that it actually makes me mad. I’ve been trying for 20 years at least to say something about the intentional walk, and I’ve never been able to say it as well as Babe Ruth (and his ghostwriter) did in 1920:

Yes! Exactly! It’s about competition. It’s about the very core of baseball. Who is better: Me or you? That’s what’s thrilling about our games. People talk about the strategic advantages and disadvantages of the intentional walk, and I just don’t care much about that. Yes, the intentional walk is often used dumbly. Yes, the intentional walk often works, too. Yes, there’s a strong analytical argument to be made that Garrett Crochet should not pitch to Aaron Judge for the fourth time in a 1-0 game.

But don’t you want to know? Isn’t that why we go to games? Isn’t that why we watch? Isn’t that why this sport still matters to us after 150 years?

Crochet and Cora give us this gift. They don’t use the loophole. They don’t walk Judge. Crochet knows what he’s up against. “It’s tough when you’re looking at scouting reports,” he would say, “and the whole thing is bright red.”

Crochet throws a high fastball out of the zone. Judge watches it go by. Smart move by Crochet; you don’t want to give Judge anything to hit on the first pitch. This year, when he connects with the first pitch, Judge is hitting .649. That’s not a misprint. He’s hitting .649 and slugging 1.622 on first pitches.

And this isn’t even all that much out of character. For his whole career, Judge is hitting .440 and slugging .884 on first pitches. Now, yes, that’s a little bit deceiving, because those numbers only count when he puts the ball in play. BUT it’s not THAT deceiving. You don’t want to give Aaron Judge anything he can hit on Pitch 1.

Crochet follows it up with the nastiest cutter imaginable, a 95-mph wasp that attacks Judge’s knees. Judge swings and misses for Strike 1. They’re on even ground now.

Pitch 3 is a fastball that cuts inside, and Judge likes it and swings and cracks it foul down the third base line. He breaks his bat. Judge looks perturbed. At-bats turn on pitches like that — had he let it go, the count would be 2-1 and he’d be in command. Instead, he’s in a hole, 1-2, and even Aaron Judge is a shell of himself when behind in the count.

Crochet tries to get Judge to chase a high fastball. Smart. Pitchers have known since the nineteenth century that if you throw the baseball hard enough, it will rise or jump. Kid Nichols supposedly had a good jump on his fastballs. The ball doesn’t actually jump, no matter how hard you throw it, gravity doesn’t work that way, but a good fastball will give the illusion of rising (it sinks more slowly than you expect) and, let’s be honest, that’s really the same thing. Crochet throws his high heat, and it is too high to hit, and he hopes Judge will swing under it and get himself out.

Judge does not. The count is 2-2.

Pitch 5 is a mistake, a 100-mph middle-middle fastball that Judge fouls off. That was the one. Judge just doesn’t miss middle-middle fastballs, even the triple-digit variety; that’s what separates him from everyone else. But he misses this one, and Crochet breathes out. Judge takes a short walk to clear his mind.

Pitch 6 is another 100-mph fastball, this one a touch inside. Judge lets it go. It’s close enough to make the fans groan and boo, but it’s definitely a ball.

So it’s a full count, Friday night at Fenway Park, ninth inning, the Red Sox leading the Yankees, 1-0, one of the game’s best pitchers still on the mound, one of the all-time greatest hitters at the plate, fans losing their minds, and why would they want to take this from us? Why have the forces of baseball pushed us away from moments like these?

Pitch seven is a 100-mph fastball on the inside edge of the plate.

Aaron Judge hits it to the moon. He hits it over the Green Monster. He hits it over the fans behind the Green Monster. He hits it over Boston. Garrett Crochet stands on the mound shaking his head while Judge runs around the bases.

“They shoulda walked him,” a Red Sox fan friend of mine texts me immediately.

“They shoulda brought in Chapman,” another Red Sox fan friend of mine texts me immediately.

“AARON JUDGE!” A Yankees fan friend of mine texts me immediately.

The Red Sox do go on to win the game, if you care. But do you care? Babe Ruth was right. Winning isn’t all there is to this sport.