How the Homer Took Over

The good folks over at MLB — David, Jason and Tango, of course — sent me all the raw data for a question I’ve been fascinated by:

What percentage of runs are scored on home runs?

You can follow the line above across a bunch of different eras — from Deadball to KBall — and trace the peaks and valleys of the home run as a run-scoring weapon.

I’ve spent way too much time thinking about home runs … specifically, what is the right number of home runs? Of course, there is no universal “right number.” Some people can’t get enough home runs. Some people prefer 1-0 games with sac bunts and double steals. Most people like a little bit of both.

And I think most people probably believe that baseball’s happy place is when home runs are:

• Common enough to provide plenty of thrills.

• Uncommon enough that homers feel rare and special.

The chart gives me insight into my own thinking — I was 9 years old in 1976, which is a very clear low point for the home run. That year, only 23% of all runs were scored on homers. It’s wild. Even in The Year of the Pitcher, 1968, the percentage of runs scored on home runs was significantly higher (28%).

In 1976, only one American League player — Graig Nettles — hit 30 home runs.

The California Angels and St. Louis Cardinals hit 63 home runs AS TEAMS — Bobby Bonds led the Angels with 10 homers, José Cruz’s younger brother Héctor led the Cards with 13.

More than half the teams in baseball did not manage 100 home runs for the season.

MLB freaked out and spiked the baseballs. There’s not really another reasonable explanation for why home run numbers soared the next year. And they did soar. Two teams were added in ‘77, but that wouldn’t explain why more than 1,200 home runs were hit. The ball was most definitely juiced as demonstrated by two pieces of persuasive circumstantial evidence:

1. In 1977, George Foster became the only player between 1966 and 1989 to hit 50 homers in a season.

2. My hero, Duane Kuiper, hit the only home run of his career.

But the point, for me anyway, is that 1976 is coded into my baseball DNA. I knew when we went to Cleveland Municipal Stadium for a game, chances were good that I WOULD NOT see a home run hit by either team.* Home runs were gems of the purest ray serene. I didn’t know, couldn’t know, that 1976 was an outlier, a strange baseball season when, for countless reasons, there were very few home runs.

To me, that felt like what baseball was supposed to be — lots of singles, lots of bunts, lots of sac flies, lots of hitting the ball to the right side of the infield.

I don’t need to tell you that we’re in the opposite place now. We’re in a moment when home runs are EVERYTHING. People will look back to, say, 2001, when Bonds hit the 73 homers and Sammy Sosa hit 64, and five other guys hit 49 or more (including Luis Gonzalez’s 57) and all the rest.

In 2001, 37% of all runs scored via homer—high historically, but not the record and not significantly higher than, say, 1987.

Now, look at the last 10 seasons:

Yep, every one of those years has a higher HR-scoring percentage than 2001.

We all feel this. It’s not a trend. It’s a philosophical shift in baseball. Strikeouts are up, balls in play are down, and pitchers are throwing nastier stuff than ever. How are you going to score runs? Try to string together a few hits? Nah, the league’s hitting .237. Move runners over? Nah, you still need a single or sac fly to knock the run in; singles are at an all-time low, sac flies require making contact.

The only viable and sustainable plan for scoring runs is bashing the baseball over the wall.

This is why I truly believe that fixing what MLB sees as the game’s biggest problems — too many pitchers, too many injuries, the devaluing of starting pitchers — will require looking at things from the hitter’s point of view. Right now, batters feel no choice but to swing for the fences.

A Gift From A Friend

A friend recently gave me an incredibly generous gift — this business card from a Century 21 Travel salesman named Jim Hedge in Tarzana, California. I’ve tried to enhance it a little bit so you can see it clearly, but basically, this is what it looks like.

I had no idea just how much this card would take over my life.

It’s a long business card — probably 1.25 times longer than a typical card — and it screams 1960s business style. This is the sort of card you could imagine Harry Crane carrying around. It’s a bright yellow, it has that funny CABLE: “CENTURYTRAV” thing in the top left-hand corner, and my second favorite part about the card is that it has Jim Hedge’s home number on there.

You could imagine Jim giving this card to clients and saying, “My home number is on there. If you need anything, call me anytime. I never sleep.”

When this friend gave me the card, he thought he was giving me fun little gift.

What he did not know was that he was giving me an obsession to chase.

Who was Jim Hedge? What was his deal? What did he like to do? What were his hopes? His dreams?

And why, oh why, was the back of this card signed by Willie Mays?

Settle in, folks. This is going to be a wild and strange ride.

Have any of you seen this show on BritBox called “Ludwig?” Margo and I just started watching it, and it’s truly wonderful — we started watching it because a friend told me that it has an amazing assortment of pens and notebooks.

The story is that Ludwig (that’s his pen name) is a creator of puzzles, and through a very funny series of events (he has a twin brother, his twin brother is missing, he’s probably in love with the wife of his twin brother, we’re still early in the show), he ends up solving murders. The thing about it is, he doesn’t want to solve murders. He only wants to go back to his home and create puzzles. Unfortunate for Ludwig, once he hears about a murder, he can’t help but try to solve it because murders are the ultimate puzzles … and he is incapable of letting go.

When Jeff, the friend, gave me this card, he undoubtedly thought I would just like to have a Willie Mays autograph. And I do. It’s lovely. It’s clear and authenticated, and it even has the fun “To Pal” on it, which, I don’t know if Willie signed every autograph like that, but it’s cool. To Pal.

But, like Ludwig, I had to at least try to find out what happened here. I mean, was Willie just walking by? Did he happen to be in Tarzana when he had the urge to go on a trip? Did Jim go to a ballgame, get a chance to meet Willie Mays, and the only thing he had to sign was one of his business cards?

And who wrote WILLIE MAYS in all caps on the bottom? I assume that was Jim.

Did Jim get a lot of famous people to autograph his business cards? Did he put all of their names on the bottom so he would remember which card was which? Or did he ask Willie Mays to write his name on the bottom? Or did Willie voluntarily write his name on the bottom just to be nice?

The first thing I found out about Jim Hedge is that he was a bowler. There are so many things I miss about the golden age of newspapers … one of them is that just about every paper had a weekly bowling column. It was somebody’s job to record the top bowling scores from leagues around the city; one of the great joys of my childhood was seeing my father’s name in the paper when he would bowl a 200 game or 600 series. Community journalism … it brought us together somehow.

“Hey,” people used to say. “I saw your dad’s name in the paper.”

Sigh.

Anyway, Jim Hedge was a regular in the Greater Los Angeles bowling columns, particularly in Ray Rosenbaum’s column in the Valley Times of North Hollywood. He was mentioned so often that every now and again, Ray would just throw a little side into his column wondering how “our friend Jim Hedge” might feel about something. For instance, in 1964, a Tarzana bowling alley started hosting risque entertainment in order to bring in larger crowds.

Jim wasn’t a fan of that. He believed in the sanctity of bowling alleys.

“I have nothing against this type of show,” he said. “But I don’t think it belongs in a bowling alley. I have bowled for 20 years and am a member of the Professional Bowlers of America. The game has been brought up to a high standard and should be kept that way. Women and children bowling in daytime leagues should not be exposed to burlesque shows.”

Of course, I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that this is same Jim Hedge.

But I’m 99 percent certain. Tarazana ain’t that big a place.

Jim Hedge lived a sort of Fred Flintstone existence — he bowled a lot, obviously, and his wife was involved in numerous church activities at St. James right there in Tarzana, and he seemed to belong to a couple of men’s clubs.

“Yeah!” Annie from “Field of Dreams” says, “But what’s it gotta do with baseball?”

In February 1965, Jim’s daughter Patricia married William Hardwick at St. James Church. Pat, as she was apparently known, had attended Reseda High … and I thought I had my first clue. Do you know who else attended Reseda High School … and precisely at the same time as Pat? Big league pitcher Jim McGlothlin.

And I imagined the scene — maybe Pat Hedge and Jim McGlothlin dated or something. Maybe they were just friends. Maybe Jim and Jim and stayed pals. Maybe pitcher Jim introduced Century 21 Jim to Willie Mays. Maybe!

Yeah, it’s weak sauce.

I started to give up on this whole thing.

Before I closed off the investigation, I ran across one more bowling story about Jim Hedge. This one was a little bit different. This one wasn’t about Jim as a bowler. This was about the bowling prowess of Jim’s son-in-law, William Hardwick.

Billy, everybody called him.

It turns out Billy had a knack for bowling — he had a knack for bowling, even though he had lost a finger in a machine shop accident. The lost finger, for some reason, kept him from getting a lot of spin on the ball — he bowled dead straight and also much slower than many of the other top guys. Somehow, even with that style, he racked up so many strikes that people began calling him “The Magician.”

Billy was such a fine bowler that Jim staked him $3,000 and encouraged him to try his luck on the fledgling Pro Bowlers Tour. It was money well spent. Billy struggled at first but soon became one of the top bowlers in the world. In 1965, an Akron lawyer (and non-bowler) named Eddie Elias came up with this idea for a big-money bowling extravaganza called the “Firestone Tournament of Champions.”

“I think bowling is a better game for TV than golf,” Eddie told Sports Illustrated. “It’s like a game show — if he does it, he wins the money. If he doesn’t, he loses.”

Billy Hardwick won the very first Firestone Tournament of Champions. In fact, he became the first to win the triple crown of bowling — Firestone, the U.S. Open and the PBA National. He was Pro Bowler of the year in 1963 (just after marrying Pat) and 1969, when he set the record for most titles won in a season.

Billy Hardwick is in the Pro Bowlers Hall of Fame. In 2008, the PBA ranked him the 12th greatest bowler ever.

“Yeah!” Annie from “Field of Dreams” says, “But what’s it gotta do with baseball?”

OK, here’s my guess: Billy Hardwick and Willie Mays were at the same event somewhere. Maybe it was an Alabama event — Billy was born in Alabama (“I’m the biggest Alabama fan there is,” he was quoted saying”), and so was Willie Mays. I can’t actually FIND the event, but I feel like it had to … HEY, here’s a Billy Hardwick quote that ran in The Cleveland Press in 1972 when he was asked about losing his passion for the sport.

“You know, guys like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron are older than me,” he said. “And they are still doing the job. But they don’t have to be mentally geared up for an entire game … maybe for part of a game or one certain game, they are bending their mind, but it’s a fluctuating kind of intensity. But in a game like bowling you aren’t going to get paid unless you go out to win.”

No, that doesn’t really say anything at all … but it is Billy Hardwick and Willie Mays in the same paragraph.

I think Billy Hardwick introduced Jim Hedge to Willie Mays.

And I can imagine the scene:

“Hey Willie,” Billy Hardwick said. “Come on over here. I want you to meet my father-in-law Jim.”

“It’s a great honor for me,” Jim Wedge said.

“Oh, none of that,” Willie Mays replied. “You want me to sign something for you?”

“Oh,” Jim said as he reached for a pen and one of his card. “Could you sign the back of my business card?” And Willie signed “To Pal, Willie Mays.”

And as the greatest ballplayer who ever lived walked away, Jim Wedge memorialized the moment but writing on the bottom of the card, very neatly, “WILLIE MAYS.”

OK, where else can this absurdity go? Well, I just typed in “Willie Mays” and “Billy Hardwick” into the search engine.

And a story came up from comedian, actor, and podcaster Chris Hardwick.

Yes, Chris Hardwick is the son of Billy Hardwick.

I don’t know if this makes Chris Jim Hedge’s grandson — Billy Hardwick married five times, and it’s not clear how long that first marriage lasted. In truth, I don’t know how much I really learned here. This whole thing was probably nothing more than chasing ghosts on a treadmill. But what is life without wild goose chases? What is collecting autographs about if not creating memories? What is a business card worth if it doesn’t have the person’s home phone number on it?