Grrrrr. Two of my least favorite things reared their ugly heads at right about the same time in recent days, and since it gives me indigestion to write about either of them, I figured I’d get it out of my system and address both of them at the same time.
Andre Ethier, a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, currently boasts a 29-game hitting streak that is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise moribund and depressing time in L.A. The media coverage has been considerable, to say the least, and the name DiMaggio continues to crop up with regularity now that Ethier is all of halfway to the exalted No. 56. Whoopee!
I realize that I risk coming off as the spoilsport, but the hitting streak is the most overrated and misunderstood “statistic” in all of Major League Baseball. We have the redoubtable DiMaggio to thank for that, or more precisely, his impeccable timing of having engineered his historic effort at a critical time in American history when the country desperately needed such a distraction as an almost-certain entry into World War II loomed on the no-so-distant horizon.
DiMaggio’s beloved streak nicely distracted a nation that sorely needed to be distracted, and in the process wound up with a place in history wildly disproportionate to the importance of the deed. Here’s the only part you need to remember: getting a hit in consecutive games is little more than a parlor trick that doesn’t intrinsically enhance the team’s chances of winning.
There is no premium attached to getting a minimum of one hit in each game; evaluating the relative importance of hits has a myriad of variables attached, but common sense tells you spacing hits in this kind of tidy fashion doesn’t address any of them. Note: In 1941, Ted Williams hit for a higher average for the entire season than DiMaggio did during his 56 games – slightly more than 1/3 of a season.
If seeming to denigrate one of the most revered records in all of professional sport makes you queasy, try a hypothetical. As a manager, would you rather have a guy who hit .350 with eight home runs over a 20-game span but had an 0-4 interrupt his tear smack dab in the middle, or a .320 log with five homers over the course of a handsome 20-game hitting streak?
Ultimately, it turns out we revere the hitting streak largely because we have revered the hitting streak for the last 70 years, never stopping to ask ourselves why. Which is not terribly unlike how we cling to any number of preposterous golf rules even though we know deep down that many of them are cruel, pretentious injustices that often dramatically alter outcomes.
Like Webb Simpson the other day in New Orleans getting hosed out of his first PGA tour win because a golf ball wiggled for some reason that nothing whatsoever to do with the now still-winless Webb Simpson. What if he never does win on the PGA tour, which is unlikely but certainly not beyond the realm of possibility? A dumb PGA rule that exalts tradition over the notion of fairness will have denied a deserving player with the most important accomplishment of a life’s work.
There are probably at least a half dozen dumb-ass rules – signing scorecards, bunkers that aren’t, various groundskeeping faux pas – that accomplish little more than to allow the self-important golfing community to bask in the sport’s uniqueness of self-policing and proclivity to sabotage great moments in golfing lore. Fairness, justice and common sense are the collateral damage of this tired ritual, which, sadly, takes place on average probably once or twice every season.
When Simpson’s golf ball gave a microscopic wiggle through no fault of his own, a couple of the TV announcers quickly came to the lame defense of the peculiar rules. This bit of defensiveness made the injustice all the more galling, especially in light of the fact that news reports on the following Monday morning indicated that golf’s rules makers had been considering sacking that particular travesty for a reported seven years.
Hey, no rush, guys.
- T.S. O’Connell
