The long and short of it

Sporting News, The, Oct 21, 1996 by Michael Knisley

The list of reasons to admire the Yankees' pitching acumen grew last week by leaps and bounds, and it was already at least as long as the arms of every Yankee Stadium fan who ever reached over a fence to interfere with a ball in play.

But when the American League Championship Series finally ended--and we say `finally'! because nearly every game that was played between New York and Baltimore last week seemed as though it might never end--a simple exponential factor had emerged by which to gauge the abilities of the Yankees' pitching staff. We'll call it "The Mighty Casey Factor," because every time an Orioles hitter took a home run swat at a New York pitch, the admiration meter jumped another notch into Yankees territory.

And rarely did Baltimore take anything other than a home run swat.

"Our philosophy," Orioles hitting coach Rick Down says, "has always been to get a good pitch you can drive."

And Down doesn't mean just a drive over the infield or into the gap. The Orioles' philosophy in 1996 was to drive the ball to just one place: out of the ballpark. Baltimore set a major league record this season with 257 home runs, bettering by 17 the mark set by the Roger Maris-Mickey Mantle Yankees of 1961. Seven Orioles hit at least 20 home runs in a Baltimore uniform this season, also a major league record. And they hit 11 grand slams in 1996, another major league record shared this year by Seattle.

That's what the Yankees' staff faced last week. And that's what the Yankees' staff undid last week with a series of smart, plucky pitching performances made all the more remarkable by the overlay of baseball's undistinguished pitching this season in general. New York dispensed with the Orioles in five games to advance to its first world Series appearance in 15 years, largely because of the Mighty Casey Factor.

That the Orioles didn't seriously hurt the Yankees with the home run isn't exactly a shocker. Joe Torre's staff led the American League this season in fewest home runs allowed, so you knew something was going to have to give, one way or the other. In fact, that "something" gave both ways, because Baltimore did bash the ball about as often as it did during its record-setting regular season. The Orioles hit nine home runs in the five games.

But the manner in which New York neutralized the game's most powerful lineup, despite the home runs, exposed Baltimore's one-trick pony just as surely as Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "writhing pitcher" found the holes in Casey's swing in "Casey at the Bat."

The difference in the series, then, was this as much as anything: When the Orioles weren't scoring with the long ball, they simply weren't scoring at all. Thirteen of their 19 ALCS runs came on home runs. Five of their remaining six runs scored on outs--sacrifice flies or ground balls. The only non-home run hit that produced a Baltimore RBI in the entire series was BJ. Surhoff's pinch single in the fourth inning of Game 4 last Saturday night. The Orioles stole no bases; didn't, in fact, even attempt a steal. Hit-and-run? Nope. Move a runner along? An alien concept in Baltimore.

That left the Yankees' pitchers to worry about one thing, and one thing only: Keep the ball in the ballpark. The game thus simplified, New York could direct its full attention to the corners of the plate. And few pitchers in the American League do that better than Andy Pettitte, Jimmy Key and David Cone--not to mention the game's best relief duo, Mariano Rivera and John Wetteland.

"The home runs are great," Yankee pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre says. "But the majority of time, if you have a ballclub that's swinging for home runs and if you have a pitcher who is on his game, that ballclub is definitely easier to pitch to than the guys that are just trying to make contact. That's no secret. It's always been that way.

"I'm not saying other clubs were giving in to them and throwing the ball down the middle, but our guys know what they're capable of doing and they made their pitch es when they had to. Good pitching shuts down good hitting. No question about it."

Stottlemyre's approach to preparing his pitchers for Baltimore boiled down to three basic tenets--and is hardly unique in the body of science about pitching. He wanted his pitchers to work fast. He wanted his pitchers to throw strike one early in every at-bat. He wanted his pitchers to change speeds as often as possible. That's pretty basic stuff, but all three elements helped take the "pow" out of the Orioles' power last week, even if the Yankees didn't always execute the approach to perfection.

For the most part, New York's pitchers, in fact, failed miserably at working fast, at least if the length of the games is the applicable measure. Among the other things that characterized the Orioles' philosophy at the plate during their reign of home run terror in 1996, they surely must have set a major league record for the longest average at-bats in history. Baltimore's modus operandi is to work the count to the hitter's advantage--2-and-0 or 3-and-1--and then try to hit the ball over Chesapeake Bay. The Orioles are never in much of a hurry to put the ball in play.