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Terrific news from Will’s World, where Will Clark still knows what to do with a big, fat pitch.
He got a peach at the outset of his appearance Tuesday on KNBR’s Tolbert & Lund show. The subject of Major League Baseball’s rules changes, both implemented and proposed, was raised. The Thrill almost came out of his shoes.
“I’m not a huge rules-change guy,” said the 15-year veteran, who retired with a .303 career average. “They’ve changed the game around enough right now where it’s tiddlywinks. You can’t go into second base and hit anybody.”
If you know Clark, you know the take-out slide at second base is near and dear to his heart:
“You can’t go into home plate and hit nobody,” Clark told KNBR, warming to the discussion. “The strike zone is defined by a box on the TV, stuff like that. That’s not the way the game has been forever.”
He bristled at the mention of pace-of-play initiatives and the rule that would mandate a relief pitcher to face at least three batters (unless the inning ends).
“They’ve even talked about pushing the pitcher’s mound back,” he said, the exasperation clear in his voice, “just absolutely stupid stuff that as a baseball historian, or a guy who’s an old-type player, that just ruins the game for me.”
This is no surprise. Clark was already a throwback when he took his first at-bat in his first spring training game. He hit a home run, by the way. He embraced the game, its history, its perfect geometry, its book, its time-honored codes of conduct. When the Giants had a throwback game in 1991, Clark looked as if he’d stepped straight out of the Roaring Twenties wearing his vintage duds.
There’s something you need to know about Clark’s attitudes toward advanced analytics: You’ll want to pull up a chair.
“Some of this analytical stuff drives me up a wall,” he said.
Some?
“Do you think I’m standing in the batter’s box watching a baseball come at me and go, ‘Hey, it’s traveling 3,000 rpms?’ No. I’m trying to hit the dog meat out of it. I don’t care how many revolutions it’s making.”
Don’t look now, but here comes another hanger-banger.
“One of the guys, he hasn’t been on the team a long time, he’s been up and down,” Clark said. “He asked me, ‘Hey, Will, what was your average exit velocity.’
“I said, ‘Scuze me?’
“‘Yeah, your average exit velocity.’
“I said, ‘Back then, you either hit the hell out of it, or you were walking back to the dugout. And if you were walking back to the dugout, your exit velocity was probably pretty slow.'”
Clark believes that the new breed of ballplayer is “more worried with mechanics than worrying about the baseball.
“The perfect example would be,” he said, “if you’re taking batting practice and you’re hitting some baseballs and the ball’s acting like a tennis ball, it’s got topspin on it where it gets past the infield and just sort of dies on you. You know there’s something wrong that is causing the topspin, so you’ve got to go into the batting cage or go see it on video and say, all right, I need to change this around a little bit. It’s a feel thing.
“There’s a lot of guys, they’ll just keep hitting topspin after topspin and finally I’ll have to walk in and go, ‘Hey, just letting you know you’re rolling over on that ball a little bit. That’s why you’re hitting the crap out of them and they ain’t going nowhere.'”
