BSN Exclusive: Charlie Blackmon on modern baseball breaking hundred-year-old truths

DENVER – For well over a hundred years, hitting a baseball has been considered the most difficult thing to do in all of professional sports. And it ain’t gettin’ any easier.

The information age brought on by the invention of the internet has spawned a whole new era in Major League Baseball. This, in and of itself, isn’t entirely surprising. The game has always been known for its distinct eras and, on the surface, this doesn’t look any different.

And maybe, and its core and in practice, the modern evolutions of the game were as natural and necessary as any throughout its history, but there are absolutely elements of what we are currently witnessing that are unique.

A combination of an explosion of available data and the mostly highly-trained athletes we have ever seen means that the level of competition has skyrocketed in quality by leaps and bounds.

This is why you hear something like former-Rockies-reliever-now-with-the-Yankees, Adam Ottavino, commenting on his theoretical domination of Babe Ruth. The thing is, he almost certainly would baffle the legend.

Ottavino has access to hot-and-cold zone data, some of the best nutritionists and trainers in the world, video tracking that has helped him alter each of his pitches for the desired effect, and a slider that would have looked like it was thrown by an alien to anyone in the 1920s.

And that’s just one example. Baseball is now littered with these guys.

All this means is that the life of a hitter is just getting harder and harder. Sure, there are still stars at the plate and the home rates are up, but so are the strikeouts, and it may well be in large part due to the fact that trying to get base hits is becoming more and more of a fool’s errand.

We profiled recently how the Rockies were implementing new data in order to govern their shifting, something that has paid off to great effect.

And in that piece, Charlie Blackmon noted how crazy it is that this pre-play positioning is taking away hits that have been such for “over a hundred years.”

As if hitting the baseball wasn’t hard enough, now guys are standing right where you’ve been taught to hit it your whole life. But, as Ruth himself used to say, “They ain’t standin’ over the fence.”

But there’s another part of this that we discovered in an unrelated conversation with Blackmon several days later.

We were examining the importance of patience at the plate, getting into hitter’s counts, and Blackmon intimated that such a notion may soon be a thing of the past.

“There are just no fastball counts anymore,” he says. “So unless you end up walking, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good to get ahead in the count.”

This mindset stands in contrast to most of the history of baseball when it was known to expect certain pitches in certain counts. If you got up 3-0, you better be sitting “dead red.

But,”It just doesn’t matter anymore,” says Blackmon. “That guy today, in all of the hitter’s counts, he threw more changeups than anything else.”

Pitchers have grown more confident in their ability to control and command non-fastballs, he adds, and hitters have grown more confident in their ability to catch up to velocity.

“Everyone is just getting better on both sides of the ball. If guys weren’t crushing fastballs, pitchers wouldn’t be throwing 2-0 changeups.”

In trying to accomplish a task where the very best fail 70 percent of the time, one of the few advantages the man with the bat has always had was to work the count in his favor and find that rare predictable pitch to hammer.

This art is slowly dying.

“I think guys just go up there and look for their pitch and try to hit it,” says Blackmon. “I don’t think guys really change their approach because the count really doesn’t matter anymore until you strike out or walk.”

And there it comes back to the three true outcomes again; a strikeout, a walk, or a home run.

That isn’t to say that singles, doubles, and triples no longer hold value, it just helps to explain even further why they are beginning to feel like relics of the past.

Pitchers are naturally better than they’ve ever been, have more information, and are now altering strategies that have stood the test of time, only to find that they could indeed be improved upon.

We are seeing this play out with fielding as well. The game is starting to look different. And for many, that can be scary. Change always is. But it will always be 90 feet between bases.

The essence of the game will always be a batter against a pitcher in a battle of mind and body. Taking the extra base, diving in the dirt, and making the smart play will always be the little things that seem to come up in the biggest moments.

But those fighting on the cutting edge must live by the code “adapt or die” and the Rockies, just like everyone else, are searching for the right way to proceed in an era built to make the hardest thing in sports even harder.