Pitching’s hard. You knew that. But dig into everything involved with pitching and you wind up amazed that anyone can do it at all.
Never mind, for a moment, the routine and chronic physical danger inherent in it — the stress and pain of doing something unnatural and damaging over and over again. And put aside the rare but catastrophic danger inherent in it — the non-zero chance that this next pitch may be the one that causes the shoulder to bark, the fingertips to tingle, the elbow to burn, or be transformed into a missile fired back at the head faster than anyone can process the danger and react.
Even if we could assume physical safety, pitching would be really hard — there’s the need to commit the windup and the stretch to muscle memory, to get and keep your limbs working in sync, to ensure a fatigued arm stays at the proper angle, to coax weary legs into guiding the front foot to the right landing spot and following through properly. All of that has to become a process that can be repeated 100 times in a row, despite stress and strain and distractions and bad luck.
Hell, pitchers have to do all that and commit stepping on and off the rubber to muscle memory — to name a seemingly small thing that’s also pretty hard. If I were forced onto a big-league mound, this is what would happen: I’d immediately walk somebody or give up a hit, balk that guy around the bases while trying to throw my next pitch, and then run off the field to hide in a cave and starve myself to death.
But pitchers learn all that, and work at it, and become masters of something that should be impossible. Even the least successful of them has done something extraordinary.
Now let’s throw in one more wrinkle. Sometimes really good pitchers do everything right, walk out to the mound to ply their trade, and discover that despite all their preparations they have arrived unable to put up a fair fight. The breaking pitches won’t bite, the fastball won’t go where it’s told, the change-up arrives so exuberantly that it’s become a lousy fastball, and so on. That pitcher has arrived at a gunfight and wishes he was the much-mocked dummy holding a knife — because all he has is a handful of air.
That’s what happened to Jacob deGrom [1] against the Brewers. He was down 2-0 before he recorded an out, and it didn’t get much better [2]. To point out that this is the same deGrom who was the hero of the realm [3] in his last start is to underscore the point. In all likelihood (caveat because you never know with this ravaged team), there’s no why worth pursuing. DeGrom’s usually good; on Wednesday night he was really bad.
That’s it, it happens, and if you can get past the unavoidable partisan aspect of it, you might find yourself thinking it’s kind of wonderful. Sometimes your seat’s not even warm and the Mets are unloading on Sandy Koufax [4] or Greg Maddux [5] or Roger Clemens [6] or Jake Arrieta [7] and what looked like a stressful appointment has become a giddy carnival. And sometimes before you’ve dressed that first hot dog Tom Seaver [8] or Dwight Gooden [9] or Al Leiter [10] or Jacob deGrom has his hands on his knees and the manager and the pitching coach are exchanging helpless shrugs.
It’s just baseball, deciding it’s that pitcher’s turn.
(Oh, and Mr. Met got in trouble but I don’t care because it’s dumb.)