Maybe The Last TimeI Don't Know.
On opening day, some broadcaster was speculating that we might see the return of the pitchout this year. Pitchers, deprived of unlimited pickoff attempts, could rediscover the pitchout as a way of stopping base stealers. It was logical.
It didn’t happen. As Tom Tango tweeted recently, the long, steep decline of the pitchout—they’re down about 98 percent since 1988, and 94 percent just since 2010—has at best “bottomed out.” They haven’t dropped further this year, but neither have a bunch of rules seemingly designed to incentive pitchouts produced any rebound:
On average, each team will throw one pitchout this year.
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One of my favorite recent books is 4,000 Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. It’s about accepting our finitude. It includes this sentence, which I left on our family-menu letterboard for about four months:
Our lives are full
of activities
we are doing
for the very last time.
There are lasts we’re aware of when they’re happening—last day of high school, last time seeing Derek Jeter hit—but mostly life slips away from us quietly, with no real intent on our part. Yesterday, I tried to notice what might be a last in my life as it was happening, but it was nearly impossible. Everything I did seemed like it would be around forever.
The answer, I’ve decided, is probably: I heard The Impression That I Get, by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. It was playing in a supermarket. I flashed back to when I was listening to that song in my friend Jon’s AMC Eagle as we drove back from a Jalopy Taco Stand concert in 1997, the first concert I’d ever been to without an older sibling. And I also remembered driving home with my dad one night, me behind the wheel for one of the first times, hitting 17 green lights in a row and cheering louder at each miraculous one. I was playing him that Bosstones CD—a Discman channeled through the cassette player—as we drove, and I felt proud when he finally said he really liked it. I loved that song, and I discovered yesterday that I love it still, love especially the way Dicky Barrett’s vocals fade out his final time through the chorus. But there’s no reason to expect I’ll ever hear it again. Let’s face it.
My friend Henry and I were emailing about pitchouts the other day, and Henry came back with the results of a query he’d run: According to his query, there hadn’t been a successful pitchout—as in, a pitchout where the runner was actually going and the runner was actually thrown out—since 2020. I gasped! Thankfully, those query results turned out to be wrong. (Statcast had just quit listing “runner caught stealing” in its play descriptions.) But for a period of time, Henry and I were both a bit moony over this loss. “A pitchout that works is extremely cool, to me,” Henry wrote to me. “We will probably see a successful pitchout again at some point in time, right?”
Maybe. But there really were only six successful pitchouts in 2021. There really were only three in 2022. There really hasn’t been one this year, and the last pitchout at all was in May, almost half a month ago. I’d guess major league baseballers might produce 25 more successful pitchouts from now until the end of time, and mathematically speaking I’m not likely to be watching those games.
Nobody is going to announce it’s the last successful pitchout whenever it happens.
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