Joey Whiffs, Meet Mr. Hit 'em Where They Ain't.

 

Sorry, just have to riff a little more on that Joey Gallo apologia from SNY and the NY Post that Duque was good enough to bring to our attention.

https://www.sny.tv/articles/yankees-joey-gallo-unluckiest-hitters-baseball

The article and video are, inadvertently, some of the most hilarious things you will ever read/see/hear about today's baseball, what would have been a perfect satire had it not all been so sincere.

First there is the SNY appearance of Steve Serby of the Post, apparently another Cashman minion—"Brinion"—giving us all the reasons why Mr. Gallo is struggling, this year but also last year.

After interviewing Gallo, Serby discovered that the man went through the usual "culture shock" coming to New York last year. We Yankees fans had "high expectations" and "expected him to be the next Babe Ruth"—but he's "not Babe Ruth." 

As it happened, last year he "had to find a home after being traded, bouncing around from New York to New Jersey to White Plains." And while he knows he is "not a lovable player," the fans' "hot and cold approach" and "the boo-birds were bound to effect him." But now he "loves the passion of New York fans."

The SNY host chimed in with a sympathetic acknowledgment of how this here New York is always a "euphoria or disaster town."

Um, okay.  

Funny, I think I remember hearing some people boo once in Philadelphia—or was it Boston? Or maybe Chicago?—but never mind. I guess they don't boo in Dallas.

And one almost wants to sing, "Poor Wandering One" for Mr. Gallo, who did of course make over $6 million last season, and might have managed to figure out an abode in the Greater New York Area. But never mind. On to the even more stats-laden analysis from Ryan Morik at SNY.

This includes, as our Peerless Leader noted, a cartload of hilarious new statistics, including xBA, wOBA, xOBA, xOBP, "expected slugging percentage" (and of course wxyzHEYLADY), all to conclude that Joey Gallo IS in fact hitting in terrible bad luck, "the 35th unluckiest hitter in baseball."

I mean, he's "in the 95th percentile in barrels per batted ball (22.2 percent)," for crying' out loud!—no, I'm not making this up—and he really should be hitting....234.  

And "Seriously, who wouldn't take a .234/.343/.612 slash line?" Besides, Joey "provides a ton of value—he's a two-time Gold Glover who can hit 30-plus home runs in his sleep from the left side of the plate."

Okay, let's sweep all the ancillary nonsense aside for a moment. First, Gallo has looked awful in the field and even running the bases this year, and since when has a .234 BA been the gold standard?  

And to revert to the immortal Lloyd Bentsen once again: Babe Ruth played here, Mr. Gallo. New York was his big stage. We know about Babe Ruth here. And nobody, but nobody, ever expected you to be another Babe Ruth. 

But I digress.

Let us get down, instead, to the hitting. 

Joey Gallo is hitting the ball hard, but not getting hits. Well, that happens in baseball. It especially happens when you're stubbornly swinging away into an overshift. And BECAUSE it's an overshift, there's no saying when Joey G.'s "bad luck" will end. 

For every action in baseball, there is a reaction. Joey's line drives are quick outs? Then why should the other team change how it's pitching and setting up against him? They start falling in or going out...THEN they'll change. (And something tells me that Joey will take a long, long time to make another adjustment.)

But let's look at his polar opposite for a moment.

"Wee Willie" Keeler sounds almost like a fictional character. He was 5'4" and 140 pounds, and he used a 30-inch, 29-ounce bat that he often choked up on. He batted .341 lifetime, stole nearly 500 bases in his career, and played on championship teams in Brooklyn and with the original, fabled Baltimore Orioles.

His most famous quote about hitting was, "Keep your eye clear and hit 'em where they ain't," but he found all sorts of other ways to beat out hits, too, including "the Baltimore chop." 

He was probably the greatest bunter the sport has ever seen, and it's said that the two-strike bunt rule—and counting fouls as strikes in general—were both added to the game to keep Keeler from spoiling pitches interminably.

He won two NL batting championships, led the league in OPS in 1897, at 1.003, batted as high as .424 on a season, and scored over 140 runs 4 times. He was already past his prime when he came to play for the Yankees—Keeler was one of the very few to play for all 3 NYC teams—but still hit .343 in 1904, and played the team's swamp of an outfield very well. 

He was known to have a very sweet disposition and loved kids, signing autographs between innings. Nonetheless, there was a kernel of toughness in the man. Playing in one of the primitive parks of the time, he made a leaping catch over a low, right field wall...even though it meant jumping up into a mess of barbed wire place there to keep the fans from the field.

Keeler made the catch—and had to wait until his teammates could come and pull him off the wire. But went on playing.

Once, when cantankerous teammate John McGraw picked a fight with him in the showers, Keeler beat him up. But he was still asked to be an usher at McGraw's wedding years later—testimony to his good nature.

The son of a Brooklyn trolley motorman, Willie left school at the age of 15 to begin playing professionally.

He did so to avoid the alternative: working in a factory. 

Keeler—seen here practicing the old "hide behind the fence" trick—was supposedly the first player to make $10,000 a year. Nonetheless, suffering from TB and a heart condition, he died at 50 in near-poverty, living in a Brooklyn rooming house.

Still, he once said, "Say, I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I get paid for  doing what I'd rather do than anything else—play ball."

Funny, I seem to remember somebody else saying that, too. 

I wish Joey Gallo the best of luck. But call me when he gets all the way up to .234.