In command: Why pitchers have taken back the game

Once upon a time, true cowboys roamed the dusty prairies in the middle of baseball infields. Real men, like Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale and Nolan Ryan.

They were authentic gunslingers. They made hitters blanch and their mothers squirm. They strung up zeroes as far as the eye could see.

We've heard a lot about them through stories passed down from our grandfathers. We've read about them in books. We've seen them in grainy black-and-white footage, sometimes even in comically fuzzy color highlight reels long before today's flat-screens were even a gleam in Panasonic's eye. (Ha! There was life before high-def?)

But until this throwback season of 2010, when no-hitters and potential no-hitters suddenly have become as routine as designer coffee and gym memberships, we've rarely had the ability to see them in real time.

And while today's updated models often are not fully loaded with extra testosterone and, for the most part, remain unfamiliar with the complete game and chin music, they're on the cutting edge of figuring out new ways for the species to adapt.

Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name meets the digital age.

Look around. It's as if suddenly there's an app for this. iPitch. Just when we were sure Roy Halladay's move to the National League would earn him an instant Cy Young Award, suddenly, Ubaldo Jimenez springs up in Colorado. Then, when our attention is fully focused on him, Oakland's Dallas Braden fires a perfect game, Halladay follows and Detroit's Armando Galarraga nearly does, too.

Never in modern baseball history had there been more than one perfect game in a season, yet Braden and Halladay produced two in May alone. Add Jimenez's no-hitter and there already have been three no-hitters thrown; mix in Galarraga's, and there should be four.

Only 11 weeks into the season, 12 other pitchers have taken a no-hitter into the seventh inning or later. Add those to the quartet who rightfully have completed one (yes, we're including Galarraga), and it's a full-on assault.

After a decade of hitters bashing distant fences, pitchers are seriously flirting with no-nos on an average of more than once a week.

"I'm blown away by it, every night now," Jim Deshaies, the former pitcher and current Astros radio broadcaster, says. "We run through out-of-town scores on the air, and every night, it's 2-0, 2-1, 1-0, 1-0.

"I made a crack the other night on the air, somebody had a two-hitter, and I said, 'That's nothing. If it's not a no-hitter, it's not worth talking about.' "

• • •

Everybody's got a theory: All things in the game are cyclical, and now it's the pitchers' turn. The game has cycled through the Steroid Era and pitchers have emerged alive on the other side. Old hitters are tired because amphetamines are banned. Young hitters care so little about striking out that they'll swing at anything.

"How do I explain it?" Minnesota Twins manager Ron Gardenhire mused to the San Jose Mercury-News' Dan Brown a couple of weeks ago. "They're putting a magical moon dust on the ball this year, and it's taking all the hits out of the bats."

Well, we do know this: More men have orbited the moon (24) than have thrown a perfect game (20). Which is why it was so startling to watch Braden, Halladay and even Galarraga earlier this year.

But the way things are going, that lunar statistic isn't going to last much longer.

"It's scary," Atlanta closer Billy Wagner says, proving that being a pitcher always means having to say you're sorry, even when you're not surrendering runs. "Because if pitchers continue to do this, the next thing you know, they'll push the mound back to 65 feet and cut the plate in half."

Shaun Marcum's no-hit bid on opening day for Toronto, it turns out, was a premonition. As was CC Sabathia's bid for a no-no on the first Saturday of the season for the Yankees. Yeah, there would be more where those came from. Lots more.

"I think the overall pitching has become so much better over the last couple of years," Braves manager Bobby Cox says. "I do. There are no patsies in the rotation anymore.

"In the expansion era, pitching was down. I think it's caught up rapidly now. Ian Kennedy in Arizona -- I love him. He throws nothing but strikes on the black. I remember the day where rotations were such that if you were playing a team four times, you figured you were a lock to win three of them. You can't say that with any of them now."

Batting averages have receded to their lowest point in nearly two decades in each league. Strikeouts are at an all-time high. And in an era where we worship at the altar of the on-base percentage ... well, guess what? OBPs are at their lowest ebb since the early 1990s, too.

"I think pitching's better, and I think stuff like this goes in cycles, to be honest with you," Dodgers manager Joe Torre says. "Although I can't say the reduced strike zone is helping the pitching because it would be the opposite.

"There's some quality out there. I haven't seen the kid [Braden] with Oakland, but Jimenez is ridiculous. And Doc Halladay is ridiculous, as far as the head-and-shoulder-type stuff. We faced Galarraga, he's like a journeyman. He's 28 years old, he's been around a bit, but you could see, he makes you hit the ball. I think the fact that you make people hit the ball gives you a chance to do something special like that. You try and strike everybody out, you end up throwing 150 pitches.

"But I think it's just a cycle. I don't see anything that would tell me it's like 1968."

• • •

As the baseball men bandy the theories about, no-hitters line up for takeoff like jets on the runway, sometimes stacking up too many at a time. Look at Chicago a week or so ago, where the Cubs' Ted Lilly and the White Sox's Gavin Floyd took dueling no-nos into the seventh.

"It's definitely amazing," Braves starter Tim Hudson says. "I can't believe it. To have three realistically perfect games and a no-hitter, and all of these one-hitters ... I see these young kids come up now and I think, 'Gol-lee, they're a lot better than I was when I was 23, 24.'

"The progression in any professional sport is to get physically bigger, stronger, faster. Who knows where it will be 10 years from now? Ten years from now, I'll look back and think the stuff I threw was garbage. That's just the way it is.

"In the late '90s, the average fastball was in the 80s. I know when I first came into the league, if somebody was throwing in the mid-90s, that was cheese. You rarely had somebody throwing 96, 97. Now there's somebody on every team."

Hudson, of course, undoubtedly hits on something when he uses the term "bigger, stronger, faster." And while it's true that each subsequent generation in turn does become more skilled, well ... there also has been testing for that since 2003.

The majority of scouts say that testing for performance-enhancing drugs is the No. 1 reason the pendulum has swung back to pitchers this year. Players, predictably, are more mixed on the reasons.

"I don't know," Wagner says. "Pitchers did it, too."

Yeah, but if you play the percentages ... say 40 percent of the players were juiced, just to pick a number. Well, in an AL lineup, that's roughly four hitters. And in a rotation, that's two starters. So, in a typical AL game, four juiced hitters would be swinging every night. And they would be facing juiced starters only twice every five days.

"I don't think that has anything to do with it," Washington slugger Adam Dunn protests. "Steroids were just as much for the pitchers as they were for the hitters. I think, top-to-bottom, pitching is better. Pitching is starting to dominate. You've got guys that throw 95 and then you've got two other [relievers] to go along with them."

• • •

The 14 no-hitters through seven innings are the most through this date since divisional play started in 1969, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Last year, through mid-June, there were only four.

The numbers are right there in black and white, as obvious as the 100 mph radar-gun reading measuring a Stephen Strasburg fastball.

The reasons, though, they're not so obvious. The discussions work their way around the edges, the way Marcum, Cole Hamels (no-hitter into the seventh on June 7) and others work the corners.

"Generally, you know, pitchers who have what I consider above-average, quality off-speed pitches generally prosper early in the year because a hitter's timing is not there like it is the way, say, as you get into the middle of June, July," highly respected Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan says. "So I think they have an advantage early in the season.

"The power guys, they always have an advantage if they have command. The big power guys like Jimenez, he eliminates two or three of those hitters automatically just because it's him throwing. They can't catch up to him. The middle of your lineup generally has the ability to hit pretty much anybody's fastball. But there are guys who are not able to catch up to that kind of a fastball."

The pitchers Duncan speaks of also are aided by this: Not only are more teams emphasizing defense in the aftermath of the Steroid Era -- Tampa Bay's 2008 World Series team has become a model -- but clubs are smarter about it than ever before. Cardinals hitting coach Mark McGwire says the biggest change he has seen in the game -- coming back from a decade away -- is in defensive positioning.

The combination of old-fashioned bird-dogging and digital scouting (the DVR is a wonderful tool, with nearly every game televised), McGwire says, has made for several occasions this year when what he thought would be a sure hit died in the glove of a waiting fielder who was perfectly positioned.

"Teams are building more with pitching and defense and speed," Dodgers third-base coach Larry Bowa says. "It's nice to have a home-run hitter, but I think overall now the philosophy is, it's nice to have pitching, defense and speed. When you get into the playoffs, it's not 9-8 games, it's 2-1 and 3-2. I do think the philosophy's changing."

Another factor: We're further removed from the expansion of the 1990s, a time during which four clubs were born (Florida and Colorado in 1993, Tampa Bay and Arizona in 1998) and pitching became incredibly diluted. Some in the game think the effect of that, coupled with the Steroid Era and the inflated price of starting pitching on the free-agent market, was that clubs began overdrafting pitchers, thus the current infusion of several impressive young arms.

Strikeouts are up, and that surely is contributing to pitching's re-emergence. Never before has the importance of Strike 1 been as magnified: In the OBP era, with hitters across the land determined to take pitches and grind starters, finally, pitchers and clubs appear to have smartened up. The good ones now are regularly getting ahead of hitters with Strike 1.

"I can understand the strikeouts because since these kids put on a uniform, their agents are telling them you hit home runs and you drive in runs, you get paid," Bowa says. "If I've heard one baseball player in this era say it, I've heard 100: An out's an out. It doesn't matter if it's a strikeout.

"Which is a ridiculous statement, because a lot of things can happen when you put the ball in play. You can get a base hit, a guy makes an error, it gets lost in the sun, it takes a bad hop, a guy catches the ball and throws it away. I don't want to hear that an out's an out. It's not just an out. Most of the time, hitters in my era, we'd choke up with two strikes. Put it in play. Today everybody's right on the end and they go for home runs. That's why swings are longer and that's why pitchers are more successful."

NL clubs are striking out 7.20 times per game -- hello Tim Lincecum, Dan Haren, Clayton Kershaw, Adam Wainwright, Yovani Gallardo, et Al -- easily the highest rate in history.

AL clubs are whiffing an average of 6.74 times per game -- buon giorno Romero, Jered Weaver, Jon Lester, Francisco Liriano, Felix Hernandez, etc. -- which falls just short of last year's 6.74, which was the AL's highest rate in history.

• • •

Part of what's happening is a numbers game that includes -- but extends beyond -- strikeout counts. As pitching settles down in the aftermath of expansion, the math says maybe the number of perfect games and near no-nos should be trending upward.

Jay Jaffe of Baseball Prospectus points out, simply, that with expansion, more games are being played. There are roughly twice as many games in today's 30-team, 162-game era as were played in the old 16-team, 154-game setup. As such, according to Jaffe, starting in the modern era (1901), about 0.063 percent of games become no-hitters, and 0.005 percent of them result in perfect games.

Here's one idea of how baseball has gone this year: Josh Johnson's ERA of 1.80 is a distant third in the National League. (US Presswire)

Extrapolate those numbers into today's schedule, and there should be roughly three no-hitters a year and a perfect game every four.

But entering this season, there were only 16 perfect games in modern history (since 1901), which computes to one every 6.75 years. Even factoring in more games being played, what has occurred in 2010 remains off-the-charts unheard of.

The other thing expansion has done is wreak havoc with the schedule, which at times can favor pitchers. Thanks to today's unbalanced schedule, some clubs see each other only twice a year. Atlanta, for example, memorably saw Colorado in April (Jimenez's no-hitter was April 17) and then will not see the Rockies again until late August. Those six games -- three in Atlanta, three in Denver -- are it for the two clubs this season.

"No question," that can aid pitchers, Bowa says. "We might go into Philly and then we never see a guy again after one start."

Pick your reason as to why pitchers have their swagger back -- or, pick your reasons. The debate, like a Yankees-Red Sox game, plays on.

"My thought is, let the season play out," says St. Louis manager Tony La Russa, whose own rookie pitcher, Jaime Garcia, is contributing to the dominance. "It's been two months. Let the season play out. In the next four months, it might get blown up.

"I think it's just, you take it for what's happened. There's been some outstanding pitching, there's a hot summer ahead, and the hitters catch up or they don't. I don't know. We've seen some good pitching."

As mounting evidence suggests, we're trending toward a new cycle in the game. Now, it's modern-day cowboys roaming those dusty prairies in the middle of diamonds. And while they maybe aren't as generally irascible as Bob Feller or Gibson, they're a different breed for a hard-drive world. They come armed with video scouting reports, and a new-age knowledge. iPitch.

Maybe it's the PED testing balancing the field. Maybe it's being a few years removed from expansion, or a rare breed of tremendous young arms.

Perhaps, as pitchers take their once-in-a-blue-moon turn in the spotlight, it really is magical moon dust covering the ball.

Whatever your explanation, pitchers once again are dominant. They're ruling. They're rocking.

But, truth be told, even these good times can't help but make them jumpy.

"I hope nobody gets any wild ideas about lowering the mound or changing the strike zone and making it even smaller than it is," Atlanta's Hudson says. "That definitely don't need to happen."