Animal rights
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You may have noticed that the baseball playoffs have descended upon us, unless you are my wife, who is about as interested in sports as I am in Grey’s Anatomy. (I hear that McCrumbly or somebody died? Is that right? Spoiler alert, or something. They apparently played the last episode in almost random order, it was unwatchable.) I think fairly frequently about the changes in baseball over time, specifically modern players’ ability to draw walks far more than they used to. The reason for it is fairly simple: in the old days, Batting Average was king. If you drew a ton of walks but batted .210, you weren’t going to see a lot of playing time. On-base percentage was unheard-of. Hitters routinely swung at anything close, which meant that walks were few, pitch counts were lower (making it easier for starting pitchers to complete games), and there was generally less offense.

Modern baseball, however, has wised up to the fact that there is a lot of value in getting on base, or more correctly, simply not getting out. A guy who bats .280 with no walks is getting out 72% of the time. That’s not great. A guy who bats .240 in 500 at-bats BUT also walked 80 times got on base 200 times in 580 plate appearances, which is a .344 on-base percentage, which is very, very good. If the guy couples that with a half decent slugging percentage, he will be an every day player. Adam Dunn played 151 games for the White Sox this year despite posting a .204 average. He struck out 222 times! But he also walked 105 times, and slugged .468. (None of this is particularly news to baseball fans, but bear with me, I’m bringing everybody else up to speed.)

The problem is, and I think we can agree on this: walks are pretty boring, as outcomes go. The actual battle between the pitcher and the batter is always interesting, but balls hit into play are much more satisfying. Even a strikeout can be interesting; watching a good pitcher rack up double digit Ks is very exciting. If a batter racks up 4 walks in a game, that’s just lame. But is there any way to reduce the number of walks in the game? I don’t think pitchers are less accurate than they’ve been in history, it’s just that the move towards on-base percentage has led to batters learning to wait for their pitch. Pitches that in the past would have been swung on and bounced to short are let go because the batter knows he can’t put decent wood on it. Pitch counts are up, walks are up, offense is up. So in order for walks to go down, you can either convince batters to swing more often, which there’s really no way to do, or convince pitchers to throw more strikes.

In theory the latter should be relatively easy. Pitchers are usually told “throw strikes,” “pitch to contact,” “stop nibbling.” The best pitchers throw far more strikes than balls (Cliff Lee is 7.43 times more likely to strike a batter out than walk him, a ridiculous rate). However that doesn’t always mean that the pitcher is throwing more pitches through the strike zone; a curveball that dives under the zone and is swung on is just as much a strike as a fastball on the corner that’s looked at. So a pitcher may produce a high strike/ball ratio just by having insane “stuff” (be it movement or speed) that hitters just miss a lot. Pretty much the only way I can think of to reduce walks is to make them more of a penalty for the defense in some way, like letting the batter go to second base in certain situations (any 4-0 walk, be it intention or otherwise), or to add some monetary penalty (teams or players have to pay a tax if their walk rate is too high), or to make a huge fundamental change like going back to the late 1800s when batters had to watch 6 balls to draw a walk.

The problem with increasing the in-game penalty is that it just makes it MORE beneficial for a hitter to draw a walk. Say MLB makes a change like saying once a team allows four walks, any walk beyond that sends the batter to second. Batters become even LESS likely to swing at that point, unless they have two strikes. It might perhaps make pitchers throw a few more strikes than they already do, but I think that’s counterbalanced by the fact that the hitter is going to be looking to swing less frequently. Same with the 6-ball walk: that just delays the inevitable. It gives the pitcher a bit more leeway, so he’s going to probably throw FEWER strikes, and the hitter can be more selective because he knows the pitcher will throw fewer strikes.

The monetary penalty has some value, I think. It doesn’t make it more likely for a team to walk a guy in any single situation, so they still can use the intentional walk as before if they feel a game is on the line, but I feel like overall walks will drop because a pitcher will want to shy away from the penalty level. He’ll still pitch around Miguel Cabrera, but he’s going to be a bit more likely to throw strikes to a lesser player like Michael Martinez. Also, it doesn’t change the fundamental rules of the game, something I always prefer to avoid (I don’t believe that the American League has played actual baseball, aside from interleague games on the road, since 1972).

The best day to start documenting what’s going on during a quarantine is during the first day of the quarantine; the second best day is whatever today happens to be. Today, six days in, is when it finally occurred to me it might be wise to start noting what’s been happening, what might happen next, and any other thoughts that occur to me.

So, after 5 years of zero updates, I’m resurrecting matthearn.com, at least for the Duration of the Current Emergency.

A brief glimpse of what’s happened so far, just for posterity; the details can be found at many other sources far more reliable than I.

• A new (“novel”) coronavirus erupted in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
• It reached the United States via cruise ship and other travelers in early 2020, and rapidly began to spread throughout the country.
• The Trump Administration, in its collective “wisdom,” played down the severity of the outbreak, even implying that it is a “Democratic hoax.”
• In mid-March, the first cases were confirmed in Delaware; a professor and three of his students who apparently picked it up at a conference out of state. Other cases began to be confirmed over the following days.
• Friday, March 13th, Governor Carney ordered schools to be closed for two weeks, and asked people to begin to use “social distancing” to slow the spread of the virus and avoid overwhelming the healthcare system, which only has so many ventilators and ICU beds.
• Shortly thereafter, following the lead of other states, the Governor orders restaurants and bars to become “take-out only”, with no eat-in service.
• Saturday, March 14th, the Hearn family goes into more-or-less complete lockdown. Our eldest asks if he can still play with his friends; we decree that he can only do so outside, not trapped in the same room sharing germs.
• Tuesday, March 17th, our eldest and his friends spend the afternoon writhing all over each other on the trampoline in our backyard.
• Wednesday, March 18th, one of those friends is now reportedly “sick.”

So we’re playing the waiting game to see if any of us contract some sort of virulent illness. The good news is that none of us is in the demographic that’s in significant danger, so I’m not terribly concerned about any of us getting sick to the point of hospitalization or worse.

There is much to be concerned about, of course. We’re lucky; my jobs can be done from anywhere, and Sarah’s office completely closed, so she and I have both continued to work, while trying to keep our children’s brains from atrophying. We’ve been making them try to do a little bit of schoolwork every day, though at this point they’ve completed everything that had been assigned before schools closed their doors, and have mostly moved on towards educational videos and Duolingo. I’m hoping we can start doing some actual instructional time, because it’s looking increasingly likely that schools will be out for far more than the two weeks that the Governor originally decreed.

I’m worried for people who can’t work remotely, or whose jobs depend on folks actually being able to leave their homes. We’re going to try and get in the habit of getting take-out from local restaurants on occasion to help keep them afloat. It does look like the Federal government is actually doing its job; we could see billions of dollars spent on actually helping people, which is more novel than the virus itself.

My main concern is for anyone over the age of 60. Not just for their health, though the virus seems to be far more dangerous for them, but the stock market tanking seems to be hitting everybody’s retirement funds pretty hard. I know the value of mine has dropped 25% in the last 3 weeks. Luckily, I’m 17 years away from being able to withdraw anything from mine, so I’ve actually increased my 401K contribution to buy while the funds are cheap. Plenty of older folks are in a tough spot right now, particularly if they didn’t move their money from the stock market to less volatile investments as they got closer to retirement.

We’ve decided that it’s possible for us to “isolate” but still spend some time outside, which is good. The kids and I have played soccer in our yard every evening this week, and yesterday afternoon we drove to the DuPont Environmental Education Center (the funny-looking building in Churchman’s Marsh south of Frawley Stadium and the Shipyard Shops in south Wilmington); the center itself is closed, but all of the walking paths are open. There were a fair number of other people there as well, taking advantage of the warm sun. The Jack Markell Trail was also open and busy; I might need to take a bicycle down there and go for a ride if I can break away for a few hours. We hope to start going to state parks, particularly as the weather warms, but have to deal with the fact that the younger kids will want to use playgrounds where they found them, and I have to assume that every inch of a jungle gym is crawling with COVID19 and my children cannot stop touching their own faces.

From reports, China is starting to recover from its outbreak; hopefully more good news comes from there. Meanwhile, hunker down and wash your hands everyone!