A Little John Tudor Essay

I would commend to you the SABR Oral History interview of John Tudor, which can be found here Tudor interview. From the beginning, you knew this was going to be a different interview. John McMurray favors simple questions, but Tudor gives simpler answers.

“How did you get interested in baseball?,” McMurray asked.

Tudor responded, “I was a kid.”

McMurray expected him to go on. At first, he didn’t. But what a true answer that was!

Tudor emerged in some ways as a Zack Greinke-like character, or at least as Greinke has been described to me. Tudor never threw a no-hitter, so McMurray asked him to recall his one-hitter against the Blue Jays. Tudor wouldn’t and couldn’t dwell on it. Didn’t remember any of the details. “It was a game.” If it sounds like there was rudeness in this, there wasn’t. There was honesty.

Posnanski has described Greinke as wickedly competitive, and I have no doubt Tudor was the same way. What else would drive a kid to play different sports, day after day? He wasn’t really a baseball fan; he got lost in playing. However, there is a rankness in Greinke that I don’t perceive in Tudor, as in “rank individuality.” Whether he’s unintentionally putting teammates down, or defining his preference for a new team solely in financial terms, Greinke can be alienating. Tudor seemed to emphasize “the team” in his comments. Neither orientation is necessarily better, but Tudor did strike me as having a different makeup.

I did not find that he was trying to be difficult or contrarian in the interview. He effused on at least a couple of occasions. First, about the Cardinals defense (Bill James actually noted Tudor’s identification of this as the main reason for his improvement with the Cardinals oh so many years ago, so the man also sticks to a story.) Then Tudor categorically praised Whitey Herzog, repeating what we heard from others after Herzog’s recent passing — that he was a “player’s manager.” Herzog had an even temperament, Tudor said, and Herzog only faulted players when their effort sagged.

Maybe the most interesting thing specific to baseball that Tudor threw in there, which unfortunately McMurray didn’t asked him to elaborate on, was that, as a pitcher, “you can’t pace yourself.” The way that I understood it, he was saying that if you have a 95 MPH fastball in you but need to be able to throw a complete game, you generally aren’t going to sit 91 or 92 and hold something in reserve. Certainly, we do see some pitchers who will throw harder in the most crucial situations to the best hitters, but I think pacing has gotten to be overstated. Today’s pitchers just throw a lot harder than yesterday’s. There is no doubt that most pitchers are more effective in the short relief outings than they could be as starters, but that may be due to a lot of things besides starters not going all out all the time. Fundamentally, you may not strain so your arm hurts, but a fastball is called a fastball for a reason. But I have a new subscriber who is apparently a professional player and recent college coach, and I hate to think of what he might think of my naked opining. I really am out of my depth on this. Tudor is not, however, and I wish this had been further explored with him.

Tudor clearly never aspired to run an amateur personnel department, as Greinke perhaps does. Doesn’t have interest in analytics, and suggested some contempt for them. But you can surpass others in perception just through simple honesty, even eschewing probing and rigor. Most people not only won’t stick to the truth the way Tudor does, but they don’t care about it the way that he seems to. And in the process, they don’t see it, no matter how simple it is.