There has always been a weird contradiction surrounding Morgan, something that wasn’t there for McCarver or the rest. While Joe Morgan the announcer railed against modern baseball statistics, Joe Morgan the ballplayer lit them up like Paul Millsap against the Heat. While Joe Morgan refused to give any credence to the new baseball ideas that were popping up all around him, Joe Morgan the ballplayer had foreshadowed many of them. Joe Morgan the announcer seemed utterly detached from Joe Morgan the amazing ballplayer. Morgan is a smart man. He lives in the moment. But, strange, it’s like he never understood his own genius for playing baseball. I’ve heard this same thing about a certain brilliantly funny Saturday Night Live actor who was in some of the funniest skits ever — that he didn’t entirely know WHY they were funny. He just did his part. He followed his instincts. And it worked.

I wish I could know the difference between a noun and a pronoun and an adverb and a verb, but I don’t know, and you know, I don’t wanna know. Why do you have to know English? It’s like ‘two’. There’s three ‘twos’! There’s tee-oh, there’s tee-double-ya-oh, and there’s tee-double-oh! Three twos! Now, if I put any one of those down in a letter, you know which one it is I’m talkin’ about. It’s like ‘there’ and ‘their.’ What’s the difference, as long as you know there’s a there there.

The problem with the move toward pitch counts was that there was never any logic or research that said that limiting a pitcher to 100 pitches would prevent injuries, as opposed to 130 pitches, or 130 for young pitchers and 160 for mature pitchers, or as opposed to getting the pitcher out of the game at the first sign of a problem, or as opposed to improving his training regimen. I am opposed to making decisions based on fear, and in favor of making decisions based on logic and research, and therefore I support what Nolan Ryan is trying to do.