There is a time in life when you expect the world to always be full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of space where the memories are.
– Helen Macdonald
On Tuesday night, Rich Hill made his first major league start of the season and his first ever as a Kansas City Royal. Although he took the loss, the game lived up to its billing as a feel-good story. The 45-year-old lefty went five innings against the second-best offense in baseball, allowing one earned run and two unearned. He walked two Cubs, struck out one looking, induced 11 groundballs, and left the game with a 1.80 ERA. Stylistically, it was a vintage Rich Hill performance (from a vintage Rich Hill), featuring not-so-fastballs, loopy curves, and dropdown frisbee sliders. It was also a vintage Hill performance from a sensorial perspective, in that it involved a whole lot of strange human sounds.
I mentioned Hill’s vocalizations when I wrote about the minor league deal he signed with the Royals back in May. They’re right there in my mental map of a Hill start. But memory just can’t do justice to some things. It fades. It falters. Even the events that imprint upon us most deeply tend to loosen their hold with time. It’s cruel, but it’s for the best. If our memories could transport us exactly to who we were when we felt that first rush of puppy love, heard that one perfect song, tasted that one croissant in Paris, would we even bother to seek out new experiences, or would we just live within the old ones and keep playing the hits? All of this is to say that I thought I was prepared for the Rich Hill experience. I tuned into the game Tuesday night expecting to hear the man grunt. But then I actually heard the man grunt. I was not prepared.
For two main reasons, it’s hard to be prepared for the sound that Hill makes when he pitches. The first is that it’s not your standard grunt. Here’s David Robertson, who also grunts when he pitches.
Robertson sounds more or less like what he is, a 40-year-old man trying to throw a ball as hard as his 40-year-old body will let him. It’s relatively low-pitched. It’s guttural. It makes you think that maybe grunting is the wrong word entirely for what Hill does, because here’s what Hill does.
It sounds a lot more like speech. It’s higher pitched. And it’s way, way louder. You can hear a clear vowel sound; usually it’s “Ah!” but sometimes he throws in an “Ugh!” or an “Ooh!” just to mix things up. It may be more accurate to say that Hill is simply screaming while he pitches. And because it sounds a lot more like human speech, it grabs you more. Our brains are wired to pick out the human voice, and Hill sounds like a human being under some form of duress. He’s a kid fending off blows in a karate class; he’s Link speed-rolling his way across Hyrule Field. “Every time I go out there, I’m going to give everything I’ve got,” Hill said after the game, and it certainly sounded like he did just that.
Back in 2015, right around the time Hill was finally putting it all together in his 14th season as a professional, a study in Current Biology explained why screams trigger a fear response in the amygdala. “We asked ourselves what makes a scream a scream,” said neuroscientist David Poeppel. “It isn’t that it is always loud, high-pitched or shrill.” What makes a scream a scream is that its intensity changes much more rapidly than normal speech, a trait they called roughness. The rougher the sound, the scarier people found it, and the more active their amygdala. “Screams result from the bifurcation of regular phonation to a chaotic regime,” wrote Poeppel and his colleagues.
You could argue that Hill’s whole approach, including the sounds he makes, relies on that chilling bifurcation of regular to chaotic. He looks like a normal enough lefty. His fastball is very slow, but it’s not a wild departure. And then all of a sudden, he’s screaming at you. He’s dropping down to a radically different arm angle. He’s swearing at himself between pitches. He’s throwing big loopy curveballs like the ones you saw in high school.
The second reason it’s hard to be fully prepared for the noises Hill makes is that, much like Link speed-rolling across Hyrule Field, he never stops making the noises. It’s unrelenting. Hill threw 90 pitches on Tuesday night, and on 67 of them, he scream-grunted so loudly that the home broadcast picked it up very clearly. He did it on his first 11 pitches, and he never went more than three pitches in a row without doing it again. And in case you’re wondering, I know all this because I analyzed the video and audio of all 90 of Hill’s pitches. Sound up, please.
The best grunt of the night was actually a double grunt. On his fifth pitch, Hill got Kyle Tucker to chase a fastball well off the plate inside. Statcast classified it as a changeup, and it’s hard to blame the computer for that one. This season, the league’s average fastball clocks in at 94.2 mph, while the average offspeed pitch is 86.0. This pitch was 87.8. Regardless, Tucker fouled the ball directly off his right knee. Considering that he fractured that same right leg with a foul ball last season, this is not remotely funny, but it does hold crucial information for those of us on the cutting edge of the “grunt or scream” beat.
It’s a treat that we get to enjoy this at all. A friend who was about 20 rows back on Tuesday night told me that Wrigley Field was so loud she couldn’t hear Hill. There’s a lot that goes into a major league broadcast, and every one is different. You could only hear Hill on the Cubs broadcast, not the Royals one. Maybe it’s because Chicago was the home team, which meant its broadcast had more microphones set up, or maybe the two broadcasts just choose to mix the sound differently. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it before, but the sound on your television often gets louder when the pitch comes in, then drops back down afterwards. It’s easy to see in the waveforms. The one below is from a pitch with no announcers talking and no loud noises from the pitcher.
The big spike is when the pitch hits the catcher’s mitt, then there’s a big drop-off immediately after it, presumably because a compressor is registering the loud noise and quickly dropping the overall volume in order to avoid blowing out anybody’s speakers. We’re focusing on the way the volume swells before the pitch, then fades back down after it. Here’s that same pitch with the waveform overlaid on top.
That swell isn’t something you’d hear if you were in the ballpark. If anything, that’s probably a quieter moment, because people tend to stop talking in order to pay attention to the pitch, just like the announcers on TV tend to stop talking in order to allow their viewers to pay attention to it. Your television gets louder because the sound engineer is deliberately cranking up the microphones directed at home plate so that you can hear the ball hitting the mitt, the crack of the bat, or the umpire calling a ball or strike. Because those microphones are generally right behind home plate, they also pick up Hill’s vocalizations. If he’d made his season debut at another park with another audio setup or another sound mixing philosophy, we wouldn’t have heard him at all.
Thankfully, we should get the full Rich Hill experience for at least a few more months. For the first half of the season, when it wasn’t clear whether we’d ever see him again under the bright lights, Hill’s grunts receded to that shining dullness of space where the memories are. They were fun to remember, but they weren’t the real thing. There’s no way of knowing how much longer he will last. He’s still topping 90 mph at 45, and for at least one night he’s still flummoxing major league hitters. Make sure you catch him while you can. And turn it up loud.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com