“Going Down Swinging” Versus “Going Down Looking”
To say that someone has “gone down swinging” is usually intended as a compliment, suggesting that while he has failed, he has at least given his best shot -- unlike those who have “gone down looking,” who are viewed as having declined to make any attempt at all. In other words, whether one succeeds is less important than whether one has made a public display of effort in doing so. This mindset reaches beyond baseball, but how it functions may best be examined through examples from the sport. For instance, when star hitters Carlos Beltran, then of the New York Mets, and Ryan Howard of the Philadephia Phillies made the respective final outs for their teams in the 2006 and 2010 National League Championship Series by striking out looking, fans excoriated them: by not swinging, they hadn’t appeared to “go down fighting” or even to “try” at all, putting into question the players’ desire to win, their ability to madter pressure situations, and implicitly their masculinity (cf. Rhoden D1, Donnellon). Indeed, many appeared more upset that their stars hadn’t swung than their teams had been eliminated.
Of course, this ideology is as absurd as it is common. A batter gets no bonus for having swung at a third strike rather than having let it pass. While a player might be justly criticized for failing to swing at a pitch in the middle of the strike zone, swinging at pitches on its edges (as were the pitches to Beltran and Howard) is usually counterproductive. Ted Williams, perhaps the greatest hitter of all time, notes in his The Science of Hitting that:
A good hitter can hit a pitch that’s [directly] over the plate three times better than a great hitter with a ball in a tough spot. . . . [M]ore often than not, you hit a bad pitch in a tough spot and nothing happens. Nothing. And when you start fishing for the pitch that’s an inch off the plate, the pitcher -- if he’s smart -- will put the next one two inches off. Then three. And before you know it you’re making fifty outs a year on pitches you never should have swung at. (25).
Granted, if one does not swing, one has no chance to get a hit -- but if one does swing, the pitch cannot be called a ball, and the player cannot draw a walk. For a pitch on the edges of the strike zone -- where, given the inherent margin of error and subjectivity of the umpires’ calls, it might be ruled either a ball or a strike -- the batter’s swinging and either putting a weakly hit ball in play or missing it entirely may well lead to a worse result than letting the pitch pass. The aforementioned Ryan Howard exemplified this all too well a year after his season-ending 2010 strikeout when he made the Phillies’ final out in the 2011 playoffs by flailing at another tough pitch, subsequently not only hitting an easily fieldable ground ball but tearing his Achilles tendon while dashing out of the batter’s box. “Going down looking,” then, is not a failure to “give it your best shot,” as many claim, because letting the pitch go may well be the hitter’s “best shot.”
Those who adhere to the ideology of “going down swinging,” however, refuse to acknowledge this. They also grant too little rhetorical respect to “drawing a walk,” even though a walk is clearly more valuable than a strikeout of any kind. The walk appears to them an undeserved reward, gained by good fortune and evasion rather than by honest effort. For instance, when a federal judge declared a mistrial in the initial perjury case of alleged steroid-user Roger Clemens, headline writers exploited the obvious pun by writing that Clemens had “walked” (Keidel). This wordplay was not intended to credit Clemens -- indeed, most showed nothing but contempt for him -- but to suggest that the pitching legend had not deserved the positive outcome he’d receieved. Had he “gone down swinging,” with an impassioned, heartfelt denial of the charges instead of relying on strategic stonewalling and legal manueuvering, he might have garnered more respect.
Excerpted from: Letzler, D. (2014). Walking Around the Fences: Troy Maxson and the Ideology of "Going Down Swinging". African American Review. 42: 301-312. (x)
