THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 21 - 22, 2020 |C5
The Long Fight
Against
Unjust Taxes
WITH THE WORLD IN
the grip of a major
health crisis, historical
milestones are passing
by with little notice.
But the Boston Massacre, whose
250th anniversary was this month,
deserves to be remembered as a
cautionary tale.
The bloody encounter on March
5, 1770, began with the harassment
of a British soldier by a crowd of
Bostonians. Panicked soldiers re-
sponded by firing on the crowd,
leaving five dead and six wounded.
The colonists were irate about new
taxes imposed by the British Parlia-
ment to pay for the expenses of the
Seven Years War, which in North
America pitted the British and
Americans against the French and
their Indian allies. Whether or not
the tax increase was justified, the
failure of British leaders to include
the American colonies in the delib-
erative process was catastrophic.
The slogan “No taxation without
representation” became a rallying
cry for the fledgling nation.
The attitude of tax-collecting au-
thorities had hardly changed since
ancient times, when empires
treated their subject populations
with greed, brutality and arro-
gance. In 1st-century Judea, anger
over the taxes imposed by Rome
combined with religious grievances
to provoke a full-scale Jewish re-
volt in 66-73 A.D. It was an unequal
battle, as most tax rebellions are,
and the resistors were made to pay
dearly: Jerusalem was sacked and
the Second Temple destroyed, and
all Jews in the Roman Empire were
forced to pay a punitive tax.
Even when tax revolts met with
initial success, there was no guar-antee that the authorities would
carry out their promises. In 1381, a
humble English roof tiler named
Wat Tyler led an uprising, dubbed
the Peasants’ Revolt, against a new
poll tax. King Richard II met with
Tyler and agreed to his demands,
but only as a delaying tactic. The
ringleaders were then rounded up
and executed, and Richard revoked
his concessions, claiming they had
been made under duress.
Nevertheless, as the historian
David F. Burg notes in his book “A
World History of Tax Rebellions,”
tax revolts have been more fre-
quent than we realize, mainly be-
cause governments tend not to ad-
vertise them. In Germany, 210
separate protests and uprisings
were recorded from 1300 to 1550,
and at least 1,000 in Japan from
1600 to 1868.
The 19th century saw the rise of
a new kind of tax rebel, the consci-
entious objector. In 1846, the writer
and abolitionist Henry David Tho-
reau spent a night in the Concord,
Mass., jail after he refused to pay a
poll tax as a protest against slav-
ery. He was released the next
morning when his aunt paid it for
him, against his will. But Thoreau
would go on to withhold his taxes
in protest against the Mexican-
American War, arguing in his 1849
essay “Civil Disobedience” that it
was better to go to jail than to “en-
able the State to commit violence
and shed innocent blood.”
Irwin Schiff, a colorful antitax
advocate and failed libertarian
presidential candidate, wouldn’t get
off so easily. Arguing that the in-
come tax violated the U.S. Constitu-
tion, he refused to pay it, despite
being convicted of tax evasion
three times. In 2015, he died at age
87 in a federal prison—an ironic
confirmation of Benjamin Franklin’s
adage that “nothing can be said to
be certain, except death and taxes.”
Fortunately for Americans at this
time of national duress, tax day
this year has been mercifully post-
poned.HISTORICALLY SPEAKING
AMANDA FOREMAN
THOMAS FUCHSREVIEW
ball, before leveling off at the
point of contact. Cues like “be
short to the ball” or “chop wood”
or “stay on top of the ball” devel-
oped into coaching buzz phrases.
But not everybody agreed with
that line of thinking. In 1970, the
legendary hitter Ted Williams
and author John Underwood pub-
lished “The Science of Hitting,” a
short guide outlining Williams’s
ideas about the best way to swing
a bat. “You have always heard,”
they wrote, “that the ideal swing
is level or ‘down.’” Williams, how-
ever, advocated what he de-
scribed as a “slight upswing” of
about 10 degrees. Instead of
chopping down to meet the pitch,
hitters should bring the barrel of
the bat behind the ball as quickly
as possible and swing up through
it. This put the bat “flush in line
with the path of the ball for a
longer period.”
Despite Williams’s success as a
hitter, baseball traditionalists dis-
missed his ideas as too compli-
cated and strange for mere mor-
tals, who lacked the superhumanFROM TOP: LYNNE SLADKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS; ASSOCIATED PRESS
natural gifts of the Splendid
Splinter. It took a group of base-
ball outsiders to bring Williams’s
theory into the mainstream.
In the 2010s, MLB players be-
gan to turn to freelance swing
gurus like Craig Wallenbrock, a
self-described “pot-smoking hip-
pie” who spent part of the 1960s
as a full-time surfer; Doug Latta,
a former swim-
ming pool repair-
man who became a
swing whisperer to
the stars; and
Richard Schenck—
“Rich from the
Basement,” as he
calls himself—the
owner of a bil-
liards bar near St.
Louis. None of
them had played professional
baseball or even high-level col-
lege ball. But with the benefit of
technology, creative ingenuity
and an entrepreneurial spirit,
these baseball nobodies started a
trend with one central tenet: Hit
the ball in the air.
The movement began
quietly, with a few early
adopters quietly changing
their swings. During
spring training in 2014,
the Houston Astros cut
J.D. Martinez, a marginal
outfielder who had se-
cretly spent the winter un-
der the tutelage of Mr.
Wallenbrock. Mr. Martinez
signed with the Detroit Ti-
gers and emerged as a
long-ball monster. Now
with the Boston Red Sox,
he ranks among baseball’s
premier sluggers.
Third baseman Justin
Turner had an almost
identical story. The New
York Mets let him go after
the 2013 season, not
knowing that he was hard
at work with Mr. Latta to
learn to hit the ball in the
air. The Los Angeles
Dodgers picked him up,
and now he is a star. Once
on the verge of being out
of baseball, Mr. Martinez
has since signed a $110
million contract, while
2020 is the final season
of Mr. Turner’s four-year,
$64 million pact.
Word of these transfor-
mations spread through
the baseball world. In
2016, the Dodgers hired
Mr. Wallenbrock and his
protégé, Robert Van
Scoyoc, as consultants. In
the winter following the
2018 season, the damburst. By the end of April
2019, 17 teams had a differ-
ent hitting coach from the
season before. Thirteen of
those coaches had never
played in the majors, and
four hadn’t even played in
the minors—including Mr.
Van Scoyoc, who is now the
Dodgers’ hitting coach.
The benefits of hitting the
ball in the air are irrefutable.
Since 2015, MLB batters
have posted a .247 batting aver-
age and a .269 slugging percent-
age on balls hit on the ground.
On balls hit in the air, those num-
bers jump to .406 and .787, re-
spectively.
The question that baseball
now faces is what this means for
the future of the game. There’s
no doubt that MLB is smarter
than ever before,
and the willing-
ness to hire out-
siders has only
sped the rate of
change. What’s
less clear is
whether the game
is actually better.
Baseball is, after
all, a form of en-
tertainment. It
can be dissected and studied in
every conceivable way, but if fans
don’t like what they’re seeing on
the field, it hardly matters.
As the number of home runs
has increased, strategic elements
that once defined the sport, like
stolen bases and sacrifice bunts,
are disappearing. Singles have
fallen to record lows, while
strikeouts have soared. In 2019, a
whopping 35% of plate appear-
ances ended in either a home run,
a strikeout or a walk, the highest
rate ever.
With so few balls actually hit
into the field of play, it sometimes
feels like nothing happens during
a baseball game, except for the
sudden burst of action when a
player blasts a ball out of the park.
Meanwhile, the average length of
an MLB game has ballooned to 3
hours, 10 minutes, a record, and
average attendance dropped for
the fourth straight season.
This is the new reality that
baseball has to reckon with, and it
is shaping the game at every level.
One of the most vocal proponents
of hitting the ball in the air is
Minnesota Twins third baseman
Josh Donaldson. In the summer of
2016, while he was playing for the
Toronto Blue Jays, he was inter-
viewed on MLB Network and
asked what advice he would give
to children who wanted to become
hitters. “If you’re 10 years old and
your coach says, ‘Get on top of the
ball,’” Mr. Donaldson said, em-
phatically pointing to the camera,
“tell him no.”Mr. Diamond is The Journal’s
national baseball writer. This
essay is adapted from his new
book “Swing Kings: The Inside
Story of Baseball’s Home Run
Revolution,” which will be pub-
lished by William Morrow on
March 31.Today’s
baseball is all
about power
and how
to cultivate it.Legendary
slugger
Ted Williams
in 1941.N
o feat in Ameri-
can sports cap-
tures the imagi-
nation quite like
the home run.
The act of sending a baseball
soaring into the sky, over the
fence and into the bleachers,
represents the pinnacle of
strength and power.
The homer earned that
status in part because of its
rarity. From 1900 through
2015, Major League Baseball
averaged 1.4 home runs per
game, meaning that a fan
showed up to the ballpark not ex-
pecting to see both teams hit one.
But in the past four seasons, that
number has jumped to 2.5 hom-
ers per game, an offensive explo-
sion that has fundamentally
changed the baseball experience.
The 2019 season set a record as
players combined to bash 6,776
home runs—671 more than in
2017, the previous high. That
mark will almost certainly stand
for at least a year, with the status
of the 2020 season now uncertain
because of the coronavirus pan-
demic.
Today’s baseball is all about
power and how to cultivate it. The
home run revolution proves that
the ability to launch balls into the
stratosphere doesn’t entirely stem
from winning the genetic lottery.
It’s a skill that can be taught—
with the right technique.
Perhaps the most fundamental
part of the game is how to swing
the bat. For generations, hitters
from Little League to the majors
were taught to drive the barrel of
the bat in a straight line to theBYJAREDDIAMOND
TheHOME RUN
REVOLUTION
Thanks to new hitting strategies, baseball players
are bashing out more homers than ever before—and
changing how fans experience the game.The Dodgers’ Justin
Turner hits a first-
inning home run,
Aug. 14, 2019.