The home-run league

By Brian Hilderbrand (contact)

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 | 8:35 a.m.

The Pacific Coast League has been known as an outlaw circuit for allowing blacklisted players to play and a third major league before the West Coast landed its first Major League Baseball franchise.

Throughout its 104-year history, however, the Coast League has had a reputation as a hitter's league. Pitchers dread the smaller ballparks and the way the ball rockets off the bat in the "lighter air" in current PCL cities such as Colorado Springs, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas.

Some major league affiliates have refused to allow their top pitching prospects to pitch in the PCL - or let them linger here for more than a few games - for fear of doing irreparable damage to their psyches.

That, clearly, is not a position held by the Los Angeles Dodgers, the parent club of the Las Vegas 51s. The Dodgers' top prospect, right-hander Chad Billingsley, spent the first 10 weeks of this season in Las Vegas before being called to the major leagues where he pitched solidly in his first two starts.

Ken Howell, in his first season as pitching coach for the 51s, thinks the horror stories of the Coast League that fuel pitchers' nightmares are exaggerated. Going one step further, Howell believes a season in the league actually can be beneficial to a pitcher.

"I hear a lot of guys say, 'Well, it's a home-run league, it's a home-run league' and, yeah, it probably is so," Howell says.

But the majority of home runs his pitchers have allowed this season, Howell says, are the result of poorly executed pitches - usually fastballs up in the strike zone.

"When you're playing in A-ball and double-A, a lot of those mistakes that you made were pop-ups," he says. "Here and in the big leagues, they're going out of here.

"I'm not saying give all these hitters all the credit, but when you make mistakes, they're going to let you know that you did. And making mistakes up in the zone when you're talking about higher altitudes, you're going to pay for it."

That's where pitching in the Coast League can pay dividends once a pitcher gets promoted to the big leagues.

"When you talk about playing baseball, you've got to go to Colorado, too," Howell says. "These are great experiences and great opportunities to learn to pitch in some of these conditions and elements.

"Some people say in the light air, you don't get that real good break on your breaking ball. But then you also have that understanding that when you leave here and go somewhere else, your pitches should be better. If you can have a good breaking ball here and work the strike zone down, all it can do is help you later on wherever you're going to go."

That, apparently, is the lesson Billingsley took with him when the Dodgers came calling in mid-June. In 13 starts with the 51s, Billingsley won six of nine decisions, posted a 3.95 earned-run average and struck out 78 and walked 32 in 70.2 innings.

Walks, the downfall of pitchers in any league, are more directly responsible than any other factor for the 14-4 scores that are commonplace in the league, according to Howell.

"A solo home run is not going to beat you a lot of times," Howell says. "When you add three or four walks to that and then when you look at the end of the game and you see the box score and you walked five guys and three of those five guys scored, that's on the pitcher. It has nothing to do with the ballpark or the elements or the thin air."

Although the 51s have been involved in their share of high-scoring games this season, manager Jerry Royster says that Cashman Field has not lived up to its reputation as a "launching pad" through the first five home stands this season.

"Of all the ballparks we've played in so far, our ballpark has played as fair as any of them as far as the ball traveling," Royster says. "We've seen some ridiculous stuff (in the past) and that hasn't happened at all this year; there have been very few balls that have been hit (out) that really weren't legit."

The stats bear that out. At the halfway point of the season, Las Vegas pitchers had a combined 3.78 ERA in 40 games at Cashman Field and a 5.14 ERA in 32 games on the road.

"How do you explain it? I have no idea," Royster says.

One thing Howell constantly is explaining to his pitchers is something he has learned from his half-season in the PCL as a pitcher (in 1984 with Albuquerque) and another half-season as a pitching coach: Sometimes a pitcher can do all the right things against a hitter and still lose the battle.

"If a guy goes down in the zone and hits a good pitch out of the yard, that's not a mistake, that's just baseball," he says. "Sometimes the other guy over there with that wand in his hand is going to win."