Deep in the compelling prose of Ben McGrath's appreciative if sometimes blistering profile of Manny Ramirez a few weeks ago in The New Yorker, one zesty factoid virtually vaulted from the page.

McGrath reported that Bill James, one of baseball's most respected statistical reconstructionists, had documented 53 instances of game-altering failure to hustle with the 2003 Boston Red Sox, with Ramirez being the feckless author of a mere 29 of those.

Even by removing Ramirez from the equation, that team, which won 95 games and took the Yankees to seven games in the American League Championship Series, still had a game-altering failure to hustle in 15 percent of its performances. Your typical baseball game being a two-team affair, one ballpark estimate might be that 30 percent of games include a game-altering failure to hustle. You can provide your own guestimate on what percentage of big-league games include standard, generic failure to hustle aside from or in addition to the more virulent game-altering strain.

My own view would be that hustle has very slowly devolved toward an archaic value in the game, but that its decline has been so gradual that a lot of people don't notice it, much less have an idea how long the symptoms have been exhibited.

"There was a young outfielder for the Yankees who was pulled out of game for not running hard enough to first," Jerry Coleman was telling me one night this week. "Mickey Mantle."

Mickey Mantle?

"Yeah. Stengel pulled him right out on the spot. Casey Stengel. Out!"

Coleman, a Hall of Fame broadcaster with the San Diego Padres for 35 years and a key member of six World Series teams in nine years with the Yankees (1949-57), insisted he wasn't terribly qualified to judge hustle because he's always following the ball rather than the baserunner.

"Ninety-five percent of players today are very proud of their work and expect themselves to exhibit that pride," Coleman said. "[Jack] Wilson and [Freddie Sanchez] do things with their gloves that Phil Rizzuto and I could only have dreamed about. The only thing that I've noticed along the lines of lack of hustle is that some guys don't go to the wall [as hard as they should]. They start that little pitty-pat run. But hey, some walls are pretty hard."

While it seems to me that I see a significant number of doubles that should be triples, and about as many singles that should be doubles, the business of quantifying effort seems a highly problematic if not a dubious endeavor.

"Obviously I have a lot of respect for what Bill James has done with a lot of objective analysis," said Pirates general manager Dave Littlefield, "but when you get into something like -- what was it? -- game-altering failure to hustle, there has to be a degree of subjectivity in that. There's a general understanding in the game as to what really matters in regard to hustle and a lot of that has to do with the trained eye. A lot of people who see a lot of baseball still don't have the trained eye of people in the game.

"One example is the existence of false hustle. On a foul ball you'll see a guy run with full effort to the railing, and the ball is 30 rows back. You're better off saving your energy."

No group of contemporary employees has seized the save-your-energy position with more enthusiasm than pitchers when they come up to bat. The general practice of running out a ground ball has, to many of them, become strictly optional. This approach has infiltrated the position player camp to a much lesser extent.

"There are some ground balls on which I don't see enough effort, regardless of whether it's a pitcher," Littlefield said. "There's a certain professional pace and sometimes I see some people who go below what I'm comfortable with in that regard. Even on a ball hit back to the pitcher, a play that is made 99 percent of the time, you should run hard because you never, ever know."

Pirates manager Jim Tracy, who, I would estimate, sees no more but certainly no less than his allotment of game-altering failure to hustle -- whatever that is -- figures that James' numbers were high and his science perhaps flawed.

"It sounds like a formula where something's being added and subtracted and divided and that always leaves out the human element relative to a player's capabilities and the way he responds to certain situations," Tracy said. "There are problems on the field that occur, and maybe you can point them out and say this or that, but then all of a sudden someone will come up and knock the living ... out of the ball and negate the whole process."

That's an analysis I'm guessing Ramirez would embrace. You know, if he gave a ...

First Published: June 3, 2007, 2:30 a.m.