by Roger Angell
Tony Kubek, the NBC baseball commentator, often points out that the designated-hitter artifice, which was adopted by the league in 1973, allows a manager to stay with his starting pitcher for as long as he seems to be pitching effectively, even though his team may be behind in the game, and, furthermore, that A.L. pitchers have to make a larger number of high-level, high-strain pitches per game, because they are facing an additional dangerous bat in the lineup in the person of the designated hitter. Kubek remembers asking Catfish Hunter about the D.H. rule when it was first enacted (Hunter pitched in the A.L. exclusively), and the Cat said, “Well, it’s going to make me a lot more money, and it’s going to shorten my career by about two years”—a dazzling prognostication, it turned out, for Hunter’s number of games won, complete games, and innings pitched suddenly rose after 1973 (he led the league in all three categories in 1975) and then almost as quickly dwindled, when arm miseries overtook him. By 1979, he was down to 2–9 with the Yankees, and by the next year he was gone, at the age of thirty-three.
Steve Garvey, another thoughtful mikado of the pastime, is also convinced that the designated-hitter rule has been a stroke of very bad fortune for the A.L. pitchers. “Because there’s no pinch-hitter, the good starting pitchers stay in the game longer and run into more of those stressful late-inning situations—a men-on-base, close-game crisis, where they’ll be throwing that much harder just when their arms are getting tired and are most vulnerable,” he said. “There are very few easy batters in big-league lineups now, and in the American League, of course, the pitcher never gets to pitch to the other pitcher. There’s no rest for him, I mean. Count up the good American League starters we’ve lost these past few years and see. It’s not a situation you want to think about.”
Perhaps we should think about David Bush instead. Last year, in the midst of spring training in Arizona, David felt some minor and then not so minor twinges of pain in his right shoulder, and finally consulted Mark Letendre, the Giants’ new trainer, who had just ascended to the post. Letendre poked and pulled and then diagnosed a mild rotator-cuff injury (“My first rotator cuff!” he exclaimed to Bush), and suggested anti-inflammatory drugs and rest. Bush, who is a veteran baseball-beat writer with the San Francisco Chronicle, refused to baby himself, and did not miss a single deadline (“I’ll play through pain,” he said stoutly), and there is some hope that he may have made a complete recovery. When I inquired about the possible source of the injury, David finally confessed that it might have happened when he heaved his wife’s clothesbag up on his shoulder the morning she was flying back to the Bay after a conjugal visit to Scottsdale. Lesly Bush, a stylish lady, does not travel light.
The Hook: New fans always want to know what the manager is saying to his pitcher when he goes to the mound to take him out of a game. The answer is: Nothing much. There are four or five new baseball books out every week, it seems, and soon, I don’t doubt, there will be an anthology of pre-shower epigrams. In Scottsdale, I saw a thin Athletics right-hander named Stan Kyles give up a walk and single in the fifth inning. Then he walked three batters in a row—walking himself to Tacoma, in effect. Eventually, manager Tony LaRussa showed mercy and got him out of there, and when the game was over I asked LaRussa what he’d said to Kyles. “I said it looked like he’d run into a moving target today,” Tony said.
Bill Rigney told me once that one day in his first summer as a major-league manager he went out to the mound in the Polo Grounds to yank a veteran Giants relief man named Windy McCall, who had got nobody at all out during his brief stint that day. Rig said, “I walked out there and I said ‘How are you?’ and McCall said ‘Great. How the hell are you?’ So I never asked that question again.”
I took a drive across the desert to visit the Indians in Tucson—in particular, to watch their two new genuine stars: Joe Carter, who rapped twenty-nine home runs last year and led both leagues with a hundred and twenty-one runs batted in; and Cory Snyder, the phenom sophomore, who, by sudden consensus, is said to have the best outfielder’s arm in the majors. The Indians are trying to deal with an unaccustomed emotion—hope—and may make a real run at the leaders in the American League East. The most hopeful Indian of them all, I found—by far the most cheerful pitcher I talked to this spring—was Tom Candiotti, a youthful-looking, almost anonymous twenty-nine-year-old right-hander, who had been informed the day before by Tribe manager Pat Corrales that he would be the team’s opening-day pitcher. A year ago, Candiotti was invited to Tucson for a look-see by the Indians, in spite of his most ordinary seven-year prior career, passed mostly in the bushy lower levels of the Milwaukee organization. He had a scattered 6–6 record while up with the Brewers, but had spent all of the previous, 1985 season in the minors; three years before that, he sat out an entire season after undergoing elbow reconstruction. Cleveland wanted to look at him because of some gaping vacancies on its own pitching staff and because Candiotti had experienced some recent success while throwing a knuckleball in a winter league in Puerto Rico. His early adventures with the flutterball in the American League last summer were a bit scary—he was 3–6 by mid-June—but he finished up with an admirable 16–12 record, including seventeen complete games. Only scriptwriters fashion turnabouts like that, but Candiotti’s help had come from a more reliable source—Phil Niekro, a forty-eight-year-old knuckleball grand master (only four other men in baseball history were still active players at his age), whom the Indians picked up on waivers when the Yankees released him just before the 1986 season got under way. Niekro had won his three-hundredth game at the end of the previous season, and he went 11–11 for the Tribe last year, his twenty-third in the majors; Candiotti and everyone else on the club gave him much of the credit for the younger man’s wonderful record as well.
“Knucksie is my guru,” Candiotti told me. (Knucksie is Niekro: sorry.) “He coached me during every game and in between. Last year—early last year—I was trying to throw the knuckleball hard all the time. It was a nasty pitch but tough to control, so I was always in trouble—3–0, 2–1. He said, ‘Listen, that’s not the way to do it. First of all, you want the batter to swing at it. You don’t want to go 3–2 all day. So take a little off it, make it look tempting to the batter as it comes up to the plate.’ I did that, and after a while I began to get a little more movement on my slower knuckler. I haven’t come close to mastering anything yet, the way he has, but I’m better.”
The knuckleball looks particularly tempting if you are a lizard or a frog. It is thrown not off the knuckles but off the fingertips—off the fingernails, to be precise—which renders the ball spinless and willful. It meanders plateward in a leisurely, mothlike flight pattern, often darting prettily downward or off to one side as it nears the strike zone, which results in some late and awkward-looking flailings by the batter, sudden belly flops into the dust by the catcher, and, not uncommonly, a passed ball or a wild pitch. It is the inelegance of the thing that makes it so unpopular with most managers, I believe (some of them call it “the bug”), but some distinguished and wonderfully extended careers have been fashioned by wily Merlins such as Wilbur Wood, who had two twenty-four-victory seasons in the course of his seventeen-year tenure (mostly with the White Sox) in the nineteen-sixties and seventies; Charlie Hough, of the Rangers, now in his eighteenth year in the big time; and, of course, Hoyt Wilhelm, who went into the Hall of Fame after twenty-one years of knuckling, with a record—let’s say “all-time” this once: with an all-time-record one thousand and seventy game appearances. The pitch, in short, is unthreatening to a pitcher’s arm, and I have often wondered why it isn’t practiced and admired more widely.
Candiotti, an agreeable fellow, told me that Niekro had emphasized that it was absolutely necessary for a knuckleballer to field his position well and to learn how to hold the runners close (Niekro’s pickoff move is legendary), since the bug is unhurried in its flight and tends to spin weirdly when nubbed along the ground. “The pitch takes its time, you know,” Tom said. I asked how much time, and
he said that his knuckleball had been timed between forty-eight and seventy-one miles per hour last year. “Seventy-one is slow, you understand,” he said. “You just can’t believe how easy on your arm this pitch feels. Knucksie keeps telling me that I’ll go through a lot of frustrating days with the knuckleball, and sometimes you’ll get racked up. But the thing to do is stay with it.”
Niekro pitched against the Giants that afternoon in beautiful little Hi Corbett Field, and tried his damnedest to stay with the pitch. It was a bright, windy afternoon (the knuckleball becomes even more flighty in a breeze, or else refuses to perform at all), and Phil gave up four runs, including a couple of walks and two doubles, in his three-inning outing. The pitch seemed to arrive at the plate in stages, at the approximate pace of a sightseeing bus.
Niekro, whom I found in the Indians’ empty clubhouse after his stint, was not much cast down. “I haven’t thrown a real knuckleball all this spring training,” he said. “It’s too dry here, and the wind keeps blowing. I can’t sweat. Just can’t get it right. If the knuckleball ain’t there, I’m a mass of confusion. I can’t defend myself with a fastball or a slider, like other pitchers. It seems like it takes me a little longer to find it each spring.”
He sounded like a man who had been going through his pockets in search of a misplaced key or parking-lot stub, and it came to me that I had sometimes had this same impression when listening to Dan Quisenberry, the Kansas City sidearm sinker-bailer, talk about his odd little money pitch. Niekro said that this feeling around for the perfect knuckleball—this sense of search—was a year-round thing with him. “You’ve got to sleep with it and think about it all the time. It’s a twenty-four-hour pattern,” he said. “The margin for error is so slight, and it can be such a little-bitty thing—your release point, the ballpark, your fingernails, the ball you’ve just gotten from the umpire. If anything is a fraction off, you might not have a thing out there.” He crooked his fingers and waggled his wrist. “It’s hunt and peck, all year long.”
Niekro is lean and gray-haired, with an easy manner and a sleepy sort of smile. Watching him take off his spikes and his elastic sock supporters and the rest, and tuck his gear into his square-top travel bag (the club was going on a road trip the next day), I was reminded of an old-time travelling salesman repacking his sample case. Niekro is unhurried and precise in everything he does. I have never seen a neater ballplayer. Something else about him surprises you, too, but you can’t quite figure it out at first: he is a grownup.
He told me that helping Candiotti had been a treat for him, because the young man had exactly the right makeup for the job. “He knows his limitations,” he said. “He changes pitches better than I did when I was his age. I used to go: Bang—here’s a knuckleball. Bang—here’s another. He’s really pitching: Go at one speed, go at another. Take a little off. Throw one knuckler to set up another one. But he’s sort of like me, at that. I won my first game in the big leagues at the age of twenty-six, and he won his at the age of twenty-five. So he’s right on track.”
Niekro’s lifetime record is an herb garden of statistics-three twenty-game-or-better winning seasons, two years when he lost twenty games (he combined the two in 1979, when he won twenty-one games for the Braves and lost twenty), and a 17–4 record in the summer of his forty-fourth year: the best percentage in the league that season. He has thrown a no-hitter, he has struck out four batters in a single inning, and he has thrown four wild pitches in one inning and six in one game. Almost any day now, he and his brother Joe, who is a starting pitcher for the Yankees, will set another record when they surpass Gaylord and Jim Perry’s lifetime total of five hundred and twenty-nine victories by pitcher brothers. Joe, who also throws the knuckler, is forty-two, and has won two hundred and fourteen games.
“I learned my knuckleball from my daddy,” Phil said, “but Joe was a different kind of pitcher at first. He had a three-quarter mediocre curveball, a fastball, and a slider, and he was just getting by in the major leagues. I think he was on his way down when he said, ‘Oh, hell—all right,’ and he went into his back pocket and began throwing the knuckleball, too. It took him three or four years to make the transition, but once he got it he was as good a pitcher with the knuckleball for eight or nine years as there’d ever been in baseball.”
I asked Niekro if he was ever tempted to giggle when one of his pitches danced away from a batter for strike three.
“Oh, no—you can’t do that,” he said. “I won’t ever laugh at him, but I’ll laugh with him sometimes, if I see he’s laughing over it. We’ll have a little fun out there.” He gave me a glance, and said, “You know, there’s lots of guys can throw the damn knuckler for fun. It ain’t all that hard to pick up. But here’s a game: You’re out on the mound, here’s the strike zone, and there’s a man standing there with a bat in his hand. It’s a 3–2 count, there’s a man on third base, or maybe the bases are loaded, and now you’ve got to throw the knuckleball over the plate on pitch after pitch after pitch—because he’s sure as hell going to foul some of them off. You just go back to it and throw it for another strike, and that’s not fun. That’s a little different.”
Niekro got up and pulled off his sweatshirt. He is trim and narrow, and his body doesn’t show his years. He is famous for never doing conditioning sprints, never running at all, and when I mentioned this he smiled and said, “I’ve never run the ball across the plate yet.” An old joke. “I stretch and I do just about ever’thing else,” he said, “but I don’t do weights. It’s just that much more muscle to tighten up when you’ve finished for the day. Maybe those big boys can throw the ball harder, but when the game’s over you see them iced down from their wrists to their hips. I never ice. Well, maybe I did about four times in my career, but I can’t exactly remember the last time. Maybe I’m getting old.”
Grumpy: Some of us were eating our cold-cuts lunch off paper plates in the Cardinals’ pressroom before a Cards-Blue Jays game in Al Lang Stadium, when I noticed that the small, snub-nosed man sitting next to me was Birdie Tebbetts, the old-time Tiger catcher; he also managed the Reds, the Braves, and the Indians. Tebbetts is seventy-four years old, and scouts for the Indians. He listened to our conversation about pitches and pitchers, and muttered, “Sometimes I watch one of these young pitchers we’ve got, and I tell my club, “This man needs another pitch. By which I mean a strike.’”
There is a lot to this game. as my trip began to run out, I realized how many aspects of pitching I hadn’t gone into yet, or hadn’t asked enough about—what it takes to break in as a major-league pitcher, and how great a part luck plays in the kind of pitching roster and the kind of club a rookie is headed for, for instance. Pete Rose said that it was often easier for a youngster to make it up to the majors in the middle of a season, if the chance came, because his control would be better than it was in the spring. What about bum steers—poor advice from a pitching coach, or the wrong advice for that particular pitcher? Charlie Leibrandt, a first-rate left-hander with the Royals, told me that the Cincinnati coaches had insisted that he was a power pitcher, a fastballer, when he tried to catch on with the Reds some years ago, because they were a team that specialized in big hard throwers. He had four scattered, so-so seasons with the team, then went back down to the minors, and when he came back, with the Royals, it was as a breaking-ball, control sort of pitcher, and he felt at home at last. “I remember being on the mound at Riverfront Stadium and hearing the ball popping over the sidelines while the relief pitchers warmed up to come in for me,” he said cheerfully. “I was about to be gone again, and somebody in the dugout would be yelling ‘Throw strikes!’ and I’d think, Oh, strikes—so that’s what you want! Why didn’t you say so?” I also wanted to talk with the Mets about how they bring along their young pitchers, because they seem to be so good at it. And someday I want to sit down with a first-class control pitcher and go over a video of a game he has just pitched, and make him tell me why he chose each pitch to each batter, in every situation, and how it
related to what patterns he had thrown before that.
The business of strength came up a lot in my conversations, I noticed—which pitchers lasted, and why, and whether young pitchers today were in better shape than their predecessors twenty or thirty years ago. Almost everybody said yes, they were in better shape today, and probably stronger, too. Aerobics and weight work and a much better understanding of nutrition came into that, of course, and so did plain genetics; ballplayers are all noticeably bigger and taller than they used to be—you can see it. But I heard some interesting opinions to the contrary.
Jim Kaat, the deep-chested left-hander who pitched twenty-five years in the majors (he is one of the few players at any position who have performed in the big leagues in four calendar decades), told me that he’d been wondering about the decline of the fastball pitchers—the burners—and about why so many pitchers of his generation, like Gaylord Perry, Nolan Ryan, and Phil Niekro, had lasted so long. “One of my theories is that we did a lot of work by hand when we were kids,” he said. “Mowed the lawn, washed the car, shovelled snow, and walked. I used to walk everywhere.” (Kaat grew up in Zeeland, Michigan, on the western edge of the Michigan peninsula.) “Now you see kids who haven’t logged as many sandlot innings as I did, and when they come into baseball you don’t know how big they’re going to be. When I was eighteen, my body was developed.”
