by Roger Angell
Mel Stottlemyre, the old Yankee wizard who is now the pitching coach for the Mets, said, “There’s no doubt that there are fewer good arms than there used to be. For one thing, a lot of young pitchers start throwing breaking balls when they’re too young, and they don’t develop their bodies the way they could have. That’s going to take a toll. I think there’s less plain throwing than there used to be—just throwing the ball back and forth with your neighbor or your brother. There are more things for kids to do now, so they end up not playing catch. You see kids in Little League who aren’t strong enough to pitch at all, hardly, and there they are, throwing breaking balls. There’s nothing I hate worse than to see a Little Leaguer with his arm in ice—but I’ve seen that a lot.” (Mel Stottlemyre’s twenty-one-year-old son Todd, by the way—or perhaps not by the way—is a pitcher with the Toronto organization; he is still a year or two away from the majors but is considered one of the great young prospects in the country.)
Other pitching people I talked to did not quite agree. Dave Duncan, the pitching coach for the Athletics, said, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t go along with that idea about the old days. Oh, young players and pitchers may have lost some of that sandlot toughness, but baseball is taught so much better now, with all that work on body strengthening and conditioning, that I think skill and muscular development are way ahead of what they were when I first came along.”
I put this question to Tex Hughson, the commanding old Red Sox righty of the nineteen-forties—he is seventy-one now, but still long and cowboy-lean; he used to raise quarter horses near San Marcos, Texas—and at first he went along with Duncan and that group. He was sure that young players at the college and minor-league levels were far stronger and better developed than they had been in his time. But then I mentioned what Jim Kaat had said—what I think of as the Walk-to-School Factor—and he did a turnabout. “Why, that’s so,” he said cheerfully. “Course it is. I walked to school every day—three miles on a gravel road in Kyle, Texas, throwin’ rocks the whole way. Maybe I picked up some control that way, and developed my arm. Chunked at everything. But if it was bad weather my mother would drive us in our old Model A Ford.” And I’d heard somewhere that Roger Clemens also walked three miles to school—it’s always three miles, never two or three and a half—when he was a kid.
I didn’t know what to think, but in time it came to me that, of course, it is mental toughness that matters most of all to a pitcher: nobody would disagree about that. I was strengthened in this conviction by a talk I had with Bob Ojeda, the left-hander picked up by the Mets in a trade with the Red Sox, who played such a sizable part in his team’s triumphs last summer and last fall. Ojeda is midsize and tightly put together. His uniform fits him perfectly—not a rumple or a wrinkle on the man or his clothes. He looks dry-cleaned.
When I asked how he would describe himself, he said that he was a man who had to work at his work—think ahead of the hitters, concentrate on control, and come inside on the batters. This last can be a long lesson for lefties at Fenway Park, where Ojeda first came to full command, because of its horribly proximate left-field wall. He told me that he had talked to Roger Craig over the winter (not about the split-finger, for Ojeda already possessed a peerless changeup, which he throws by choking the ball back in his hand), and Craig had said to him at one point, “You’re a pitcher.”
“That meant a lot to me,” Bobby O. said. “If I hadn’t learned some things over the years, I wouldn’t be here. When I say I’m a pitcher, I’m thinking of guys like Mike Flanagan and Scott McGregor, of the Orioles. I always tried to watch how they worked, how they set up the hitters. Or Steve Carlton, if he was on TV. I remembered how they pitched in certain situations, how they changed from what they’d done before, because of what the game situation was—man on first, men on first and second, and the rest. To me, it doesn’t matter if you strike out ten guys in a game. But if you’ve got the bases loaded and nobody out, and then you get your first strikeout and then a ground ball, how big was that strikeout? That’s the kind of stat players notice. Tommy John sometimes gives up six, seven, eight hits in a game, but only one run, and that is the number that counts.”
I told Ojeda that his victory over the Astros in the second game of the playoffs had been the sort of game I enjoy most—a first-class ten-hitter—and he grinned. “That’s right—it was,” he said. “There are always days when every ground ball is going to find a hole. Days when you have to reach back a little. It all comes down to how many runs you give up. I look at the runs—not whether they’re earned or not. You look in the paper, and if you’ve lost it’ll say ‘Larry Ojeda.’” (“Larry” for “loser,” as in a line score or box score: “L: Ojeda.”) “A run is a run, and you try to prevent those. There’s so much strategy that goes into that. Each day is different. Each day, you’re a different pitcher. Consistency is the thing, even if it’s one of those scuffle days. When I’ve started, I’ve been very consistent, and that’s something I’m proud of. I led the league in quality starts last year—you know, pitching into the seventh inning while giving up three runs or less. That means something to me.”
He said that breaking into a new league, with unknown batters, hadn’t been especially difficult for him. “I was as new to them as they were to me,” he said. He doesn’t believe in extended studies of the opposing team’s batters before the game. “I see them up at bat—where they are in the box, how they stand—and it clicks into place: Oh, yeah—you’re that one. It’s the situation that matters more than the batter—there’s always the situation. Maybe this particular batter doesn’t like to pop people in—maybe he bats .300 but only has fifty runs batted in. Then, there are the guys who bat .260 unless there are men on base. Then they’re much, much tougher up at the plate. Those are the guys I respect.”
Like who, I asked, and Ojeda said, “I don’t want to name them—I don’t want to think about them—but I know who they are, and they know who they are. No, there really are some great, famous hitters that I don’t mind seeing up at bat in certain situations, because I know those are the situations they don’t like.”
Ojeda relishes being on a World Champion team. “I can’t get over what we did last fall,” he said seriously. “When you grow up in this sport, all you hear is people talking about what they’re going to do if they ever get into a World Series. But that’s just talk—we went out and did it. I like the chance to do things. It’s ‘This happened,’ and then there’s no more talk. Back when I was a kid, I had those dreams of playing in a World Series someday, but so what? Every player in this clubhouse and every player in all the twenty-five other camps right now had those same dreams. But those other guys don’t know how they’d do, and we know. To get there and then win it—that’s the thing. Because who knows if you’ll ever have another shot? If I’d still been with the Red Sox—If you’d gotten there and then you didn’t win it, if you’d made some bad mistakes like some of their guys did—major mistakes!—and then you began to think you’d never get that chance back, because you’d never be there again…I don’t think I could stand that.”
Two days after this, I found myself in the visiting-team dugout at Al Lang Stadium, in St. Pete, where, surrounded by Pirates, I watched a steady downpour of rain and waited for the game to be called, as, indeed, it shortly was. I didn’t care, I decided. My trip was almost over and I was feeling a little baseballed out, and I was pretty sure there wasn’t much more about pitching that I could pick up on this particular afternoon. Sitting on the bench just to my left was Syd Thrift, the Pittsburgh general manager, and after a few moments’ conversation we simultaneously recalled that we had both been at Ypsilanti, Michigan, for a college doubleheader on an afternoon in May, 1976, and had watched Bob Owchinko pitch the first game for Eastern Michigan University, and Bob Welch, then a college junior, pitch the second. I had gone there in the company of a scout named Ray Scarborough, whom I was preparing to write an article about, and Thrift, a friend of Scarborough’s, was there sco
uting for the A’s. “That was a day!” Thrift said now, for both Owchinko and Welch, of course, had later matriculated as long-term major-league pitchers.
Thrift and I chatted about the Pirates a little, and then (he had been holding a baseball in his hands and turning it slowly this way and that) he said, “How many times do you think a ball rotates between the time it leaves a pitcher’s hand and the time it crosses the plate? A fastball, let’s say.”
I was startled, for Thrift could not have known that I had been thinking about pitches and pitchers all month.
“I have no idea,” I said. “A lot, I guess. Fifty rotations?”
“That’s what everybody thinks,” Thrift said with relish. “Everybody is way too high. It turns over only fourteen to sixteen times in that space, which is amazing, because your eyes tell you something quite different. We had no notion until we did those measurements back at the academy in about 1970. We had cameras set up, and on a background screen we marked off the distance from the mound to the plate into four fifteen-foot segments, but even then we couldn’t figure out those rotations until somebody came up with the idea of painting half the ball black. Then we could see it.”
I remembered now that Syd Thrift had been the founding director of the Kansas City Royals’ Baseball Academy, in Sarasota—a long-since-defunct institution where rookies could be trained in fundamentals, away from the pressure of making a particular team, and where the first time-motion studies of the sport were essayed. One of the academy’s significant experiments had been to make a precise definition of the proper lead off first for a good base-stealer, and to take stopwatch measurements of the time it took for him to make it down to second, in comparison with the optimum elapsed time between a pitcher’s release, the catcher’s reception of the pitch, and his best peg down to second base. These conclusions correctly predicted the arrival into the game of the ninety-to-a-hundred-stolen-base specialists—the Rickey Henderson-Tim Raines fliers of the nineteen-eighties.
Thrift next asked me if I knew which pitch was quicker—the two-seam or the four-seam fastball. These are baseball definitions deriving from the appearance of the ball when it is held in different positions in the pitcher’s hand; there is in fact only one stitched seam on a ball. With the two-seamer, the ball is held with the forefinger and middle finger together on top of a seam at the point where the tips of the fingers touch, at right angles, the narrowest alley of white on the ball. With the four-seamer, the fingers are held at a forty-five-degree angle off this position, with the fingers now up on the seam that forms the wider, horseshoe sector of white. Rotating the ball out from under the fingers will produce two spinning seams in the first mode and (amazing!) four in the other.
I told Syd that I’d been given conflicting answers to this question, but that I’d always somehow assumed that the two-seamer was the faster pitch, because it looked as if the ball would encounter less wind resistance that way.
“Well, it’s the four-seamer,” he said. “The four-seam fastball is approximately four miles an hour faster than the two-seam, when thrown by the same pitcher, and it’s because of just the thing you mentioned. What happens—isn’t this interesting—what happens is that those four seams set up a molecular mass underneath the ball that sustains it just a little in flight. There’s less turbulence in flight, so it gets there sooner.”
Thrift is a sizable man, with a buttery Virginia accent, and when he talks his big, intelligent face lights up with his fervor for his subject. “The second thing,” he went on, “is that that same thrown pitch falls approximately twenty-one inches between the time it leaves the pitcher’s hand and the time it crosses the plate. That’s at eighty-five miles an hour, and it’s with the four-seam pitch. The two-seam pitch falls twenty-four inches. That three-inch difference is about the width of a baseball. At first, I just didn’t believe this, because a lot of the time the fastball just looks straight, doesn’t it? But it’s only straight laterally. It always falls.”
He told me that he had once asked Ted Williams if he swung at all pitches the same, and Ted had said no—if the pitch was across the seams he’d swing at the middle of the ball, but if it was a two-seamer he’d swing at the bottom of the ball. If he hit two ground balls in a row against two-seam pitches, on the next time up he would swing at an imaginary ball just under the real one. “You can see that difference in pitches, you know,” Thrift said to me. “If you’re not too far back in the stands, you’ll notice that the four-seamer looks a little smaller in flight, and the two-seamer looks more white as it’s comin’ in.”
He said that whenever he receives a report about a new pitching prospect and his velocity, he always asks the scout how the kid was throwing the ball. “If he’s doing eighty-eight on the gun and he’s throwing two-seamers, we know we can get him up in the nineties with the four. Isn’t that something? So many of the scouts say this boy is throwin’ straight or this boy has a rising fastball, and I say there’s no such thing. The rising fastball is an impossibility in physics.”*
“But what about Sandy Koufax?” I said at once. “I saw that pitch again and again, and it rose. Everybody knew that.”
“I saw it, too,” Thrift said, “but it was an optical illusion. The batter was only swinging at where he thought the ball was going to end up—a batter has to make up his mind about a pitch in the first eight to fifteen feet after it leaves the pitcher’s hand, you know. We measured that, too. But if that fastball of Sandy’s was well up in the nineties it probably fell only seven inches instead of fourteen, so the batter would miss it by seven inches or more. No wonder it looked as if it was rising.”
In Thrift’s estimation, these findings are of more use to a batter than to a pitcher. He believes that the batters need all the help they can get right now, and he thinks that baseball is badly in need of another research laboratory along the lines of the old academy. If so, it is clear that he should be invited back to be its Oppenheimer, its Wernher von Braun. Sitting with me in the damp little dugout, he went on at length about the researchers he had brought into the Baseball Academy to conduct those pioneering studies—a Youngstown, Ohio, inventor and physicist named John Garver, and a retired banker from Chicago named John Nash Ott, who had done pioneering studies on the effect of light on plants and animals. He told me that most baseball people had doubted and discarded their discoveries at first. Some years after the academy closed down, he recalled, he had been driving in South Carolina, on his way to scout a game at The Citadel. He had the radio on, and suddenly he heard a program about Igor Sikorsky, the helicopter inventor and developer, and about a special interest of his, the physics of a thrown baseball. His findings were exactly the same ones that Ott and Garver and Syd Thrift had come up with. “Isn’t that great!” Thrift exclaimed. “I tell you, I was so excited I had to pull my car over to the side of the road and think about it. I was thrilled.”
We sat together watching the rain fall on the soggy field and the puddles forming on the infield tarp, and Syd said, “Well, here comes another season, and nobody knows what’s going to happen. Nobody can say for sure. We can study and study and make plans for our team and for the season, but what we don’t know is always there. It’s the best part of the game.”
*This statement by Syd Thrift aroused extended retorts from various quarters, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech. A physicist there, Tom Yunck, reminded me in a letter that anyone who has thrown a wiffleball or a Ping-Pong ball with a sharp downward flip of the fingers (as I have) will see in an instant that a rising fastball is not an impossibility. A spinning ball (including sliders and curveballs and the rest) causes air to flow around it asymmetrically, and if the air over the top of a fastball is moving faster than the air beneath it as the result of backspin, lift will ensue—the same lift that causes an airliner (or a Sikorsky helicopter, Mr. Yunck adds) to rise. But no one is quite prepared to say that a major-league pitcher can throw the four-seamer with sufficient speed and backspin to make a five ounce-plus b
aseball move upward. Mr. Yunck admits this would be tough, but he believes that a few pitchers may be equal to the task; John Garver—he is cited just ahead—by contrast, very much doubts it. Incomplete investigations of his seem to suggest that a one-hundred-and-fifty-m.p.h. fastball would be required in order to achieve a perceptible rise, but he quickly adds that calculations of the necessary degree of spin are not at hand. I believe Syd Thrift meant to say that a rising fastball is an impossibility in physics until we find a rookie pitcher who is fifty percent faster than anyone we’ve seen out there to date. He is a famous optimist as well as a famous scout, and I don’t think we should bet against him.
Up at the Hall
— Summer 1987
HERE WE ARE, AND here it all is for us: already too much to remember. Here’s a meerschaum pipe presented to Cy Young by his Red Sox teammates after his perfect game in 1904. Here are Shoeless Joe Jackson’s shoes. Here’s a life-size statue of Ted Williams, beautifully done in basswood; Ted is just finishing his swing, and his eyes are following the flight of the ball, into the right-field stands again. Here is John McGraw’s little black mitt, from the days when he played third base for the old Orioles: a blob of licorice, by the looks of it, or perhaps a small flattened animal, dead on the highway. Here’s a ball signed by seventeen-year-old Willie McCovey and his teammates on the 1955 Class D Sandersville (Georgia) club—Stretch’s first address in organized ball—and over here is a ball from a June 14, 1870, game between Cincinnati and the Brooklyn Atlantics; Brooklyn won, snapping the Red Stockings’ astounding winning streak of two full years. Babe Ruth, in a floor-to-ceiling photomural, sits behind the wheel of an open touring car, with his manager, little Miller Huggins, almost hidden beside him. The Babe is wearing driving gauntlets, a cap, a fur-collared coat, and a sullen, assured look: Out of the way, world! Let’s hum a song or two (from the sheet music for “Home Run Bill” or “The Marquard Glide” or “That Baseball Rag”) while we think about some intrepid barnstormers of the game: the Chicago White Sox arrayed in front of the Egyptian Pyramids in 1889; King George V (in a derby) gravely inspecting a visiting American exhibition squad (in uniforms and spikes) in 1913; and shipboard high jinks by the members of a 1931 team headed for Japan (Mickey Cochrane is sporting white-and-tan wingtips). The 1935 Negro League Pittsburgh Crawfords were travellers, too; their blurry team photograph has them lined up, in smiles and baggy uniforms, in front of their dusty, streamlined team bus. Over here are some all-time minor-league records for us to think about: Ron Necciai pitched a no-hitter for the Appalachian League’s Bristol Twins in 1952 and struck out all twenty-seven batters in the process; and Joe Wilhoit hit safely in sixty-nine consecutive games for the Wichita Wolves in 1919. Wilhoit was on his way down by then, after four undistinguished wartime seasons with four different big-league clubs, but Necciai’s feat won him an immediate starting spot with the Pittsburgh Pirates—and a lifetime one-season 1–6 record in the majors, with a 7.08 earned-run average. Hard lines, but another kid made more of his chances after hitting safely in sixty-one consecutive games with the San Francisco Seals in 1933: Joe DiMaggio.
