There is no danger of that. The tension between pitcher and batter will maintain baseball’s most fundamental equipoise. What pitchers continue to do in self-defense against the Forces of Darkness (offense) is to use their heads about how they use the great freedom they received for their arms in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1887. Mankind has moved a far piece from Cummings and his curving clamshells but mankind has not exhausted novelty. There always seem to be new ways to make a thrown and revolving sphere deviate in deceptive ways from a straight path.
One winter early in this decade Roger Craig, a former pitcher and at the time the Detroit Tigers’ pitching coach, was working with youngsters at the San Diego School of Baseball. He was interested in finding a breaking pitch that young boys could throw without jeopardizing their undeveloped arms and shoulders. It had to be a pitch that did not depend on the torque of a snapped wrist. Unlike a fastball, which has a natural backward rotation, a curveball is given an unnatural spin by twisting the arm or wrist or both. (A curveball is harder on the arm than a fastball because the pitcher spins the ball while generating high arm speed.) Craig tinkered with the grip used by the few pitchers who threw a fork ball. The result of Craig’s experimenting was, within a few years, something like a revolution. Rarely, if ever, has a pitching innovation had so much impact so quickly.
The split-finger is a fastball with a difference. The difference is not in the arm speed, or in the motion with which it is thrown, but in the action of the ball as a result of the way the pitcher grips it. He grips the ball with his first two fingers spread wide along the seams. Pitchers speak of the ball “tumbling” out from between their fingers. This has the effect of slowing the ball’s velocity without altering the pitcher’s fastball arm speed or motion, the two factors by which most batters orient their calculations. The ball tumbles out of the pitcher’s hand with a fastball rotation but less speed. When it works well, the pitch plunges as it reaches the plate. Pitchers say the pitch is like sex: When it is good it is terrific and when it is bad it is still pretty good. Meaning: When it works it sinks fast, often falling out of the strike zone, resulting in missed swings or ground balls. And even when it does not sink as it is supposed to, its reduced velocity makes it a useful change-up. At its best it behaves somewhat like a spitball—another pitch without backspin.
Some baseball curmudgeons insist that there is nothing new under the sun and that the split-finger is just a fork ball with a fancy name. Do not try to tell that to hitters. Or to Mike Scott. As late as 1984 Scott was a marginal (5–11, 4.68 ERA) pitcher. Then he learned the split-finger and in 1986 was the Cy Young winner who won the division-clinching game for the Astros with a no-hitter. Scott says it took him less than a week to learn the split-finger. What did he stop throwing when he started throwing it? “Everything else.” He explains: “A year or so later I still had a sign for a slider because I had been a fastball-change-slider pitcher. One day [Astros catcher Alan] Ashby comes out to the mound and I said, ‘Why do we even have a three [three fingers down as a sign for a slider]? There’s no situation in which I’d rather throw the slider than a split-finger.’” Scott says that only about 30 percent of the split-finger fastballs he throws “really dive.” “If it’s 0–2 and there is no one on base, I’ll throw it really hard. It may bounce. It’s either going to be a great pitch or a ball.”
Before the arrival of the split-finger the slider was the most recent significant addition to the pitcher’s arsenal. Some baseball people think the slider, like the split-finger, is yet another sign of national decadence. They say it was made necessary because of the decline of a fundamentally important American skill, the ability to throw a serious curveball. Roger Craig, of course, does not subscribe to the decadence theory of the slider or split-finger, but he does admit, “You don’t see the big curveball like you used to with Erskine, Podres, Koufax. Today’s pitchers have shortened it up into a slider. But Hershiser has the big curve.” The big curve, which Hershiser has and Craig had, is indeed seen less now than in the 1950s. There is more reliance on the slider because it is easier to control and throw for strikes, and you can throw it almost as hard as a fastball. Craig says that a big curve that a catcher is going to catch low and away is going to go almost through the middle of the strike zone. “A slider,” says Roger Craig, “is easier to control, you can throw it harder. A good pitcher can throw it almost as hard as a fastball, and it is easier than a curve to throw for a strike.” Craig, who talks slowly and does not smile promiscuously, has the demeanor of a man who has had some searing experiences. For sure he did in those two seasons (1962 and 1963) pitching for the Mets when his record was 15–46. In 11 of those losses the Mets were shut out, so his manager, Casey Stengel, was, as usual, talking scrambled sense when he said, “You’ve gotta be good to lose that many.” Still, he did lose them, so if he does not like batters, he should be forgiven. Whether they will forgive him for the fork ball is another matter.
Craig is one of the Thomas Edisons of the pitching profession. He is more inventive than most people, but necessity is the mother of pitching inventiveness. As Hershiser says, the batters keep learning. So pitchers keep improvising. Pitching is a vocation with multiplying variations. And as one team looks at another, pitching is a multiple problem. A batter thinks not just of facing a particular pitcher but of coping with a pitching staff—different starters in a series and several pitchers in a game. To a batter, a pitching staff is a monster with 10 or 11 pitching arms. The composition of a staff can cause problems for opponents. The 1989 Texas Rangers could send heat-throwing Nolan Ryan to the mound one night and knuckleballer Charlie Hough the next night (or the other way around). The Rangers’ opponents had difficult adjustments to make.
Because pitching is such a many-faceted profession, let us leave Orel Hershiser for a moment and consider two other members of the pitchers’ guild, Greg Swindell and Jim Gott. For a while they worked not far from one another, about 120 miles apart, in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Long ago, when mankind was young and wit was fresh, if someone in an audience called out, “Say something funny,” Mort Sahl, the comic, would say: “John Foster Dulles.” Today’s last-gasp laugh-getter for desperate comics is some reference to Cleveland. Cleveland has indeed had all the problems of an old industrial city. And yes, the Cuyahoga River did catch fire once. But such problems do not obscure the city’s fascinating dimension, which may be what some of Cleveland’s detractors despise: The city embodies the American middle—Midwestern middle-class civilization. Ohioans were, in a sense, the first thoroughly American Americans. Ohio’s northern part was once “New Connecticut;” the southern part was the Virginia Military District. “Ohio,” said a nineteenth-century writer, “is at once North and South; it is also—by the grace of its longitude and its social temper—both East and West. It has boxed the American compass.” Ohio was the first defined wilderness area made into a state, and the names of its communities include London, Dublin, Berlin, Geneva, Moscow, Holland, Poland, Smyrna, Cadiz, Lisbon, Antwerp, New Paris and New Vienna. One historian suggests that Ohio has produced eight presidents because an Ohio candidate could not seem alien to any other part of the nation. In 1784 George Washington examined a map of the wilderness and predicted that “where the Cuyahoga River flows into Lake Erie shall arise a community of vast commercial importance.” A century later, a Clevelander explained his city to an Easterner whose eyes were irritated by the air: “Smoke means business, and business means money and money is the principal thing.” Ohio’s largest city has always been bound up with America’s basic commodities. Edison was born 60 miles west of Cleveland, which became the first city in the world with electric lighting in a public place, and the first to unite electricity and steel in transportation (in streetcars). One of Cleveland’s thoroughfares, Superior Street, is a reminder of the link between Cleveland and Lake Superior, which is surrounded by iron ore deposits. For years those deposits were shipped to Cleveland’s mills and turned into rails and loc
omotives. Oil was needed before transportation could move from steel wheels to rubber tires (tires are a giant industry in the state bisected by the National Pike, U.S. 40). The world’s first producing oil well was 100 miles east of Cleveland, and oil’s potential was first understood by a product of Cleveland’s Central High School, John Davison Rockefeller. Cleveland is the only major American city where the original city center is still the city’s hub. Public Square is the site of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial, which a guidebook gently describes as an example of “the literalness of Victorian art.” It is a stupendous pile, a granite-and-bronze clutter of guns and warriors. But an even more stupendous pile is a five-minute walk away. It is the Mistake on the Lake, Memorial Stadium, home of the Cleveland Indians.
Spring comes late to the shores of Lake Erie and it comes last to the cavernous stadium. Greg Swindell thinks that is swell. He thinks Cleveland’s spring climate, which often is like March well into May, is an advantage to him. As a pitcher he is either moving around throwing the ball and keeping warm or he is bundled up on the bench. And hitters, who hate to be pitched inside in the best of times, especially hate it in cold weather because making contact down on the handle produces painful stinging in cold hands.
Cleveland has generally been on the receiving end of baseball pain. The Cleveland Spiders of 1899, then in the National League, set a major league record for the most regular-season losses and worst percentage: 20–134, .130. They finished eighth, 84 games out of first and 35 games out of seventh. Of the first 88 American League pennants, the Yankees, among the original eight franchises, have won the most (33). The Indians have won the least (3). Entering 1990 the Indians had gone 29 seasons (not counting strike-shortened 1981) without finishing within 10 games of a division or league title. If the pain ends soon, Swindell’s left arm will be one reason for the relief. But it is never wise to make predictions about pitchers.
In 1988, after Swindell had started the season with a spectacular 10–1 streak, a reporter asked him what he expected for the rest of the year. No way, said Swindell, I’m not going to make a prediction. Why, I could go out and lose eight in a row. Which he promptly did. From May 30 to July 19 his record went from 10–1 to 10–9. Still, he finished 18–14. It is a rare pitcher who wins 18 in his first full season. Paul Hoynes, who covers the Indians for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, made this list of the top left-handers in the American League in the late 1980s and the number of games each won in his first full season: Frank Viola (7), Jimmy Key (4, and 10 saves), Ted Higuera (15), Mark Langsten (17), Charlie Leibrandt (10), Frank Tanana (14).
Looking at tapes of Swindell’s losing streak, Mark Wiley, the Indians’ pitching coach, found the flaw. It was perfection. Swindell was finishing his delivery too well. That is, he was too well positioned, too perfectly poised facing the batter. He was letting up at the end of his motion, not driving through toward the plate with the driving force from his thick lower body. When he is pitching best, that force causes him to fall away a bit toward the third-base side.
However, there is a problem with that. It can be dangerous, leaving the pitcher unprepared to defend himself against line drives. Swindell says that does not worry him: “I don’t think you think about it.” But then indicates that he thinks about it. “It has to worry you, but we’re pretty good athletes. Canseco has hit one right at me knee-high and I jumped over it. I’d rather give him a single than get hurt.” People do get hurt in baseball, by the ball. By the ball coming in from the mound and by the ball going out toward the mound. Cleveland knows. The most serious injury in the history of baseball involved a batter hit by a pitch, and one of the most serious injuries happened to a pitcher hit by a batted ball. In both cases the victims were Indians. On August 16, 1920, Carl Mays, pitching for the Yankees, hit Ray Chapman, Cleveland’s shortstop, in the head. Chapman died the next day. Chapman was the best-hitting shortstop in the American League at the time. Bill James believes he probably was destined for the Hall of Fame. He was the first and, so far, only fatality in major league baseball. Clevelanders wore black crepe and 24 priests presided at Chapman’s funeral. The death had a consequence. It was generally believed that Mays was not trying to hit Chapman, that a pitch—perhaps a spitball—got away from Mays. And it was believed that Chapman had trouble picking up the flight of the pitch because the ball was dark with dirt and grass stains—among other things. Baseball officials decided that henceforth more of an effort would be made to keep a clean ball in play. That is why today, in the glamorous world of the big leagues, you usually can find in the bowels of the ballpark, 90 minutes before game time, a middle-aged man sitting in long underwear, his hands covered with mud from the Delaware River. The man with the mud will be umpiring home plate that day. Before every game 60 baseballs are rubbed with mud—only the Delaware stuff will do—to remove the ball’s slickness. (The long underwear spares umpires the discomfort of itchy dust and the inelegance of sweat-stained trousers. Umpires understand, as Charles de Gaulle did, that dignity sustains authority.)
In the 1930s Lena “Slats” Blackburne, a coach for the Philadelphia Athletics, was bothered by the fact that when umpires rubbed new balls with dirt from the playing field to remove the slickness from the (at that time) horsehide, the ball became scratched. There must, he thought in the American way, be a better way. He found some nearby mud, from a river in southern New Jersey, and in 1938 helped found the Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud Company. To be strictly accurate, the river is rumored to be the Delaware. The actual location is a secret as closely held as the recipe for Coca-Cola. The rubbing is baseball’s way of remembering Ray Chapman.
Another of baseball’s serious injuries occurred 37 years later in Cleveland, again in an Indians-Yankees game. On the night of May 8, 1957, Herb Score, then 23, was on the mound for the Indians, throwing what was then probably the best fastball in baseball. Gil McDougald, the Yankees’ shortstop, ripped a screaming line drive through the middle. It struck Score in the face, breaking his nose and nearly blinding him in his right eye. He never really recovered as a pitcher. In 1955, his first year, he had been 16–10 with a 2.85 ERA and a league-leading 245 strikeouts in just 227 Vb innings pitched. In 1956 he was 20–9, 2.53, and again led the league with 263 strikeouts in 249 V⅓ innings. After the accident, he pitched for the Indians and White Sox for five more years but won only 17 more games. Was he destined for the Hall of Fame? Perhaps. Pitchers are subject to burnout, so it is hard to say where he would have wound up. Where he did wind up is in the broadcasting booth, where in 1989 he spent his twenty-sixth season doing radio and television.
Score insists that the problem after 1957 was with his arm, not his psyche, and had nothing to do with the accident. “I came back and pitched as well as I ever did the next year but I tore a tendon in my elbow that year.” And he recalls that getting hit by batted balls was nothing new to him. “I got hit a lot, on the shins. I didn’t see half the pitches. I had to look at the scoreboard to see if they were balls or strikes. When I was a young pitcher, in my first or second year here, I didn’t cover first base on a ground ball that the first baseman fielded. I didn’t see where the ball went. [Manager] Al Lopez chewed me out and made me take extra fielding practice. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t see the ball. It would have seemed like I was making excuses.”
In 1988 Doc Edwards, then the Indians’ manager, was glad to see Swindell falling away toward third again. But he thinks that the flaw in Swindell’s follow-through was a weak excuse for losing those eight in a row. The real reason, says Edwards, was simpler and more serious. Edwards, a man of exemplary concision, says: “He quit pitching.” He means Swindell went back to being a mere thrower. “Instead of mixing pitches, he reverted to the style that gets big strong boys through Little League, high school and even college. They just rear back and throw hard and set three guys down and go over and sit on the bench. You can’t do that up here. We had to convince Swindell that he’s not this overpowering pitcher that everybody was writing ab
out.”
Power pitching has been a Cleveland tradition since the arrival in 1936 of a 17-year-old prodigy from Van Meter, Iowa—Bob Feller. The 1954 Indians’ staff, which won a record 111 games, included Bob Lemon (23–7), Early Wynn (23–11), Mike Garcia (19–8) and Feller (13–3). The 1968 Indians’ pitching staff, which included “Sudden Sam” McDowell and Luis Tiant, became the only staff in major league history to have more strikeouts than hits allowed. Swindell rocketed up to the major leagues from Texas in the wake of, and wearing the same number as, The Rocket Man, Roger Clemens. On May 10, 1987, Swindell struck out 15 Royals, becoming the first Indian since McDowell to fan 15 in a game. That solidified the misunderstanding about Swindell. He was portrayed as a power pitcher pumping out what Hershiser calls “high gas.” He was supposed to pile up impressive numbers of strikeouts.
Swindell knew better. He knows that high velocity is nice but it is no substitute for pitching. High velocity is especially necessary if you are not a real pitcher, because you can get away with a lot more mistakes when the ball is going 94 miles per hour than you can when it’s going 84 miles per hour. And high velocity can propel you into the record books, even all the way to Cooperstown.
In 1973, the first year of the DH, Nolan Ryan, then with the Angels, struck out 383. That is the major league record. It could have been much higher. If pitchers had still been batting, Ryan might easily have run up 425 strikeouts. (The National League record is Koufax’s 382 in 1965.) In 1987, at age 40, Nolan Ryan, then with the Astros, set a major league record by striking out 11.48 batters for every nine innings pitched. His average was more than three-quarters of a strikeout per game higher than all but one pitcher’s season record in baseball history (Dwight Gooden’s 11.39 in 1984). The Elias Bureau calculated that Ryan’s record was “the statistical equivalent of batting nearly .400 in today’s environment, or of hitting 65 home runs.” In 1988 Ryan, then with the Astros, was 41 and for the second time since turning 40 he had a league-leading number of strikeouts. In 1989 Ryan, at age 42, led the league in strikeouts again. He had 11.319 strikeouts for every nine innings pitched, the third-best season record of all time. But at the major league level, throwing hard is not enough. “If it was,” says Ray Miller, pitching coach and logician, “Nolan Ryan would be 500 and 2. Nobody in the history of the game has thrown longer or harder than he has and he’s only about 20 games over 500.” (At the end of the 1989 season Ryan’s career record was 289–263.) Miller notes that no Orioles pitching staff, not even in the salad days of Cy Young awards and 20-game winners, has ever led the league in strikeouts.
Men at Work Page 17
