Every power pitcher should have burned into his memory the date September 15, 1969. That night Steve Carlton broke the Cardinal team record of 17 strikeouts, set by Dizzy Dean. And he broke the then major league record of 18 held by Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax and Don Wilson. Carlton struck out 19, which is still the National League record, jointly held with Tom Seaver, who fanned 19 in 1970. But Carlton lost the game, 4–3. He threw 152 pitches but two of them were hit for two-run home runs by Ron Swoboda (who also struck out twice). Even Carlton, who should be elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, had days when it would have been better for him to throw fewer pitches, get fewer strikeouts, settle for banal ground balls and get the win. Piling up strikeouts is not smart. Dwight Gooden is smart. The following are Good-en’s year-by-year totals of games in which he recorded 10 or more strikeouts:
1984 15
1985 11
1986 5
1987 5
1988 1
By the All-Star break in 1989 he had had two such games. (And he had a sore arm that sidelined him for most of the rest of the season.) The decline in the number of games in which Gooden was overpowering was said, by some people, to show that he, at age 24, was in decline. But not so fast. It might also show that he is wise beyond his years, that he understands what Sandy Koufax came to understand. Koufax said he became a good pitcher when he quit trying to keep batters from hitting the ball and started making them hit the pitches he wanted them to hit. Actually, try as he might to get them to hit it, poor Koufax kept striking them out. It must have been frustrating for him.
Swindell is, in baseball parlance, “not afraid of the bat.” He is less determined than Hershiser is to get batters to swing at pitches out of the strike zone. Doc Edwards, a former catcher, says, “All the good pitchers I ever caught”—they were as different as the elegant Whitey Ford and the intimidating Sudden Sam McDowell—“were not afraid of coming into the strike zone. The ones who were not good major league pitchers had that fear of coming into the strike zone, so they were always 1–0, 2–0, 2–1, 3–1, 3–2 and they eventually got to the point where they had to throw it over the middle of the plate.”
“When Greg throws a good game,” says Mark Wiley, pitching coach, “there will be at least three or four bullets—bullets—hit right at [center fielder Joe] Carter.” Just as Swindell is not afraid of the bat, he is not afraid to use the large park in which he plays half his games. The configuration of a park matters. So do winds and other factors.
The most important changes in parks have been in the National League. Most of that league’s parks are relatively new. (Other than Wrigley Field, which opened in 1914, the oldest National League park is San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, which did not open until the Giants’ third season on the San Andreas fault, 1960.) And most of the new ones are relatively big. That is good for pitchers, and for the teams that play there. (Question: When you hear the phrase “hitters’ park,” which parks—one in each league—come to mind? Right. Wrigley Field and Fenway Park. Question: Which two teams have not won a World Series since 1908 and 1918, respectively? Right again. Moral: It is bad to play in a park that is beastly to your pitchers.) In the 13 seasons from 1977 through 1989, there were only five 1–0 games at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium. From 1977 through 1989 there were forty-six 1–0 games in the Astrodome. If Swindell were pitching in his hometown, Houston, he could have a lot of eight-pitch innings, letting batters launch long outs into the large Astrodome outfield.
Some pitchers adjust to parks, but only up to a point. Because Hershiser is a sinker-ball pitcher who forces batters to hit a lot of ground balls, he (and his infielders) have a harder time on artificial turf: The balls get through so fast. Pitching in St. Louis against what he calls “the rabbits”—the running Redbirds whose speed takes advantage of a large park with artificial turf—Hershiser adjusts by pitching higher. He is content to let the Cardinals hit fly balls into Busch Stadium’s capacious outfields. But a pitcher’s mechanics are different when pitching up, so by doing that a pitcher risks upsetting his rhythm. It can take several starts to get it back.
The danger of allowing the conditions in a particular park to control your thinking about how to pitch is, according to Mike Scott, apparent at Wrigley Field. “You get to where you say, ‘I can’t give this guy a fat pitch.’ So it’s ball one. Now he’s looking fastball so you go breaking ball and miss and it’s ball two. Now you’re at his mercy. So you just have to attack them, and if they get seven runs, you get eight.” Scott says that if the wind is blowing out at Wrigley Field, he will not watch batting practice. It is too demoralizing. But when the wind is blowing in, Wrigley, with its high infield grass, is a pitcher’s park. If the wind is blowing strongly straight out at Wrigley Field, Scott holds his fingers a little closer together when throwing the split-finger. This means the ball has a little less than the usual movement, but when thrown into the wind the normal split-finger can have too much movement and be hard to throw for strikes. A knuckleball pitcher throwing into the wind often can not control his pitches well enough to throw strikes.
Baseball people, with cheerful indifference to the facts of physics, talk about pitchers in puzzling ways. They say things like “his fastball takes off as it reaches the plate,” or “it gets a final burst.” Both things are said about Swindell. (Cliff Gustafson, Swindell’s coach at the University of Texas, says that two of Swindell’s strengths are that he “hides” the ball well in his delivery and his fastball “explodes” or “jumps” in the last six or eight feet.) Both are probably nutty, but there is a kernel of truth inside the nuttiness. Tom House, pitching coach of the Rangers, says, “We made a motion study of pitchers who are considered sneaky-fast, and we found that they gained their extra ‘speed’ by delaying the hitters’ recognition of the release point, often by throwing up their front elbows as they came forward. Or you can change the delivery—come up top once, then three-quarters, sidearm, all over the place.” Many hitters “overswing” on Swindell because they think he is throwing harder than he is. Edwards explains, “He has great deception because he hides the ball well.” Deception can be, and with Swindell is, partly in the throwing motion, particularly a motion that brings the ball across the body so that the ball is coming out of the white of the uniform. Some pitchers, and Swindell is one, toss their heads before releasing the ball and some batters focus on the pitcher’s head when gauging the rhythm of the pitcher’s delivery.
Many things that seem like handicaps can help pitchers. Mordecai Centennial “Three Finger” Brown (he was born in 1876) found that his handicap wasn’t—a handicap, that is. His terrific curveball was the result of the odd way he was forced to grip the ball. Ewell “The Whip” Blackwell, the sidearming Cincinnati right-hander, was said to look less like a pitcher than like a man falling out of a tree. The Giants’ Juan Marichal, he of the extraordinary high kick, looked to Roger Angell “like some enormous and highly dangerous farm implement.” Doc Edwards remembers Stu Miller, the soft-throwing journeyman with a 16-season record of 105–103. “He would fling his glove at you, flop his head, and you’d swing, and then in would come the rabbit [Miller’s hippity-hopping knuckleball]. You had to swing at the third thing thrown at you. But with the ball coming out of all that deception, you couldn’t pick up the ball.” Some baseball people believe that a left-hander who throws 87 miles per hour is as effective as a right-hander who throws 92 miles per hour. Mark Wiley explains the 5-mile-per-hour advantage this way: “A right-handed hitter has longer to see a left-handed pitcher. Greg throws his slider so hard and at such a low trajectory that the batter gets a good long look at it and says, ‘Fastball.’ Then just when he starts his swing, it buries itself out of the strike zone toward the hitter’s back knee. Not many hitters can stop their swings in time.”
Andy Allanson is the Indians’ catcher who has received most of Swindell’s pitches. Like a lot of catchers, Allanson talks as though he pitches as well as catches. (“I’ve had some su
ccess against Mattingly. He’s had some 0-for-4s and 0-for-5s with me.”) In a sense, he does. He is part of the thinking and rhythm of the pitcher’s game. “The secret of this game,” says Allanson, “is to get hitters ‘in between’—a little bit ahead of the curve, a little bit behind the fastball.” Allanson uses throw-overs to first base to make the base runner a disadvantage to the hitter. “It takes rhythm to hit. When the pitcher throws over, it breaks the hitter’s concentration and focus.” The same is true with pitchers shaking off signs. Allanson sometimes gives the pitcher a sign to shake his head as though he is shaking off the sign.
A perennial argument among pitchers and their coaches is: What matters most in a pitch—velocity, movement or location? Obviously the ideal is to have them all, to be able to put a breaking ball, or a fastball with a hop, where you want it. Allanson has no doubts about what matters most. “I rank location first. It tells the hitter you have command. Then movement. Only third comes velocity.” Allanson says Swindell has command of two pitches, his fastball and curve. That, Allanson says, is one more than most pitchers have. By “command” he means the ability to throw the pitch for a strike to get ahead in the count or keep from walking someone. Allanson estimates that 60 percent of American League pitchers do not throw breaking balls for strikes more than 60 percent of the time. (The Mets’ Davey Johnson, a severe mathematician who does not grade on the curve, has a lower opinion of National League pitchers. Johnson believes that those who are real pitchers, rather than mere throwers, are those who can make a hitter hit a particular pitch thrown to a particular place. He thinks that at any given time real pitchers are about 5 to 7 percent of the people employed as pitchers.)
Swindell is one of the best in the business at the most important ingredient in pitching—throwing strikes. In 1988 he produced this pretty number: just 45 walks in 242 innings. It was, therefore, newsworthy when, in late April, 1989, Swindell walked two Rangers in a row. It was just the second time in 442 major league innings that he had walked two consecutive batters. Those bases on balls will kill you. Not always, of course. In 1941 the Yankees’ Lefty Gomez shut out the Browns, 9–0, in spite of the fact that he gave up 11 walks. But, then, Lefty was a lefty, so strange events were bound to follow him around. Doc Edwards, marveling at Swindell’s control, says, “That’s an oddity in a young left-hander.” Asked why a left-hander should be different, Edwards says cheerfully, “I don’t know.”
Swindell works the top, and just over the top, of the strike zone as it is actually called by umpires—a bit above the belt. He gets a lot of outs on pitches that would not be called strikes. (“You have to have the prestige of a Jim Palmer,” says Edwards, “to get that borderline high pitch called a strike.”) But they are pitches that a lot of batters can not lay off. The problem with getting people out with pitches mid-thigh to belt-high is that you get a lot of foul balls, so you can get a lot of eight-, nine- and ten-pitch outs. Swindell prefers to face power hitters rather than contact hitters like Wade Boggs. The latter kind foul off too many pitches, which is tiresome. Besides, Swindell can not be blamed for suffering from a bad case of Boggs-ophobia. In one outing in Boston in 1987, Boggs, leading off, hit a Swindell fastball for a double off The Wall. The second time up he ripped a slider and Cleveland’s left fielder had to make a spectacular diving catch. The third time up he hit a change-up for a double. The fourth time he hit a line drive that hit the outside of Swindell’s glove and broke his middle finger.
For Swindell and Allanson, not being afraid of the bat is a matter of simple thrift, economizing the supply of pitches in Swindell’s left arm. Against an aggressive team that comes to the plate eager to hack, Allanson tries to have a lot of 11-pitch innings, and few 8- and 7- and even 6-pitch innings, and he tries to have only one 15-pitch inning. That is why Swindell has pitched complete games of just 2 hours and 3 minutes and 2 hours and 9 minutes.
So far, Swindell has survived three modern developments that pose a danger for pitchers. One is the practice of hurrying young pitchers to the major leagues too fast. “They’re not serving their apprenticeship,” says Don Drysdale. “Years ago, 25 was a good age to come to the major leagues. Now the pitchers are younger.” Another development is the designated hitter. The result of these two developments is that young pitchers whose arms are still maturing find themselves pitching into the eighth and ninth innings more often than is healthy. The third modern development that causes problems for pitchers and skews the development of strong arms is the increased importance of college baseball in the development of players. The most important, and for pitchers the most problematic, aspect of college baseball is the aluminum bat.
Every manager has the sad story of The Bird in the back of his mind. The Tigers’ Mark “The Bird” Fidrych pitched 24 complete games in his 28 decisions (19–9) in 1976. That was his first season. It was his last good season. He won only 10 more games over his next, and final, four seasons. “If I were pitching today,” says manager Tom Trebelhorn of the Brewers, “I would most assuredly want to pitch in the National League. In the American League I throw extra pitches, extra innings, and I face nine bona fide outs. In the National League, if I am Orel Hershiser pitching at the top of my game, and I face 32 batters in a given game, I don’t even face 32 batters. I face the pitcher—if he pitches a good game—maybe three times. Then I face the eighth-place hitter who, some of those times, isn’t approaching me as an offensive player. He’s approaching me as a defensive hitter trying to work me for a walk or do something else just to get the pitcher up so he will not lead off the next inning. I’ve had a pretty good night. On another night, when I’ve not pitched too well, I’ve given up four runs in four innings, in the American League I might finish that game and get beaten 4–2. In the National League, if you’re down 4–1 and you’re not pitching too well, see you later. You don’t have those tough innings piled on those tough starts.”
If the DH makes the American League permanently prone to overworking pitchers, then Swindell’s career has involved double jeopardy. He came to the American League from big-time college baseball. Swindell won 18 in 1988 with his second-best pitch, his slider, severely rationed. It was rationed because of the injury that prevented 1987 from being his first full season. A ligament separated from a bone in his left elbow and he did not pitch after June 30. That injury intensified the suspicions and fueled the prejudices that some baseball people “of the old school” have concerning college baseball programs for pitchers. The complaint concerns two things, the increased pressure to win and the use of metal bats.
Even the most high-powered college baseball programs are nowhere near as big time as many college football programs, and sensible people hope they never will be. But in some conferences, such as the Southwest, where Texas plays, baseball is a serious business, and now that ESPN is bringing college baseball by cable to a national audience, college baseball is going to be modestly big business. It will never be as lucrative as football, but it will bring in some revenue for university athletic departments, and prestige. Therefore winning is taken seriously. A manager with an overpowering pitcher will be tempted to use him a lot, perhaps more than is in the player’s long-term interest. Swindell pitched 440 innings in three college seasons. And he was pitching to people swinging metal bats.
Did Swindell pitch too much too soon? He certainly pitched a lot while young. Swindell has been a pitcher since he was old enough to know better (if age seven really is, as the Jesuits say, the age of reason). He was a pitcher in Little League, in junior and senior high school, and for three years at the University of Texas, the mother of power pitchers. As a high school junior Swindell was 14–0 and pitched Sharpstown to the Texas state championship. The next season he lost only one game, and the score of that game was 1–0. However, he was not picked by any major league team in the amateur draft, for two reasons. Major league scouts had doubts about his physique and his velocity. His high school coach, who probably is a better coach than diplomat, remembers Swindell as �
�plump” and “short and squatty, a Porky Pig type.” When he first came to Cleveland sportswriters referred to his “butterball physique.” His teammates hung on him a nickname he hated—“Flounder,” the name of the fat pledge in the movie Animal House.
As a Texas freshman, Swindell asked for and was given uniform number 21, which had belonged to a pitcher who had just left Texas, Roger Clemens. And Swindell became a pupil of a proven teacher, Coach Cliff Gustafson. The 1989 season was Gustafson’s thirty-sixth as a college coach and his twenty-third at Texas. He has a mesquite-seasoned voice and an accent as Texas as can be. Good college baseball is, he says, equivalent to “good Single-? ball.” Only the best players can step from their junior year in college into the Double-A level.
Gustafson believes that by age 19 a pitcher will be within two or three miles per hour of the best velocity he is ever going to achieve. Swindell was an exception to this rule. Gustafson did not at first regard Swindell as a professional prospect, partly because Swindell was, in Gustafson’s words, “kind of pudgy” and partly because Swindell’s fastball was not very fast. It was “80, 81 tops.” But Gustafson was impressed that Swindell had “excellent control for a lefthander.” Gustafson is one of those baseball people who hold to the unshakeable (and unsupported) belief that “most young left-handers have trouble throwing strikes.” Why is this? Gustafson is an empiricist, not a theorist: “That’s an oddity of baseball. You have a lot of wild left-handers.” Or as Ring Lardner wrote, “Shut up, he explained.”
Men at Work Page 18
