But what if personal experience, or information from the advance scout, indicates that a particular batter is jumping on first pitches? “There are two theories of pitching,” Hershiser says. “One is that you try to convince the batter that a particular pitch is coming and you throw something different. The other theory, that you don’t hear as much but that I use, is that if the batter expects a particular pitch, you throw it, but you throw it in a place where he can’t hit it.” That is: Know what a batter wants or expects and throw the ball almost there. If he is a high-ball hitter, throw it a bit too high. His eagerness will prevent him from laying off it, but it will be hard to hit well. Davey Johnson, the Mets’ manager, says the same thing in baseballspeak: “If a guy is a first-ball, fastball, high-ball hitter, and you are a fastball pitcher, give him a first-ball fastball a little higher than he likes it and see if he’ll bite on it rather than hook [curve] him and miss, hook him and miss, and then give a cherry [unconvincing] fastball.”
Hershiser wants to learn what a batter is thinking during this at bat. “If a guy is a good first-pitch fastball hitter, I know it and he knows it, and I throw a fastball right down the middle and he takes it, that tells me his thinking is different this at bat. He thought I was going to throw him a curve because he knows that I know he’s a first-pitch fastball hitter and he was sitting on a curve—he took a pitch he normally swings at. He’s looking for something else and that gives you a clue to his thinking.” Unlike a lot of pitchers—and batters—Hershiser can not call up from memory at any time a sequence of pitches, or remember the nature of a particular pitch that got an out, or got hammered. But he can do that when he is on the mound. “It just comes to me. The situation has been re-created and it just all clicks in.” Any pitcher must draw upon memory, he says, and continues, “In the big leagues, no one has enough talent to overcome slumps just by kicking it in and overpowering people.”
There are various ways of learning what a hitter is looking for. Jim Lefebvre says that a really observant pitcher can tell by the way a hitter takes a pitch what the hitter is looking for that day. Hershiser has talked to hitting coaches to learn about pitching and has learned to watch a batter’s check swing. The batter has been fooled; he did not understand where the ball was going. But where his bat was going tells you where he wanted the ball to be. It tells you if he is looking for a high or low pitch. When a left-handed hitter lines a fastball foul into the stands on the third-base side, either he did not get his bat up to the speed required for the fastball or he was looking for an off-speed pitch. It does not matter which is the explanation. The lesson is: more fastballs, and keep them outside, where a slow bat will never catch up with them.
“I lockered next to Sal Maglie in Brooklyn,” Don Drysdale remembers, “and he had a theory that stuck in my mind. He said that if you’re ever in doubt about what the hitter is looking for, always watch his feet. Take your first pitch and go low and away for a ball and watch the hitter’s feet. If he’s moving into the pitch so he can cover the outside corner, he’s told you that he’s looking for a pitch that is going to be out over the plate or down and away. He’s going out to cover that zone. If he’s coming straight at you, you learn nothing. If he’s pulling out [a right-hander striding slightly toward third; if a left-hander, toward first], he’s looking for you to crowd him.”
A first-pitch strike to the leadoff batter in an inning is a big first step toward the out that makes life a lot easier. Hershiser says that one of the keys to pitching is to get the first batter in each inning out. “Never walk a leadoff batter because he scores about 80 percent of the time. Even a good pitcher gives up an average of about a hit an inning. You give a guy a free pass and they advance him one base with an out, now where is your hit-an-inning going to come? It’s going to come and you’re going to give up a run.”
As the strike zone has become smaller and hitters have become stronger, and less fearful at the plate, pitchers have had to pitch more carefully, nibbling at the strike zone (what is left of it). So they have more frequently fallen behind in the count to more confident hitters. However, a pitcher with good control can often influence the size of the strike zone, at least for part of a game. Once a pitcher has shown a batter and the plate umpire that he wants to get the first strike in, and that he will continue to throw strikes, he is apt to influence their decisions about pitches at the edges of the strike zone. He can, in effect, enlarge the strike zone. “If you’re consistent in an area,” says Hershiser, “that part of the strike zone will become bigger because you have proven that you can hit that area, so the umpire gives you the benefit of the doubt. When you are all over the place, you’re less apt to get strikes called on close pitches. You get more close pitches called strikes the more consistent you are in hitting the glove.”
There may be nothing a pitcher can do to make some umpires expand the strike zone. However, when the pitcher gets ahead of the batter in the count, the batter will expand the strike zone on his own—he will swing at borderline pitches that are too close to risk taking. Every hitter goes to the plate determined to do what dozens of coaches, from Little League to the big leagues, have urged: “Be selective.” But that is devilishly hard to do with two strikes on you. Mike Scott recalls one umpire, the late Lee Weyer, who had an enormous strike zone. The pitchers knew it, the hitters knew it, and the games went fast because anything around the plate was a strike, so the hitters were always swinging.
Throw strikes? Piece of cake, said Satchel Paige, because “home plate don’t move.” In a reasonably good game, Hershiser will face 35 batters and will be ahead in the count to at least 25 of them. Paige probably did even better. He would warm up by pitching over a matchbook. Whitey Herzog tells the following story about something Paige did when he, Herzog, was playing for the Miami Marlins:
The Marlins once had a distance-throwing contest before a night game. [Don] Landrum and I had the best arms of any of the outfielders. We were out by the center-field fence, throwing two-hoppers to the plate. Ol’ Satch came out, didn’t even warm up, and kind of flipped the ball sidearm. It went 400 feet on a dead line and hit the plate. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it.
We were on the road in Rochester one night, screwing around in the outfield. They had a hole in the outfield fence just barely big enough for a baseball to go through, and the deal was that any player who hit a ball through there on the fly would win $10,000. I started trying to throw the ball through the hole, just to see if I could. I bet I tried 150 or 200 times, but I couldn’t do it, so I went back to the dugout.
When Satch got to the park, I said, “Satch, I bet you can’t throw the ball through that hole out there.”
He looked out at it and said, “Wild Child, do the ball fit in the hole?”
“Yeah, Satch,” I said. “But not by much. I’ll bet you a fifth of Old Forester that you can’t throw it through there.”
“Wild Child,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
So the next night Satch showed up for batting practice—first time in his life he’d ever been that early. I took a few baseballs, went out to the outfield, and stepped off about 60 feet 6 inches, the distance from the mound to home. Satch ambled out, took the ball, brought it up to his eye like he was aiming it, and let fire.
I couldn’t believe it. The ball hit the hole, rattled around, and dropped back out. He’d come that close, but I figured it was his best shot.
Satch took another ball and drilled the hole dead center. The ball went right through, and I haven’t seen it since.
“Thank you, Wild Child,” Satch said, and then went back into the clubhouse.
Control isn’t what it used to be. But to repeat, the strike zone (smaller) and the batters (larger, less fearful) aren’t what they used to be either. So there are more walks. But come to think of it, that may not mean worse control. It may mean more nibbling—more well-controlled pitches near but not too near the corners. In any case, some of the records of the past masters of c
ontrol are amazing.
In two seasons, 1913 and 1914, when his records were 25–11 and 24–13, Christy Mathewson walked fewer men than he had victories (21 in 1913 and 23 in 1914). In 1913 Mathewson allowed just 0.62 walks per 9 innings pitched, a single-season record. Only 22 pitchers in this century have allowed less than 1 walk per 9 innings over a season. Only 3 of those 22 have done it since 1920, the dawn of the age of offense. The great achievements of control include the 7 innings Stan Coveleski pitched without a single pitch called a ball. Babe Adams in 1920 and Cy Young in 1905 pitched 21 and 20 innings, respectively, without a walk. And in 1933 Carl Hubbell pitched an 18-inning shutout without a walk. The modern era does have one hero of control: Ferguson Jenkins is the only pitcher in history to have more than 3,000 strikeouts and fewer (just three fewer) than 1,000 walks.
For most mortals, control is a sometime thing. It comes and goes. Tom Seaver said that when he had his best control, he could pitch within a quarter of an inch of a spot nine times out of ten. Hershiser illustrates his best control by holding his palm forward, as a catcher holds a mitt, and rotating his wrist without moving his forearm. He says that when his catcher has given him a target with the mitt, the catcher should be able to receive eight out of ten pitches with no more movement than twisting the wrist, leaving his forearm immobile and moving the mitt about an inch.
When a pitcher does not have good control—when home plate seems to be moving—it may or may not be nice to have an infielder like Davey Johnson. Johnson was second baseman for the Orioles in some of their salad seasons (1965–72). He also was a math major at Texas A&M. Imagine the puzzlement of Dave McNally, an Orioles pitcher, the day he was having control trouble and Johnson trotted in to the mound to suggest that McNally give a thought to the theory of “unfavorable chance deviation.” No jury would have convicted McNally, who had other things on his mind, if he had murdered Johnson right there on the mound. But Johnson had a point. “A pitcher,” says Johnson, “is in an ‘unfavorable chance deviation’ if he’s aiming at a particular area and he’s missing by X on each side. If he’s trying to go on the inside corner, he either is missing six to eight inches inside or right over the heart of the plate. So if he aims over the heart of the plate, he’ll hit the corners. So I told McNally he was in an ‘unfavorable chance deviation,’ to just throw it down the middle. He said, ‘Get back to second base.’”
Control does not mean always throwing strikes. Rather, it means throwing enough strikes to get hitters to swing at balls. To do that, change speeds.
Warren Spahn pitched for 21 seasons and won 363 games. If he had not missed three seasons because of military service during World War II, he would have far surpassed Christy Mathewson and Grover Cleveland Alexander’s 373 wins as the National League’s winningest pitchers. Spahn’s craft was subtle. His explanation of it is concise: “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” Sandy Koufax says, “Every pitcher’s best pitch is his fastball. It’s the fastball that makes the other pitches effective. Hitters must look for it and try to adjust for a breaking pitch. While they are looking for the breaking pitch, the fastball is by them before they can adjust.” Ray Miller produced a compilation of every pitch thrown by all the Orioles’ 20-game winners. He learned, with the delight that any theorist feels when facts confirm his beliefs, that all of them threw at least 60 percent fastballs in those seasons of maximum success. Changing speeds can mean mixing up the kinds of pitches you throw, or changing the speed at which you throw one kind of pitch.
Miller believes that “offensive” pitching is not coming at the batter with hard stuff. Rather, it is coming at the batter with all sorts of stuff. And “defensive” hitting is not a batter biding his time waiting for the pitch he wants. Rather, defensive hitting is nervous, uncertain swinging at pitches anywhere near what the batter prefers. Jim Palmer estimates that half of all swinging third strikes are defensive swings at pitches outside the strike zone. “When pitchers are offensive,” says Miller, “the batters become defensive. When you change speeds, batters swing more.”
Most baseball people say a good starting pitcher needs only three pitches. Hershiser has four: the two fastballs (the hard one that sinks and the “cutter” that sort of slides), the curve and the change-up. However, his curve is really several pitches because he can “tighten” the break. “If the hitter is the kind who reacts early to the ball when it leaves your hand, I’ll throw more of a sweeping large curveball. If it’s a good disciplined hitter who reads that pitch very well, like a [Keith] Hernandez or [Kevin] McReynolds, or a Punch-and-Judy-type hitter who really stays in there and fights you off, I shorten the break to get the ball to look like it’s really going to be a strike the whole way and then quickly break at the end.” Because Hershiser changes the trajectory and velocity, “there might be ten different curveballs in my arm.”
Hershiser, says Drysdale, is in “the low end of the power-pitcher category,” but batters know that what they face when they face him is “not a comfortable 0-for-4 but a bastard 0-for-4.” That is, they are going to be jammed, struck out, they will swing at curveballs in the dirt, they will break their bats, they will be made to look foolish.
Fiddling around with a radar gun one day, Hershiser concluded that a ball must be thrown 40 miles per hour to get from the mound to the plate in the air. He says that there is about a 10-mile-per-hour difference between his fastball and his curve. There are always some pitchers of whom it is said: If you are going to get them you have to get them early in the game. Often these are pitchers who throw too hard when they come in from their pregame pitching in the bull pen, pumped up and rarin’ to go. They may throw their curves so hard that those pitches straighten out, or their sinker so hard it doesn’t sink. The serious use of the radar gun is less to measure the velocity of a pitcher’s fastest pitch than it is to measure the difference between a pitcher’s fastball and his change-up, or between his fastball and his curve. Some differences are too small and others are too large to be of maximum effectiveness in upsetting a hitter’s timing. A radar gun can pick up the fact that a pumped-up pitcher is throwing too hard.
The new high-tech aspect of baseball is, in Tony La Russa’s view, just “backing up observation with numbers.” Many experienced baseball people can watch a pitcher for a few minutes and estimate his velocity within one or two miles per hour. They can watch a pitcher’s release and tell if he is quick or slow, if he can be run on or not. The backup by technology becomes most effective when, during a game, the manager, with much on his mind, can be told that between the seventh and eighth innings his tiring starter lost three miles per hour off his fastball, or that the opposing pitcher did. Clever pitchers, especially now that pitchers work constantly with radar guns pointed at them, complicate things by masking fatigue. Tom Seaver, generally regarded as the most thoughtful pitcher of the modern era, would save in his arm a few full-power pitches for late in the game, when batters were adjusting to any loss of velocity that the radar gun had recorded. Hershiser throws his fastball at maximum velocity (around 94 miles per hour) only about five times a game. Usually he throws it at 85 percent of maximum velocity because he wants the option of going up in speed late in the game, when it will be, in effect, a new pitch. Jim Palmer would do something like that during an entire game. On days when he did not have a good fastball he would slow his other pitches down proportionately and still pitch effectively.
Hershiser thinks of a game as a tennis match, with three “sets,” each consisting of three innings. He tries to save one pitch to introduce into the second “set” and another to introduce into the third. By varying his repertoire within a game, he makes himself his own relief pitcher in the sense that the second, third and fourth times through the lineup the opposing hitters still do not quite have the advantage of a second, third and fourth look at his complete repertoire.
The pitcher’s most formidable new weapon in the postwar era has been the slider, a fastball with a tight spin that can break six inches hor
izontally and vertically. Hershiser does not throw it. The second most important new pitch has been the split-finger fastball. Hershiser does not throw it either. Why this unilateral non-armament? The answer is: Why take risks when there is no need—not yet, at least. The risk Hershiser sees with a slider is the need to alter his mechanics, and the additional strain put on the arm and elbow by the act of imparting spin to the ball. The split-finger, Hershiser says, dangerously tightens the arm from wrist to elbow when the ball is wedged between the index and middle fingers. (Try it; it does.) When will he throw one or the other or both of those pitches? “When I start getting hit around. You know what I said about having a repertoire within a game, and when to show it? You should have a repertoire within a career. All the guys who pitch 15, 20 years make adjustments on a 3-to-5-year basis. They come up with a new pitch, new angle, new style. There’s no way I can get [Keith] Hernandez out for 10 years pitching the same way. There’s no way we can play in the same league because all the information is not coming to my favor. It’s coming to his favor. So I’ve got to create some new information. He’s the one learning. I’m not learning. Batters don’t change. That’s why knuckleball pitchers, screwball pitchers and speciality-pitch pitchers do so well. Because batters won’t change that one day and risk ruining the other four. Charlie Hough goes out and throws that floater and everybody says to himself, ‘Come on, just stay back, maybe change your swing, maybe crouch a little, move up on the plate.’ But the batter gets up and thinks, ‘I’ve never been in this part of the batter’s box before!’”
Work fast.
Work fast for many reasons, not the least of which is that a pitcher is only as good as his defense. Good defense is a matter of concentration and anticipation. A pitcher who dawdles puts his defense to sleep. A pitcher working fast sets a tempo that keeps people on their toes. Miller says an average major league game has 13V2 pitches per half inning, or around 120 in nine innings. So 120 times the seven players behind the pitcher “set up” on the balls of their feet. Working fast also helps a pitcher maintain his mechanics once they are in tune. Hershiser says he is “mechanically conscious” when on the mound. He puts on his computer disks his postgame recollections of successful adjustments he has made in his delivery during games. “When I’m not in a groove I make adjustments on every pitch. ‘You didn’t stay on top of that pitch, so the next time you throw a curveball make sure you get your arm up. And the way you get your arm up is not by just thinking it. This is what you need to do: Stay back, allow your hip to move out first, don’t put your shoulder in front of your hip. You have to feel the weight on the inside part of your foot. That allows your hip to slide out.’ There are différent keys I have learned that will bring me back in sync on a certain pitch. If my sinker is just going sideways instead of down, I know I need to get more on top of the ball, not with arm angle but with hand discipline.”
Men at Work Page 22
