K

by Tyler Kepner

  In 1971 Richard tied a record for strikeouts in a major league debut, with 15 in a complete game victory in San Francisco. Willie Mays struck out three times. It was an early glimmer of overpowering talent, and the start of an exhilarating and tragic career.

  Richard took years to gain footing in the majors, then broke through with a run of extraordinary seasons before it all ended, abruptly, at age 30. All of this was true for Sandy Koufax, too, and while everything else was different—their stuff, their throwing hand, their race, their teams’ visibility and levels of success—people speak of Richard with the same kind of reverence they do of Koufax.

  “Nobody struck me out,” says Dusty Baker, but Richard did—24 times, more than any other pitcher Baker faced in his 19 seasons. “They had him and Nolan, both of them were nasty. But J.R. was the nastiest. He was 6 foot 8, big old hands; the ball looked like a golf ball in his hands. He had a big Afro and he pulled his hat way down, so you couldn’t see his eyes, and he was kind of wild. Boy, he was nas-tee! And the nastiest part about him is you know it’s 60 feet, 6 inches from the mound, right? He was throwing from about 50 feet. You had no time to pick up the ball.”

  For the entirety of his career, Richard was the tallest pitcher in the major leagues. He could hold eight baseballs in one hand, as he demonstrated for a 1979 Sporting News story that called his slider “the best ‘out pitch’ any man possesses today.” Richard threw it nearly as hard as his 98-mile-an-hour fastball, often with better control.

  By 1980 he was coming off consecutive seasons of 300 strikeouts, a feat that had been achieved by just three others: Rube Waddell in the 1900s, Koufax in the 1960s, and Nolan Ryan, his new Astros teammate, in the 1970s.

  Ryan had just become baseball’s first $1 million–per–year player, yet it was Richard who started the All-Star Game for the National League at Dodger Stadium. He did not allow a homer through the season’s first three months. He was holding hitters to a .168 average. And he would be bathed in the California sunlight, with hitters in shadows, when the game began at prime time in the East.

  In the top of the first inning, Richard faced Reggie Jackson with a runner on third and two outs. He had just brushed Jackson back with a high fastball, running the count to 3–1. Working from the windup, Richard rocked back and lifted his left knee almost to his chin, turning and whipping his right arm through the air. Jackson swung hard, and the slider fooled him so badly that he lost his balance, his body whirling completely around, his back foot becoming his front.

  On the ABC telecast, Keith Jackson said the slider measured 94 miles an hour. “If it was,” said Don Drysdale, the Hall of Fame pitcher in the booth, “it was one of the quickest sliders known to mankind.”

  Jackson bit on another slider, this one in the dirt, striking out to end the inning—and that was as good as it would ever get for J. R. Richard. He would pitch in the majors only one more time.

  Richard had complained of a stiff, dead arm in the first half, but his performance showed no decline. On July 14, back in Houston, he struggled to read the catcher’s signs, and moved slowly. He left in the fourth inning and was placed on the disabled list.

  This was the summer of “Who Shot J.R.?,” the cliffhanger from the TV show Dallas. The comparison was irresistible—and misguided. Houston’s J.R. mystery was not some manufactured drama. Richard’s complaints were real. In late July he was diagnosed with a clot in the artery leading to his right arm. Doctors told him it was stable, and cleared him for supervised workouts.

  At the Astrodome on July 30, with the team on the road, Richard began to sweat profusely, yet his arm had gone cold. He made a few throws and collapsed to the turf onto his left side. His ears rang. He lost feeling on the left side of his face. A blood clot in his neck had begun to cut off circulation to his brain.

  Richard suffered a series of three strokes, underwent surgery, and never made it back to the majors. He battled depression, lost his fortune, and was homeless by the mid-1990s, often sleeping under a bridge at Fifty-ninth and Beechnut Streets in Houston.

  “I had some people I knew when I was playing ball and I would go to their house and wash my clothes and eat, maybe spend a night or two, but some of those people had families and I did not feel right just coming in,” he says. “So I would go under the bridge, and that’s it. Everything became a point of survival. You’re trying to survive; you have no transportation, no food, no finances. You ask yourself a lot of times: Where do I go from here? You don’t have an answer.”

  Richard would connect with a local pastor, find work with an asphalt company, and receive help from the Baseball Assistance Team. The details are a bit hazy—Richard says that he lost brain cells because of his stroke, which still affects his reflexes on his left side and, sometimes, his speech. But he walks a lot, loves to fish, and is skilled at cooking baby back ribs. He says life is good.

  And he can still remember his days of dominance.

  “It was grand, to be in control,” Richard says. “I felt like I was the baddest lion in the valley.”

  * * *

  ————

  There was no magic moment in the development of Randy Johnson’s slider. He knows that he was seven years old when he started playing baseball, in 1971, the same year Vida Blue rose to stardom for Johnson’s hometown Oakland A’s. Blue was also left-handed, so maybe he inspired Johnson, but he is not really sure. It was all so long ago, Johnson said in 2015, just before his induction to the Hall of Fame—and anyway, Blue did not throw a slider then.

  Johnson could flip knuckle-curves as an amateur, but mostly he needed only a fastball. More important, though, was his ability to consistently harness the power of his 6-foot-10 frame. J. R. Richard led his league in walks three times by his age-28 season, and so did Johnson.

  His first season in professional baseball was 1985. Johnson made eight starts for the Jamestown (New York) Expos, going 0–3 with a 5.93 ERA and more walks than strikeouts. He did not have his slider then because he was simply trying to survive, mechanically. Two years later, at Class AA Jacksonville, he pitched 140 innings—with 128 walks and 163 strikeouts. Jim Fanning, a former Expos manager, came to watch him.

  “He wanted to know, ‘What’s wrong, is everything OK?’ ” Johnson says. “I go, ‘Yeah, why?’ He said, ‘Randy, you could strike out 12 in six innings, but you could walk seven in three.’ That’s what I was dealing with, the inconsistency. I didn’t need to be able to strike out 12, I just needed to be able to throw strikes. I couldn’t repeat that, and as a professional athlete, it’s frustrating when you know that you can do it, but you can’t do it today—and you can’t figure out why.”

  Around that time, Johnson learned his slider; he does not know precisely how or when. It was all a blur in the early years, a long slog with the Expos and the Mariners to unlock his potential. With his fastball and slider, Johnson had two luxury sports cars—but what good were they if he kept running them off the side of the road?

  By 1992, Johnson had made an All-Star team, thrown a no-hitter, and averaged a strikeout per inning over two full seasons with Seattle. He was also coming off a season of 152 walks, a figure unequaled for more than a decade before, and more than a quarter century since. In his zest to overpower hitters, Johnson would speed up his delivery and overthrow his fastball. Calling for sliders, catcher Scott Bradley found, tended to calm things down. Johnson was a different beast to corral, and it gnawed at him.

  “It bothered Randy that every other pitcher would go over scouting reports, and for some reason, because he was big and had control problems, they’d pretty much say, ‘OK, Randy, just throw strikes, just get the ball over,’ ” says Bradley, who caught Johnson in his first three years with Seattle. “I think he was kind of self-conscious. If everybody else was going over scouting reports, he wanted to be a pitcher just like everybody else.”

  Sometime during the 1992 season, Johnson was
scheduled to throw a bullpen session before a game against the Rangers at the Kingdome. The Mariners’ bullpen was then located down the right field line, beyond the visitors’ dugout, which Johnson passed on his walk there. Rangers pitching coach Tom House had gone to USC, like Johnson, and asked if he wanted to watch Tex throw in the Rangers’ bullpen. Tex was Nolan Ryan. Johnson said yes, and it changed the course of his career.

  “We’ve seen some things that you’ve been doing,” House told Johnson, who demonstrated his mechanical flaw for me, many years later, in a boardroom at Chase Field in Phoenix. He rose from a table and faced a wall.

  “I was landing on the heel of my foot, so I’d be spinning and I would lose my arm angle,” he said, unfolding his frame toward another wall on his right. “Now look where that’s going—all my momentum’s kind of going off to the side, and my arm angle’s dropping. You need to be consistent with your arm angle in order to throw a strike.

  “But if you land on the ball of your foot, now all your momentum’s landing on the ball and you’ll go straight.”

  Johnson would demonstrate this lesson dramatically later that season, against Ryan and the Rangers in Arlington, when he struck out 18 in eight innings (and 160 pitches). But the off-season brought despair when Johnson’s father, Bud, a police officer, died on Christmas. The change in mechanics, and the clarity of purpose he gained from the death of his father, set Johnson on a new career path.

  “I got help mechanically, didn’t have to struggle as much, and it was a little bit more fun,” Johnson said. “And because it was fun throwing strikes, I was able to dig down deeper and pitch with a chip on my shoulder because of my dad dying. So I used my emotions and pitched with anger.”

  Everyone feared him. Johnson’s physical presence was intimidating enough—the pterodactyl wingspan, the low-three-quarters delivery, the mullet and the mustache and the scowl. Add in a focused rage, and his fastball/slider combination was all but impossible to solve.

  “He was gonna bully right-handers in with the fastball and slider, and bully left-handers away with the fastball and slider,” says Mark Grace, who was 1-for-10 off Johnson until becoming his teammate in Arizona. “He didn’t really need to pitch in. His weapons were so ridiculously good that he didn’t really need to change his location. You knew where he was going with it and you still couldn’t hit it.”

  Tony La Russa, who managed many games against Johnson, said there was no better pitch in his era than Johnson’s slider, which Tim Raines nicknamed “Mr. Snappy.” Gary Sheffield, the most dangerous right-handed pull hitter of his time, could not solve it.

  “He throws it out like a slingshot, and it comes down on your back leg,” says Sheffield, who hit .209 off Johnson. “By the time the ball gets to the plate, you think it’s a strike, but it’s bearing down on you. Because he’s so tall, you can’t judge if the ball’s close to you or not. And once you go forward on a cutting slider, it’s hard to hold up.”

  Johnson won four Cy Young Awards for the Diamondbacks, part of a five-year stretch in which he averaged almost 350 strikeouts per season and beat the Yankees three times in the 2001 World Series, a year in which he struck out a mind-bending 419 hitters, postseason included. He reached 300 victories with the Giants in 2009 and made his final start two months before his forty-sixth birthday. Johnson—a right-handed hitter—lunged at a curveball in the dirt from the Astros’ Roy Oswalt. His bat went flying and Johnson grabbed his left shoulder, seized by immense pressure. He struggled to get the ball to the plate in his warm-ups for the top of the fourth, allowing two home runs and a single before fielding a bunt by Oswalt. Johnson threw wildly to first and winced: he had torn his rotator cuff.

  Surgery would have ended his season and career. It was not an option.

  “I didn’t want to go out that way,” he says, so he came back, 10 weeks later, as a reliever. His arm was shot but his spirit still burned. “You tell players: ‘You don’t know when your last game is. You’re a superstar now, you’re in the limelight, but you don’t know what’s gonna happen today—and it may not even happen on the field. It could happen on the way to the ballpark, anything. Play the game.’

  “It took me forever just to get to the major leagues and feel like I could compete. So when I could, I relished the moment.”

  * * *

  ————

  John Smoltz, who entered the Hall of Fame with Johnson in 2015, also had a wipeout slider. Two, actually: one before his 2000 Tommy John surgery, and one after. The first he learned from Leo Mazzone, who passed on the principles he learned from Johnny Sain in the Braves’ farm system: think four-seam fastball, then turn and pull. When Smoltz’s rebuilt elbow made turning the ball too painful, he changed its position in his hand—“I call it, like, putting the ball on a 45-degree angle,” he says, “so when you throw it, it’s already coming out cut.”

  After shoulder surgery in 2008, that slider was about all Smoltz had left. Released by the Red Sox the next summer, he got his final job because the Cardinals believed in his slider. Smoltz pitched well for a few starts and made his final appearance as a reliever in the playoffs. His fastball did not have its old extension, those explosive last few feet. But at 42, he could have kept pitching. He trusted his slider that much.

  “I could have been that guy that just pitched with sliders,” he says. “I could have been the Larry Andersen if I wanted to. That’s just not who I am. I did not want to be hanging around if I didn’t feel like I had the arsenal. I didn’t want to be a specialist.”

  Smoltz did not need the work. He’d had a Cooperstown career as an elite starter and closer, and that was enough. For pitchers like Andersen, Jeff Nelson, and so many others, life as a slider specialist was a necessity, and a fine way to make a living. Together, Andersen and Nelson pitched for 32 years, almost entirely as setup relievers, and combined to hold right-handers to a .214 average.

  They both improved their sliders by closely observing Hall of Famers at work. Andersen was already in his ninth season when he joined the Astros in 1986 and saw the power of Nolan Ryan’s high leg kick. Andersen found that the higher he lifted his leg, the harder he threw his pitches. Nelson, who came up with the Mariners, admired Dennis Eckersley, the closer for the division-rival A’s. He wore 43 in Eckersley’s honor and tried to mimic his arm angle.

  “He always threw three-quarters,” Nelson says. “Once I started doing it, my fastball moved a lot more, my velocity stayed the same—but my breaking ball was huge.”

  Nelson also threw hard and had no fear of pitching inside. It was all to set up his sweeping slider, down and away from right-handers, taught to him in the minors by coach Pat Dobson—who had learned his on the 1968 Tigers from Johnny Sain. Nelson used his slider to humble some of his era’s Hall of Fame right-handed hitters: Ivan Rodriguez hit .121 off Nelson, Frank Thomas .161, Paul Molitor .188, and Cal Ripken .200.

  When Andersen talks to young pitchers, he tells them, “Don’t make it break, let it break.” He said he kept a loose wrist, put his fingers together, held a four-seam grip off-center, and pulled down on the side—a simple-sounding trick and a good cover for a wily craftsman.

  Andersen was a master of disguise off the field, so mischievous that the Phillies once gave away plastic masks of his face for a summer Halloween promotion. His longevity—17 seasons—was all about deception and guile. Hitters knew he threw sliders, but which one?

  “I was a three-pitch pitcher with three sliders,” Andersen says. By altering the pressure of his fingertips or the position of the ball in his hand, he could spin out a cutter, a slider, or a slower slider. And when those pitches abandoned him at the biggest moment of his Phillies career—two outs, bottom of the tenth, one-run lead, Game 5 of the 1993 NLCS in Atlanta, Ron Gant at the plate—he improvised.

  “He has thrown him three straight sliders,” said McCarver, in the CBS booth, “and if there was ever a time to make sur
e that if a hitter beats you, he’s gonna beat you with your best pitch, this is it.”

  Catcher Darren Daulton did not want to be beaten with anything, and another slider, he was sure, would fly a long way off Gant’s bat. Daulton had a different idea: a changeup with a split-finger grip, the emergency lifeline Andersen had never come close to perfecting.

  “He called that and my jaw hit the ground on the mound,” Andersen says. “But why not? I threw it, it started off the plate away and came down to the outside corner, and Jerry Crawford rung him up.”

  It was the fiftieth and final save of Andersen’s career.

  * * *

  ————

  The Phillies would win the pennant but lose the World Series to Toronto. By 2008, their city’s streak without a major sports title had stretched to 25 years. It ended, at last, with a slider from a different right-handed reliever.

  Brad Lidge had converted every save opportunity for the Phillies in 2008. He had done so largely with his slider, a pitch he had never even tried to throw until well into his professional career. The pitch had not always worked: three Octobers before, needing one out to send the Astros to the World Series, Lidge had thrown a flat slider that the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols obliterated into the Texas night.

  But it had been the right pitch, Lidge was sure. The first time he had ever faced Pujols, he ended the game by striking him out on a slider, on the front end of a strike-him-out/throw-him-out double play. It was the very first save of Lidge’s career.

  Earlier in the playoff at-bat, he had fooled Pujols with a slider, and his plan was to throw an even better one the next time, reasoning that a pitcher’s stuff should get nastier the longer an at-bat lasts. But the added pressure undid Lidge: he wanted to make Pujols “swing and miss even worse,” and so his legs uncoiled too quickly, his arm lagged behind a bit too long, and the slider hung in the strike zone, begging to be crushed. Pujols obliged.