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by Tyler Kepner

  Now, in Game 5 of the World Series, before another home crowd ready to explode, Lidge faced a similar challenge in Eric Hinske of the Tampa Bay Rays. Hinske was no Pujols, but his best skill was enough to ruin everything: Hinske could demolish a fastball. He had shown this the game before, with a homer to straightaway center off Joe Blanton. The blast was inconsequential—the Phillies won easily, to take a three-games-to-one lead in the series—but Lidge noticed the type of pitch Hinske had hit.

  That bit of intelligence underscored what Lidge knew from his own history with Hinske. It was brief—just four pitches in June 2005—but memorable. The first time Lidge had faced Hinske, who then played for Toronto, he struck him out on a slider to end a game, just as he had done with Pujols. But the next night, Hinske, a left-handed hitter, scorched Lidge’s first-pitch fastball off the right field wall.

  Lidge processed all this as Hinske came up as a pinch hitter. The tying run stood at second base. Lidge did not think about Pujols, but the circumstances were the same: failing to clinch in Game 5 would send the series, and the momentum, back to the other team’s park. The Phillies’ pitching coach, Rich Dubee, and catcher, Carlos Ruiz, met Lidge on the mound. The infielders also huddled there, with second baseman Chase Utley stationed just behind Lidge’s left ear. Utley was in perfect position to shout at Lidge if he chose the wrong strategy.

  “If we would have said fastball,” Lidge says, “he probably would have been like, ‘Wait, wait, wait! Let’s think about this.’ ”

  Utley said nothing; Lidge’s plan was to not throw another fastball until 2009.

  “The last time I threw this guy a fastball, he crushed it off the wall,” Lidge told Dubee. “We’re going all sliders here.”

  If Ruiz gave him a sign, Lidge does not remember it. Maybe Ruiz patted the ground—signaling location, not the type of pitch—but Lidge was committed to the pitch that had made him a star. If Lidge had never learned the slider, and had stuck with the curveball as his off-speed pitch—well, his elbow would probably have blown apart. But even if he had managed to stay healthy while throwing a curve, the best he could have been was a setup reliever, a middle man. Without the slider—without a true swing-and-miss weapon—Lidge never would have found himself on the mound at the end of a World Series.

  As a boy in Colorado, he rarely found himself on the mound at all. Lidge did not pitch until his sophomore year at Cherry Creek High School, and then just occasionally, because he had shown a strong arm on throws from the outfield. As a senior, he lost his starting outfield spot to a sophomore, Darnell McDonald, who would go on to play in the majors. Lidge’s only chance to play varsity was to pitch.

  He took to it instantly, his velocity rising from about 83 miles an hour to 91 with a few weeks of instruction. Lidge also spun a curveball, just to have something slower to drop into the strike zone. But in Colorado, a poorly located curveball can hang in the thin air and be hit a long way. The rush of the fastball made pitching fun.

  “Something just felt right with rearing back and throwing the ball as hard as I could,” Lidge says. “That felt even better than hitting a home run for me.”

  Drafted by San Francisco in the 42nd round—teams now stop at 40—Lidge instead chose the University of Notre Dame, down at sea level, where his curveball had a much sharper break. Still, he had only a rudimentary understanding of the pitch, and it was not what got him drafted again. A fastball, by then touching 97, enticed the Astros to choose him in the first round in 1998.

  The problem in pro ball was that Lidge needed something else. He was a starting pitcher then, and because starters face more hitters than relievers do, they need more options—at least three, generally. Lidge tried a changeup but never mastered it, and the more he used his curveball, the more his elbow swelled. He threw 74 innings, total, in his first three minor league seasons.

  Somehow Lidge had never tried the slider. He had heard it could be more effective than the curveball, because it was thrown harder, but he feared that tinkering with a new pitch would distract him from perfecting his curve. He did not attempt a slider until his third spring training, in Kissimmee, Florida, in 2001, when an Astros coach, Dewey Robinson, altered his arm angle to alleviate the pain.

  Lidge was a bit of a short-armer, releasing his pitches closer to his head than most pitchers do. With his hand further away from his head, Lidge’s arm felt better but his curveball suffered. He trusted Robinson, whose analytical approach appealed to Lidge and whose status, as the pitching coordinator for the farm system, made him familiar to Lidge and important to his future.

  Throwing the slider as if making a comma with his index and middle fingers, Lidge found that the pitch had too much horizontal spin, staying on the same plane as the hitter’s bat. He wanted something to make hitters miss, and Robinson encouraged him to stay on top of the ball for a deep, almost vertical break that Lidge could control by altering his finger pressure and the angle of the ball. They played catch for a week before trying the slider on a mound. Lidge spiked the first two in the dirt, but on the third try, like that, his muscle memory kicked in. Everything felt right.

  “It was, I guess for lack of a better word, miraculous,” said Robinson, a former White Sox reliever, in 2010. “I’ve never, ever had somebody pick it up so quickly and so devastating. It had this huge break, it was an instant swing-and-miss pitch, and it was thrown harder than anybody I’ve ever taught before or since.”

  In about 14 months, Lidge was a major leaguer, and on that chilly night in Philadelphia, at the apex of his career, he reached for the pitch Robinson taught him. Hinske dribbled the first slider up the first base line, a weak foul. He checked his swing on the second slider for strike two.

  Lidge could make his slider dive away from a left-handed hitter. “A little bit of inside-out,” he calls it, and sometimes his frustrated victims would tell Lidge his pitch was not a slider at all, because sliders from righties do not break that way. Further, they would say, the seams on Lidge’s slider did not form a red dot. That was because he threw them with topspin—top-to-bottom rotation, not sideways—yet still threw them hard, about 84 miles an hour in 2008.

  Lidge stared at Ruiz’s target and held the final slider of the season in his right hand. He gripped it as he always did but tilted it a bit to the right, and made sure that his index finger would be the last to leave the ball.

  “On the very last one, it was one of those deals where I gripped the ball and I could feel, like, the grip was just right when I came set,” Lidge says. “There were two strikes and I was like, ‘OK, this is the one.’ I could really feel it the second I gripped it in my glove that everything was just where it needed to be, and that last slider was going to be a good one.”

  Hinske had no chance. The pitch dive-bombed into Ruiz’s black Wilson catcher’s mitt, far below Hinske’s swing. Lidge leaped in the air, his arms outstretched, then fell to his knees and cried: “Oh my God, we just won the World Series!” A teammate, Jayson Werth, would tease him about that reaction, telling Lidge he seemed to be speaking in tongues. Lidge did not mind. His slider was the snapshot of triumph for a generation of Philadelphia sports fans.

  * * *

  ————

  For all of these slider masters, though, there is still something missing about the pitch—respect, perhaps, or maybe widespread recognition. The curveball or the slider? When it comes to pitching, this is the Ginger or Mary Ann question.

  “The curveball’s so sexy, it’s such a great pitch,” says A. J. Ellis, a veteran catcher. “Broadcasters can recognize it and they really spice it up and describe it well. The whole stadium oohs and aahs. There’s nothing better than seeing that guy jelly-legged, like he’s drowning, as that curveball finishes its last 10 feet. It’s a slow, slow, painful death.”

  Curvy, glitzy, and glamorous, the pitch is so perfectly Ginger that Tina Louise, the actress who played the stranded starlet on G
illigan’s Island, actually dated Bo Belinsky, a playboy Angel of the 1960s who threw, yes, a curveball. The one described by Ellis belongs to the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, the ace of his era. Yet Kershaw’s best pitch is actually the slider, his Mary Ann: alluring in its simplicity, comfortable and familiar but a knockout at the end.

  Kershaw did not throw a slider at Highland Park High School in Dallas. The summer after eleventh grade, he was the No. 4 starter on a junior national team behind future major leaguers Tyson Ross, Brett Anderson, and Shawn Tolleson. As a senior, he was the best high school pitcher in the country: undefeated with a 0.77 ERA and 139 strikeouts in 64 innings. The dominance foretold his success in the majors, after he had added the slider.

  “His curveball looks the best, because everybody sees it on a GIF or on TV, that big break, guys turn the other way,” says Anderson, his Dodger teammate in 2015, when Kershaw became the first pitcher in 13 years to strike out 300 hitters in a season. “But as far as hitter in, hitter out, the slider’s his best pitch, because it looks so much like his fastball and he can throw it for strikes or he can get them to chase. The curveball is so big and there’s so much break and it’s so nasty that guys just take it automatically. It’s tough to throw that pitch for a strike because there’s so much movement.”

  That was Kershaw’s problem in his last high school start before the 2006 draft. Without command of his curveball, he walked four hitters and gave up a home run. His failure was the Dodgers’ gain, though, because six teams passed on Kershaw before the Dodgers grabbed him. Within two years, at age 20, he was pitching at Dodger Stadium. He struck out three in his first inning and started Game 1 of the NLCS the next fall.

  Yet Kershaw’s ascent was not as direct, or as easy, as those facts make it seem. Without the slider, it would not have happened.

  “You adapt to survive, and that’s basically what I was doing,” Kershaw says. “I was kind of just putting along being mediocre, so I wanted to try to figure something out.”

  Kershaw? Mediocre?

  “Yeah, I was,” he insists. “Check the numbers. Check ’08. Check the first half of ’09.”

  In 22 games in 2008, Kershaw’s ERA was 4.26. It was 4.34 by the end of May 2009, when the Dodgers played a four-game series at Wrigley Field. Four times already, Kershaw had lasted just five innings and thrown at least 97 pitches. Two other starts were headed that way before he was pulled in the fifth.

  Kershaw was surviving, barely, but not adapting. He would snap off that picturesque curveball, hitters would stare at it for a ball, and Kershaw would fall behind.

  “Eventually it got to the point where he was a one-pitch pitcher,” Ellis says. “He was throwing a lot of heaters. Even though his fastball was elite, as it is today, guys are still able to hit a major league fastball, especially when they know it’s all you can throw for a strike. And even if they weren’t able to put it in play and hit it hard, they were able to foul it off because there were no speed changes, nothing that was throwing their timing off. They were on time for the fastball, so his pitch counts were getting out of control. It got to the point where a demotion to go work on some things—probably a changeup—was really strongly considered.”

  The slider saved him. Mike Borzello, a Dodgers coach in 2009, suggested Kershaw throw it while playing catch. Pitching coach Rick Honeycutt showed Kershaw a grip. Ellis, up for the weekend as an emergency third catcher, squatted behind the plate as Kershaw tried it out in the bullpen.

  Ellis had caught Kershaw in the minors, and tried to nurse him through an awkward experiment with a changeup. This was different. The slider hurtled toward the plate on the same plane as the fastball for 58 feet—and then it bottomed out, below the hands, below the barrel. This is usable, Ellis thought, finally something besides a fastball that Kershaw could throw when behind in the count.

  Kershaw had never tried the pitch before. He had never needed to. But just like that, he had it down.

  “It’s really tough to explain, because it’s such a feel,” he says. “You know when you throw it right. It’s the same with any pitch. When it comes off your fingers the right way, you know it’s the way it’s supposed to. And when it doesn’t, it feels that way instantly. With the slider, I kind of felt that right away. I felt when I did it right, and I felt when I didn’t.

  “Like the changeup, I still don’t have that feel. It’s still hard for me to figure that out, and I think it’s just because it’s such a feel pitch. The slider, it’s more grip it and rip it.”

  Kershaw gripped it and ripped it and by 2011 had begun streaks unprecedented in major league history: four seasons in a row as the major leagues’ ERA leader, and five in the top 3 in Cy Young voting. He took home three of those awards, plus an MVP trophy. He earned a $215 million contract and built an orphanage in Zambia.

  None of it would have been possible without the best pitch of baseball’s best pitcher, the difference-maker for Gibson and Carlton and so many more, the spinner that changed the game.

  THE FASTBALL

  Velo Is King

  Every pitch is a decision. That is the beauty and the burden of the pitcher. Think there’s downtime in baseball? Tell it to the man on the mound, all alone on that dirt bull’s-eye. The catcher thinks along with him, back behind the plate, but the pitcher rules the game. Nothing happens until he answers these questions: Which pitch should I throw, where should I throw it, and why? It is an awesome responsibility.

  “It’s about being in control—who’s in control of the game?” says Jamie Moyer, one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, whose competitive fire kept him pitching until the year he turned 50. “I don’t want to sound brash or rude, but if they came to me at 3:00 and said, ‘OK, tonight we’re starting at 7:06,’ I’d say, ‘We’ll start it when I’m ready to throw the first pitch.’ ”

  With each pitch thereafter, the calibration changes—sometimes slightly, like the position of the sun, and sometimes seismically, like an earthquake. But it always comes down to the pitcher’s internal computer, and his default setting is the four-seam fastball, thrown with the index and middle fingers separated slightly across the widest gap between the seams. As the backspinning ball hurtles through the air, four seams cycle through each revolution. It is the easiest pitch to steer, and gives the hitter the least time to react. Every pitcher, no matter what else he throws, understands this rule:

  The best pitch in baseball is a well-located fastball.

  “For sure it is, because if you can’t do that then you can’t use your other stuff, because you use that other stuff based on your fastballs,” Madison Bumgarner says. “I don’t throw a two-seamer. I feel like my curveball and slider/cutter—whatever you want to call it—are pretty close; some days one’s better than the other. But the fastball’s always got to be number one.”

  That is where Bumgarner turned in Game 7 of the 2014 World Series, when faced with a decision few others had ever confronted. Just six pitchers before and one since—the Cubs’ Mike Montgomery, in 2016—had been in position for a Golden Pitch, a term used by the Society for American Baseball Research for a pitch that could win or lose the championship for either team. By definition, this spot arises only in Game 7 of the World Series, in the bottom of the ninth inning or later, with the visitors leading and at least one runner on base. Those precious pitches, loaded with cork, yarn, and possibility, can make the ballpark go silent or crazy.

  For Bumgarner, the steely left-handed ace of the San Francisco Giants, there was no doubting his weapon of choice. There never is. His mind-set, and a deceptive delivery that offers hitters no basis for comparison, gives Bumgarner an extraordinary edge.

  “The thing that’s different about him compared to a lot of guys is there’s conviction behind every fastball he throws,” says A. J. Ellis, who faced Bumgarner more than any other pitcher across his first 10 years in the majors. “It might not go to the area he wants it
to go all the time, but it comes with aggression, and it comes with conviction.”

  Bumgarner entered Game 7 in Kansas City in the fifth inning with a 3–2 lead. He had shut out the Royals in Game 5 and also beaten them in the opener, when he worked seven innings in a blowout and gave up just a solo home run. Here, Bumgarner retired 14 in a row after a leadoff single. Then the earth shook.

  With two outs in the ninth, Alex Gordon looped a sinking liner to center field. It fell for a single, skipped past one outfielder, and squirted away from another. Gordon huffed his way around second, but left fielder Juan Perez, a former high school pitcher, fired a strong one-hop throw to shortstop Brandon Crawford. The third base coach, Mike Jirschele, wisely held Gordon at third, 90 feet from tying Game 7. The next hitter could win it with one swing.

  It was Salvador Perez. It had to be. Bumgarner had pitched shutout ball in the 2010 World Series against the Texas Rangers, and again two years later against the Detroit Tigers. In his three games against the Royals, he had allowed only that solo homer—to Perez. If he struck again, Perez would ruin everything.

  * * *

  ————

  Fifty-two years before, in another Game 7 involving the Giants, Ralph Terry had faced this precise problem. For Terry, a Yankees right-hander, the predicament was even more acute. Just two years earlier, in 1960, he had become the first pitcher ever to allow a home run to end the World Series, by the Pirates’ Bill Mazeroski in Game 7. Terry had warmed up five times that day on a steep bullpen mound down the left field line at Forbes Field. He was worn out when he finally got into the game, and could not adjust to the flatter mound on the field. His foot came down early, everything was up, and Mazeroski smashed a high, cutting fastball over the left field wall.