The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (149 page)

Early on, I found out about—or was confirmed in my guesses about—an amazing revolution in pitching style and theory that has been in progress for more than a dozen years now. Pete Rose put it well (Pete puts
everything
well) in Tampa a year ago. “The two biggest changes I’ve noticed in baseball in my twenty-three-year career are, first and obviously, the much bigger salaries and, second, the maturity of big-league pitchers today,” he said. “There’s a reason for this, which is that in every class and level of baseball today there is a pitching coach. It didn’t used to be that way when I was coming up. I don’t think the pitchers are faster than they used to be, but I think they’re better. By the time a pitcher is twenty or twenty-one years old now, he’s very comfortable throwing 2–0 changeups and 3–1 curveballs. We’ve gotten used to that, but it’s something real different. When I first came up, most of the relievers were freak-ball pitchers, who threw screwballs or knuckleballs or forkballs or palmballs. Now the hardest throwers—I’m only talking National League, because that’s where I’ve been—the hardest throwers are in the bullpen. Gooden is an exception. Most of the other burners—Gossage, Lee Smith, Jeff Reardon, Ted Power, Niedenfuer—are coming out of the pen.” Ted Power, it should be noted, was moved into the Reds’ starting rotation last summer—a move made by the Reds’ manager, Pete Rose. “I mean, the top relievers are smokers, and most of the starters are the other way,” he went on. “More and more, the starters in this league pitch backward—2–0 breaking balls and changeups, and 0–2 fast-balls. They don’t give in to you. It’s a good way to pitch, if you can do it, because you can win that way.”

Steve Garvey, the first-base perennial—he is thirty-eight years old and is now in his nineteenth season in the majors—agreed with Pete Rose right down the line, and said as well that the advent of the new split-finger fastball (which we will examine in more detail shortly) has brought a fresh dimension of difficulty for the batter. He thinks that the batter who tends to go with a pitch and rap it up the middle of the diamond—a hitter like his Padre teammate Tony Gwynn, for example—will have more success against the new pitch than someone who likes to pull the ball. Garvey told me that the swift arrival of very talented relievers in a game also adds to the batter’s burdens. “The second guy to pitch now is as good as a fifth starter,” he said, “and that’s pretty decent.” The man up at bat gets to see three and maybe four pitchers pitch in the same game, he noted, each with a different style and size and delivery point, and batting averages in both leagues are drooping as a result. Garvey feels that the old respectable, upper-level .280-to-.295 hitter is being forced down into mediocrity merely by much better pitchers and tougher pitches.

“Basically, we’re all fastball hitters,” Garvey said. “If we couldn’t hit the fastball, we wouldn’t be here. But if you have to look at breaking balls all the time you’re only as good as your ability to adjust. It’s a whole different game. When I came up, there was more of that pure challenge from the starting pitchers. Seaver threw hard, Jerry Koosman threw hard. Bob Gibson threw, I mean,
hard.
Fergie Jenkins threw hard and had that good slider away. Jerry Reuss and Steve Carlton threw hard when they were together on the Cardinals in the seventies. So did Candelaria, when he came along, and that same Pirates team had Terry Forster and Goose Gossage coming out of the bullpen. Hard throwers. The 2–0 breaking ball used to be a special trait of the American League, because they had smaller ballparks and it’s harder to hit the breaking ball out. But now, because of free agency, the National League has a lot of American League pitchers in it, and even with our bigger ballparks the whole pitching staff is saying, ‘Why don’t we do it that way, too, instead of being the hardball league?’ It’s tougher on hitters every day.”

Joe Rudi told me that when he first came up the slider was a relatively new pitch and he had to deal with the new masters of the genre, like Jim Lonborg. “Now it’s this split-finger fastball,” he said. “It seems like the pitchers are always getting ahead. The real change, to me, is that middle-innings relief specialist—the long man. You hear pitching coaches talking about your rookies, and they’ll say, ‘This guy is going to be a real good middle-innings pitcher.’ That’s something new. What it really means is you never get that fourth at-bat against a great pitcher. I used to have to face Jim Palmer in maybe three or four games a year, and the first two or three at-bats against him were tough, believe me. But the fourth time up I thought maybe I had a chance. Nowadays, that pitcher is out of the game by men and you’re looking at a sinker-bailer like Quisenberry or a Jay Howell throwing gas. That good last at-bat is gone.”

Doug DeCinces, the California third baseman, said he almost missed the old challenge of waiting for a guaranteed fastball (“sitting dead fastball,” in baseballese) on a 3–1 count, but not if the pitcher was Goose Gossage. He said, “You didn’t want
that
every day, but Goose sure liked it. It was ‘Here it is, what are you going to do about it?’ You knew that before you stepped in there. But I wouldn’t say that the hard throwers are all the same. I mean, they’re not dumb. I remember when I was younger I was with the Orioles, and Nolan Ryan threw a no-hitter against us at Anaheim Stadium one day. He struck out Bobby Grich on a 3–2 changeup for the last out of the game. He made Bobby look so bad it was pathetic. I mean, everybody in the park knew that with a 3–2 count it had to be a fastball coming. Only it wasn’t.”

There were echoes and variations on these themes everywhere. In Mesa, Herm Starrette, the Cubs’ pitching coach (he has held the same post with the Braves, the Giants, the Phillies, and the Brewers), said, “There’s no doubt in my mind that pitchers are better than they used to be. They know more things.” Starrette is kindly and gently pedagogic in manner; he wears outsized spectacles and reminds you a little of a smalltown insurance man. “I think a starting pitcher in the big leagues has to have three pitches he can get over the plate in any situation, and now the man who comes in and relieves him is just about as good,” he went on. “You don’t follow a starter with a reliever who has the same kind of delivery. It’s like dancing with somebody—if you shift to a partner with a different sense of rhythm, it takes a time around the floor to get used to it. It’s not easy for the batter to pick up the change—from left-hander to right-hander, or a new release point of the pitcher’s hand, or whatever—and by the time he does the game is about over. Then here comes Lee Smith, who’s throwing ninety-per or better, and now he’s got a slider to go with it, and that hard sinker, too. It’s unfair. I think pitchers are the smartest people on the field. They’ve got to know every batter and understand every situation in the game. If a guy wins twenty games, he’s real smart. If he doesn’t—well, he’s proved it: he’s not so smart.” He laughed.

Hotdog: Nothing is easy in baseball, of course, even for the pitchers. In Phoenix Stadium last spring, Bill Rigney and my teen-age son, John Henry, and I watched from behind home plate while Oakland’s Joaquin Andujar worked in a little B-game against the Indians one day. It was about ten-thirty in the morning—a time of day when a ballgame feels like a special treat, like a children’s birthday party—and the desert sunlight was putting a fresh-paint sheen on the empty rows of reserved-seat stands around us. Four or five scouts sat together on little metal chairs in a box-seat section down behind the screen, and now and then one of them would pick up a coffee container from between his feet and sip at it and put it down again. There were about thirty fans in the rest of the park, and the only unhappy folks in view may have been Andujar, out on the mound, and Rig, just to my right, who were equally unimpressed with the pitching just then. Andujar, a combustible 21–12 pitcher with the Cardinals the year before, had been acquired in a trade over the winter and was expected to add some zing to the lacklustre Oakland pitching corps. Rigney, a former manager of the Giants and the Twins and the Angels, is the chief baseball adviser to the Athletics, and now he exchanged a couple of sharp glances with me as Andujar kicked unhappily at the rubber and stared around at a couple of Cleveland base runners he had put aboard on a walk and then a single that was hit off an unimpressive 3–1 pitch. A white-haired, mahogany-tan gent with a cigar came along the aisle and sat down behind us and put his arms up on the back of our row of seats. “You see it, don’t you, Rig?” he said instantly in a deep, mahogany-colored voice. “The whole key to Joaquin is that front knee. If he don’t pick it up in his motion and bring it right up ’longside the back leg, it opens him up too soon. There—he just did it again. He throws three-quarters that way, and when he’s three-quarters the goddam ball gets up, and his slider just goes
shh-shh-shh.
When he gets tired, he does that all the time, and his sidearm is horseshit. He’s got to tuck in that front knee—just that much more gives him time to get up on top of the ball…. Like
that—
he did it that time.”

Our new companion was Hub Kittle, a legendary erstwhile pitching coach with the Cardinals. Now seventy, he had become a travelling instructor in the Cards’ farm system and a part-time scout. He was dressed in several eye-shattering shades of Cardinals red, with a thong tie and a turquoise tie clasp. Rig introduced us, and Kittle buried my hand in his, but his eyes stayed on the field.

“Oops—there’s that little forker I taught him,” he said. “But that forearm has got to come down,
down
onto his goddam knee. He’s so quick you don’t see where he’s going wrong.” He curled his right hand into a spyglass and peered through it with one eye. “Close out the batter, close out the hitter and the ump, and then you can see him,” he muttered. “I had him at Houston and down in the Dominican for five years, and I know you got to stay on his goddam ass. ‘OK, now,’ you say to him. ‘OK
¡Bien! ¡Arriba! ¡Bueno!’
You keep on his case so the
brujo
don’t get him—the witch doctor. He gets in those spells out there.”

Andujar gave up a little single, which scored a run, and then the home-plate ump—the woman umpire Pam Postema—called a balk when he tried to pick off the runner at first.

“Oh-oh,” Kittle said. “Now he’s pissed. See him stompin’ around out there. He’s talking to himself again.” Kittle half rose and shouted something in Spanish to Andujar. “Go full circle!” he roared. “Keep the ball down,
hombre!”

Joaquin, struck dumb, stared around the stadium in confusion—I think for a moment he looked straight up at the sky. Then he spotted Kittle and waved his glove. The next two pitches were good breaking balls, and then he struck out the batter with a fastball to end the half inning.

“There,” said Kittle. “That’s the
pistola.
He’s still got it.”

“I think you should have been part of the deal,” Rig said. “This man”—he grabbed Kittle by the knee—“this man and I played together on the Spokane Hawks in 1938,” he went on, to John Henry and me. “He was a pitcher, and I was a kid shortstop. That was a B League, and it was my first professional team. Wes Schulmerich was finishing up his career there.” He shook his head. “Nineteen thirty-eight…”

The split-finger fastball is baseball’s Rubik’s Cube of the eighties—a gimmick, a supertoy, a conversation piece, and a source of sudden fame and success for its inventor. It is thrown at various speeds and with a slightly varying grip on the ball, but in its classic mode it looks like a middling-good fastball that suddenly changes its mind and ducks under the batter’s swing just as it crosses the plate. The pitch isn’t exactly new—nothing in baseball is exactly new. A progenitor, the forkball, was grasped in much the same fashion, between the pitcher’s forefinger and middle finger, but tucked more deeply into the hand, which took off spin and speed—a “slip-pitch,” in the parlance. Elroy Face, a reliever with the Pirates, was its great practitioner in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and he put together an amazing 18–1 won-and-lost record (all in relief) with it in 1959. Bruce Sutter—like Face, a right-handed relief specialist—came along with the first so-called split-finger fastball a decade ago while with the Cubs, and has employed it (and very little else by way of repertoire) to run up a lifetime National League record of two hundred and eighty-six saves, with a Cy Young Award in 1979; he later moved along to the Cardinals and is now with the Braves and in temporary eclipse, owing to a sore arm. The Sutter pitch seemed not only unhittable but patented, for no one else in the game has quite been able to match his way of combining the forkball grip with a mid-delivery upward thrust of the thumb from beneath, which imparted a deadly little diving motion to the ball in flight. Here matters rested until 1984, when Roger Craig, a pitching coach with the Tigers, imparted his own variant of the s.-f. fb. to several members of the Detroit mound staff, with instant effect. Craig went into retirement after that season (he has since unretired, of course, and manages the Giants), but he is an affable and enthusiastic gent, who loves to talk and teach pitching. He is tall and pink-cheeked, with a noble schnoz; as most fans know, he has endured every variety of fortune on the mound. Callers at his home near San Diego that first winter of retirement included a good many opportunistic pitchers and pitching coaches from both leagues who were anxious to get their hands on the dingus. Most prominent among them—now, not then—was Mike Scott, a large but as yet unimpressive pitcher with the Houston Astros (the Mets had traded him away after 1982, at a time when his lifetime record stood at 14–27); he spent a week with Craig and came home armed with Excalibur. With the new pitch, he went 18–8 in 1985 and 18–10 last year, when he won a Cy Young Award after leading the majors with three hundred and six strikeouts and a 2.22 earned-run average. He capped his regular-season work with a no-hitter against the Giants, clinching the Astros’ divisional pennant, and then zipped off sixteen consecutive scoreless innings while winning his two starts in the championship series against the Mets, to whom he surrendered but one run over all. Indeed, the other great “what if” of this past winter (along with second-guessing the way the Red Sox played the tenth inning of Game Six in the World Series) is the speculation about the Mets’ fate in the playoffs if they had been forced to face Scott for a third time, in a seventh and deciding game.