The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (154 page)

Thrift next asked me if I knew which pitch was quicker—the two-seam or the four-seam fastball. These are baseball definitions deriving from the appearance of the ball when it is held in different positions in the pitcher’s hand; there is in fact only one stitched seam on a ball. With the two-seamer, the ball is held with the forefinger and middle finger together on top of a seam at the point where the tips of the fingers touch, at right angles, the narrowest alley of white on the ball. With the four-seamer, the fingers are held at a forty-five-degree angle off this position, with the fingers now up on the seam that forms the wider, horseshoe sector of white. Rotating the ball out from under the fingers will produce two spinning seams in the first mode and (amazing!) four in the other.

I told Syd that I’d been given conflicting answers to this question, but that I’d always somehow assumed that the two-seamer was the faster pitch, because it looked as if the ball would encounter less wind resistance that way.

“Well, it’s the four-seamer,” he said. “The four-seam fastball is approximately four miles an hour faster than the two-seam, when thrown by the same pitcher, and it’s because of just the thing you mentioned. What happens—isn’t this
interesting—
what happens is that those four seams set up a molecular mass underneath the ball that sustains it just a little in flight. There’s less turbulence in flight, so it gets there sooner.”

Thrift is a sizable man, with a buttery Virginia accent, and when he talks his big, intelligent face lights up with his fervor for his subject. “The second thing,” he went on, “is that that same thrown pitch falls approximately twenty-one inches between the time it leaves the pitcher’s hand and the time it crosses the plate. That’s at eighty-five miles an hour, and it’s with the four-seam pitch. The two-seam pitch falls twenty-four inches. That three-inch difference is about the width of a baseball. At first, I just didn’t believe this, because a lot of the time the fastball just looks straight, doesn’t it? But it’s only straight laterally. It always falls.”

He told me that he had once asked Ted Williams if he swung at all pitches the same, and Ted had said no—if the pitch was across the seams he’d swing at the middle of the ball, but if it was a two-seamer he’d swing at the bottom of the ball. If he hit two ground balls in a row against two-seam pitches, on the next time up he would swing at an imaginary ball just under the real one. “You can see that difference in pitches, you know,” Thrift said to me. “If you’re not too far back in the stands, you’ll notice that the four-seamer looks a little smaller in flight, and the two-seamer looks more white as it’s comin’ in.”

He said that whenever he receives a report about a new pitching prospect and his velocity, he always asks the scout how the kid was throwing the ball. “If he’s doing eighty-eight on the gun and he’s throwing two-seamers, we know we can get him up in the nineties with the four. Isn’t that something? So many of the scouts say this boy is throwin’ straight or this boy has a rising fastball, and I say there’s no such thing. The rising fastball is an impossibility in physics.”
*

“But what about Sandy Koufax?” I said at once. “I saw that pitch again and again, and it
rose.
Everybody knew that.”

“I saw it, too,” Thrift said, “but it was an optical illusion. The batter was only swinging at where he thought the ball was going to end up—a batter has to make up his mind about a pitch in the first eight to fifteen feet after it leaves the pitcher’s hand, you know. We measured
that,
too. But if that fastball of Sandy’s was well up in the nineties it probably fell only seven inches instead of fourteen, so the batter would miss it by seven inches or more. No wonder it looked as if it was rising.”

In Thrift’s estimation, these findings are of more use to a batter than to a pitcher. He believes that the batters need all the help they can get right now, and he thinks that baseball is badly in need of another research laboratory along the lines of the old academy. If so, it is clear that he should be invited back to be its Oppenheimer, its Wernher von Braun. Sitting with me in the damp little dugout, he went on at length about the researchers he had brought into the Baseball Academy to conduct those pioneering studies—a Youngstown, Ohio, inventor and physicist named John Garver, and a retired banker from Chicago named John Nash Ott, who had done pioneering studies on the effect of light on plants and animals. He told me that most baseball people had doubted and discarded their discoveries at first. Some years after the academy closed down, he recalled, he had been driving in South Carolina, on his way to scout a game at The Citadel. He had the radio on, and suddenly he heard a program about Igor Sikorsky, the helicopter inventor and developer, and about a special interest of his, the physics of a thrown baseball. His findings were exactly the same ones that Ott and Garver and Syd Thrift had come up with. “Isn’t that great!” Thrift exclaimed. “I tell you, I was so excited I had to pull my car over to the side of the road and think about it. I was thrilled.”

We sat together watching the rain fall on the soggy field and the puddles forming on the infield tarp, and Syd said, “Well, here comes another season, and nobody knows what’s going to happen. Nobody can say for sure. We can study and study and make plans for our team and for the season, but what we don’t know is always there. It’s the best part of the game.”

*
This statement by Syd Thrift aroused extended retorts from various quarters, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Cal Tech. A physicist there, Tom Yunck, reminded me in a letter that anyone who has thrown a wiffleball or a Ping-Pong ball with a sharp downward flip of the fingers (as I have) will see in an instant that a rising fastball is not an impossibility. A spinning ball (including sliders and curveballs and the rest) causes air to flow around it asymmetrically, and if the air over the top of a fastball is moving faster than the air beneath it as the result of backspin, lift will ensue—the same lift that causes an airliner (or a Sikorsky helicopter, Mr. Yunck adds) to rise. But no one is quite prepared to say that a major-league pitcher can throw the four-seamer with sufficient speed and backspin to make a five ounce-plus baseball move upward. Mr. Yunck admits this would be tough, but he believes that a few pitchers may be equal to the task; John Garver—he is cited just ahead—by contrast, very much doubts it. Incomplete investigations of his seem to suggest that a one-hundred-and-fifty-m.p.h. fastball would be required in order to achieve a perceptible rise, but he quickly adds that calculations of the necessary degree of spin are not at hand. I believe Syd Thrift meant to say that a rising fastball is an impossibility in physics
until we find a rookie pitcher who is fifty percent faster than anyone we’ve seen out there to date.
He is a famous optimist as well as a famous scout, and I don’t think we should bet against him.

—
Summer 1987

H
ERE WE ARE, AND
here it all is for us: already too much to remember. Here’s a meerschaum pipe presented to Cy Young by his Red Sox teammates after his perfect game in 1904. Here are Shoeless Joe Jackson’s shoes. Here’s a life-size statue of Ted Williams, beautifully done in basswood; Ted is just finishing his swing, and his eyes are following the flight of the ball, into the right-field stands again. Here is John McGraw’s little black mitt, from the days when he played third base for the old Orioles: a blob of licorice, by the looks of it, or perhaps a small flattened animal, dead on the highway. Here’s a ball signed by seventeen-year-old Willie McCovey and his teammates on the 1955 Class D Sandersville (Georgia) club—Stretch’s first address in organized ball—and over
here
is a ball from a June 14, 1870, game between Cincinnati and the Brooklyn Atlantics; Brooklyn won, snapping the Red Stockings’ astounding winning streak of two full years. Babe Ruth, in a floor-to-ceiling photomural, sits behind the wheel of an open touring car, with his manager, little Miller Huggins, almost hidden beside him. The Babe is wearing driving gauntlets, a cap, a fur-collared coat, and a sullen, assured look: Out of the way, world! Let’s hum a song or two (from the sheet music for “Home Run Bill” or “The Marquard Glide” or “That Baseball Rag”) while we think about some intrepid barnstormers of the game: the Chicago White Sox arrayed in front of the Egyptian Pyramids in 1889; King George V (in a derby) gravely inspecting a visiting American exhibition squad (in uniforms and spikes) in 1913; and shipboard high jinks by the members of a 1931 team headed for Japan (Mickey Cochrane is sporting white-and-tan wingtips). The 1935 Negro League Pittsburgh Crawfords were travellers, too; their blurry team photograph has them lined up, in smiles and baggy uniforms, in front of their dusty, streamlined team bus. Over here are some all-time minor-league records for us to think about: Ron Necciai pitched a no-hitter for the Appalachian League’s Bristol Twins in 1952 and struck out all twenty-seven batters in the process; and Joe Wilhoit hit safely in sixty-nine consecutive games for the Wichita Wolves in 1919. Wilhoit was on his way down by then, after four undistinguished wartime seasons with four different big-league clubs, but Necciai’s feat won him an immediate starting spot with the Pittsburgh Pirates—and a lifetime one-season 1–6 record in the majors, with a 7.08 earned-run average. Hard lines, but another kid made more of
his
chances after hitting safely in sixty-one consecutive games with the San Francisco Seals in 1933: Joe DiMaggio.

Enough. Come sit down and take a load off—let’s sit here on these old green ballpark seats and watch this movie tape. I think it’s—Yes, it is:

COSTELLO:
Now, wait. What’s the name of the first baseman?

ABBOTT:
No, What’s the name of the second baseman.

COSTELLO:
I don’t know.

ABBOTT:
He’s the third baseman.

COSTELLO:
Let’s start over.

ABBOTT:
O.K. Who’s on first.

COSTELLO:
I’m asking
you
what’s the name of the first baseman.

ABBOTT:
What’s the name of the second baseman.

COSTELLO:
I don’t know.

ABBOTT:
He’s on third…

What about bats? Pete Rose had a nearly knobless bat, with six separate strips of tape on the handle—or at least that’s what he swung when he rapped out his four-thousandth hit (he was with the Expos then), against the Phillies, in 1984. Probably he wouldn’t have done so well with Babe Ruth’s thick-waisted model, or with Home Run Baker’s mighty mace. Maybe weight isn’t what matters: here’s Jim Bottomley’s modest-looking bat lying on its side in a case—the bat he used in a September 16, 1924, game, when he went six for six against the Dodgers (Sunny Jim played for the Cardinals, of course) and batted in twelve runs. I won’t forget
that,
I’m sure, but here in the World Series section (there is a cutout silhouette of Joe Rudi making that beautiful catch up against the wall in 1974:1 was there!) some text tells us that the Tigers batted .455 against the Padres’ starting pitchers in the 1984 Series—and how in the world could I have forgotten that, now that
I
know forever that Cy Young’s 1954 Ohio license plate was “C-511-Y” Cy won five hundred and eleven games, lifetime) and that Mrs. Lou Gehrig’s New York plate for 1942 (Lou had died the year before) was “I-LG”?

This clotted flow is an inadequate representation of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, but it is perhaps a good tissue sample of one man’s brain taken after a couple of hours in the marvelous place. What has been left out so far is the fans themselves—dozens and scores and hundreds of them, arrayed throughout the four floors of the modest Georgian edifice on any summer afternoon, with wives (or husbands) and kids and grandfathers and toddlers in tow, and all of them talking baseball a mile a minute: “Pop, look at
this!
Here’s Roger Clemens’ cap and his gloves and his shoes he wore on the day he struck out all those guys last year—you know, that twenty-strikeout game?” and “Ralph Kiner led the National League in home runs his first
seven
years running-how do you like that, honey!” and “Alison! Alison-n-n! Has anybody seen Alison?” I have done some museum time in my day—if I had to compare the Hall with any other museum in the world it would be the Victoria and Albert, in London—but I can’t recollect a more willing and enthusiastic culture-crawl anywhere. It took me a little while to dope this out, and the answer, it became clear, is geographical. The Hall of Fame draws a quarter of a million visitors every year—a total that cannot be fashioned out of drop-in locals from Cooperstown (pop. 2,300), plus a handful of idle music lovers, up for the nearby Glimmerglass Opera summer season, and a few busloads of kids from day camps scattered along adjoining Otsego Lake. (There are other tourist attractions in town as well: the Fanner’s Museum and Fenimore House, the latter of which displays some furnishings of the eponymous and tireless non-Cleveland Indian publicist James Fenimore Cooper.) Cooperstown is an inviting little village, with flowering window baskets set out in front of its dignified old brickfront stores, but it isn’t near anyplace else, unless you count Cobleskill or Cazenovia. From New York City, it’s three hours up the New York Thruway and another hour out west of Albany before you hit the winding back-country road that takes you thirty miles to the lake and the town. Folks who come to the Hall are pilgrims, then; they want to be there, and most of the visitors I talked to during a couple of recent stays told me they had planned their trip more than a year before. This place is a shrine.

I had resisted it, all these years, for just that reason. I’ve been a baseball fan all my life—starting long before the Hall of Fame opened, in 1939—but lately when each summer came along I realized once again that I preferred to stay with the new season, close to the heat and fuss and noise and news of the games, rather than pay my respects to baseball’s past. Cooperstown seemed too far away, in any case, and I secretly suspected that I wouldn’t like it. I was afraid I’d be bored—a dumb idea for a baseball fan, if you think about it. By mid-June this year, however, up-close baseball had begun to lose its flavor for me. The World Champion Mets—
my
Mets—had lost most of their dashing pitching staff to injuries and other unhappy circumstances, and the team fell victim to bad nerves and bickering as it slipped farther behind in the standings. The Red Sox, who also held my fealty, were even worse off: twelve games behind and already out of the race, it seemed—a terrible letdown after their championship season of 1986. Spoiled and sulky, I suddenly remembered Cooperstown one afternoon in late June, and within an hour had extemporized a northward expedition with Charles, a colleague of mine and a fellow-Soxperson, and his ten-year-old Soxson, Ben—perfect companions, it turned out. We cheated a little by flying up from LaGuardia on a Catskill Airways commuter hop to Oneonta, where we rented a car and instantly resumed our colloquy (it was too noisy in the plane to talk about baseball or anything else), which went on uninterrupted through two soggy days and four meals and three bottom-to-top sojourns in the Hall of Fame; an essential trip, we decided, maybe even for Yankee fans.