The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  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.

  “The split-finger is mostly a changeup,” Keith Hernandez told me in St. Petersburg. “It can be thrown in different ways, so you can say it’s really a three-speed changeup, with the fork-ball action as the other half of it. Scott can make it run in or out, but when he throws it inside to me he throws it hard. It has so much velocity on it that it’s a real fastball for him, plus it goes down. It just drops off the table. Sutter’s was the best until this one, but Scott has perfected it. He has tremendous command over the pitch—he never makes a mistake.” (Mike Scott, it should be added, might not agree with this generous appraisal, for Hernandez hits him better than anyone else in the league: .377 lifetime, according to the Elias Baseball Analyst.)

  Roger Craig told me that both Scott and Morris throw the split-finger at eighty-five miles an hour or better—faster than anyone else, although Scott Garrelts, a fireballing reliever on Craig’s Giants, is now approaching that level. “Jack has his fingers up higher on the ball than Mike does,” Craig said. “Mike’s got the ball as far out in his hand as you can get it. He throws it about sixty or seventy percent of the time now, and there was a stretch at the end of last year when he was just unhittable. The pitch was a phantom—you’d swing and it wasn’t there.” (A good many batters in the National League are convinced that Mike Scott also imparts another sort of witchcraft to the baseball, by scuffing it in some secret fashion, in contravention of the rules. Steve Garvey told me that retrieved balls Scott has thrown often show a patch of lightly cut concentric circles on one of the white sectors—something that might be done with an artificially roughened part of his glove or palm. Garvey made a little sidewise gesture with his hand. “That’s all it moves,” he said, smiling. “It’s enough.”)

  Craig—to get back into the sunshine here—said that the best thing about the split-finger is that it can be thrown at so many different speeds. “It depends on where you’ve got it in your fingers, on how you cock your wrist—on a whole lot of things,” he said. “But the ultimate is when it comes out off the tips of your fingers—they just slip down along the ball on the outside of the seams—and the ball tumbles. That’s the great one, because it’s the opposite spin from the fastball. People keep telling me it isn’t really a fastball, but I keep saying it is, because I want that pitcher to throw it with a fastball motion. Dan Petty, back with the Tigers, used to let up on it, because it was in the back of his mind that it was an off-speed pitch, but that’s wrong. Here—gimme a ball, somebody.”

  We were sitting out on a bullpen bench in left field on a shining morning in Scottsdale—Craig and I and one of the Giants’ beat writers. Craig has large, pale, supernally clean hands—Grandpa hands, if Grandpa is a dentist—and when he got a ball he curled his long forefinger and middle finger around it at the point where the red seams come closest together. �
�I start with my fingers together like this, and I say ‘fastball’…‘fastball’…‘fastball’”—he waggled his wrist and fingers downward again and again—“but I have them go this way each time: just a bit wider apart. By the time you’re out here”—the fingers were outside the seams now, on the white, slippery parts of the ball—“you’re throwing the split-finger. There’s a stage where it acts sort of like a knuckleball, but it’ll come. You’ve started.”

  Craig told us that he’d discovered the pitch back in 1982, while he was coaching fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys in California. He takes great pleasure in the fact that several older or middle-level professionals have saved their careers with the pitch (Milt Wilcox, a righty with the Tigers, was one), and that subvarsity high-school and college pitchers have made the team with it. Superior pitchers sometimes resist it, by contrast. “Jack Morris thinks he’s the greatest pitcher who ever lived,” Craig said. “He has that great confidence. He insisted he didn’t need it, even though he was getting killed with his changeup. So I said, ‘Do me a favor. Pitch one game and don’t throw a change—throw the split-finger instead.’ He did it, and it was a two-hitter against the Orioles.”

  When Craig arrived at Candlestick Park in September of 1985, as the Giants’ new manager, he took all the pitchers out of the bullpen on his second day and asked for a volunteer who had never essayed the split-finger. Mark Davis, a left-hander, came forward, and Craig sent the rest of the staff down to stand behind the catcher. “Well, in about twenty, twenty-five pitches he was throwing it,” Roger said, “and all my other pitchers were thinkin’, Well, if he can do it, I can do it. That way, I didn’t have to go out and try to convince them one by one.” Everybody on the Giants throws the pitch now, and one of Craig’s starters, Mike Krakow, went 20–9 with it last year—his best year ever. Craig hasn’t counted, but he believes that thirty or forty percent of the pitchers in the National League have the pitch by now, or are working on it. Five of the Dodgers’ staff—Welch, Hershiser, Niedenfuer, Young, and Leary—employ the pitch, and the American League is beginning to catch up. Gene Mauch, the Angels’ pilot, told Craig this spring that all his pitchers would be working on it this year.

  I suggested to Roger that he should have registered the split-finger, so that he could charge a royalty every time it’s thrown in a game, and his face lit up. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” he said. “Just kick back and stay home, and take on a few private pupils now and then. That would be all right! But I’ve stopped teaching it to other teams. About ten pitching coaches called me up last winter and asked if they could come out and pick it up, but I said no. And there was this one general manager who called me up and said he’d send me and my wife to Hawaii, all expenses paid, if I’d take on his pitching coach and teach it to him. It’s too late, though—I already showed it to too many guys. Dumb old me.”

  Not everybody, in truth, picks up the split-finger quickly or easily, and not all split-fingers are quite the same. Ron Darling, the Mets’ young right-hander, mastered the delivery last summer, after a long struggle, and when he did, it became what he had needed all along—a finishing pitch, to make him a finished pitcher. (He was 15–6, with a 2.81 ERA, for the year, along with a hatful of strong no-decision outings.) He has never talked to Roger Craig, and, in fact, his split-finger started out as a forkball taught to him by pitching coach Al Jackson at the Mets’ Tidewater farm club in 1983. But Darling, who has small hands, could never open his fingers enough to grasp the ball in the deep forkball grip, so it became a split-finger delivery instead. (Craig told me that some pitchers he knew had even gone to bed at night with a ball strapped between their fingers, in an attempt to widen their grip.) Darling had very little luck with the pitch at first, but kept at it because of Jack Morris’s example—especially after Morris pitched a no-hitter against the White Sox at the beginning of the 1984 season.

  “The whole idea about pitching—one of the basics of the art—is that you’ve got to show the batter a strike that isn’t a strike,” Darling said. “More than half—much more than half—of all the split-fingers that guys throw are balls. They drop right out of the strike zone. That’s a problem, because you might have a great split-finger that moves a lot, and the batter is going to lay off it if he sees any kind of funny spin. So you have to throw it for a nice strike now and then. Hitters adjust, you know. Most of the time, you’re going to throw the pitch when you’re ahead in the count. But sometimes I throw it when I’m behind, too. All you have to do is make it look like a fastball for at least half the distance. A lot of times last year, I’d try to get a strike with a fastball and then throw a split-finger strike. If it does get over—and this began to happen for me for the first time last year—it rocks the world, because then here comes another split-finger and the bottom drops out, but the guy still has to swing. He has no other choice. Nobody can afford not to swing at that pitch—unless he’s Keith Hernandez. Umpires don’t call third strikes on Keith.”

  K for Koufax: Each year, I notice, one particular old player’s name pops up again and again in baseball conversations. I don’t understand it. This year, it was Sandy Koufax. Roger Craig told me that he and Koufax were among the old Dodgers who had turned up at Vero Beach for a thirtieth reunion of the 1955 Brooklyn World Champions, and that Sandy immediately began asking him how to throw the new split-finger pitch. The next afternoon, he summoned Craig over to watch him working off a mound. “Well, first of all, Sandy was throwing the fastball at around eighty-five miles an hour,” Craig said. “He was in great shape, as usual, and he just did it naturally—no effort at all. I couldn’t get over it. He was working on the split-finger, of course, though, and already he had it down pretty good. You know how long his fingers are. Sandy was pretty excited, and after a while he told me he was going to unretire and get back into the game as a pitcher again. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, man, you can’t do that! You’re fifty years old!’ But I thought he really meant it for a while, and so did Buzzie Bavasi and some of the others who heard him. I guess somebody talked him out of it in the end, but I almost wish they hadn’t. Wouldn’t that’ve been something!”

  At Winter Haven, Eddie Kasko, the Red Sox’ director of scouting (and a former manager of the Bosox), was talking about Sandy, too. He had a couple of friends from Massachusetts in tow—fans down to watch the Sox in training—and at one point he told us about a day back in the early nineteen-sixties, when he was an infielder with the Reds, and he and Whitey Lockman and Ed Bailey were sitting together on the bench, watching Koufax in action for the visiting Dodgers.

  “Sandy is just chewing us up out there, putting down the batters in rows with that tremendous fastball,” Kasko said, “but Ed Bailey keeps saying, ‘Well, he don’t look like nothing special to me. That pitch isn’t much. I wish they’d give me just one crack at him.’ Ed loved to pinch-hit, you know—he thought there wasn’t anybody he couldn’t hit. Well, a little later we’re way behind in the game, and Hutch sends Bailey up to bat against Sandy, and it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out. Eddie swings three times and doesn’t come within a foot of the ball. He walks back to the dugout and sits down, and after a while I give Whitey a little nudge and I say, ‘Well, Ed, what do you think now?’ And Bailey turns around, all red in the face, and says, ‘He’s too straight!’ Whitey says, ‘Yes—and so is a .30-.30.’”

  Both leagues rang up strikeout records last year—a phenomenon attributable at least in part to the split-finger—and what one makes of this depends on whether one thinks like a batter or like a pitcher. Roger Craig smiled when I asked him about it and said, “I can’t call it bad.” Hernandez said, “What I’m concerned with is that the sixties brought us the slider, and now here’s the eighties and this pitch. What’s going to happen in the nineteen-nineties? What’s going to happen to us hitters? The slider was a much harder pitch to hit than the curveball, and in the end they had to change the strike zone in order to even things out a little. The only thing on our side now is that the h
anging split-finger is a great pitch to hit. It’s just sitting up there on a tee for you.”