by Roger Angell
The change that Hernandez alluded to—a historic proceeding in baseball, which has rarely altered its essential rules and ancient dimensions—came just after the season of 1968, when the two leagues showed a combined batting average of .236. Carl Yastrzemski won the A.L. batting title with an average of .301 that year, and in the same summer a rookie pitcher—the Mets’ Jerry Koosman—accounted for seven shutouts, Bob Gibson achieved an earned-run average of 1.12 (a modern record), and Gaylord Perry and Ray Washburn threw no-hitters on consecutive days in the same ballpark. The batters were dying. The remedy, put into effect the following year, was to cut down the strike zone by a couple of inches, top and bottom, and to shave the pitching mounds from fifteen inches to ten inches above field level. Offensive statistics picked up almost at once (National League hitters batted .253 last year, and those in the A.L. .262), but many contemporary hitters believe that their eventual return to form was mostly because the batters began to recognize the slider a little sooner and to attack it with more success. I have also heard them say that the same thing will happen after they’ve seen the split-finger pitch more often. They may be whistling in the dark. For one thing, most pitchers who have mastered Craig’s Little Jifry say that they don’t know exactly where the pitch is going to end up once it has been launched; in this respect, at least, it resembles the knuckleball to some degree. We’ll see.
I asked Marty Barrett (of the Red Sox) and then Wally Backman (of the Mets) how many split-finger pitches each of them sees, and what they told me suggests that the pitch is much less employed, or less trusted, in the A.L. Both Barrett and Backman are bantam-size contact hitters (well, Barrett has a bit of power: he hit thirty-nine doubles last year) who bat second in power-laden lineups, which means that pitchers tend to work them with extreme care. Barrett told me that he didn’t run into many split-finger pitches, perhaps because the pitchers were afraid that they’d get behind in the count and end up walking him. “I think the pitch is for bigger guys, who aren’t as selective and will probably go to swinging at pitches that end up being balls,” he said. “I get more fastballs. If Jim Rice got the pitches I get, he’d hit seventy home runs.”
I told Backman what Marty had said, and he was surprised. He said he saw the pitch often. To be sure, if the leadoff man got on base just ahead of him he wouldn’t be served many breaking balls, but whenever the Mets were behind late in a game the whole lineup would probably see the split-finger. “A lot of times, the split-finger is a ball,” he said, “but even if you know that, it’s hard to lay off it sometimes. I just think there are more guys in our league who are throwing the thing.”
A further ingredient in the shifting batter-vs.-pitcher wars is the indisputable evidence that in the past four or five years, the umpires in both leagues have responded to the breaking-ball and sinkerball epidemic by lowering the strike zone. There was no plan to this; it just happened. The high fastball—the old Koufax or Seaver hummer that crossed the plate at the level of the batter’s armpits, which is still the official ceiling of the strike zone-would probably be called a ball today, and umps today are also calling a lot of strikes on pitches that cross below the knee-level demarcation. Contemporary umpires are handing out quick warnings on brushback or knockdown pitches as well, and as a result the batters feel free to take a better toehold up at the plate and swing hard at low pitches away—“diving at the ball,” in the new jargon. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, Don Drysdale, the old Los Angeles intimidator, has said that modern-day batters are less wary when up at bat, and he and some other thoughtful baseball people warn that one of these days somebody is going to get beaned by an inadvertent high, inside pitch. On the other hand, it is the lower strike zone that also makes the batters so vulnerable to the split-finger’s skulking little ways, because so few of them will trust the umpire to call a ball on a pitch that ends up below the strike zone.
To return to the slider, there is very little agreement about its origins but unanimity about the fact that it is easy to throw and hard to hit. Bill Rigney says that it caught on in the National League in the early fifties, after Don Newcombe’s sudden flowering with the Dodgers. “Erskine and Branca had those big old wide-breaking curveballs, but then suddenly here was Newk with his hard pitch,” he told me. “It only broke about this much, but it was a bear. It just took over the league. It was easier to control than a curveball—you could throw it for strikes—and the batters hated it. I remember riding in the team bus before the 1948 All-Star Game, and Ted Williams was asking us, ‘What’s this new thing over in your league—this slider?’ Well, he found out about it, too. A lot of batters used to put it down, you know—they called it a nickel curve—but they still couldn’t hit it.”
The slider is admired but mistrusted, for the evidence seems clear that it can destroy a pitcher’s arm. The Dodgers discourage its instruction in their minor-league clubs, and a great many baseball people think it can permanently damage kid pitchers who begin to fool with it at the Little League and Pony League levels. “I like the slider,” Herm Starrette told me, “but I’d teach it last to a young pitcher, if at all. It’s a great pitch to throw when you’re behind in the count and want to throw some kind of breaking ball. But it will hurt your arm unless it’s thrown properly. I teach the loose-wrist slider—the Steve Carlton pitch. It has a shorter, quicker break, and it moves downward. The stiff-wrist slider is what you call the cut fastball. It’s a flat slider.”
Pitchers say that the standard slider is thrown overhand, with the forefinger and the middle finger slightly off center on the ball, and that the proper wrist action gives the ball the same spiral imparted to a passed football. The fingers are off center on the cut fastball, too, but the pitch, launched with a full fastball motion, results in a brusque, twisting action of the elbow and forearm that shortens the delivery—and, in time, a career.
“Right-handed pitchers can do better with the cut fastball against a left-handed hitter than against a right-handed hitter, because for the right-handed hitter the ball comes in on the same plane as the fastball, and you have a chance to get more wood on it,” Starrette went on. “But if your slider breaks across and down to a right-handed batter, you’ve got a chance he’ll miss it or bump the ball on the top half for a ground-ball out. If you’re a right-hander facing a left-handed batter…well, most left-handed batters are low-ball hitters, so if you throw the stiff-wrist slider—that cut fastball—up and in, you can get by with it, because it’s on the small part of the bat, in on the fists. And that’s why pitchers go back to it, even if it’s dangerous for them. Anything that works will be used, you know.”
The slow or sudden ruin of an arm and a livelihood is on every pitcher’s mind, and examples of crippled careers are to be found on all sides, although fans and pitchers alike prefer not to notice them. Steve Garvey believes that the near-epidemic of torn rotator cuffs (it is the section of muscle that encircles the arm in the same fashion, and at approximately the same site, as the seam that attaches a shirt-sleeve to a shirt) arises from pitchers’ trying to throw too many different deliveries, and from overthrowing in crucial game situations. “You see a lot of guys who used to throw hard who have lost a few miles an hour on their fastball after a couple of years,” he said. “Then they go to other stuff, to compensate, and they get into trouble. Stress comes into it more than it used to, because there’s so much more money to be made in the game. The desire to win in important situations has gone way up.”
Craig, for his part, claims that his split-finger special will be kinder to pitchers in the end, for it is thrown with a full, easy fastball motion. “Hell, you can hurt your arm throwin’ a pebble or a rock, or flyin’ a damn kite,” he said at one point, “but there’s less chance of it this way.” Other coaches and managers (Sparky Anderson is among them) are dubious, and say that we’ll have to wait and see about the long-range effects of the split-finger. One pitcher showed me that if you repeatedly split your throwing fingers apart you will feel a twinge in your up
per forearm, and said that he does exercises to compensate. Any overhand pitching motion is probably unnatural, for that matter. Joe Rudi believes that the spitball (still illegal, and still in the game, of course, because it works so well) is the most dangerous delivery of all. “You’re gripping the ball off the seams, which is to say your fingertips have very little resistance, nothing to pull down against,” he said. “When that part of the ball is wet, the ball suddenly comes flying out of there, and there’s nothing left—no resistance at all. Your arm accelerates exactly at the point when it’s begun to decelerate, and that’s a great way to blow it out for good. It’s like when you go to pick up a bag of groceries, only there’s nothing in the bag. You go oops—and you’ve thrown out your back. I don’t let the outfielders on my team throw the ball any kind of a funny way, even when they’re fooling around in practice. A lot of young players have no idea how vulnerable the arm really is. It’s a delicate mechanism.”
In 1980, by the way, a wonderful young Oakland pitching staff, featuring Mike Norris, Rick Langford, Matt Keough, Brian Kingman, and Steve McCatty, led the American League in complete games (by a mile) and earned-run average, but after three years all but McCatty were gone, with their careers in tatters. One popular theory for the debacle was that Billy Martin and his pitching coach, Art Fowler, allowed the youngsters to stay too long in too many games (the A’s had almost nothing in the way of a bullpen), but another theory claimed, or whispered, that Fowler had taught the kids the spitball. It’s hard to be sure.
Scroogie: The first screwball pitcher I ever saw was Carl Hubbell, the great—the word fits here—Giants left-hander of the nineteen-thirties, who, along with Joe DiMaggio, became my earliest baseball hero. I recall the thrilling moment at the Polo Grounds when my father pointed out to me that Hubbell’s left arm turned the wrong way around when it was at rest—with the palm facing out, that is—as a result of his throwing the screwball so often and so well. (The ball is delivered with the hand and wrist rotating in an unnatural direction—to the right for a lefthander, to the left for a right-hander—and the pitch breaks wrong, too. It’s what pitchers call “turning it over.”) I couldn’t get over Hubbell’s hand; it was like meeting a gladiator who bore scars inflicted at the Colosseum. Since men, I have talked with Hubbell a few times—he’s a thin, stooped elderly gent who lives in Mesa, Arizona—and whenever I do I can’t help stealing a glance at his left hand: it still faces the wrong way. The prime screwballer of our time is Fernando Valenzuela, of the Dodgers. His pitching arm looks perfectly normal so far, I’m sorry to say. Last summer, I ran into Warren Spahn, the old Boston Hall of Famer, in the visiting-team dugout at Fenway Park. He was there for an Old Timers’ Game—he’s a regular at these events—and he was wearing an old Braves uniform, with that tomahawk across the chest; he played twenty years for the Braves, eight of them in Boston (“Spahn and Sain and pray for rain”) and the rest in Milwaukee, and his lifetime three hundred and sixty-three victories are still the most compiled by any left-hander. Spahn, a leathery, wiry, infallibly cheerful man, was sitting with some of the Ibxas Rangers (they would play the Bosox that afternoon, once the exhibition innings were over), and in no time he had begun teaching his famous sinker-screwball delivery to another left-hander—the veteran Mickey Mahler, who was trying to stick with the Rangers as a middle-innings relief man.
“Look, it’s easy,” Spahnie said. “You just do this.” His left thumb and forefinger were making a circle, with the three other fingers pointing up, exactly as if he were flashing the “OK” sign to someone nearby. The ball was tucked comfortably up against the circle, without being held by it, and the other fingers stayed up and apart, keeping only a loose grip on the ball. Thrown that way, he said, the ball departed naturally off the inside, or little-finger side, of the middle finger, and would then sink and break to the left as it crossed the plate. “There’s nothing to it,” he said optimistically. “Just let her go, and remember to keep your hand up so it stays inside your elbow. Throw it like that, and you turn it over naturally—a nice, easy movement, and the arm follows through on the same track.” He made the motion a few times, still sitting down, and it certainly looked easy—easy but impossible.
Spahn went off to join some other uniformed geezers, and I asked Mahler if he intended to work on the pitch, now that he’d had it from the Master.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m trying to learn the screwball from our pitching coach, and this would mess me up for sure.” He seemed uncomfortable, and after a couple of minutes he told me that a little earlier he and Spahn had been standing near the stands and some kids there had asked him, Mickey Mahler, for his autograph. “They asked me—not Warren Spahn,” he said. “Can you believe that?” He was embarrassed.
I don’t like to see young pitchers get their hearts broken in spring-training games, but it’s much worse when it happens to somebody you know and remember and care about—to a veteran, I mean. In Winter Haven, the starting pitcher for the Tigers one afternoon was Frank Tanana, a thirty-three-year-old lefty with fourteen years’ service in the majors. Like many fans, I remembered him as a slender, dazzling left-hander when he first came up with the Angels. He led the league then with two hundred and sixty-nine strikeouts in 1975, and went 19–10 the next year, and the year after that his 2.54 earned-run average was the best in the league. (A scout told me once that as a teenager Tanana had played in a high-school league in and around his native Detroit, where two strikes on a batter retired him and three balls meant a walk. “Nobody touched him there—it was just a mismatch,” the scout said. “Everybody got home for supper early that spring.”) But Tanana went down with a rotator injury in 1979 (his pitching motion was across the body—a dangerous habit for a fastballer), and he was a different sort of pitcher after that. He lost eighteen games for the Rangers in 1982, but then he began to do better. He is smart, and he knows the corners, and he has become a master at changing speeds. Over the last four years, he won forty-six games and lost forty-seven while toiling for the Rangers and then the Tigers, but there was more arm trouble last year. Against the Red Sox, in his outing at Winter Haven, he gave up ten runs on eleven hits, and couldn’t quite get the last out in the third inning. When he left, he raised his cap to the Boston fans just before he disappeared into the dugout, and got a nice little hand in return. I hated it.
The Sox’ opponents the next afternoon were the Montreal Expos, a team that has systematically stripped itself of most of its expensive stars and is engaged in filling out its roster with youngsters and retreads. Len Barker threw three pretty fair middle innings for the visitors, giving up a lone run on three hits, but I felt edgy the whole time he was out there. A hulking, six-foot-four flinger with blazing speed, Barker had a brief time in the sun with the Indians at the beginning of this decade, when he led the American League in strikeouts two years running. Early in the 1981 season, in a game against the Blue Jays, he achieved the ultimate rarity, a perfect game: no hits, no walks, no runs, nobody on base. His occupational injuries began in 1983, and ultimately required extensive surgery on the elbow of his pitching arm, and he never had a successful or pain-free season after that. He moved along to Atlanta in time, and spent all of last summer with Indianapolis, a Class AAA minor-league team, but his most common address was the disabled list. He didn’t make the team this year, it turned out; the Expos gave him his release just before the season started, and his career may be at an end at last. Another rotator-cuff casualty, Bruce Berenyi, gave it a last try this spring with the Expos, but the pain was too much, and he announced his retirement a few days after camp opened; he had been with the Mets and, before that, the Reds, but he never returned to form after shoulder surgery two years ago. He was a hard thrower, too. Bob McClure, a left-handed ten-year man who has worked mostly out of the bullpen, hung on and made the Expos’ opening-day roster—an exception in this unhappy litany, for he has made do in the majors ever since his rotator-cuff trauma in 1981. His spring wasn’t exactly
carefree, however: just before the regular season began, he gave up nine runs to the Yankees in two-thirds of an inning of work, during a grisly 23V7 blowout at Fort Lauderdale.
Earlier, when I was out in Arizona, the Athletics had announced that Moose Haas, a prime starter for them last year until he was side-lined by bursitis, was suffering from a pulled muscle in the rotator cuff of his pitching shoulder and would be unable to start the season. And then, a bare day or two before the season began, Pete Vuckovich announced his retirement from baseball, thus terminating a distinguished eleven-year career that included a Cy Young Award in 1982, when he put together an 18–6 season for the Brewers, which helped take them into the playoffs and the World Series that fall. A torn rotator cuff got him the following spring. I was in the Brewers’ camp at Sun City the day it was announced, and I well remember the waves of dismay that went through the clubhouse that afternoon—dismay but perhaps not surprise, for it was known that Vukey had pitched in great pain during the final stages of the pennant race the year before. In late September, two days after receiving a cortisone shot in his shoulder, he somehow went eleven full innings against the Red Sox, throwing a hundred and seventy-three pitches, and won the game. (I reported on this unhappy business at the time.) Vuckovich underwent extensive shoulder surgery early in 1984 and sat out the entire season. He was never sound again, but he just wouldn’t give up. As scarcely needs saying, he is a man of enormous determination, pride, and stubbornness. The Brewers demoted him a year ago, but he refused to report to the minors; then he changed his mind and went to Vancouver after all, when he threw well enough (a 1.26 ERA in six games) to be invited back to the Brewers again in September. Now it’s over for him.
Vuckovich and Haas and McClure were on the same Brewer pitching staff in the early eighties, and so was Jim Slaton, who also suffered a rotator-cuff injury but eventually recovered. So was Rollie Fingers, the slim, flamboyant relief pitcher who won his Cy Young in 1981 but could not pitch for the team in the playoffs or the World Series in 1982, because of an injury to his forearm that forced his retirement three sad seasons later. And so on. I don’t think we should draw any particular conclusions about the Milwaukee club of that time, beyond its famous combativeness and pride, but the point I am getting at here is that all the pitchers just mentioned, with the exception of Berenyi, came up in, and mostly pitched on, American League clubs. To go back a bit, we should also remind ourselves that the 1980 Cy Young Award winner in the American League—Steve Stone, who won twenty-five games and lost seven for the Orioles—was forced into retirement by elbow miseries after but one more summer’s work. When three successive Cy Young winners in the same league—Stone, Fingers, and Vuckovich—together arrive at a point when none of them is able to throw a pitch in combat, the award suddenly begins to take on the meaning of a Purple Heart.