The Baseball

by Zack Hample

  Why did Sprinz agree to do it in the first place?

  “All the other players refused and walked off the field,” he recalled. “But I said to myself, ‘God hates a coward.’ ”

  KNOCKING THE COVER OFF THE BALL

  Ever since Robert Redford’s character in the 1984 movie The Natural literally knocked the cover off a baseball, people have wondered if such a feat is actually possible. Twenty-three years later, a TV show on the Discovery Channel called Mythbusters attempted to find out once and for all.

  The two hosts, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, tested the myth by firing balls at a “static bat” from an air cannon. In other words, the bat wasn’t being swung; it was held in place by a mechanical arm. And therein lay the first of two problems: the experiment, as interesting as it was, degenerated into an exercise in bunting the cover off the ball.

  As Hyneman and Savage increased the speed at which the balls were fired, something unexpected happened at the 200-mile-per-hour threshold. The bat snapped in half, but the ball remained intact.

  “It’s obvious to me,” said Hyneman to his co-host, “that knocking the hide off a ball is way beyond the capability of a human pitcher or batter.” (Even guest star Roger Clemens.)

  The test concluded with Hyneman and Savage cranking up the cannon full blast and shooting a brand-new ball 437 miles per hour into a padded backdrop. That did the trick and caused the cowhide cover to fly off the twiny core—but that’s where the second problem arose. There were several unanswered questions: What’s the slowest speed at which the ball would’ve broken apart? What exactly made the cover rip off at top speed? Was it the jolt of 150 pounds per square inch from deep inside the cannon’s long barrel? Or was it the air resistance once the ball escaped?

  The most important question might be: would it have been possible to knock the cover off an old and slightly worn-out ball, like the one used in The Natural? Probably not, but the circumstances were favorable. The scene took place in 1939, when umpires weren’t nearly as anal about discarding used balls—and in the moments before Redford unleashed his sensational swing, a close-up of the ball in the pitcher’s hand revealed a small imperfection on the stitches.

  Still, Hyneman and Savage are probably right: myth busted.

  PUNK’D BY PETE ROSE

  Pete Rose did not perform well in All-Star Games. He played in 16 of them and batted just .212 (7-for-33), but at the 1978 contest in San Diego he used a different approach to help the National League.

  Long before the game took place, Rose devised a plan to psych out the American League. He knew that Japanese baseballs travel farther than major league balls because they’re made smaller and wound tighter, so he secretly arranged for Mizuno to ship dozens of balls to the stadium.

  “I brought the balls in for the National League’s batting practice,” said Rose. “It was all for psychological warfare.”

  With his teammates in on the trick, Rose visited the American League clubhouse and convinced a bunch of players to watch BP.

  “Everyone was hitting them out of the park,” recalled Phillies second baseman Larry Bowa.2 “I even hit a couple out in BP—something I never did before. It made me feel like Babe Ruth.”

  Rose and Bowa and the rest of the National League All-Stars put on quite a show, then made sure to gather every ball before clearing the field and watching the American League take their cuts.

  “They were just barely hitting them to the outfield wall,” said Bowa. “It was normal stuff, but after the way our balls were flying way up into the stands, the American Leaguers looked like Little Leaguers.”

  Rose’s plan worked. The National League beat the American League, 7–3, for its seventh straight win.

  OUTER SPACE

  Ceremonial first pitches have come a long way since President Taft started the tradition in 1910. There’ve been comical first-pitch mishaps, like the time Olympian Carl Lewis made an inconceivably wimpy throw that nosedived 30 feet in front of the mound and rolled to home plate, or when Cincinnati mayor Mark Mallory flung one so far off the plate that one of the umpires jokingly ejected him, but there’ve also been historical triumphs. In 1995, before Game 5 of the World Series got under way at Cleveland’s Jacobs Field, NASA astronaut Ken Bowersox became the first person to throw a first pitch from outer space. His antigravity toss inside the space shuttle Columbia was transmitted via satellite to the scoreboard at the stadium and viewed by a national audience on ABC-TV. The seven-member crew, spending time in space to conduct a microgravity research mission, had taken two baseballs aboard the shuttle—one from each league—and then signed them after the mission. One of the balls was sent to the Hall of Fame. The other was displayed at the NASA Glenn Visitor Center.

  Michael Lopez-Alegria, a member of Bowersox’s crew, teamed up with a fellow astronaut (and die-hard Red Sox fan) named Suni Williams in 2007 to throw the second ceremonial first pitch from space. This time it took place at the International Space Station before a regular-season Yankees–Red Sox game at Fenway Park. One year later, as the same two teams prepared to face off in the Bronx, NASA astronaut (and lifelong Yankee fan) Dr. Garrett Reisman threw another ceremonial first pitch at the space station.

  THE MOTORCYCLE TEST

  Before radar guns were invented, there was no way to measure exactly how fast a pitcher could throw. That didn’t stop Major League Baseball officials from trying, along with a team of scientists, two cameramen, a stunt driver, the Chicago Police Department, and Bob Feller.

  The experiment took place during the 1940 season. The police blocked off a street near Lake Michigan, and two paper “targets” were set at a distance of 60 feet, 6 inches, from Feller. The plan called for him to throw a baseball toward one target at the exact instant that a speeding motorcycle flew past him toward the other.

  Feller, just 21 years old at the time and widely regarded as having the best arm in baseball, was instructed to pitch from the stretch in order to time his release. But instead, he used a full windup so that he’d throw as hard as possible, and as a result, the motorcycle raced past him a fraction of a second too soon. The motorcycle was supposedly traveling 86 miles per hour, and the scientists estimated that Feller’s pitch gained 13 feet on the bike during its brief flight. Therefore, it was believed that he had thrown the ball 104 miles per hour.3

  DOES A CURVEBALL REALLY CURVE?

  Since the early days of professional baseball, countless people have questioned whether a curveball really curves, suggesting instead that its irregular flight is merely an optical illusion. (These doubters all have one thing in common: they’ve never tried to hit one.) “Study Finds Curveballs Do Curve,” proclaimed the New York Times in 2009 after a Bucknell University professor wowed a group of neuroscientists and psychologists with new findings on the subject. In 1982 a study conducted by physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed that curveballs are very real. Going back even further, two of America’s biggest magazines—Look and Life—made the same conclusion in 1941 by using stop-action photography.

  Yawn.

  No one’s sure who threw the first curveball, but Fred Goldsmith, a pitcher who debuted in 1875 with the New Haven Elm Citys,4 was definitely the first person to prove that a curveball really curves, and get this—he did it as a 14-year-old in 1870. The demonstration, which took place in front of a large crowd at the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn, New York, began with a 45-foot chalk line being drawn on the ground. (That was the distance at the time from the pitcher to the batter.) Two 8-foot poles were then driven into the ground at each end, and a third pole was set up in the middle. The right-handed Goldsmith, baseball in hand, took his position on the left side of the line at one end. His goal was to throw the ball from the left side of the first pole, make it hook around the right side of the middle pole, and return to the left side of the line before reaching the far pole. Not only did Goldsmith succeed, but he performed the feat half a dozen more times. Henry Chadwick, a legendary baseball pioneer and w
riter, was on hand for the event and provided what should have been a definitive account the next day in the Brooklyn Eagle: “That which had up to this point been considered an optical illusion and against all rules of philosophy was now an established fact.”

  THE BRASS GLOVE AWARD

  Hecklers sometimes yell “Clank!!!” when a fielder drops the ball, as if to suggest that his glove is made of metal. During batting practice before Game 1 of the 1964 World Series, Cardinals backup catcher Bob Uecker literally made some clanking noises when he brought an unusual piece of equipment onto the field—and the hometown fans couldn’t have been happier. Uecker was standing in left field, not too far from three Dixieland bands that were there for the pregame festivities. When the musicians took a break and left their instruments behind, Uecker walked over and picked up a tuba. He briefly considered playing it, but then his baseball (and comedic) instincts took over and he attempted something even funnier: he tried to catch a fly ball with it.

  Uecker, a notoriously bad player, missed the first ball, then caught the next one in the mouth of the tuba, and dropped another. His teammates were laughing. The crowd was cheering. He finished by booting a couple of balls and catching one more—not a great fielding percentage, but he’d put on quite a show. The only person who didn’t appreciate it was the tuba’s owner; the baseballs had dented the instrument, and the Cardinals later received a bill for $250.

  JUST SAY NO

  This isn’t your typical stunt. In fact, no one was supposed to know about it. On September 25, 1980, a drug-sniffing German shepherd at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport alerted customs officials to a suspicious package that had arrived on Air France from Sialkot, Pakistan. Mike Streicher, a special agent for the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, opened the package and found an assortment of sporting goods, including 18 baseballs, which further attracted the dog. Agents carefully dissected the balls and discovered that each of the cork centers had been replaced with two ounces of pure heroin. The entire shipment had an estimated street value of $2.5 million.

  “We had to get the balls sewn back up,” Streicher told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Unless the suspect tried to open the balls, we would have no case against him.”

  Streicher recruited three Rawlings employees to construct a batch of baseballs with the original Pakistani covers stitched on top. One of the balls was left with one gram of heroin in it—just enough to prove criminal possession—and the package was returned to the Air France claims desk. After weeks of surveillance and stakeouts, it was traced to a customer of the National Bank of Pakistan in Chicago—a man named Arshad Ali Malik, who’d gotten busted four months earlier on a heroin charge.

  Malik and his accomplice were arrested and held in jail pending bond. It turned out, though, that they hadn’t actually cut open the baseballs, so the case against them was weak. Fortunately, they told another prisoner about their smuggling operation; that prisoner happened to be an FBI informant, and the pair were convicted and sentenced to 15 years in a federal penitentiary.

  1 The Brooklyn Dodgers changed their name in 1914 and were officially known as the Robins until 1932.

  2 Bowa finished his 16-year career with a total of 15 home runs and a .320 slugging percentage.

  3 Sometime later, at the Aberdeen Ordnance Plant in Washington, D.C., Feller was reportedly clocked at 107.9 miles per hour by a primitive speed-measuring device. In recent years, stadium radar guns (often believed to give exaggerated readings for entertainment’s sake) have recorded speeds as high as 105 miles per hour, but the official Guinness world record for the fastest pitch belongs to Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan, who was clocked at 100.9 miles per hour during a game in 1974.

  4 Yes, that was a major league team. Sort of. It was in the National Association. That was the only “major” league at the time. Historians are still debating whether to count it as part of the Major Leagues. The stats, meanwhile, are on MLB.com, so you can make your own decision.

  CHAPTER 5

  FOUL BALLS IN POP CULTURE

  MOVIES AND TV SHOWS

  There’s a Stephen King novel called Under the Dome in which a character gets bludgeoned by a golden baseball. There’s a Star Trek character named Benjamin Sisko who receives a baseball from an alien and keeps it in his office on the space station. There’s a song by Rodney Carrington, a country music artist, about his grandfather getting hit by a Joe DiMaggio foul ball in 1952.

  What do we learn from all of this? First, that the baseball is part of America’s DNA, and second, that it can be helpful to do a little fact-checking; Joe DiMaggio retired after the 1951 season.

  Want more culture?

  There’ve been too many foul ball–themed TV commercials for even the Elias Sports Bureau to count, and they’re all pretty much based on the same premise. In most cases, there’s either some dude in the stands who catches a ball because he used the advertised product, or there’s a guy who gets hit by the ball because he didn’t—so let’s not even go there.

  Foul ball scenes in movies and TV shows, while sometimes just as predictable, are more fun to dissect because they’re more complex. Here are some examples, none from baseball movies, which would be redundant in this book.

  FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF—1986

  THE PLOT Ferris Bueller, in the process of playing hooky from school, attends a game at Wrigley Field and catches a foul ball. After making the bare-handed grab, he jumps around in celebratory fashion, causing the TV cameras to zoom in on him. Somehow he doesn’t get noticed by his bumbling principal, who’s looking for him in a pizzeria and briefly turns away from the TV as the action unfolds.

  THE CRITIQUE Although Bueller’s dorky fist pumps (and attire) belie the athleticism required to make a bare-handed catch in a crowded section of presumably rowdy Cubs fans, the scene is very realistic. It begins as the dozens of extras react to the ball entering the stands—an obvious detail that often gets overlooked—and continues with Bueller’s snag. First he experiences the rush of obtaining the souvenir. Then, after a few seconds, the pain sets in and he shakes his left hand. Upon closer inspection, his girlfriend Sloane can be seen ducking with her right hand covering her head, while his best friend Cameron quickly looks to the side as if he’s trying to see who ended up with the ball. The only flaw is that when the TV camera follows the initial flight of the ball, two relief pitchers can be seen warming up along the left-field foul line, but when the field is then shown from Bueller’s perspective, the bullpen mound is mysteriously empty. That said, writer-director John Hughes expertly blended actual game footage with his own attention to detail in the stands.

  BIG—1988

  THE PLOT Thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin makes a wish that he could be big, then wakes up the next day in an adult’s body. As he learns to embrace his new identity, he lands a great job in New York City, moves into a sweet apartment, and meets a beautiful young woman. Life, for the moment, is more fun than ever for Baskin as a kid in a grown-up world. A 90-second montage shows him dropping a water balloon off his fire escape, skateboarding and playing basketball in his spacious loft, getting a pinball machine delivered, impressing his boss with his childlike enthusiasm, boxing with an inflatable dinosaur, and, most importantly, helping his best friend Billy snag a foul ball at Yankee Stadium.

  THE CRITIQUE Baskin, seated with Billy in the front row along the right-field foul line, grabs his small friend around the waist and lowers him over the short wall, enabling him to snatch the foul grounder off the warning track. This is a common ball-snagging maneuver, and the two actors execute it with precision. The whole scene lasts just five seconds and looks sharp at first glance, but there are two subtle mistakes that are noticeable in super-slow motion. First, in the snippet of actual game footage that shows the batter making contact, it’s clear that the ball is not going to be the foul grounder that Billy then snags, but rather a fly ball to right field; both the batter and umpire start to look up (to track its flight) as soon as the batter makes contact. Second, the backgr
ound reveals the scene to have been filmed before the game started; as the two boys rise to their feet, the scoreboard behind them is filled with zeroes—no runs, no outs, no balls, no strikes—and has a blank spot in the “at bat” column where the batter’s uniform number is normally displayed. In addition, as Billy reaches for the ball, there’s a uniformed security guard standing in the distance on the warning track, just in front of the first-base dugout. Security personnel never stand on the field during games—only during commercial breaks and pregame warm-ups. Still, it’s a fairly realistic scene that captures the joy of getting a foul ball.

  SEINFELD—March 25, 1992

  (Season 3, Episode 20: “The Letter”)

  THE PLOT George, Elaine, and Kramer are given tickets to a Yankees game and discover that their seats are in the second row of the owner’s box right behind the dugout. One of the owner’s friends notices that Elaine is wearing a cap of the visiting Baltimore Orioles—a blatant sign of disrespect in his mind. He asks her to take it off, and when she refuses, he summons a security guard to have her removed from the stadium. As George reluctantly agrees to leave with her, Kramer climbs awkwardly into the front row and gets whacked on the head with a foul ball.

  THE CRITIQUE This scene is completely unrealistic. At Yankee Stadium, when fans are courageous enough to support the visiting team, they get punched and then ejected. Beyond that (and not surprisingly), the main problem lies with the extras’ nonreaction as the ball enters the stands. Not only do they neglect to duck or flinch or make an attempt to catch it, but they all appear to be staring aimlessly in various directions. Why even hire extras? Why not fill the seats with cardboard cutouts? Finally, in the moments leading up to the foul ball, there’s a continuity error involving the sporadic clips of game footage. It starts when a left-handed batter on the Orioles is shown taking a called strike on the outside corner. The Seinfeld crowd then cheers boisterously as if it were strike three, and just 20 seconds later another clip shows a right-handed batter hitting a weak grounder up the middle. Why is this a problem? Because the first batter hadn’t really struck out. The called strike was a harmless first strike; the batter can be seen backing away casually from the plate as the umpire points to the side with his right index finger extended. One finger equals one strike. Come on.