by Tim Wendel
Sports psychologist Rick Wolff says in Coaching Kids for Dummies that “excelling in sports has become as much a part of the American dream for parents as getting their kids into the best schools and living in the best neighborhoods.”
Certainly playing baseball for a living, reaching the major leagues, was a dream of Feller’s from an early age. But he shakes his head when discussing the lengths kids and their parents will go in pursuit of an athletic scholarship or a professional contract a half century later.
“At some basic level, you have to keep it fun,” he says. “I mean that’s why you play the game in the first place. That’s what I did.”
Feller emphasizes that while baseball was always his first love, reluctantly agreeing that some would consider his father overindulgent for helping him build his own personal field, he adds that things were somehow different back then. Feller also played basketball at Van Meter High School. In fact, he was a starter. His sister was on the girls’ basketball team and the state champion in table tennis.
“We had success, but it was a part of our regular life,” Feller says. “No matter how well I pitched or played, there were still chores to be done. I’d say it was the same with Walter Johnson, probably most players coming up until recent years. And you know, looking back on it, thank God for that farm work. I may have hated it at the time, but it made me strong. I could pitch all day after doing those chores.”
Fleisig nods as I tell him about Feller’s upbringing. “He did different sports; his body had a chance to recover,” the ASMI research director says. “His was a more reasoned approach than what we see happening today. Somewhere the next Bob Feller or Nolan Ryan is growing up, but I doubt if he’s playing baseball 12 months out of the year.”
Anybody who followed baseball during the 1990s realizes that they were lied to. Nearly all of us covering the game during that period can probably look back on at least one moment or interview where we allowed the wool to be pulled over our eyes when it came to the steroids issue. Mine came in 1998, when I covered what was then billed as “The Great Home Run Chase” for Baseball Weekly. I bought into much of the hoopla surrounding Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Once upon a time, the thread of epic home-run hitters—Babe Ruth, Hank Greenberg, Roger Maris, Hank Aaron—held together different eras of the game. Now the stain of performance-enhancing drugs extends from McGwire and Sosa to Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Manny Ramirez. For a long time, steroids and supplements were thought to benefit only hitters. It took a topflight fireballer—Roger Clemens—to prove otherwise.
In 1998, Clemens was enjoying a season for the ages with the Toronto Blue Jays. When I caught up with him late that summer he was well on his way to not only winning a record fifth Cy Young Award, but to capturing pitching’s Triple Crown (victories, ERA, and strikeouts) for the second consecutive year as well. Despite his being almost 36 years old, scouts marveled that he was throwing harder than ever. His fastball, which was topping out at 92 miles per hour his last season in Boston, was close to the century mark on the radar gun.
It was an amazing turnaround from the start of the season. Eleven starts in, Clemens had gone 5–6, with an ERA of 3.50, and was still trying to win three games in a row, let alone repeat as Cy Young champion. But from the end of May through the rest of the season, Clemens went 15–0 in 22 starts with a 2.29 ERA. After failing to reach double figures in strikeouts in his first 11 starts, he reached that plateau 11 times afterward, averaging 11.02 strikeouts per every nine innings.
As the summer got hotter, so did the Rocket. During a stretch in late August he almost single-handedly led the Blue Jays back into wild-card contention, pitching three consecutive shutouts against Seattle, Kansas City, and Minnesota.
“Sometimes I stop and shake my head,” Clemens said after that third shutout. “I feel I’ve been in a zone. All the work I did in April, May, and June is paying off.”
What was actually paying off for Clemens was the regimen he was employing. According to the Mitchell Report and later detailed by Jeff Pearlman in The Rocket That Fell to Earth, Clemens had begun to shoot up with Winstrol, a synthetic anabolic steroid. That’s the same stuff sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for in the 1988 Summer Olympics. Down the road, baseball sluggers Rafael Palmeiro and Barry Bonds would be accused of using it. By the end of the season, Blue Jays strength and conditioning coach Brian McNamee was injecting Clemens with Winstrol every third day.
Of course, Clemens didn’t mention that particular part of his fitness plan. Instead, he preferred to talk about his role as an elder statesman, a would-be Zen master to the promising Blue Jays hurlers, who included Pat Hentgen, Roy Halladay, and Chris Carpenter. Carpenter grew up in Raymond, New Hampshire, 40 minutes from Fenway Park. “Roger was my hero back then,” he told me at the time. “Now I get to watch him every day. How he prepares.”
Ah, the downside of hero worship. The epic season that enthralled us all was soon suspected to be tainted. As were many of the seasons that followed. More than a decade later, with Clemens still in denial about any involvement with steroids or human growth hormones, investigations indicated how improbable those Cy Young seasons were in Toronto. “The arc of Clemens’ career is upside down,” wrote Eric Bradlow, Shane Jensen, Justin Wolfers, and Adi Wyner in the New York Times in 2008. “His performance declines as he enters his late 20s and improves into his mid-30s and 40s.”
Anybody who’s seen Damn Yankees knows that ballplayers will make a pact with any devil to improve performance. It’s nothing new. A century before Clemens, Pud Galvin drank a concoction of glycerin and ground-up animal testicles to give his fastball more staying power. “If there still be doubting Thomases who concede no virtue of the elixir,” the Washington Post reported in 1889, “they are respectfully referred to Galvin’s record in yesterday’s Boston-Pittsburgh game. It is the best proof yet furnished of the value of the discovery.”
Despite Galvin’s and the Post’s claims, there is no magic potion or elixir that will transform a pedestrian pitcher into a fireballer. But that hasn’t stopped players from going to great, sometimes superstitious, sometimes dangerous and illegal, lengths to take their game to the next level or, in the case of veterans, delay Father Time. Clemens managed to throw hard into his 40s, but that still wasn’t even close to one of the greatest, most prolific fireballers of all time.
The incomparable Satchel Paige pitched well into his 50s, even though his exact age was always up for debate. A skinny kid growing up (“If I turned sideways, you couldn’t see me”), Paige was still a beanpole when he began to star in the Negro Leagues. He would always be embarrassed by his skinny legs and often wore two pairs of socks to flesh out his lower silhouette. But Paige knew the value of being physically fit. He regularly warmed up by fielding bunts, shagging flies, taking infield at third base. He tried not to throw hard “until every muscle, every single one, was all loosened up.” On game days, which were pretty much most days when Paige was barnstorming, he took a hot bath after he woke and often a hotter one after the game.
Many of Paige’s fitness tips would play as well today as they did three-quarters of a century ago. In his autobiography, Paige outlined his keys “for staying young.” Such tips included:• ′Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.′
• ′If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.′
• ′Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.′
• ′Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society—the social ramble ain’t restful.′
• And the tip that would become his calling card, ′Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.′
Phil Pote once asked Bob Feller, excluding himself, who was the fastest pitcher ever. Feller replied, “Satchel Paige.”
Feller and Paige barnstormed together during the 1940s and many came away believing that Paige’s fastball was a touch quicker.
“[My] fastball looks like a change of pace alongside tha
t little pistol bullet Satchel shoots up to the plate,” Dizzy Dean once wrote in his newspaper column. “And I really know something about it because for four, five years I tour around at the end of the season with all-star teams and I see plenty of Old Satch.
“It’s too bad those colored boys don’t play in the big leagues because they sure got some great ballplayers.”
If the search for the fastest pitcher wasn’t complicated enough, consider that several of the top hurlers ever to play the game were forbidden from appearing in the major leagues due to the color of their skin. They played in the old Negro Leagues, in what passed for baseball’s parallel universe, underpublicized and too often unnoticed by much of the country, until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Paige was eventually afforded the opportunity to pitch at the game’s highest level, making the big leagues in 1948 at the ripe old age of 42.
“Age is a question of mind over matter,” Paige once said. “If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
To this day, Paige remains the most famous pitcher to come out of the Negro Leagues (he struck out 21 major leaguers in one exhibition game) and he made the Hall of Fame in 1971 as the first Negro League inductee. Lost in his shadow, though, stand such other quality fireballers as Smokey Joe Williams, Leon Day, and Wilber “Bullet” Joe Rogan.
In an effort to recapture the past, Buck O’Neil once wrote up several scouting reports on the old Negro Leaguers. They now reside at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. O’Neil was a player and manager in the Negro Leagues, and in his later years he scouted for the Chicago Cubs and Kansas City Royals and was the star of Ken Burns’s television series Baseball. The scouting reports O’Neil assembled are in his handwriting, on Royals letterhead, and they have become a tribute to what might have been.
For right-hander Leon Day, O’Neil notes that he would have been a “front-line starter” in the major leagues. “Everything quick,” O’Neil writes. “Strikeout pitcher. Very durable. Worked with three days rest. Played second base or left field between starts. Top athlete. Very desirable.”
O’Neil becomes more laudatory in his look back at Bullet Rogan. A pitcher with little or no windup, who came right at hitters, Rogan was maybe 5-foot-5, 155 pounds, proving that little guys could bring the heat well before Tim Lincecum and Billy Wagner.
What exactly did Rogan’s no-windup delivery look like? Allow historian Paul W. Fisher to describe the scene:Every eye is trained on the mighty Rogan. He is a trim, square-shouldered, deep-chested man, with slim legs and hips. He brings his hands softly to his belt buckle, his hips begin to pivot slowly right, the hands come slowly and softly toward his face and then—
His right arm has swept back quicker than the eye, whipped around and over and at slightly less than three-quarters motion. In the yellow afternoon, a mote of white light flies from his black hand. The fortunate among the thousands caught its split-second speed; even at the far reaches of the roped outfield, they heard its crash into [Frank] Duncan’s big glove. WHAP!
What we have here is a pitcher intent on getting batters out in a hurry.
“Live high fastball and hard sharp breaking curveball that we called a drop ball,” O’Neil says of Rogan. “Strikeout pitcher. Excellent athlete. Hit fourth in the lineup when he played the outfield. Very desirable. Bob Feller type.”
Was he better than Paige?
“I don’t know,” Bobby Williams, a veteran shortstop in the Negro Leagues told John Holway. “He was good, but I wouldn’t say he was greater than Paige. But Rogan was another infielder when he was pitching, he could play outfield, he could hit. Paige couldn’t do anything but pitch.”
For much of his career, even though it rarely showed on the field, Paige was bothered by an upset stomach, especially in high-pressured games. He nicknamed his stomach troubles “the miseries,” and initially the condition was blamed on big-game stress and fast living. Several doctors wondered if he had ulcers. It wasn’t until late in his career, between the 1948 and 1949 seasons, that the real culprit was discovered—lousy teeth. Paige’s choppers were literally rotting away, so he had all of them pulled and went the rest of his days with ill-fitting dentures.
“When your whole life may be depending on your stomach, you don’t worry about having no teeth,” he later wrote. “You’ll do about anything, even if you got to put a bunch of sticks in your mouth.”
After Paige got used to his “store teeth,” he prayed and waited to see if the old stomach ailments would return with the same vengeance. “But those pains weren’t coming back like they used to,” he said. “They were there, but not like they’d been all through the last season.”
Teeth problem aside, what made Paige unusual among legendary pitchers was his miraculous comeback from a bout of arm trouble that would have ended most careers and perhaps reduced him to a footnote in the search for the top fireballer of all time.
In 1938, Paige was arguably at his peak. He had just returned from the Dominican Republic, where he and other Negro League stars—Josh Gibson, Schoolboy Griffin, and Cool Papa Bell—had led Cuidad Trujillo to the championship. That team had been bankrolled by the country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Before the championship game, against Estrellas de Oriente, Paige’s ballclub was sequestered in a guarded hotel. After they fell behind in the early innings, Trujillo’s troops began to surround the diamond.
“You better win,” the Trujillo City manager told his all-stars.
They rallied for a 6–5 victory. Paige was on the mound, where he took a look around at all the weaponry and figured he was pitching for his life.
After that near-death experience, Paige and the others hurried back to the United States. While the other Negro League all-stars stayed close to home, Paige was looking for another big payday, so he ducked out of his agreement with the Pittsburgh Crawfords and headed to Mexico.
“Being greedy like that just about ended my career,” he wrote,
“and just about cost me a couple or three times the money I was making for those few games in Mexico.”
Three games into the season, Paige felt what was at first a burning sensation in his arm. A few days’ rest didn’t help. In fact, the burning gave way to numbness. Paige began to run a fever, and soon after he couldn’t even lift his arm above his head.
In desperation, he went down to the stadium and, without bothering to change into his uniform, tried to throw. The ball only traveled a few feet and Paige headed home the next day. He was examined by several specialists. One told him he would never pitch again.
Paige was only 32 years old. A typical ballplayer would usually have several more years in him. But in the world of high heat, the fall from star to mere mortal can be sudden and unexpected.
“I didn’t want to see nobody,” Paige later said in his autobiography. “I could see the end. Ten years of gravy and then nothing but an aching arm and aching stomach. Oh, I had my car and shotguns and fishing gear and clothes.
“I had those, all right, and they were all mighty fine. But you got to make money to keep them and when you ain’t making money and when you ain’t saved money, they go fast.
“Mr. Pawnshop must have thought I was a burglar the way I kept coming back to see him with another shotgun or another suit.”
Sucking up his pride, Paige got a job as a pitcher/first baseman on the Kansas City Monarchs’ barnstorming squad. With another Negro League season under way, the team was essentially a backup squad. They toured the Northwest and Canada, playing whenever they could. Paige often heard it from the crowd when he took the mound. They came to see the fabled fireballer and instead all he would deliver was soft stuff, sidearm and even underhanded. When Paige’s arm showed no sign of coming around, he was moved to first base. His goal was to save up some money before returning home to Mobile, Alabama.
But one day, before the next game, Paige began to warm up on the sidelines. Even though he was playing first base, a position that didn’t require much throwing, Paige threw repeatedly in warm-up
s. It was the only way to push the pain in his arm toward numbness. But on this day, there was no pain when he threw. He called the catcher over and began to throw harder to him. Knut Joseph, the manager, was summoned and proceedings shifted to the pitching mound. There, Paige threw pitch after pitch, putting more and more effort into each one, beginning to kick his leg toward the heavens in that classic pitching motion of his. With each delivery, the velocity increased and, more importantly, the pain didn’t return.
The catcher and manager were both grinning by now. That evening Joseph called J. L. Wilkinson, the Monarchs’ owner back in Kansas City. Even though Paige was eager to rejoin the parent club, Wilkinson, to his credit, refused to rush things. He told Paige to stay with the backup club for the rest of the season, to get back in shape. It wasn’t until the spring of 1939—at the age of 33—that Paige’s comeback began.
“After my arm first came back, I didn’t know for sure I could blaze away until I got back into some games and really had to,” Paige said in his autobiography. “I could. That hummer of mine sang a sweet song going across the plate. It was the finest music I’d ever heard.”
Paige would later call his recovery “a miracle.” With his arm better than ever, he rejoined the Kansas City Monarchs for the 1939 season and finally got his chance to play in the major leagues nine years later.
The scar has long ago faded to just a thin white line, riding the inside of the elbow joint on Tommy John’s famous left arm. After retiring as a player in 1989, with a 288–231 record and 3.34 ERA, John still found ways to stay in the game. He was a coach, a broadcaster, and, as the 2009 season began, in his third season as the manager of the Bridgeport (Connecticut) Bluefish in the Atlantic League. Over the years, he’s had several players on his teams who’ve had the operation he made famous. In fact, one guy even had Tommy John surgery twice.