by Tim Wendel
“That’s when I knew I had to get Stevie back home,” Cain says. “It was his only chance. He ended up in the hospital in Oklahoma City due to his drinking. I started to work with them to get him back here, back to New Britain. That finally happened in March 1994. That’s when he came home for good.”
Dalkowski moved into the Walnut Hill Care Center, near where he used to play his high school ball.
“When we brought him home from Oklahoma City, the doctors told us not to get our hopes up,” Cain says. “They said he probably didn’t have much time left and if you looked at him, tried to talk to him, you’d understand why. Steve wasn’t in very good shape.”
Slowly, though, Dalkowski showed signs of turning the corner. One evening he started to blurt out the answers to a sports trivia game the family was playing. Bill Huber, his old coach, took him to Sunday services at the local Methodist church until Dalkowski refused to go one week. His mind had cleared enough for him to remember he had grown up Catholic.
Less than a decade after returning home, Dalkowski found himself at a place in life he thought he would never reach—the pitching mound in Baltimore. Granted, much had changed since Dalkowski was a phenom in the Orioles’ system. Home for the big-league club was no longer cozy Memorial Stadium but the retro redbrick of Camden Yards. On September 7, 2003, before an Orioles game against the Seattle Mariners, Dalkowski threw out the ceremonial first pitch. His friends Boog Powell and Pat Gillick were in attendance.
“I bounced it,” Dalkowski says, still embarrassed by the miscue. Yet nobody else in attendance that day cared.
“He was back on the pitching mound,” Gillick recalls. “Back where he belonged.”
Five and a half years later, in the sweet afterglow of the first warm day of spring, Dalkowski arrives at the St. George Church’s social center in New Britain. He’s come for the town’s Sports Hall of Fame Annual Induction Dinner. Dressed in a mock turtleneck, gray pants, and dark blazer, he enters the room, taking slow steps, with his sister by his side. Without much fanfare, they find a table in the back row of the banquet room, one of the 27 under golden chandeliers that have been trimmed out in linen tablecloths and enough food, plates, and utensils to feed a small army. Although Dalkowski and his sister don’t move too far from the table they’ve selected, soon word spreads that the pitching legend has made an appearance, and old friends begin to gather around. Most of them have known Dalkowski for ages. At Pat’s urging, several of them sit down, and the conversation—a rehash of the good old days, a remembrance that makes things larger than life—soon bubbles forth.
In recent years, New Britain has struggled. In 2007, the median household income was $36,681—barely half the state average. Yet the institutions of community, church, and family remain strong and vibrant in the town of 71,000.
“Stevie couldn’t have done this, just sat around and talked, a few years ago,” Pat Cain says, smiling. “Every year he gets a little bit better when it comes to memory. This town, his friends—I really believe coming back to New Britain has saved him.”
At the table, Dalkowski has been joined by Len Pare, John Arduini, and Bob Barrows. All of them grew up on New Britain’s west side and played Little League ball.
“I was on the Red Sox,” Dalkowski says.
“Me, too,” Barrows says. “I caught you and everybody else, too.”
“I know,” nods Dalkowski, who now sports a closely cropped gray beard. Gone are the thick glasses and the youthful countenance that was all smiles in posed minor-league photographs. “I remember. How could I forget the guys who caught me?”
“Same goes for us,” says Pare, who once had his finger broken catching a Dalkowski heater.
“I know, I know,” Dalkowski says in a soft voice.
Pat Cain asks Arduini what Little League team he was on.
“The Dodgers,” he says, bringing the conversation to a brief halt.
“The Dodgers?” Dalkowski repeats as if it’s the most ridiculous notion he’s ever heard.
“I thought we were all on the same team in ’50,” Barrows says. “The Red Sox.”
“Most of the time we were,” Arduini says, “except for that first year. Then I was on the Dodgers.”
For a moment, nobody says a word. They contemplate that even in New Britain, a place that prides itself on its sports, to the point that several speakers who step to the podium this evening will call it the best sports city in all of New England, things weren’t always quite the way everyone remembers them to be.
“Well, that’s OK,” Dalkowski begins.
“That’s right,” Barrows adds. “You were with us soon enough.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Arduini says.
Throughout the evening, people drop by Dalkowski’s table to say a few words. When it’s my turn, I ask him what advice he would give to young pitchers.
“Throw strikes,” he replies. “And run. That’s good for the legs, you know.”
Then Dalkowski pauses, ready to deliver the punch line. “And don’t drink,” he adds, smiling.
Yes, alcohol and great expectations nearly killed arguably the hardest thrower ever. Yet on this spring evening, among this band of brothers, such troubled times seem a long time ago. A few weeks after the 2009 banquet, Dalkowski turned 70 years old. Many in the baseball world believed that he had died years ago. But here he is, talking baseball with the friends he’s known since childhood.
“New Britain never forgets its own,” says coach Bill Huber, dropping by the table to shake hands with his old star. “I’m happy he’s back. I’m happy this town has again reached out to him.”
The Call
Nolan Ryan Satchel Paige
Steve Dalkowski Joel Zumaya
Bob Feller Amos Rusie
Walter Johnson Goose Gossage
Sandy Koufax Bob Gibson
Billy Wagner J. R. Richard
We remain a land fascinated by speed. In large part, that’s why baseball’s top pitch, the fastball, has held the public’s attention since the game’s beginnings more than a century ago. Go to a ballpark today and it is still the fastball, now clocked by stadium radar and spelled out on the JumboTron scoreboard at the big-league locales that gets the crowd buzzing. Often in baseball lore, pitchers like Ryan and Feller, Johnson and Dalkowski, Tim Lincecum and David Price, are cast as loners, individual players forever set apart by their gift. But if we again gather them together in a lineup, and then take a step back to look at the group as a whole, we can see that the lives and career trajectories of these athletes are often intertwined. When it comes to the question of who is the fastest of the fast, finding an answer takes more than simply assessing them individually. It requires a larger perspective, a sense of what separates but also what binds these players together.
The names above form a top-12 list of the fastest pitchers of all time—a consensus of the experts I spoke to in writing High Heat. Now it also serves as the homestretch in a journey that took me from Brooklyn to Cooperstown, Birmingham to Los Angeles, Durham to Dallas. Everywhere along the way, I asked for a rundown of the top fireballers ever. Some that I interviewed complained that it’s next to impossible to compare pitchers from different eras and levels of competition. Others protested that there is no definitive way to measure a phenomenon that often borders upon the supernatural. These concerns are certainly valid.
“It’s not an easy question to answer,” says Phil Pote. Once again we’re on the phone, talking baseball. “Folks probably hemmed and hawed about giving you answers.”
“Some did.”
“But in the end they still had an opinion, didn’t they? It’s always been that intriguing a proposition. The game’s ultimate can of worms.”
Indeed, almost everyone I spoke with, from historians like John Thorn to Hank Thomas, and former players like Jeff Torborg and Tommy John, came up with a list of the top fireballers ever. With that in mind, let’s consider once again perhaps the most arbitrary and yet captiv
ating of baseball questions: Who is the fastest of all time? To reach a conclusion we need to navigate a few more twists in the road, answer a few additional remaining questions.
First, would Walter Johnson be a star in today’s game? For much of his career, the Big Train got big-league hitters out with nothing but a fastball. It can be argued that in baseball, unlike in other sports, one actually can compare stars from different eras. Until the steroids scandal made headlines, you could discuss Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds in a conversation about the best home-run hitters ever. Yet even before performance-enhancing drugs began to take over such conversations, some maintained that the stars of yesteryear don’t measure up to superstars of the modern era. The old-timers weren’t as big physically and they didn’t benefit from today’s modern training techniques.
“Outside of Rod Carew and Tony Oliva, I didn’t have to worry about the kinds of hitters that you find throughout the game today,” says Dick Bosman, who pitched at the major-league level and now coaches in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. “You’re looking at the very best athletes who ever put on a uniform right now. The steroids issues aside, they’re bigger, they’re stronger, better nourished, and hopefully they’re better informed and better coached.”
Bosman adds, “The way they teach hitting is so different now, too. They teach them to wait on the ball, let it travel back into the strike zone more. An example is Derek Jeter’s inside-out swing. It’s damn hard to pitch to a guy like that. I had plenty of guys I pitched to—Harmon Killebrew, Bobby Allison—they were looking to do one thing and one thing only and that was to drive a ball out of the ballpark. You knew if you made your pitches low and away to those guys, you’d probably get them out.”
While others agree that the approach at the plate has changed, with hitters usually more disciplined and much better prepared, they maintain Johnson would have been just as successful today as he was in the 1910s.
“He not only threw the ball hard, he won,” says Washington Nationals broadcaster and historian Phil Wood. “To me, he’s still the greatest pitcher who ever lived.”
“Walter Johnson would have adapted to today’s hitters,” adds author Peter Golenbock. “He was an incredible fireballer. That talent translates down through the years.”
If you agree with Wood, Golenbock, and those in that camp, you have your answer. There’s no need to go any further. But if any sliver of doubt remains, let’s move on to the next fork in the road.
Do we underestimate Bob Feller? At first, that question seems to border upon the ridiculous. After all, how can anyone underestimate a Hall of Famer who finished his career with a 266–162 record, leading the American League in strikeouts seven times?
Yet World War II cost “Rapid Robert” nearly four seasons in the majors. Unlike other ballplayers who kept playing until they were drafted, Feller enlisted in the U.S. Navy soon after Pearl Harbor. He had won a league-leading 25 games the season before and returned to strike out a league-leading 348 in 1946. Who knows what he could have accomplished without the time away from home? It’s likely that he would have easily surpassed 300 career victories and perhaps even put up another no-hitter or two.
“Bob Feller threw as hard as anybody,” Nolan Ryan says. “You cannot forget about him.”
But for many, Feller was, perhaps inadvertently, knocked down a peg or two by Johnson. Soon after Feller came up with the Cleveland Indians, sportswriter Shirley Povich asked the Big Train to assess the new phenom. Was Feller as fast as him? Johnson studied Feller and finally replied, “No.” No matter that Johnson also said, “That kid sure is fast.” Povich, who often championed the Big Train’s accomplishments, made sure the world knew of Johnson’s verdict. If that statement rings true, then the case is closed. But again, if you’re still uncertain, let’s continue along to the next question.
If we don’t give Feller enough credit, do we perhaps give Steve Dalkowski too much?
The bespectacled left-hander gained a mythic reputation for his exploits on and off the field in the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system. By studying still photographs of Dalkowski (to date no footage has been found of the fireballer in action), John-William Greenbaum calculates that this phenom threw as hard as 105–109 miles per hour. Dalkowski’s great promise and even his epic failures speak to something deep inside all of us. Dalko was the lovable loser so many of us can identify with.
“Based on the comments I’ve heard, based on the other contenders, those being Bob Feller, Herb Score, Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson, I would believe that Steve was the fastest ever, prior to his 1963 arm injury,” Greenbaum says. “He’s my choice.”
But even those who were in Dalkowski’s corner during his struggle to reach the major leagues wonder if he really belongs on the top rung.
“I believed in Steve Dalkowski as much as anybody,” says longtime Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver. “With some better luck, I’m certain he would have been remembered as one of the best, maybe even the best, hard-thrower in baseball history.
“It was like he never got comfortable with this remarkable gift that he had been given. He didn’t give it a chance. He wasted it all. Because of that you can’t say he was the fastest ever. He didn’t reach the big leagues.”
Pat Gillick, who was once Dalkowski’s roommate and went on to be the general manager for the world champion Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies, agrees with his old manager. “Nobody wanted him to succeed more than the guys who played with him,” Gillick says. “Even though I have no doubt that Steve Dalkowski was a hard thrower, he didn’t quite make it.”
Such comments prompt Greenbaum to reply, “OK, I can say he was the fastest professional pitcher. . . . Think a left-handed Joel Zumaya, only a bit faster.”
Yet even Ron Shelton, who transformed the tall tales he heard while in the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system into the movie Bull Durham, has second thoughts about rating Dalkowski as the top fireballer ever. “That is what haunts us,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times in July 2009. “He had it all and didn’t know it. That’s why Steve Dalkowski stays in our minds. In his sport, he had the equivalent of Michelangelo’s gift but could never finish the painting.”
Perhaps, in a way, that’s why all these fireballers enthrall us so. In this realm of the surreal, often the inexplicable, each struggled to find a way to make all the pieces fit, and none of them had a perfect path to the top. Satchel Paige spent his prime in the separate and unequal domain of the old Negro Leagues. Amos Rusie and Jim Creighton pitched more than a century ago, in a netherworld that’s now difficult to comprehend. Sandy Koufax’s dozen years in the major leagues were split almost evenly between pedestrian and then Hall of Fame numbers.
During the 2009 season, the year of my search, David Price reached the majors on Memorial Day, but even though the promising left-hander often pitched well, especially at home, Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon was still waiting for that “moment of epiphany.” Meanwhile, the Detroit Tigers’ Joel Zumaya was once again sidelined by injury, and Billy Wagner returned from Tommy John surgery only to find he would be joining the playoff hunt with the Boston Red Sox in the unaccustomed role of setup man. And yet elsewhere, newcomer Neftali Feliz of the Texas Rangers was clocked at 101 miles per hour in his major-league debut; teams were lining up to bid for the services of Cuban defector Aroldis Chapman, whose fastball hit 102 miles per hour; and phenom Stephen Strasburg signed at the 11th hour with the Washington Nationals, finalizing a record-breaking deal that arguably placed the weight of the franchise squarely on his shoulders. The allure of speed, however fleeting or capricious, remained one of the game’s constants. It was still, as it had been for much of the game’s history, very much the coin of the realm.
Ironically, few of the pitchers featured in these pages asked for the largesse of high heat. Due to the expectations and pressure of possessing such rare talent, arguably more have suffered and even failed than have succeeded. If what binds them all together
is the gift they’ve been provided with, then what truly separates them is the ability to harness and to honor it. And so, after glancing down this lineup of fireballers for the ages, adjusting our focus to get a sense of the bigger picture, perhaps that is what our final question should be about: gifts and blessings, curses and missed opportunities. Who persevered the most with what was bestowed upon them?
Years ago, before the Baltimore Orioles moved to Camden Yards, I often drove up to old Memorial Stadium before the Sunday home games. It was a good time to do interviews as the players had time on their hands. During the 1992 season, the Texas Rangers were in town, and after talking with several players in the visiting clubhouse, I went up the tunnel to the dugout. A steady drizzle had soaked the field and nobody was sure if the afternoon’s game would be played. A few of us sat there, watching the storm clouds roll in.
That’s when I noticed two figures out in center field. They were running, doing calisthenics, in the gray mist. Due to the elements and distance, I couldn’t make out who it was and finally asked one of the players sitting nearby.
“It’s Ryan,” he replied. “He’s out there with the trainer.”
Even though Ryan had pitched and won the night before, he was the only one making sure he got his workout on this gloomy morning. Perhaps that’s why so many of today’s young guns drop his name when the talk turns to throwing hard, with purpose and intention.
Umpire Ron Luciano once said that Ryan’s fastball left the pitcher’s mound “as big as a golf ball.” Yet by the time it reached home plate, the sheer velocity caused an optical illusion to take place. The ball seemed to explode “into a million blinding white specks,” and after it smacked into the catcher’s mitt the batters would look back at Luciano in disbelief.