Hershiser has reacted to the likes of Coleman (and Tim Raines and Gerald Young) by adopting a new delivery from the stretch position. He used to come to a set position with his feet close together. This allowed him to get power behind his pitches from a full stride. Now he begins his motion from a set position with his “plant leg”—his left leg, which he plants as he comes forward toward the plate—almost as far toward the plate as it will be when he plants it and follows through. This costs him velocity—about three miles per hour off his fastball—but he thinks the sacrifice is well worth it because “no matter how good a jump the runner gets, it’s almost impossible for him to steal.” Scioscia says, “Orel has a quick release but, more important, he has good stuff with men on base. Some pitchers will sacrifice their good stuff to try to hold a runner on first. It’s not just that they may go too much to fastballs. It’s that if you call a curveball you might get one that will roll a little bit because a guy is so wrapped up in his quick delivery to the plate that he is not making his best pitches. Orel has the ability to give me a quick release and still give me his best stuff. It all has to do with pressure and command out there. Orel knows that if he takes a long time throwing the ball to the plate, then any walk he gives up is going to be a double.”
Hershiser rarely shakes off Scioscia’s signs more than a couple of times an inning. “Let’s say he throws me a bad curveball. I’m thinking we’d better go to a sinker because if he gets that sloppy curve in the strike zone the batter is going to hit it. But Orel is out there thinking, ‘I threw a sloppy curveball but I know what I have to do to throw a good one.’” In the seventh inning of the second game of the 1988 World Series, Hershiser, facing Carney Lansford, shook off Scioscia’s sign twice just to get Lansford, a thoughtful veteran, thinking too much. (Not all shake-offs of signs involve such cunning. The young Lefty Gomez, facing a scary slugger, once shook off his catcher so many times that the catcher came to the mound for an explanation. “Let’s wait a while,” explained Gomez. “Maybe he’ll get a phone call.”) Pitchers work in different and constantly changing contexts. What they try to do depends on the score, the risk of a run scoring immediately and the stage of the game. (The importance of two runners on base in the second inning may not be the same as the importance of two runners on in the ninth.) And the controlling conditions include the condition of the pitcher himself: How does he feel?
“The season takes a big toll on you,” says Scioscia, who makes a living squatting, being hit by batted balls and colliding with base runners. “I think a pitcher probably has his really good stuff 60, 70 percent of the time. You are usually going to be a little short on your fastball or some other pitch.” Sometimes a pitcher will not have a clue as to how he is going to do until he does it—or fails to. Mike Scott remembers the night in St. Louis when he felt the best he has ever felt when warming up. He felt as though he was throwing 100 miles per hour to the exact spots he wanted to throw to. “I thought, ‘There’s no way they can hit me.’ I didn’t get out of the first inning. The first guy—Brock or Templeton—got a hit. Then I walked somebody. Then Hernandez hit a home run. Then Ted Simmons hit a line drive by my ear that was caught against the center-field wall for an out. Then someone hit a home run off the stadium restaurant and I was out of the game.”
Scioscia knows how baseball goes when things are not going smoothly. He once was knocked cold by Jack Clark in a collision at the plate, but he held on to the ball and made the putout. Pitching, he says, requires making do when you can’t make the ball do what it does on your best days. “Anyone can win when they’re pitching well. But guys like Orel and Fernando [Valenzuela] can win when they don’t have great stuff. They know that you don’t have to throw strikes to get a guy out.” A pitcher once said: “Control without stuff is far better than stuff without control. Whenever you hear it said that such and such a pitcher didn’t have a thing, you can bet he had control if he didn’t have anything else.” (That was said by Yankees pitcher Carl Mays the year before he threw the only pitch to kill a batter.) Scioscia says that if he had to select the most valuable of the three virtues—velocity, movement, location—that pitchers cultivate, “I’d pick location because of the ‘holes’ in every batter’s swing. Willie Mays had holes, they were just smaller than anyone else’s.” That is Scioscia’s answer to the perennial question about who is easier to pitch to, a power hitter or a contact hitter. Scioscia says it is easier to pitch to a hitter with a lot of “holes” in his swing, and that is usually a power hitter. But if you make a mistake with a power hitter, it hurts a lot more than a mistake to a contact, singles hitter. So Scioscia says that Hershiser, who has good control, matches up well against a power hitter with more “holes” to pitch to. Hershiser agrees but still does not enjoy it. When asked for an example of a hitter who bothers him, Hershiser says, “Any power hitter. I don’t want to see [Atlanta’s Dale] Murphy coming up with the score tied or a one-run game.” What makes Murphy so tough? “You make a mistake, he hits it.” What is enough of a mistake? “A curveball in the middle and a little high, compared with a curveball low and away.” What is the difference in inches? “Six inches each way.”
Baseball is indeed a game of inches and the most important 17 of them form the width of the five-sided slab of rubber called home plate. The last really good news for pitchers came nine decades ago, in 1900, when the plate was changed from a 12-inch square to a five-sided object 17 inches wide. But that did not settle things. Life is a battle and baseball life is an endless series of skirmishes about who will control the periphery of the plate, batters or pitchers. The stakes are high. A 90-mile-per-hour fastball in on the fists is hard to hit and nearly impossible to hit with power. If that fastball is 6 horizontal inches farther out over the plate, all the 90-mile-per-hour speed is doing is generating energy for the impact with the bat. “You throw the ball on the outside corner,” Hershiser says, “you have a perfect pitch and you have either an out or a strike. You make a mistake, you miss for a ball, you get four of those. You pitch inside, you can have a strike on the inside corner, but if you miss over the middle of the plate, you don’t have either a strike or a ball, you have a double or a home run. So you pitch away. But you have to come inside to protect the outside of the plate.” That is, if you do not pitch inside the hitter will crowd the plate, even dive across it, and suddenly the outside corner will be, in effect, the middle of the plate and there will be nowhere to throw the ball.
Ron Perranoski says, “If you have 8 inches inside and 4 inches outside, you have quite a lot of area that they [batters] have to adjust to.” To be precise, 29 inches for the pitcher to work in rather than just the 17-inch plate. However, says Hershiser, just as it is risky not to pitch inside, it is also risky to pitch there. “You can’t make a living pitching in all the time because your mistake either hits the batter or gets hit hard. So the odds are better away.”
Still, the pitcher’s principal problem today is to get away with pitching inside as often as he needs to. There is too much litigious-ness by batters who, like all other Americans, are very sensitive about their rights, real and imagined. Tim McCarver grudgingly credits hitters (McCarver was a catcher and is on the pitchers’ side) with “successful lobbying efforts to push the ball out over the plate.” This lobbying has consisted of aggressive responses to brushback pitches, responses ranging from baleful glares to bench-clearing brawls. Scioscia agrees that umpires have, for whatever reason, become less tolerant of pitches that come inside. “Let’s say a fastball is called inside and the count is 0–2. A pitcher who has pitched long enough, and has been in our meetings and knows what we are trying to do, knows that in that situation he’s got to throw the ball off the plate between the hitter and the plate, maybe 8 inches inside. Now, let’s say the pitch gets away and comes up and in. Here is where we’re running into trouble with umpires saying you’re throwing at a guy. But actually you’re not going to hit a guy or knock him down or even take a chance of hitting him when you’re 0–2.”
During the 1988 League Championship Series, Hershiser says, “The Mets crowded the plate, trying to take my sinker away from me. They knew I like to throw it low and away. I adjusted back, throwing a lot of fastballs in.” Such an adjustment is not optional if the pitcher wants to make his living in the major leagues. “You can’t let the outside part of the plate become the middle or the inside. That’s when you have to pitch in to get them off the plate. You have to pitch in often enough that the outside corner is still the outside corner. You have to keep the definition: That’s the outside corner, fellas.’” Mike Scott is equally emphatic: “There isn’t a successful pitcher who just throws on the plate and away, on the plate and away. Because if you do that, they’ll just sit there and drill you. You’ve got to make them uncomfortable. You’ve got to put a little fear in there.”
Fear can be instilled unintentionally, or at least by wildness that seems unintentional. Six times Nolan Ryan has led his league in both strikeouts and walks. Bob Feller did that four times. Wildness makes hitters nervous and nervousness makes them vulnerable. Wildness makes it easier to make them flinch.
Aluminum bats (a bane we shall deal with in the next chapter) have taken away one of the educational processes essential for pitchers, the process of learning to pitch inside. “You can’t do that in high school or college,” Hershiser says, “because you can’t break any bats.” When a pitcher jams a batter who is using an aluminum bat, the batter is often able to fight off the pitch and dump a hit over the infield. So until pitchers enter professional baseball, they tend to pitch away, away, away. As a result, they do not get practice pitching in, and when they start pitching in they hit batters unintentionally.
Intentionally throwing at batters is a punitive measure justified, Hershiser indicates, by, among other things, naughty behavior by batters, such as peeking. The catcher can help prevent peeking back at the catcher by moving at the last instant. Hershiser has begun to come forward in his delivery before Scioscia shifts toward the zone where the ball is coming. And every once in a while, especially with a runner on second, Hershiser will throw inside without even telling his catcher the pitch is coming there. He will let the catcher set up outside, then throw inside, just to make sure the batter is not peeking at the catcher’s location and to convince the other team that he is a little wild. “My strength is location, not blowing people away with high gas.” If the batter peeks, or if the runner on second signals pitch locations, that makes Hershiser a book easy for batters to read. If the runner signals to the batter that the pitch will be inside, that tells the batter the kind of pitch, too. It is almost certainly a fastball. If the runner signals a pitch away, the batter moves up on the plate and takes away the outside corner, where Hershiser’s sinker is effective.
Hershiser remembers the way Willie Stargell of the Pirates used to stand in the batter’s box cranking the bat around rapidly in a big circle until the pitcher was in motion. Hershiser suspects that Stargell did that partly to disguise his head movements that enabled him to peek and see where the catcher was setting up. Remember the way Joe Morgan of the Reds used to flap his left elbow while at bat, just before each pitch, darting his eyes back at his elbow? Hershiser suspects that Morgan was peeking. Notice, says Hershiser, the way Keith Hernandez of the Mets wiggles his fingers on the bat handle. “Hernandez is always looking at his fingers? He’s not looking at his fingers.”
Hershiser watches to see that his catcher does not move into position too soon during day games because the catcher’s shadow is so easy for the batter to see. But there are shadows at night, too. When the Padres came from behind to beat the Cubs in the final game of the 1984 League Championship Series, their comeback was capped by hits by Tony Gwynn and Steve Garvey. Gwynn got his hit because he glanced down and saw the shadow cast by the Cubs’ catcher, Jody Davis, who had moved to take an outside pitch. When told of this episode, Hershiser laughs his boyish laugh but speaks words from the man’s world in which he works: “When a pitcher sees that, or a catcher suspects that, you can guarantee that the batter is going down—in a hurry. He’s stealing meal money.” In 1987 Hershiser hit nine batters (one every 29 innings), which suggests he is not nice beyond the point of prudence.
Drysdale hit a batter every 22.2 innings. Koufax hit a batter every 129 innings. In 1966 Koufax pitched 323 innings and hit no one. The difference between Drysdale and Koufax was not control, it was a matter of temperament. Pitchers like Don Drysdale and Early Wynn (who said he would throw at his grandmother “only if she was digging in”) could not pitch today the way they did 25 years ago. Neither could Sal “The Barber” Maglie, who once said this about throwing at batters: “It’s not the first one. It’s the second one that makes the hitter know I meant the first one.” The last of the no-damned-nonsense-about-niceness pitchers may have been Bob Gibson. Never mind in games, you were not safe during batting practice. One day when Gibson was the Atlanta Braves’ pitching coach he was pitching batting practice and called to a young hitter waiting near the cage, “Eddie, you’re in there.” The young hitter did not like to be called Eddie and replied, in a less than respectful tone, “The name is Ed.” Gibson quietly said, “All right, Ed, get in there.” Then with the first pitch he drilled Ed in the ribs.
In Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant, one of the best baseball novels, the protagonist muses, “To be a pitcher! I thought. A pitcher standing at the axis of event.” That is indeed where the pitcher works, at the point from which all action begins. But the protagonist does not understand everything. He adds, “And to live in a world without grays, where all decisions were final: ball or strike….” Wrong. There is much gray in a pitcher’s world. Pitching inside, moving batters off the plate, punishing their bad manners (if that is what peeking is), retaliating for teammates who have been hit—these are aspects of baseball’s gray area. Cheating is different. It is a matter of black and white.
Once when Earl Weaver visited Ross Grimsley on the mound in a crisis Weaver said, “If you know how to cheat, start now.” Hershiser figures that 15 to 20 percent of all National League pitchers scuff balls or throw spitballs or otherwise cheat. A scuffed ball is an otherwise pristine ball with a small, strategically placed nick or scratch. In the hands of a pitcher who knows how to hold and throw it, such a ball has just enough aerodynamic irregularities to have extremely effective movement. Hershiser says he will not scuff a ball but has thrown scuffed balls that were waiting for him on the mound when he returned after the Dodgers had batted. He says it is hard to overestimate the potency of a skillfully scuffed ball as a weapon. The scuffed balls he has thrown have either produced strikeouts or, if the batters made contact, balls that stayed in the infield. “It is unbelievable. I have such a natural sinker already and I can double the break with a scuffed ball.”
Cheating is, of course, nothing new. Whitey Ford has written about his rich repertoire of techniques for cheating. He had a ring with a sharpened edge for scuffing. When the ring was banned, his cooperative catcher, Elston Howard, would scuff the ball on a sharpened rivet on his shin guards. Ford used spit, sometimes applied by, or helpfully wiped away by, his infielders as the ball was whipped around the infield after an out. Ford even caused a rule to be written. At the 1957 World Series between the Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves the guild loyalty of pitchers took precedence over mere team considerations: Braves pitchers Lew Burdette and Warren Spahn showed Ford how to throw a mudball. That is—was—a pitch with an exaggerated break because of a bit of dirt stuck to one side of the ball. Ford would wet the ball with saliva located in the pocket of his glove, then hold the ball with the wet spot down and reach for the resin bag with the ball in his hand, brushing the wet spot in the dirt. Unfortunately for Ford, baseball’s crime-busters soon made it a criminal offense for a pitcher to pick up the resin bag with a hand in which he is holding a ball.
Gaylord Perry, pitcher and author (Me and the Spitter), won 314 games and probably would be in the Hall of Fame by now (he will be eventu
ally) were it not for the fact that, as he more or less cheerfully admits, he cheated. The “foreign substances” he applied to the ball included saliva, Vaseline, K-Y jelly and fishing line wax. (A Cubs pitcher accused of applying foreign substances to the ball hotly protested that everything he applied “was made in the good ol’ USA.”) Dave Duncan was Perry’s catcher on the 1974 Indians when Perry had a 21–13 record. According to Duncan, Perry threw only one spitball all year. Duncan says Perry adopted odd, furtive mannerisms on the mound to make batters wary and angry. They concentrated on finding him out rather than knocking him out of the game.
An axiom sometimes spoken and often thought is: An amateur who cheats to win is a cheat; a professional who cheats to feed his family is a competitor. The axiom is pernicious, permissive and plain wrong because it suggests that something done for money is, for that reason, legitimized. That is obviously untrue. A deceitful action is especially contemptible when done in cold premeditation, and sneakily. Which brings us to the distinction that Bart Giamatti had occasion to draw between two kinds of violations of rules.
Giamatti was the designated metaphysician of American sport. In 1987, when he was president of the National League, he flexed his mental muscles regarding disciplinary action against a pitcher who was caught using sandpaper to scuff balls. Giamatti noted that most disciplinary cases involve impulsive violence, which is less morally grave than cheating. Such acts of violence, although intolerable, spring from the nature of physical contests between aggressive competitors. Such violence is a reprehensible extension of the physical exertion that is integral to the contest. Rules try to contain, not expunge, violent effort. But cheating derives not from excessive, impulsive zeal in the heat of competition. Rather, it is a cold, covert attempt to alter conditions of competition. As Giamatti put it, cheating has no organic origin in the act of playing and devalues any contest designed to declare a winner among participants playing under identical rules and conditions. Toward cheating, the proper policy is zero tolerance.
Men at Work Page 15