Swindell’s first outing in his freshman year was against Texas Lutheran College. That team was not a powerhouse, but it was powerful enough. It knocked Swindell around, and out of the game. He pitched next against a genuine powerhouse, Arizona State University, which had two future major leaguers, Barry Bonds and Oddibe McDowell. Texas was down by two runs when Gustafson put Swindell in “for a little more baptism.” Suddenly Swindell made what Gustafson laconically calls “quite an adjustment.” His fastball zoomed into the high 80s.
Adrenaline can work wonders. But the more of it you have, the more you need prudence. Undergraduates are not long on that. Most undergraduates think they are immortal. Most undergraduate pitchers think their arms are indestructible. “When I got to college I almost never had time to ice it because I was always pitching. There are a lot of big rivals in college. I remember one time when we were playing Houston in Houston. College fans can get real rowdy and I just didn’t want to hear them. I wanted them to shut up, so I went down and started warming up on my own. Coach Gus looked down there and I said I was ready and he sent me in.” At Texas he occasionally pitched in relief the day after pitching a complete game. Once he pitched a complete game on Friday and the next day relieved in both ends of a doubleheader.
And he was pitching to aluminum bats, which do not break. That fact is even more important than the fact that they put a few extra feet on fly balls and a few more miles per hour on line drives. Because aluminum bats do not break, pitching inside becomes problematic, even futile. Jam a batter on his fists with a pitch that would shatter a wooden bat and he still may be able to put it in play or even over the infield for a hit. That is why college baseball games last so long and why college batting averages are so high—and why professional scouts have such a hard time judging college talent. Because of aluminum bats, college pitchers throw fewer fastballs than they otherwise would. They throw curves, sliders, split-fingers and other breaking balls, and they throw them away from the hitters. This has three pernicious consequences: They do not develop the arm strength that comes from throwing fastballs; they jeopardize their arms with all the torque involved in throwing breaking balls; they do not learn to pitch inside.
Gustafson says he is not sacrificing Texas wins when he encourages his pitchers to put the ball where they will need to put it in professional baseball—inside. Far from costing Texas games, he says, pitching inside makes his pitchers more effective. This is because so few other college pitchers are doing it and so many hitters are, therefore, leaning out over the plate. They find Texas’s pitching unsettling. Almost all the players Gustafson recruits “have a burning ambition to be professional players.” So “we teach how to pitch in professional baseball,” which means “throwing fastballs inside.” College pitchers, he acknowledges, “don’t like to do it, but they’ve got to learn.”
Swindell learned. He was an all-American selection all three years at Texas, with a 43–8 record and a 1.92 ERA. In 1985, his sophomore year, he won 18 in a row while going 19–1. He is third on the NCAA career strikeout list (behind two pitchers who played four seasons). As the amateur draft approached in June, 1986, Swindell found out which teams had the first three picks. They were Pittsburgh, Cleveland and San Francisco. Then he looked to see which of them could give him number 21. Pittsburgh could not because that number was retired in honor of the late Roberto Clemente. A San Francisco player was using 21. So Swindell hoped to be chosen second. He was.
On the night of August 20, 1986, Swindell was in a Waterbury, Connecticut, hotel sleeping the deep sleep of someone strong, happy and unaware of how fast things can happen in life. Things had happened fast enough already, and would accelerate on the morrow. Less than three months earlier he had been pitching to college boys for the Texas Longhorns. Drafted by the Indians, by August 20 he had pitched the grand total of 18 innings of professional baseball, all of them in Single-? ball, at Waterloo, Iowa. On August 20 he was in Waterbury because he was scheduled to make his Double-A debut the next day. Instead, a telephone call summoned him to make his major league debut—on two hours sleep—in Boston.
His baptism of fire was full of fire, from the Red Sox side. “It was like Vietnam out there,” he says. “I’m glad I got out alive.” He got out in the fourth inning with the Indians on their way to a 24–5 shellacking. But there was a bright spot. In the second inning he picked Bill Buckner off first. Buckner was then in his eighteenth season in the major leagues. In the midst of a disaster, Swindell had shown some poise and finesse. There was an especially interested onlooker in the Red Sox dugout: Roger Clemens.
Clemens and Swindell, two large, strong Texans, are about as strong as pitchers are these days. But these days are different. What has happened since August 7, 1908, when Walter Johnson shut out the Yankees for the third time in four days? For that matter, what has happened since that day in 1963 when 25-year-old Juan Manchal of the Giants and 42-year-old Warren Spahn of the Braves hooked up in the sort of game that had not been seen for many years and almost certainly will never be seen again. The Giants won, 1–0, on a Willie Mays home run in the bottom of the sixteenth inning. Marichal pitched all the way, throwing 227 pitches. Spahn had thrown 200 pitches when the Giants came to bat in the bottom of the sixteenth.
Twenty-five years later baseball looks a lot different. Roger Clemens stands 6 feet 4, weighs 215 pounds and trains like a demon. He is one of the strongest and most competitive pitchers of this or any other day. In two consecutive starts in July, 1988, he threw 161 and 149 pitches. In his next five starts he lasted just 27 innings. He was 0–5 and 7.33 in those starts. He then went 0-for-August. And by the All-Star break in 1989 (which he spent at home, not with the All-Star team) he was struggling.
The Tigers’ Jack Morris, the winningest pitcher of the 1980s, is one of baseball’s workhorses, but the most pitches he remembers throwing in a game are 140. Morris is a fierce competitor who feels that when a relief pitcher comes in for him, he has failed to do his job properly. Tony La Russa calls that attitude “beautiful.” He also calls it a mistake. La Russa says he wants all his pitchers to go to the mound thinking they are going to pitch a complete game, but he says he never thinks that way. La Russa’s rule is that anytime a pitcher has thrown 120 pitches, he’s vulnerable. La Russa remembers a game in which Mark Langston, then with the Mariners, struck out 16 Athletics, but threw 153 pitches doing so. It was a good performance but also a good way to get hurt. “If you have a pitcher who is going to make 30-plus starts for you in a season,” La Russa says, “if he is going to be effective for the year and for several seasons, there are going to be a bunch of games in which you can save him 10, 15, 20, 25 pitches, games in which it is not necessary for him to throw those pitches.” It is possible to save a pitcher 300 pitches, or the equivalent of three extra starts in which he goes seven or eight innings.
“Back in my day,” says Edwards, “everyone told a kid to throw fastballs and change-ups, building his arm strength throwing fastballs. Nowadays you hear somebody say, ‘Wow! Johnny is 12–1 in high school’ and you go out to see Johnny throw and he throws 100 pitches and 70 of them are curveballs, and the 30 fastballs are about 75 miles per hour. Of course I came from an era when 200 innings was the fifth man on the staff.” The fifth man, that is, on a staff built around a four-man rotation.
When Roger Clemens first came up, Gene Mauch told Roger Angell that 25 years earlier every team had three pitchers who could throw as hard as Clemens. Doc Edwards recalls that after the 1964 season the Indians traded Tommy John to the White Sox because he threw only 88 miles per hour. The Indians at the time had Sonny Siebert, Luis Tiant, Steve Hargan, Sam McDowell and Gary Bell, all of whom, Edwards insists, threw in the 90s, as did eight to ten pitchers in the Indians’ farm system. Of course John went on to pitch for a quarter of a century more and in most of those seasons he rarely approached even 88 miles per hour.
Leave aside fast pitches and long games. What about long careers? There are a few records that we can conf
idently say will never be broken. One is Cy Young’s 511 victories. Bert Blyleven had 271 victories by the end of the 1989 season, when he was 38. If he wins 300, he may be the last 300-game winner for a long time—at least until Dwight Gooden grows old. Mickey Welch, a Hall of Famer who was the third pitcher to win 300 games, completed his first 105 major league starts. Christy Mathewson had 561 decisions (373 wins, 188 losses) and 435 complete games. Over a 14-year span he averaged 26 wins a year. Twenty-one times in this century pitchers have won 30 or more games in a season. But that has been done only three times since 1920: 1931 (Lefty Grove, 31–4); 1934 (Dizzy Dean, 30–7); and in the famous, or infamous, year of the pitcher, 1968 (Denny McLain, 31–6). Johnny Sain was a good pitcher and a great pitching coach. (And he is the answer to a magnificent trivia question: He threw the last pitch to Babe Ruth and the first pitch to Jackie Robinson. Okay, it is a trick question. Sain pitched to Ruth in an exhibition game in May, 1943. Ruth walked.) In 1948, the year the Braves won the pennant on a pitching refrain of “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain,” he started 9 games in 29 days. He won 7 of them and lost 2—by scores of 2–1 and 1–0. Since Steve Carlton pitched 304 innings in 1980 no one has pitched 300 innings in a season. It was considered at least mildly marvelous when Roger Clemens put together three consecutive seasons with more than 250 innings pitched and an ERA under 3.00. But Christy Mathewson had 13 consecutive seasons like that and Walter Johnson had 12.
Now, to be fair to today’s pitchers, it should be noted that some of these statistics that seem to establish the superior durability of earlier generations of pitchers must be partially discounted, for reasons given by Craig R. Wright. Wright, a statistician and co-author (with Tom House, the Rangers’ pitching coach) of The Diamond Appraised, notes that in the dead-ball era, before the home-run threat became pervasive, pitchers faced fewer crucial situations, so there was less nibbling at the strike zone and more coasting by pitchers. Wright recalls reading something written by an old-time pitcher—Christy Mathewson, he thinks—arguing that stamina is important because a pitcher must be able to throw as many as 100 pitches in a game. Today more pitches are thrown per batter and 130 to 140 per game is normal. Also, more home runs mean more careful pitching, more deep counts, more walks. More base runners mean more pitching from the stretch, which increases the burden on the arm by decreasing the involvement of the rest of the body. And more base runners also mean more throws from the mound to first.
Big Ed Walsh pitched 464 innings while winning 40 games in 1908. But using an estimate of 2.8 pitches per batter then, and a conservative estimate of 3.5 pitches per batter in 1971 when Detroit’s Mickey Lolich pitched 376 innings, Lolich threw about 500 more pitches than Walsh did. Grover Cleveland Alexander’s total of 38 complete games in 1916 is impressive, but less so than it would be if we did not know that he threw about 40 fewer pitches per game than are thrown in a normal complete game today. And many of the pitches he threw were fat and slow, allowing weak hitters to dribble the dead (and gray and battered) ball at fielders.
Nevertheless, there is a broad consensus in baseball that there are not as many strong arms as there used to be. That, says Ray Miller, is not a hypothesis, it is a fact, and he thinks he knows why: America is going to hell in a handcart.
Ray Miller, a.k.a. The Rabbit, will be 44 on Opening Day, 1990. He has been the Pirates’ pitching coach since October, 1986. Before that he was the Twins’ manager for parts of two years and before that he was the Orioles’ pitching coach. In Baltimore he coached two Cy Young Award winners (Mike Flanagan and Steve Stone) and five 20-game winners (Flanagan, Stone, Jim Palmer, Scott McGregor and Mike Boddicker). During his tenure the Orioles went to two World Series, 1979 and 1983. Before that Miller was a good Triple-A pitcher who never made it to the major leagues even for, as they say, a cup of coffee. He is a man of many convictions, all of them firm and some of them odd. For example: “There isn’t a left-hander in the world that can run a straight line. It’s the gravitational pull on the axis of the earth that gets ’em.” And he believes in the unity of theory and practice. Tom Boswell reports that when Miller was a roving pitching coach for the Orioles’ minor league clubs he had an odd way of organizing wind sprints. He would line up left-handers all on the right side, or on a hill, to balance their gravitational field. “If you don’t,” Miller patiently explains, “they’ll whip out your whole line.” Miller believes that left-handers, a persecuted minority, acquire, as a stigma of their servitude, a slight “body lean,” the indelible mark of growing up groaning beneath the burdens of life in a right-handed world. (Miller is right-handed.) Miller’s physics and sociology may be hard to follow but his thoughts about pitching are as straightforward as a fastball.
The reasons young men do not have arms as strong as young men used to have, according to Miller’s doleful analysis, is that there is too damned much going on. The winningest pitcher ever, Cy Young, was also something of an aphorist: “Pitchers, like poets, are born, not made.” Actually, pitchers are made from a youth of throwing baseballs. Young people who are headed for professional baseball are not spending the time earlier generations of young people did playing baseball—or even playing catch with their fathers, for that matter. They are playing soccer or competing on swimming teams, or sitting in front of a television set or… at any rate, they are not throwing, not developing strong arms. Miller says that back in the better days, when men were men and the world was rational, the biggest kid was made into a pitcher and baseball was the center of his life. Today that kid is apt to be a four-sport athlete. Many baseball people think there are also fewer strong arms than there used to be among outfielders. That, too, indicates that other sports, particularly football and basketball, are taking more of the strongest athletes than they used to. Certainly other sports, including soccer, swimming and tennis are taking the time of even very young children. In eras when childhood was less organized, such children might have been throwing baseballs out in the pasture, when pastures were just a step from many American back stoops. Or the city children would be throwing in vacant lots, when there were more vacant lots.
Jack McKeon, the crusty manager of the Padres, believes that the scarcity of outfielders with strong arms is a result of coaching that is too good, or at least too sophisticated. Coaches, he says, are teaching young outfielders to hit cutoff men too well, so they are not developing the strength for long throws. Ray Miller, education theorist, says that the recent decline of major league pitching is partially a result of “overcoaching” at the Little League level. He says boys are being taught to throw curveballs, knuckleballs, split-fingers. The emphasis, he says, should be on throwing hard and throwing often. And Miller, like most baseball people over 40, tends to see national decline in the rise of the breaking pitch and the fall of the fastball among the nation’s young. “It’s a statement on society. Everybody is looking for the easy way out. You can’t find a big, strong kid who wants to throw year-round, who will stand out in the yard and throw rocks and knock cans down, just making himself bigger and stronger, and throw better.”
The first year Miller coached in Baltimore the Orioles’ pitchers had 65 complete games. Miller, the sociologist, blames the decline in the number of complete games at least in part on “affluence and the medical profession.” He means that there is so much money invested in each player that the teams have doctors—doctors, for Pete’s sake—in the clubhouses monitoring aches and pains. Talk about Babylonian decadence.
Ray Miller, wearing blue jeans and a day’s growth of beard, delivered these remarks in a really stupid setting, which is not his fault. He is a baseball person’s baseball person and not responsible for the fact that the Pittsburgh Pirates play in a stadium that contains a restaurant that is about as big—bigger, maybe—than the park they used to play in. (What would Honus say?)
Through the restaurant’s huge windows people eating lunch can look down to the bottom of the great concrete saucer, down at the artificial turf that is so green in the 1:0
0 P.M. sunlight it bites your eyes. It is symmetrical and immaculate—the turf, the concrete, the restaurant. It makes you want to mess it up a bit. Fortunately, an unruly force will be here soon. In a few hours a large man of the sort Miller thinks America needs more of will be out there. By about 5:00 P.M. he will be running the stadium steps, Walkman headphones clamped onto his large head, Van Halen hard rock pounding in his ears. Jim Gott, relief pitcher, will be getting himself worked up, getting ready to go to work.
As Earl Weaver says about baseball, “You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man a chance.” Baseball has roots far back in this young nation’s antiquity. The absence of a clock in baseball is a product of the preindustrial sensibility. Before time was chopped up into units (as production was chopped into units, each timed for industrial efficiency), life was governed by just two things, daylight and its absence. And that (I am needlessly complicating and also recklessly simplifying) is why there are relief pitchers, and especially those large, powerful specimens called “closers.” The closer is crucial because of one of the fundamental facts of baseball life: There being no clock, someone has to get the last outs. And they are the hardest to get.
One of baseball’s impenetrable mysteries is the origin of the term “bull pen.” Some historians believe it comes from the fact that around the turn of the century relief pitchers (to the extent that there were any) often warmed up in front of Bull Durham tobacco signs that were painted on many outfield fences. But as early as 1877 the Cincinnati Enquirer used the term “bull pen” to denote a roped-in area in foul territory where late-arriving fans were herded like bulls. Bill James says he has solved another mystery. He knows who invented relief pitching:
Men at Work Page 19