In theory, everyone can be contained. “You know how you pitch Mike Schmidt?” asks Jim Lefebvre rhetorically. “Hard fastballs inside, sliders down and away. You know how you pitch Henry Aaron? Willie. Mays? Hard stuff inside, soft away. You know how you pitch [Willie] Stargell? Hard stuff inside, soft away. You know how you pitch God? Hard stuff inside, then down and away, and if you get it there you’ll get Him out. Even though He’ll know it’s coming. Or at least they say He knows.” Lefebvre’s point is practical, not theological. It is that hitting is so hard that when a major league pitcher is doing what he wants to do, he is probably going to get you out. So hitting is usually a matter of being prepared to pounce on pitchers’ mistakes. “Why worry about that high fastball up and in or that nasty slider low and away? Look for a zone you can handle. Be ready and patient and wait for a better pitch—a mistake. Until there are two strikes. Then it’s survival.”
Almost every hitter has what baseball people call “a hole in his swing.” Often a hitter’s strength and his weakness are inches apart. Dr. Robert William Brown, cardiologist (after he was the Yankees’ third baseman and before he was president of the American League), once said, “The art of hitting is getting your pitch to hit.” Lew Burdette, the Milwaukee Braves’ pitcher, said, “I make my living from the hungriness of hitters.” He meant that hitters are vulnerable when they will not wait—will not wait for the pitch they can hit.
All pitchers know that most batters look for the fastball and adjust down. Most mortals, that is. Henry Aaron once said, “I never worried about the fastball. They couldn’t throw it past me. None of them.” That was true, but that was Aaron, he of the phenomenally quick wrists and whippy, thin-handled bat. The strength of those wrists was the serendipitous result of a mistake that could not be repeated with today’s coaching of kids from an early age. When Aaron first began playing, and until he signed a professional contract, he did not know how to hold the bat. His mistake was not a matter of mere nuance. He did not know which hand went above the other. That is right: He was a right-handed hitter who put his left hand over his right hand on the bat handle. Try it, but try it carefully. You can wrench your wrists swinging that way. You can also develop extra strong wrists by trying to overcome the handicap of swinging that way.
Getting a fastball past Aaron was, as folks said, like sneaking the sun past a rooster. Again, let us be clear about what a fastball is. A 96-mile-per-hour fastball goes from the pitcher to the plate in 0.42 second. The batter has approximately 0.17 second (give or take, say, two one-hundredths of a second) to decide to pull the trigger. Then he has perhaps 0.2 second to bring the bat around. “It’s easier to hit a breaking ball than a fastball,” says Gwynn with laconic matter-of-factness, “because you get more time to look at it.” What exactly is he talking about, “more time”? Even a slow 80-mile-per-hour curveball gets from the pitcher’s hand to the plate faster than you can say “curveball.” And because hitting is timing and pitching is upsetting timing, a pitcher needs high velocity less than he needs a variety of velocities.
A pitcher with such a variety may be unimpressive—to everyone but batters. Casey Stengel said his slow-throwing Eddie Lopat made it look so easy (“Looks like he’s throwing wads of tissue paper”) that “every time he wins a game, fans come down out of the stands asking for contracts.” However, Lopat was a master at changing speeds and locations. Ray Miller cites Tommy John as an example of what can be done with just two pitches, a little slider and a little sinker, neither of them overpowering. “He’ll throw his sinker from 65 miles per hour to 80. One hard, one slow, one in between, so you are saying to yourself, ‘Don’t get out too soon or your hit is on the ground.’ So you stay back and wait and he puts a little bit more on and you wait too long and pop it up.” Look, says Lefebvre, drawing his lesson in the dust with a bat handle behind the batting cage one day at the Oakland Coliseum, Tommy John is going to rely on slow sinkers, slow curves and sliders. It would be silly to be looking for fastballs. John wants you to swing at those around the knees, but the ones that start at the knees wind up around the ankles. So look for pitches around the middle of the plate, out and up. But with a Roger Clemens, a power pitcher, look for the middle of the plate, down. If the ball is up, take it.
“The toughest thing to judge,” says Miller, “is velocity. Good hitters see the ball right out of your hand. They recognize a breaking ball or fastball immediately.” That is why a change-up is effective. As soon as the batter recognizes a fastball he still has a second order of uncertainty: What kind of fastball? What is important in a change-up, says Miller, is “the speed of your arm after the ball leaves your hand. That’s what convinces the batter.” Before a pitcher gets to the major leagues he tries to throw what the batter is not looking for. Once in the major leagues no pitcher can be said to know his craft unless he knows how to get a hitter in a situation in which the pitcher knows what the hitter is looking for and can give it to him—with something taken off or added. Miller gives the example of using a “BP fastball,” meaning a slow, batting practice fastball. You have a two-run lead but there is a runner on second, Canseco is up. A mixture of 90-plus-mile-per-hour fastballs and breaking balls brings the count to 3–1. Canseco knows he’s the potential tieing run and that the pitcher does not want to risk walking him with a breaking ball. That would bring up McGwire, who is as menacing as Canseco. “Now, with the same delivery that you’ve been throwing a 91- or 92-mile-per-hour fastball, you throw an 80-mile-per-hour fastball on the outside part of the plate. The same motion but you just don’t ‘finish’ the pitch, you just kind of kill it. Canseco starts for the hard one, he reaches for it but has to slow down a bit. He hits a fly ball and yells at you, ‘Throw the damn ball!’ That’s what pitching is all about, the deception of speed.”
Remember, that is why good hitters like Gwynn are prepared to take a few pitches to gauge velocity, even at the cost of finding themselves behind in the count. They have such confidence in their skills that they think the information they gain more than makes up for their reduced margin of error.
“Early in the game,” says Gwynn, “I want to see a few pitches. I want to see what kind of velocity he’s got on his curveball. But later in the game I go up hacking.” Because deciphering the velocity, and hence the probable movement, of a pitch is so important in batting, it can be extremely useful for a batter to know in advance—before the ball is released—what kind of pitch is coming. Give a Ruth or a Mantle that kind of information and the batter-pitcher confrontation becomes a mismatch. There is a famous story of Babe Ruth noting that a particular pitcher bit his tongue when throwing a curve. Mickey Mantle, who was an extraordinarily acute observer of pitchers’ mannerisms, saw that Camilo Pascual had two different mannerisms with his mouth when throwing two different pitches.
Kubek remembers that in 1961 Bob Turley hurt his arm and was going to go home and have surgery, but manager Ralph Houk told him to stay with the team and continue doing what he did so well. Turley was a master at reading the movements of opposing pitchers and calling the pitches that were coming. He called the pitch that Roger Maris hit for his 61st home run. That is, he signaled to Frank Crosetti, the Yankees’ third-base coach, who passed a sign to Maris, who, as a left-handed hitter, was facing Crosetti. “Turley said, and I believe him,” Kubek recalls, “that he could watch any pitcher in baseball—this was before we used tapes much—and pick up his pitches. He would watch the way the pitcher held the ball in one way and then another, moving from one spot on the rubber to another, the way the catcher moved, always something. Maris didn’t like it until Turley proved that he was 99.9 percent accurate. Turley claims he called the pitch on 100 of Mantle’s home runs.” Turley would whistle when a fastball was coming. Silence meant a breaking ball.
It may seem odd but it is the case that Gwynn does not want the sort of help that Turley provided the Yankee hitters, or that runners on second stealing signs provide to hitters on many teams. Gwynn’s explanation for not wanting adva
nce information is not convincing: “You’re not going to hit with runners on base all the time. You’re going to have to go up there sometimes on your own.” True, but one does not normally spurn occasional help merely because one can not have constant help. Some hitters, Gwynn says, watch how a pitcher grips the ball and then watch to see if he moves his hand in a way that indicates he is changing his grip when the ball is hidden in the pocket of his glove. Gwynn pays no attention to that either. The real reason he does not want such information about what is coming at him from the pitcher’s hand is that he has an interesting intuition about the delicate mental equipoise that is needed for hitting. He has so much confidence in his muscle memory, he believes that his best chance of hitting the ball is when he sees it leave the pitcher’s hand and reacts. His ability to see it depends on work done—with batting machines, with videotape—before he gets to the plate. His reaction depends on his analysis of what this particular pitcher does. That is enough. If he does his work well prior to coming to the plate, he does not need what he can not always rely on—information about the particular pitch that is coming.
“I don’t understand how anyone hits a baseball,” says Ray Miller. “You play golf and the damn thing is sitting there and all you’ve got to do is hit it and that’s hard enough.” It is amazing that batters have as much confidence as they do. Confidence is a sometime thing; it comes and goes. A batter who has it probably has it because, as batters say, he is “seeing the ball well” at the moment. As Red Schoendienst was in July, 1950. The 1950 All-Star Game in Chicago’s Comiskey Park was won, 4–3, by the National League when the Cardinals’ Schoendienst hit a home run on the first pitch of the fourteenth inning. Late in the game Schoendienst, sitting in the dugout next to Duke Snider, said, “See that guy in the red sweater in the third row of the upper deck in left field? If I have to hit right-handed, that’s where I’m going to put it.” His home run landed two feet away from the red sweater.
When batters are hot they say they are “in a groove.” Again, listen to the common, natural language of a craft. It tells what it feels like on the rare occasions when everything feels right. A groove is something especially smooth, a path that guides movement effortlessly. To be in a groove is to have all one’s “mechanics” flowing together. “Mechanics” that flow? No, to be in a groove is not to be mechanical, it is to be animal, with the grace that only something living can have.
Batters become obsessive about good “grooves” once they get into them. In 1961, when Roger Maris was chasing Ruth’s record, he batted behind Tony Kubek and generally put his back (left) foot in the same spot in the batter’s box that Kubek dug with his foot. If Kubek changed his position even slightly, Maris would come back to the dugout after batting and ask why. It is obvious—the evidence is in the box scores—when a batter is in a groove. Some opponents will try to dislodge him from his groove. “There are,” says Cal Ripken, Jr., “a lot of mind games involved in baseball, for example against a batter who is hot. I learned this the hard way. In 1987 I was hot as anything for a while, hitting home runs and with a high average, driving in runs. So in one game in California Ruppert Jones of the Angels hits a double, gets to second and says to me, ‘Gosh, you’re swinging the bat great. You’re not taking any bad swings, your hands are out front, away from your body—you look great, keep it up.’ Now, I’m someone who diagnoses every bit of information. I say to myself, ‘That must be it. My hands are out away from my body.’ So the next time up the first thing I think about is ‘Where are my hands?’ I went into a slump.”
Gwynn reduces the mystery of hitting to five words: “See the ball and react.” However, reacting correctly is the result of constant preparation—and of thought, before the batter comes to the plate and while he is there. Now, it may seem absurd to say that thinking has much to do with an action involving episodes measured in hundredths of seconds. Branch Rickey, who had as full a head as has ever been put in the service of baseball, said: “Full head, empty bat.” He had a point. There are limits to how much cerebration can go into hitting. And some entire teams are more free-swinging and less thoughtful than others in their approach to hitting. Lefebvre says that Dave Parker, who spent his glory years in the late 1970s with the Pirates, “had the old Pirates’ philosophy of hitting: Anything white and moving, swing at it—that includes paper wrappers blowing across the infield.” But over time, and a season is a long time, it pays to pay attention. Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the Red Sox pitcher from 1969 to 1978, once said, “When cerebral processes enter into sports, you start screwing up. It’s like the Constitution, which says separate church and state. You have to separate mind and body.” In the seventh game of the 1975 World Series, Lee served up an off-speed pitch to Tony Perez, a deadly off-speed hitter. Lee practiced what he preached. Perez’s team won the Series.
In 1988 Gwynn won his second consecutive batting title and was thoroughly disgusted with himself. His average fell 57 points from the 1987 high. His .313 in 1988 was the lowest average to win the National League title in history, below the .320 of the Giants’ Larry Doyle in 1915. In the previous 112 years of the National League, only 9 batting leaders fell below .330. The average winning average over 113 years was .357, and for the 25 years ending in 1988 the average average was .343. But in 1988 Gwynn batted 119 points higher with runners on base (.382) than he did with the bases empty (.263), the largest differential in the National League. His season average was hardly bad and was, of course (we should not lose sight of this just because he does), better than anyone else’s in the National League. It was especially impressive, and a tribute to the use he makes of his mind, because in 1988 his body was a problem.
Better men than I have tried and failed, with persistence and wheedling, to wrest from Gwynn an admission that his 1988 injuries hurt his hitting. He is adamant in insisting that they did not, that his problems were bad “mechanics” and, in fact, some sort of moral failure on his part, a failure to just do his job right. I believe that he believes what he says, and that he is mistaken. Even during the last three months of 1987 he had a finger that would lock when he closed his hand around the handle of the bat. It would come open just enough to allow the bat to slide out of his grip. This, remember, was while he was hitting .370. In 1988 his physical problems were much worse.
After Spring Training started he had surgery on his left hand. He was back in the batter’s box a week before Spring Training ended but began the season slumping, with (for him) appalling 0-for-9 and 0-for-ll episodes. After 13 games he was hitting .243 and was so beside himself that he once complained so vigorously about a called third strike that he was ejected from a game, his first ejection in 781 games. Next, he tripped rounding first base on the Pittsburgh carpet, severely sprained his thumb and had to sit (well, squirm) on the disabled list for 21 days. On June 13 he was hitting .237. Then the Padres’ new manager, Jack McKeon, who had replaced Larry Bowa in May, took Gwynn’s mind off his troubles by giving him a new one. He shifted Gwynn from right field, where he had won two Gold Gloves, to center field. Five minutes after McKeon asked Gwynn to make the shift Gwynn was taking fly balls in center, but he was not a happy camper. Not happy, but well married. His wife, Alicia, gave him a talking-to.
Remember George C. Scott at the beginning of the movie Patton? As Patton, Scott tells his troops that you do not win wars by dying for your country, you win by making your enemies die for their country. Alicia suggested that instead of feeling sorry for himself he should concentrate on making pitchers feel sorry for themselves. Good idea. In July he hit .406. He hit .367 in the last 73 games of the season. He tied Pedro Guerrero for the league’s highest average with runners in scoring position, .382. In spite of the pain (he had a sign “The finger is fine” in his locker to move the media on to another—any other—subject) and missed games of 1988, his career has been a model of consistency, the virtue he values most. Over the seasons 1984–89 he ranked among the top five hitters in all of baseball in hits, average, on-base percentage
and fewest strikeouts.
In this game of fractions of inches and tenths of seconds, it is amazing what players can do while in pain from injuries—or from excesses. One fact is often forgotten: Playing baseball often hurts. In 1964, at age 22, Tim McCarver won a World Series ring. After he retired in 1980 he had a jeweler build a nodule inside the ring, on the bottom, to make the ring, in effect, a few sizes smaller. This was necessary because his hand had shrunk when it stopped taking the constant trauma of stopping major league pitches. And that trauma was just the result of normal playing. Consider some abnormal physical problems.
Gerald Astor of the Hall of Fame library notes that Ty Cobb “one morning had his tonsils removed in a Toledo hotel room (by a doctor who shortly took up residence in an insane asylum) and that afternoon played in an exhibition game, although his throat bled for three weeks.” When Mickey Mantle, star running back for Commerce (Oklahoma) High School, was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a doctor predicted eventual amputation of a leg. Tony Kubek recalls that in 1961 Mantle, who that year hit .317 with 54 home runs and 128 RBIs, frequently had to be pulled from cabs by companions, so stiff were his legs. Once when Johnny Bench sustained a foot injury so serious that even he was willing to notice it, the doctor administering the X-ray discovered three healed bones that had been broken without Bench noticing. He played 1,744 games at catcher. Assume 120 pitches a game, plus warm-ups before each inning plus Spring Training. That is a lot of squatting. His knees became so stiff it would take him 15 minutes to become fully ambulatory after the team plane had landed. He quit after 17 years because “I want to be able to walk when I’m fifty.”
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