K

by Tyler Kepner

  Baseball lowered the mound after the 1968 season, from 15 inches to 10, but Gibson kept on winning, adding another Cy Young Award in 1970. The change in the mound did not affect him much, because he threw from a three-quarters angle and could easily adjust the angle of his slider. Over-the-top pitchers with curveballs were more vulnerable.

  There was a cost to Gibson’s signature pitch: constant pain. Gibson does not believe he was tougher than modern pitchers, but he pitched with discomfort that would not be tolerated today, when injuries are more definable. On game days when his elbow really ached, Gibson would take Butazolidin after his warm-ups. Butazolidin, commonly used on horses, has since been banned by the FDA.

  “My elbow was sore all the time, and it was sore basically from that stiff-wrist slider, because that’s really hard on your elbow,” Gibson says. “The one where you break your wrist and the break is a little bit bigger, that’s not nearly as hard on your elbow as that stiff-wrist. It’s like holding your fingers on top, with your thumb on the bottom, and rotating it like you’re going to turn the doorknob, just with those three fingers. And if you do that, you can feel tension on your elbow—and you can imagine, throwing that 91, 92 miles an hour, what your elbow’s going to feel like afterwards.

  “And I threw a lot of ’em.”

  * * *

  ————

  A young pitcher on those Cardinal teams noticed the slider’s toll on Gibson. He decided he wanted no part of it. Steve Carlton never hurt his elbow throwing a baseball, and he remains very proud of that. Even as a boy, he refused to accept the idea that pitching had to be painful.

  “Kids are invariably thinking if they’re gonna make the ball spin a particular way, they have to force the ball to spin,” Carlton says. “So they’re gonna be twisting their hand and doing crazy things to it to get it to spin, to break. That just goes along with being a kid, because they don’t know, so they think they have to do it this way.

  “Even when I was a kid, I held my curveball and threw it. I didn’t twist it. I never twisted it. Even on the curveball, it was just hold it and throw it. And that’s why I had a good one: I never hurt my arm. Never had elbow problems.”

  That curveball was good enough—with a fastball, naturally—to get Carlton to the majors at age 20. He was so proud of his curve that before he had even made the majors, after a spring training game, Carlton challenged McCarver to call more breaking balls when behind in the count. They were shaving at the time, towels around their waists, and McCarver—already a five-year veteran—admonished the kid, loudly. But Carlton was probably right.

  (McCarver would find, over decades of close friendship, that Carlton had an unusual but accurate sense of things. In the mid-1970s, as they prepared for a long drive on a hunting trip, McCarver noticed that Carlton had packed a caulking gun in the trunk. McCarver teased him about it, but Carlton didn’t care. Somewhere near Mitchell, South Dakota, in 20-degree weather with snow falling, a pheasant flew into the radiator of Carlton’s Chevy Blazer. The car was leaking antifreeze. Carlton stopped, removed the bird, found the caulking gun, and used it to plug the leak. Years later, he sold the Blazer with the caulking still in the radiator. “Lefty,” McCarver told him, “I’ll never question anything you do again.”)

  For all of his intuition, though, Carlton was not above asking questions. He pitched with Gibson on two pennant-winning Cardinal teams, watching and learning what to do and what to avoid. McCarver had encouraged Carlton to develop a pitch that moved laterally, because his fastball was straight and his curveball dropped straight down, as if from 12 to 6 on a clock. Carlton asked Gibson how he threw his slider.

  “He said he kind of got it out there and turned it at a particular time; it was a timing element,” Carlton says. “And he had a great slider—but his elbow always bothered him. I thought, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I didn’t want to turn my hand, like turning-a-doorknob kind of thing. That puts a lot of pressure on the ulnar region of the elbow.”

  Carlton started experimenting with a cutter, offsetting his fingers on the fastball to get side-to-side action. What he really wanted, though, was two-plane movement: “cut, cut, cut—and then drop,” as Willie Stargell would one day describe it to him. All through the 1968 season, Carlton toyed with the shape of the pitch and his angles of release. As Gibson fashioned a performance for the ages, Carlton went 13–11. He was an afterthought in the World Series, mopping up twice in blowouts.

  That off-season, the Cardinals played an exhibition series in Japan. They would face Sadaharu Oh, the left-handed slugger who stood at the plate like a flamingo and smashed 868 career home runs. They did not understand that Oh and the Japanese would take the exhibitions seriously.

  “We thought everybody was gonna just play pat-a-cake, have some fun and have a beer,” Carlton says. “It wasn’t like that. They came out swinging. They’re trying to kick our ass. So we had a clubhouse meeting without the coaches and the managers: ‘We gotta step it up a little bit.’ ”

  Oh hit a home run off Carlton; maybe two. Desperation was his inspiration.

  “I told Timmy, ‘I gotta break this out against Oh because I can’t move him off the plate,’ ” Carlton says. “He picked that leg up and he was pretty tough at the plate. My first throw I threw it at his ribs and it kind of unsettled him. He kind of flew back. After he got that leg up, he just kind of jumped out of the way and it came over for a nice strike. That was a pretty good test right there, the first one I ever threw.”

  At spring training the next season, Carlton told the pitching coach, Billy Muffett, that he planned to use the slider quite a bit. Muffett was unsure; some teams, like the Dodgers, did not want their pitchers throwing sliders at all, for fear of elbow trouble. But as the season progressed, Carlton used it more and became a star: he struck out 19 Mets in a game that September and nearly won the league’s ERA title, at 2.17.

  He loved the pitch, sometimes too much. The next August, after McCarver had been traded, Carlton was 6–18 when he took the mound at Dodger Stadium. Joe Torre asked to catch him that night, with a plan to call only fastballs. Carlton obliged, shaking off Torre just once, for a slider that turned into a homer by Andy Kosco. It was the only run he allowed in a 2–1, complete game victory.

  Carlton abandoned the pitch in 1971—“Steve Ditches ‘Made in Japan’ Slider,” a Sporting News headline said—and while he won 20 games, he was not much better than he had been the year before. Unwilling to meet his demands for a $10,000 raise the next spring, the Cardinals traded Carlton to the Phillies for Rick Wise. By the time the Cardinals reached the postseason again, in 1982, Carlton had finished four Cy Young Award–winning seasons.

  For the first, in 1972, he was reunited with McCarver, his personal catcher for much of the decade. The two were an unlikely pair—Carlton silent with the press, McCarver loquacious—but McCarver earned Carlton’s respect with his tactics at bridge, the card game. McCarver’s knack for remembering cards impressed Carlton, who figured he could apply the same skill to remembering pitches.

  The 1972 season was Carlton’s answer to Gibson’s 1968. Only once before had a pitcher won at least 27 games with 30 complete games, 300 strikeouts, and an ERA under 2.00—Walter Johnson, in 1912, when his Washington Senators won 91 games. The 1972 Phillies won just 59.

  Carlton never threw a no-hitter, but the best of his six career one-hitters came that April at Candlestick Park, in his third start for the Phillies. He allowed a leadoff single to Chris Speier and no other hits, facing just 28 batters, whiffing 14, walking one and needing only 103 pitches. He threw 20 sliders, 17 for strikes.

  “It was freezing that night,” McCarver says. “Worst playing conditions imaginable, but it didn’t bother Steve. Nothing bothered him. Nothing. Impervious to outside pressures.”

  The slider was back, forever. All along, Carlton was determined never to hurt his elbow. He made every start for the
Phillies for 13 years, and McCarver said he never met anyone stronger from the forearm to the hand. Dick Ruthven, a teammate, would ask Carlton how he threw the slider.

  “I hold it like this,” Carlton would say, “and I throw the shit out of it.”

  Carlton laughed as he told the story; it was a joke, but basically true. He would hook his wrist to set the pitch, holding his index and middle fingers less than a quarter-inch apart, angled diagonally across the stamp on the sweet spot. He wanted to feel as if he were holding the outer third of the ball and applying pressure equally with the two fingers. His thumb provided more pressure on the bottom seam, and he released the ball off the inside of his index finger.

  “The slider’s tough because the hitter has to come out and get it, because it looks like a fastball,” Carlton says. “So he has to start swinging, and then it starts breaking. So that’s where you get the check swings. Then you throw your fastball behind that, and then he’s behind it, because he’s coming out. He’s waiting for another rhythm to it.”

  When Carlton pitched, McCarver said, the two most important people on the field were third baseman Mike Schmidt and the first base umpire—Schmidt to field the ground balls pulled by right-handers, and the umpire to call strikes on their check swings. The pitch was his ultimate finisher.

  Carlton would do this well past his thirty-fifth birthday. His four best strikeout rates (8.5 or more per nine innings) came from 1980 to 1983, his age 35–38 seasons. It was the payoff from his punishing daily workouts with Gus Hoefling, a strength coach who came to Philadelphia when the Eagles traded for quarterback Roman Gabriel, his star pupil, from the Rams in 1973. Carlton was already a black belt in Shotokan karate and found, in Hoefling, a martial arts guru who could help him ward off the dangers he had seen in St. Louis. Carlton would churn his elbow in buckets of rice or ball-bearings. He did pushups with his fingertips. Gibson had told him, “If you throw, it’s gonna hurt.” Carlton wanted to be indestructible, with Hoefling’s help.

  “We gained strength in areas that most people didn’t know how to exploit as trainers,” Carlton says. “We went after weak tissue all the time, which would be the ulnar regions. We made that stronger, more able to take the stress. That was the whole idea.”

  Walter Johnson had held the career strikeout record at the end of every season from 1921 through 1982. But in 1983, the year of that pennant-clinching victory over the Dodgers, Carlton was the all-time king. Nolan Ryan took over for good the next season, but right to the end, at age 43 in 1988, Carlton’s elbow withstood all those sliders. He finished with 329 victories and 4,136 strikeouts, and his 709 starts are the most among left-handers in the history of baseball.

  * * *

  ————

  For much of Carlton’s prime, American Leaguers had their own version of a merciless left-handed slider: Ron Guidry’s. Even when hitters knew he would throw it, Guidry could still frustrate the hell out of them.

  “What drove me nuts was his slider would start in the strike zone, and by the time I would swing at it, it almost hit my back foot—and I knew it was coming,” says Paul Molitor, who had 3,319 career hits. “I’d see Graig Nettles take two steps toward the third base line. He got the sign from the shortstop and I’d look and see him move over. So I knew it was a slider, I knew where it was going, and I still swung.”

  Molitor faced 14 pitchers more often than he faced Guidry. Yet Guidry struck him out more than anyone—20 times in just 74 plate appearances. Molitor is in the Hall of Fame and Guidry is not. But for Guidry’s first 10 full seasons in the majors, no pitcher won more games.

  From 1977 to 1986, Guidry earned 163 wins for the Yankees. He was third in that span in strikeouts, just behind two Hall of Famers (Nolan Ryan and Carlton) and just above two others (Phil Niekro and Bert Blyleven). Guidry, in his time, was in the pantheon of greats, Carlton in different-colored pinstripes.

  “Their sliders would come with such late break and with such force,” says Ken Singleton, who faced both in their primes and hit .180 against them. “Other guys would throw sliders and they would hang, you could see them, you could hit them. I was a good breaking-ball hitter, too, but theirs had such velocity, such late break, that by the time you committed, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.”

  Their careers unfolded differently. Carlton had 57 victories by his twenty-sixth birthday; Guidry had none. He had pitched college ball in his beloved home state of Louisiana and then struggled to assert himself in the majors. After a bad Guidry relief outing in August 1976, a raging George Steinbrenner offered this morale-booster: “You will never be able to pitch in this league.”

  The remark infuriated Guidry, because Steinbrenner said it in front of the Yankees’ general manager, Gabe Paul. But it would have been accurate had Steinbrenner added “unless you develop a slider.” Until he did, Guidry really was going nowhere. He knew he had to find a second pitch, and quickly.

  “All I knew was, ‘OK, look, I’m here, this is where I want to be, I can’t waste time,’ ” Guidry says. “I had to learn everything I needed to in a short time.”

  Guidry’s flat breaking ball fooled no one, and he had abandoned his high school curveball because it did not work with his mechanics. Guidry’s left arm looked like a catapult as he delivered a pitch, and he could not throw a curve from that slot.

  But frustration with a bullpen role turned into opportunity. Guidry learned pitching philosophy from one Yankee reliever, Dick Tidrow—“pitch ’em low, bust ’em high”—and learned his slider from another, Sparky Lyle, who threw with the same over-the-top technique.

  Lyle had come to the majors with the Red Sox. As a farmhand, he became intrigued by the slider when Ted Williams, then a spring training coach, told him it was the best pitch in baseball. Williams told Lyle how a slider spins, but said the rest was up to him.

  Lyle would lie in bed with a ball in his hand, wondering how to do it. He was in Double-A, living in a converted garage, and awoke at three one morning with the answer. Like Paul McCartney dreaming the melody for “Yesterday” and bolting to a piano to preserve it, Lyle dashed outside and tried his new slider against the wall of the garage. It was such an easy game to play.

  Lyle introduced the pitch in a bullpen session the next day, drilled his catcher in the foot, and knew he had a keeper. The next season was his first of five for the Red Sox until 1972, when they traded him to the Yankees for a utility man named Danny Cater. A half century after the Babe Ruth sale, the Red Sox still hadn’t learned. Lyle went on to win a Cy Young Award for the Yankees and teach Guidry his best pitch.

  “Don’t let it fly at the end,” Lyle told him. “Pull it down.”

  By using the same arm action, Guidry could mimic Lyle while throwing the pitch harder than his mentor. Guidry was just 5 foot 11, 161 pounds—a whippet, Singleton called him—and could not relate to the pain that bigger men like Gibson endured from the slider.

  “Nothing happens to the elbow,” Guidry says. “I mean, it’s almost the same as throwing your fastball. It’s all thrown with your wrist; it was not done with your elbow. If you find any pictures, you’ll see my elbow and Sparky’s elbow, they’re basically in a straight movement. Our arms are not bent to be able to throw it.”

  Guidry would need surgery to remove a bone chip from his elbow in 1989, and he never pitched again. But by then, he had done enough to one day have his number 49 retired by the Yankees. He made four All-Star teams, set the team’s single-game strikeout record (18), and followed Lyle as the AL Cy Young Award winner in 1978.

  Guidry went 25–3 that season, beating the Red Sox at Fenway Park in a one-game playoff for the division title. Danny Cater had long since retired.

  * * *

  ————

  U.S. Route 167 passes through Lafayette, Louisiana, Guidry’s hometown, and winds north through the state past Ruston, the hometown of another All-Star pitcher born
in 1950: J. R. Richard. His first target was not a catcher’s glove.

  “How I got started, I used to kill birds and rabbits with rocks,” Richard says. “My thing was just to throw, throw, throw every day. I would get a pocket of rocks and just go out to the woods throwing.”

  Sometimes Richard would tape rags together, or throw tennis balls. But mostly he threw those rocks. He did not play organized baseball until he was 15 years old. He threw four pitches, he said: fast, faster, fastest—and a slider he learned from a pitching manual he found along the side of U.S. 167.

  “In the country, sitting on the porch every day, twiddling your thumbs, sometimes you just take off and go for a walk,” he says. “Basically just something to do to keep you busy, if you weren’t working in the fields. There was divine intervention.”

  Richard picked up the manual and took it home. He was not much of a reader then, and would travel many more roads before devoting his life to the Bible. At 15, that pitching book was his scripture, its descriptions and illustrations his guiding lights. The slider had been a completely unfamiliar pitch until he found the book. He absorbed its lessons and improvised on his own.

  “We had a rock in the country called a coal rock, which was a round rock, and I used to practice a lot with that and see the movement of the rock, see what it was doing,” Richard says. “A lot of stuff I learned on my own. The fastball came naturally.”

  Richard’s high school slider had a wider, slower break than the one he featured in the majors. But it still left an indelible impression on those who saw him at Lincoln High in Ruston, where he never lost a game. The Astros made him the second overall pick of the 1969 draft.

  “If you ask me who had the best slider I ever saw, it would probably be J. R. Richard,” says Pat Gillick, the Hall of Fame executive who scouted for the Astros in the 1960s. “I was down there when we signed him and I thought he had the hardest slider, and the hardest slider to pick up, that I can ever remember.”