K
Page 6
In 1962, though, Terry had seized Game 7 from the start. Like Bumgarner, he had thrown nine innings to win Game 5, but his team had lost Game 6 to force a decisive finale. Because of rainouts, Terry started on five days’ rest for Game 7, and carried a 1–0 lead into the bottom of the ninth at Candlestick Park. After a leadoff single and two strikeouts, Willie Mays doubled to right.
Like Juan Perez, Roger Maris hit the cutoff man to keep the tying run at third. And like Salvador Perez, the next batter had already homered in the World Series off the pitcher he would face with Game 7 in the balance. It was Willie McCovey, and even with a base open, Terry told manager Ralph Houk that he wanted to pitch to him.
An intentional walk to McCovey would have loaded the bases for Orlando Cepeda, another future Hall of Famer Terry feared even more. He also knew that this strategy had backfired for the Dodgers in the playoff to decide the NL pennant; after an intentional walk had loaded the bases in the ninth inning, Stan Williams walked in the go-ahead run. With an NL umpire behind the plate for Game 7, Terry guessed, he would have little margin for error against Cepeda.
With so many factors to consider, Terry says his mind did not flash back to 1960, and the possibility that he might—again!—give up a homer to end Game 7. He had house and car payments back in New York, with a wife, one child, and a baby on the way. That was pressure enough.
“I thought about the money difference,” Terry says. “The winners got $12,000 and the losers got $8,000. I was making about $40,000. We needed the money in those days.”
Terry did think about the homer McCovey had pulled off him at Candlestick in Game 2. He had thrown a cut fastball, inside but low enough for McCovey to extend his long arms. Terry resolved to avoid that spot this time.
“I wanted it high, in here,” Terry says, shaking his hand near the chest of his pinstriped jersey on Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium in 2016. Terry noticed his second baseman, Bobby Richardson, shading McCovey to his left—too far, Terry thought, but he knew better than to challenge his infielders’ instincts. “They know how your ball’s coming out.”
McCovey hit a line drive, right to the spot Richardson was standing.
“I saw some film later on, from behind,” Terry says. “I came in, he leaned back and got on it with his hands and put a lot of topspin on it—whack! He really hit it hard, but I thought, ‘I got a man over there somewhere,’ and boy, it was right at him. It wasn’t like he made a sensational play.
“It was a fastball—crowded him,” Terry says, smiling. “And I said, ‘Thanks, Abner Doubleday, for inventing the game with a second baseman.’ ”
* * *
————
The San Francisco Giants never did win a World Series until Bumgarner came around. By 2014, they stood to capture their third in five seasons, if only he could solve Salvador Perez. Bumgarner, too, remembered the homer from earlier in the World Series, but he did not change his plan of attack: fastballs with conviction.
While backing up the plate on Gordon’s hit, Bumgarner and catcher Buster Posey talked briefly about Perez. He is naturally aggressive, a tendency that would only be heightened with a chance to hit a walk-off homer in Game 7 of the World Series. They could use that impulse against him.
“Perez is a good fastball hitter, but Bum is so good at elevating the ball when he wants to,” Posey says. “We both felt confident that in that situation, we were going to try to play off of Perez’s anxiousness. That’s somewhat instinctual, to know the type of hitter and say we probably can expand here. Could he have still got a hit? Sure. But we felt like that was the best way to attack him. The fastball’s a high-percentage pitch, probably the lowest risk, because you figure his command is gonna be the best as well.”
Thirty regular starters threw harder in 2014 than Bumgarner, whose average fastball was 92.1 miles an hour. But his superior confidence in the pitch was deeply ingrained; he threw nothing else at South Caldwell High School in Hudson, North Carolina, but was still drafted tenth overall by the Giants, at age 17. With Gordon on third in Game 7, no other pitch made sense.
“It’s a little bit of a pride thing,” Bumgarner explains. “I’m not like all these young guys that come up here throwing 100, but I like my fastball and I like to throw it. So a little bit of that, and we knew he was going to be aggressive and chase. So if I could throw it up there, we had a good feeling about it.
“We could have thrown a curveball and bounced it in front of the plate, and I think we might’ve gotten him on that, too, but then you’re putting a little bit more on Buster. I trust Buster, he blocks almost all of them for me, but you never know. What if it hits the corner of the plate and bounces over his head or something stupid like that? That’s not the way that you want to blow the lead right there.
“Could have thrown him the cutter or whatever, but you’re taking a chance on leaving something over the plate and hanging it, and then bouncing it again. So it was the easy decision for us.”
Bumgarner’s first pitch sailed up and away, letter-high at 92 mph, and Perez swung through it for a strike. For the second pitch, Bumgarner tried an even higher fastball, over the plate but even with Perez’s neck. Perez didn’t bite on that, but Bumgarner went up again with his third pitch, about shoulder-high. Perez took the bait for another swinging strike.
One more strike could end it now, and Bumgarner poked his left index finger to his left nostril, blowing a snot rocket to the ground. This seemed almost too easy. Would Perez be so antsy that he’d go for a pitch over the plate, but up by his helmet? No. He did swing at the fifth pitch, armpit-high, and fouled it back.
Two balls, two strikes, five fastballs in a row, all at 92 mph. The plate umpire, Jeff Nelson, pointed at Bumgarner. Posey balled his right hand into a fist between his legs, then pounded his glove and bent the top of the pocket. He sprang into a half-crouch as Bumgarner delivered his 291st pitch of the World Series, spreading his arms wide and stepping toward first in his smooth, unmistakable style. Posey held his target up around Perez’s chest—and Bumgarner missed his spot.
The pitch split the plate, above the belt but not as high as Bumgarner had wanted it. The pitch Perez had hit for a homer, in Game 1, was low enough to be a called strike, Bumgarner thought. This pitch, he says, was just high enough to be a ball. “It wasn’t a whole lot different,” he conceded, but that little bit meant everything.
Bumgarner found one extra mile per hour for this pitch, at 93 mph, but Perez was still too eager. He popped it up, in foul ground, to third baseman Pablo Sandoval. Posey flung his glove and mask to the sky and embraced Bumgarner as teammates swarmed from all directions. Champions, again.
“I think I got too excited,” Perez said the next spring. “That’s why I swing at a lot of pitches up. But now I got experience. I know what happened.”
A year later, Perez would follow Bumgarner as the World Series MVP, hitting .364 in the Royals’ triumph over the Mets. By then, he had also had his rematch with Bumgarner, again with Posey catching, at the 2015 All-Star Game in Cincinnati. This time Bumgarner used all his pitches and struck out Perez on a curveball. Funny thing, though—the third strike skipped past Posey, and Perez reached first base safely.
Had that happened in the World Series, Gordon would have scored to tie the game. Instead, when it had mattered most, when the stakes were the highest they could possibly be, Bumgarner had chosen the fastball. He had chosen wisely.
* * *
————
Pitching has always been a delicate balance of velocity and command. More of one can mean less of the other. In the early days, the pitcher was merely a tool for initiating action, a delivery device to place the ball in a specific spot. Throwing too hard would impede that goal if pitchers were wild, overpowering, or both.
An 1864 article in the New York Clipper—cited by Peter Morris in A Game of Inches, a treasure of research from 2006—reminds ump
ires that the pitcher cannot lift his foot until the ball leaves his hand. The desired result, the story said, was less speed, greater accuracy, “and the transfer of the interest of a match from the pitchers to the batsmen and outerfielders.”
Pitching then looked almost nothing like pitching now. In 1884, the National League finally allowed overhand pitching, from a six-foot-by-six-foot square, 50 feet from the plate. Try to imagine Randy Johnson pitching like that. He can’t.
“You think you know something, and you go to the Hall of Fame and you see how the game started off,” Johnson said, after a Cooperstown tour in 2015. “There was no pitcher’s mound there. There was a box—there was a box!—and you could move from one side of the box to the other side of the box. I don’t remember how big, but you could run in this box. Not that you’re gonna run far, because it’s a small box.”
That is the origin of the term “back through the box,” to describe a hitter lashing a ball straight over the pitcher’s mound. Tony Mullane, a big winner for the Reds in the nineteenth century, was known as “The Apollo of the Box.” The king of the box, in those days, was Old Hoss Radbourn, who was 59–12 with a 1.38 ERA in 1884. He logged nearly 700 of the 1,000 or so innings pitched by his Providence Grays.
“Radbourn was said to stand in the right-hand rear corner, turn his back on the batter similar to the way Luis Tiant did it in the 1970s, and then take a hop, skip and deliver his pitch from the left side of the box,” wrote Craig R. Wright and Tom House in The Diamond Appraised. “His motion was much like a modern shot-putter’s turn.”
A Giants pitcher of the 1890s, Amos Rusie of Mooresville, Indiana, threw so hard that they changed the game to account for him. Rusie—known as the Hoosier Thunderbolt—led the league in strikeouts and walks by such a wide margin that a pitcher’s rubber, located 60 feet, 6 inches from the plate, replaced the box for good in 1893. Strikeouts fell by 44 percent that season.
By then, a new pitching star had just begun to emerge: Denton True Young, known as Cy for a wheeling, cyclone-like delivery in which he hid the ball from the hitter. Big for his time—6 foot 2, 210 pounds—he set nearly every longevity record with a disciplined lifestyle forged on a farm in Ohio as a boy. As he wrote in Sporting Life, in 1908: “A man who is not willing to work from dewy morn until weary eve should not think about becoming a pitcher.”
That quote is not inscribed on his annual award for pitching excellence, but maybe it should be. In any case, while Young did not specialize in strikeouts—he ranks first in innings pitched but twenty-first in strikeouts—he understood which pitch was most important.
“My favorite pitch,” he said, “was a whistler right under the chin.”
Young led the AL in strikeouts in 1901, the league’s first season. Then Rube Waddell took over, joining the A’s the next June. For the rest of the decade, no one came close to Waddell in strikeouts, or eccentricities. He was known for leaving the dugout during games to chase fire trucks passing by the ballpark. Sam Crawford, a hitting star of the time, told Lawrence Ritter in The Glory of Their Times that Waddell threw so hard, he would have to pour ice water over his arm before games. “I’ve got so much speed, I’ll burn up the catcher’s glove if I don’t let up a bit,” Waddell would say.
Fastballs inspire that kind of colorful imagery. As he built his legend in the Negro Leagues, in the 1920s and ’30s, Satchel Paige mesmerized hitters with his “trouble ball,” a general term for his two fastballs—a “bee ball” that stayed on a level plane and a “jump ball” he said rose as much as six inches. Paige was such a control artist, he was said to warm up with a stick of chewing gum for a plate; he practiced hitting the corners of the wrapper. It wasn’t the only home plate substitute he could find at a drugstore.
In 1971, when Paige was elected to the Hall of Fame, he recalled his tryout for Bill Veeck with the Indians in 1948: “He asked me to throw at a cigarette as a plate, and I threw four out of five over it.”
Other Negro League stars, like Smokey Joe Williams and Bullet Joe Rogan, had fastballs baked into their nicknames. (Williams inflicted so much soreness on his poor catchers’ palms that he needed two catchers per game.) In scouting reports for the Hall of Fame, Buck O’Neil compared Williams to Walter Johnson and Rogan to Bob Feller. Johnson was known as the Big Train, and Feller as Rapid Robert.
From 1902 to 1948, Waddell, Johnson, Lefty Grove, and Feller took turns as the AL strikeout king, combining for 32 strikeout titles. (Dazzy Vance won seven in a row in the NL, for Brooklyn in the 1920s.) Grove did it in each of his first seven seasons with the A’s, starting in 1925, and collected nine league ERA crowns. He built his speed by throwing rocks as a boy in Maryland, and a humorist of the time, Arthur “Bugs” Baer, said Grove could throw a lamb chop past a wolf.
“Did you ever see speed like that in a human arm?” marveled Connie Mack, owner and manager of the A’s, in spring training of 1930. “Why, it gives you a sore arm to watch him, doesn’t it?”
We’ll never really know who was fastest, because it took until 1974 for radar guns to reliably measure velocity; Danny Litwhiler, a former major league outfielder, popularized their use while coaching at Michigan State. Before then, the best pitchers could do was engage in primitive speed contests; Feller threw fastballs alongside a moving motorcycle and tested himself on photoelectric Army devices. He claimed Johnson was fastest, anyway.
“Johnson was so great,” Feller wrote in his memoir, “that he almost belongs in his own Hall of Fame.”
* * *
————
Let’s face it: you’ll never be Walter Johnson, but you do have a fastball. Pick up a baseball, throw it, and there it is. It is probably very slow, relative to major leaguers’ fastballs, but whatever else you throw, this pitch will be your fastest and straightest. Typically, the catcher signals for it with the index finger, the ol’ number one. If it’s especially fast, it’s a heater, but with apologies to Bruce Springsteen, it’s never a “speedball”—and a hitter who swings and misses it doesn’t really look like a fool, boy. When a hitter guesses wrong and swings hard at a puttering off-speed pitch, then he looks like a fool. If he can’t catch up to a fastball, he’s simply lost the game’s most primitive one-on-one battle.
“George Brett hit some of the shots heard ’round the world off me,” Goose Gossage says. “But, man, that was the greatest part of what I did, challenging those great hitters when they know it’s gonna be the fuckin’ fastball!”
Gossage remains as brash as his old fastball, slinging opinions with such unsparing force that the Yankees, in 2018, stopped inviting him to spring training. Win enough macho duels, though, and you also might develop a personality to match.
“There’s no better feeling as a pitcher than to just tell the guy what’s coming—‘Here, fastball, get in the box, let’s go,’ and they still couldn’t hit it,” says Frank Tanana, the major league strikeout leader in 1975. “You can be loud when you have that kind of stuff, and have the immaturity to go with it.”
By the end of his career, when he teased hitters with curveballs and changeups, Tanana was a changed man, a devout Christian with a gentle nature off the mound. (He would sign autographs with the inscription “Jesus Loves You!”) But Tanana was tough enough to grind out 616 career starts, most without great stuff. Only 17 pitchers have ever started more games, mostly Hall of Famers but also a few like him: Tommy John, Jim Kaat, and Jamie Moyer.
No pitcher has ever allowed more homers than Moyer, and John once gave up 287 hits in a season while striking out only 65 (think about that). Kaat led his league in hits allowed three seasons in a row, but he also won 60 games in that stretch, including one in the World Series. All three pitched past their forty-fourth birthdays, sacrificing a few miles per hour for a lot of durability.
“Sometimes a dad’ll come up to me and say, ‘Hey, my son’s a junior in high school and they’ve got him clocked at 91!’ ” Kaat
says. “And I’ll say, ‘Really? Teach him how to pitch at 86.’ ”
Kaat wishes teams would take their hard-throwing prospects and tell them to work three innings without topping 90 miles an hour. (Think of the movie Speed, but on a mound.) Then, he believes, they would understand the art of their craft and learn to keep their best fastballs in reserve for critical moments, giving hitters a new and startling look. But times have changed.
“Somebody asked me, ‘How many times in your career do you think you threw the ball as hard as you could throw it?’ And I said zero,” Kaat says, explaining that a showoff might get hurt and lose his spot on the staff. “We wanted to throw for rhythm and control and condition our arm that way.”
There have always been exceptions, of course, pitchers who threw their hardest at all times. Nolan Ryan, the career leader in strikeouts and walks, exerted himself like a short reliever yet somehow threw more innings than anyone born after 1887 except Phil Niekro, a knuckleballer.
“I never had the ability to back off my fastball,” Ryan says. “I always pitched maximum effort.”
Ryan had a paper route as a teenager, rolling The Houston Post by hand every morning, which helped build his shoulder muscles. Then again, he flung the papers from the car window with his left arm, and we’ve never seen an outbreak of paperboys becoming strikeout kings. Ryan knew he was an outlier, crediting his ability to throw hard to God, and a perfect alignment of genetics and will. He actually expected Steve Carlton to wind up with the career strikeout record, guessing that Carlton would pitch longer because he was left-handed and famous for conditioning.
Before the 1980 season, when he left the Angels for Houston as a free agent, Ryan said he asked for only a three-year contract, to take him through age 35. He actually got a four-year, $4.5 million deal, making him the first player ever paid $1 million per season. But he had no idea he would keep pumping fastballs for well more than a decade.