K

by Tyler Kepner

  “Power pitchers faded away once they got in their early thirties,” he says, “and I had no reason to think I was going to be any different.”

  Ryan’s elbow finally gave out at the Seattle Kingdome on September 22, 1993. Pitching for the Rangers, he served up a grand slam to Dann Howitt (the last of the five homers in Howitt’s short career), and then departed before he could finish his last batter, Dave Magadan.

  “I was like, ‘Something’s not right,’ ” Magadan says. “He was barely getting the ball to the plate. Howitt hit the grand slam, then I came up and it went ball 1, ball 2. He threw a strike, and I think at that point he walked off the mound. The trainer didn’t even go out there. I was like, ‘Oh, we might not ever see him again.’ It was sad.”

  It was sad because there may never be another pitcher like Ryan, though today’s all-out, all-the-time generation will try. More common, and more effective, was the artistic approach of Greg Maddux. In the rare times Maddux fell behind in the count, hitters knew they might get a fastball. But it was not the same fastball every time.

  “It may be only a B.P. fastball,” Tony Gwynn once wrote in a scouting report for ESPN.com. “He will take something off the pitch, make the hitter get out in front and force him to hit the ball weakly.”

  While this was not especially effective against Gwynn, who hit .415 off Maddux, it highlights the value in changing speeds and giving up power for command. In the 1960s and ’70s, Catfish Hunter was a master of this for the A’s and Yankees. Early in games, Hunter would nip around the edges of the plate to establish the umpire’s strike zone. Then he would work the corners with precision, changing speeds on the fastball to bait hitters into weak contact. Hunter did not throw hard, but few have ever used a fastball better.

  “He did not have any exceptional pitch,” says Dave Duncan, who caught him with the A’s. “He was exceptional because he could hit a gnat in the ass.”

  To Duncan, the pitcher most like Hunter was Tom Seaver, whom he coached near the end of Seaver’s career with the Chicago White Sox. Jim Evans, an AL umpire then, tells a story that illustrates the way Seaver thought.

  “I was working the plate in Detroit in 1985,” Evans says. “We stayed at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn; we generally didn’t stay where the clubs stayed, but for some reason the White Sox were there. So I was sitting at the bar after the game, and Seaver tapped me on the shoulder: ‘Hey, nice job back there tonight, thank you. I just think you missed one pitch.’ ”

  It was a 1–1 fastball to Kirk Gibson in the middle innings, Seaver explained, and Evans had called it a strike. Nothing remarkable, Evans thought. So why, hours later, was it on Seaver’s mind?

  “I don’t want you to call that pitch a strike,” Seaver said, as Evans recalls it. “That was a mistake. I got it up too high, like a ball or two above the waist, and I don’t want any batter to get used to swinging at that pitch. My fastball is still my best pitch, my bread-and-butter, but if I keep throwing that one up there, they’re gonna kill me. I can’t get away with that pitch, and if the umpire’s calling it a strike, they’re gonna start swinging at it and I’ll get in trouble.”

  Command is not everything, but it matters more than sheer speed. The longtime pitching coach Don Cooper, who helped guide the White Sox to the 2005 title, ranks his priorities in this order: location, movement, velocity. A star pupil, Mark Buehrle, made more than 30 starts for 15 years in a row by following those principles. His fastball averaged about 86 mph.

  “We’re trying to turn guys into professional glove-hitters, because no matter what style you are, you still have to do that,” Cooper says. “If you can do that with 95 or 96, even better. But the common denominator is hitting the glove.”

  The pitcher who tries too hard to reach back for more velocity often works against his interests. The veteran starter Dan Straily says he throws some of his best fastballs to pitchers, who pose such little threat that he simplifies his mechanics and hits his spot easily. When a power hitter comes up, though, pitchers often try to overdo it. With the Marlins in 2017, Straily said, he saw too many pitchers foolishly try to blow heat past Giancarlo Stanton.

  “We faced a guy the other day: 90, 91, 90, 91, all on the corners,” Straily said that summer. “Giancarlo steps in the box and it’s 95, 96—but everything’s right down the middle.”

  It is possible to be Picasso with a machine gun, as reliever Dan Plesac colorfully described Curt Schilling’s fastball command to writer Jayson Stark. But such artistry and power form a rare combination indeed; nobody born between 1857 and 1985 can top Schilling’s career strikeout-to-walk ratio of 4.38-to-1.

  * * *

  ————

  The Kansas City Royals visited Yankee Stadium in early May 2016. The last time they had been to New York, the previous November, they celebrated a championship at Citi Field. Chris Young had beaten the Mets in relief in the World Series opener, and pitched well in his Game 4 start in Queens. He was almost 37, but the Royals eagerly re-signed him for two years and about $12 million.

  Young was something of an anomaly. A former Princeton center, he stands 6 foot 10 but threw his fastball below 90 miles an hour. Yet Young was still hard to hit, with a fastball that stayed true through the strike zone much longer than most pitchers’ did. In the lingo of the game, Young had a sneaky fastball, good finish. His pitches had life—that final, forceful burst that both fools and overwhelms a hitter.

  “Life, to me, is almost a mystical concept,” says Alan Jaeger, a highly regarded pitching trainer in Southern California, speaking unironically. “Some people seem to have more life than others and they might be throwing the same velocity.”

  This night, though, Young’s pitches were dead on arrival. The Yankees battered him for five home runs, and he was gone by the third inning. Young had not lost his ability to throw at his peak velocity. But his ERA was 6.68, and nothing was working. He didn’t know it then, but Young would not win another start for the rest of his career.

  “Last year I could throw an 86-mile-an-hour fastball with life and miss my spot, and the guy would swing and miss or foul it off,” he said that night. “Now I throw it 89 without life, and they hit it in the stands. That’s the difference. It’s always been more about life than velocity. You can see it in their swings.”

  Life has long been used to differentiate fastballs—a tiebreaker, of sorts, for some of the greats. Luke Sewell, a catcher from 1921 to 1942, used it to distinguish Bob Feller from Lefty Grove.

  “Grove’s fast one actually was past the batter and into the catcher’s mitt quicker than Bobby’s,” he said. “Feller’s fast one, though, had more life to it.”

  Every hitter in the majors can handle velocity. Pitchers always have the advantage, on a pitch-by-pitch basis, because batters get three strikes and nobody hits .500. But give a hitter enough looks at a straight fastball, and he’ll drive it somewhere hard. Gary Sheffield speaks for his brethren when he says, “If you ask any hitter, they would rather face a guy throwing 98 than a guy throwing 92 with filth.”

  Filth means anything deceptive—not just breaking balls, but fastballs that move differently than most. With modern analytics, we know which pitchers are more likely to survive with high fastballs. We know that while J. A. Happ and Koji Uehara do not throw hard, their fastballs spin so much that they don’t drop at the same rate as most pitchers’ fastballs.

  To hitters who see thousands and thousands of fastballs fall a certain way, a pitch with an unexpected trajectory can be baffling. You might yell at your TV when your favorite hitter swings through a high, slow fastball. But there’s more in play than it seems.

  “When they say ‘He’s got that good, riding fastball,’ I just think it doesn’t fall off,” Jason Giambi says. “With most guys, gravity will kind of take hold of it. Some guys just get those extra rotations, whether it stays on their fingers a little bit longer, or they’ve go
t a release point so they get that true plane—it’s what you want. I mean, no pitcher wants that ball to fall into the strike zone. If you can keep it riding high, kind of above that belt area, you’re gonna get a lot of strikeouts.”

  You’ll also get plenty of balls a hitter just misses. When a pitch lacks life, Mike Mussina says, it seems to just barely make it to the catcher, no matter how fast it might be. But when it’s lively, it seems capable of carrying straight through the catcher, the umpire, and the backstop. Hitters can’t do much with it, even when they connect.

  “Something caused that guy to miss that ball by a sixteenth of an inch,” Mussina says, “so it’s a fly ball to center instead of a ball off the wall or a homer.”

  Don Sutton—the Mussina of his era—threw a level-plane fastball that Tim McCarver found impossible to hit squarely; he faced him 70 times, with two extra-base hits and countless pop outs. Jim Palmer, a contemporary, conceded that while fastballs might not rise, some simply do not sink. He adds, assuredly, “I could make the ball go up. Backspin.”

  For most of baseball history, the rising fastball was taken as fact. Bob Shaw, who pitched 11 years in the majors and beat Sandy Koufax in the 1959 World Series, wrote a pitching manual in 1972 that described how to throw a four-seam fastball. The pitch is easier to control, he writes, and the seams blend together visually, to make the ball look smaller.

  “If you can apply enough spin and velocity while gripping the ball across the seams, you can overcome the downward force of gravity and make the ball rise,” Shaw asserts. He adds, with no equivocation, that “throwing across the seams produces vertical or upward movement.”

  This is a fairly consistent theme for fastball pitchers, especially of Shaw’s generation and earlier. Don’t tell Bob Gibson a fastball can’t rise.

  “Ah, those are scientists,” he says. “They also used to say it didn’t break, too. Oh yeah, it goes up. They never had a bat.”

  In Fastball, an enchanting 2016 documentary directed by Jonathan Hock, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Eddie Murray insist the fastball can rise. In Jane Leavy’s definitive Sandy Koufax biography, from 2002, Jim Bunning sneers at the theory that the rise on Koufax’s fastball was an optical illusion: “Physics is full of shit,” he says. Leavy also quotes Frank Robinson’s advice for his Baltimore teammates before facing Koufax in the 1966 World Series: “If it starts at the belt, take it because it’s going to choke you.”

  Pat Gillick, the Hall of Fame executive, swears that a fastball can rise. As a minor league pitcher for the Orioles in the early 1960s, he was teammates with Steve Dalkowski, the almost mythical left-hander who fanned 1,324 hitters (and walked nearly as many) in 970 minor league innings. Dalkowski never reached the majors, but Gillick—who became one of most astute scouting minds in baseball history—can still picture his hopping fastball. He says only one catcher, Cal Ripken Sr., could handle it.

  “What was funny about him, he wasn’t wild in and out, he was wild up and down,” Gillick says. “You could tell Steve, ‘Look, I want you to throw a pitch 58 feet,’ and he would attempt to throw a pitch 58 feet and it would be over the catcher’s head. The ball rose so much between the pitcher’s mound and home plate.”

  It literally rose?

  “Oh yeah, absolutely,” Gillick insists. “Absolutely. Well, you know, when you hit a home run, you put backspin on the ball and the ball carries out of the ballpark. And he had so much spin on it, so much rotation on the ball, the ball just kept carrying and kept rising.”

  Don’t take Gillick’s word for it? How about the man who threw more innings and won more games than any lefty in history? In The Head Game, Warren Spahn tells Roger Kahn, “If you throw enough and put enough backspin on the pitch, you get a fastball that goes against gravity.” Spahn compared a fastball’s flight to an airplane lifting off. “If a physicist wants to argue,” he concludes, “let’s just say backspin levels off the baseball.”

  An actual physicist, Robert K. Adair, addressed the topic in his book, The Physics of Baseball, taking the wise approach of respecting the perspective of the men on the field while explaining what they actually see. Like the curveball, he explains, the hopping fastball makes a smooth arc—but gets half of its hop in the final 15 feet of its journey. By then, the hitter has begun his swing and cannot adjust.

  “Such a hopping fastball, thrown with a lot of backspin, does not ‘rise’ in the sense that it increases its height above the ground as it passes the batter, but it does rise with respect to the trajectory it would have without the spin….If the batter bases his swing on the trajectory of the ball with the lesser spin but the pitcher has put extra spin on the ball, he will complain that the ball ‘hopped’ right over his bat—and I would agree.”

  Adair would get no argument from Eddie Perez, a Braves catcher who pinch hit against Randy Johnson with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning on May 18, 2004. Johnson had retired 26 in a row, but Perez was a nemesis who had several career hits off his fastball. With two strikes, Perez expected a slider.

  The catcher, Robby Hammock, set his target thigh-high, on the inside corner. Johnson fired a laser above the belt, outside, close to 100 miles an hour. Perez swung hard in futility. Perfect game.

  “Even if I was looking for that fastball, I wouldn’t have hit it anyway,” he says. “You see it as a strike and all of a sudden…”

  Perez makes an upward slash with his right hand, like a stage actor taking a bow. You know, I remind him, scientists say that kind of movement is impossible.

  “No, it goes that way, too,” Perez says, and who am I to argue? I believe in science, but I’d like to believe in baseball mythology, too.

  * * *

  ————

  History remembers 1968 as the year of the pitcher. Denny McLain won 31 games, Bob Gibson had a 1.12 earned run average, Don Drysdale threw 58⅔ consecutive scoreless innings, and only one American League batter, Carl Yastrzemski, hit .300.

  The season’s strikeout leader is less celebrated: the Indians’ Sam McDowell, with 283. He finished his first inning of the year by fanning the Angels’ Don Mincher with a 3–2 slider. When Mincher came up in the third inning, McDowell ran the count full again. Mincher expected a slider, but McDowell, a tall lefty with the best fastball of his era, had other plans.

  “I wanted a fastball up and in because the left-hander can’t hit a ball up and in,” McDowell says. “So I reared back and I was gonna throw as hard as I could, and it got away from me and hit him in the cheek. He immediately went to the hospital. I went and visited him and I was scared half to death. I never had that feeling in my life, and never want it again. It was total fear.”

  McDowell pitched 15 years in the majors, but by the end he had descended into alcoholism. He found sobriety in retirement and became a counselor, dedicating his life to helping the afflicted. He drew from that experience when I asked how it feels to unleash a fastball that crushes another man’s face.

  “You don’t really focus on the injury as much, once everything quiets down and gets back to the game, because now you’ve gotta focus on what you’re doing,” he says. “But after the game’s over with, I mean, it’s just scary as hell. It’s like—well, I won’t say it’s exactly like it, but one of the areas I work in is suicide prevention. And with each individual that’s attempting suicide, while you’re stabilizing him and getting him to come down so you can get him professional help, you’re trained to be focused on what to say, how to say it, what your reaction should be to his reaction. But I know that in every case I’ve ever had, when it’s all over with, and the individual is in the EMS or the ambulance, I just shake like you can’t believe, from the fear.”

  Fastballs have the power to kill. It happened to Ray Chapman, a Cleveland shortstop, on August 16, 1920, when facing the Yankees’ Carl Mays at the Polo Grounds. Chapman was a renowned bunter; he still holds the single-season record for sacrifice
hits, with 67 in 1917. As he led off the top of the fifth, under overcast skies after light showers at game time, Chapman moved his back foot, perhaps preparing to bunt down the first base line.

  Mays, a right-hander with a submarine delivery, noticed. He aimed his fastball up and in. Chapman, a right-handed batter, was not wearing a helmet—those would not come to baseball for three decades—and the ball struck his left temple. It caromed back to Mays, who thought for a moment that it had hit part of the bat. Mays tossed the ball to first baseman Wally Pipp, but in an instant, he knew what had really happened. Chapman slumped to the ground, blood pouring from his left ear. He staggered up, began walking to the center field clubhouse, flanked by teammates, then slumped as he neared second base.

  As Mike Sowell recounts with gripping detail in The Pitch That Killed, Mays, in the immediate aftermath, pointed to a rough spot on the surface of the ball. The umpire, Tommy Connolly, examined it and tossed it out of play, unaware that he was, effectively, trashing the murder weapon. After the game, Mays would say the ball had been wet.

  An ambulance took Chapman to nearby St. Lawrence Hospital, where doctors determined that Chapman had sustained a fracture extending 3½ inches to the base of his skull on the left side. A piece of bone, 1½ inches square, had pressed against his brain, which was shoved against the right side of his skull from the force of the impact with the ball. Blood clots had formed. Doctors operated for an hour and 15 minutes, but they could not save him.

  Jack Graney, an Indians outfielder and Chapman’s roommate, would go to his grave believing Mays had thrown at his friend on purpose. At the hospital, he had decried the danger of Mays’s pitch.

  “A batter has a chance to dodge the fastball thrown by an ordinary pitcher, but Mays has a freak delivery and his fastball has a sudden dip to it that never gives a batter a chance to dodge.”