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Mays learned of Chapman’s death the next morning, when a Yankees secretary came to his apartment to tell him the news. Later that day, he gave a statement to John F. Joyce, the assistant district attorney:
It was a straight fast ball and not a curved one. When Chapman came to bat, I got the signal for a straight fast ball, which I delivered. It was a little too close, and I saw Chapman duck his head in an effort to get out of the path of the ball. He was too late, however, and a second later he fell to the grounds. It was the most regrettable incident of my career, and I would give anything if I could undo what has happened.
Joyce ruled the death accidental, closing the investigation and releasing Mays from custody. He interviewed no witnesses, and the ball itself was gone, “mixed in with the other baseballs removed from play that day,” as Sowell writes. That in itself was somewhat rare in those days, and while lights were still years away, Chapman’s death changed the game by showing the consequences of using dark or defaced balls. In 1924, the NL used about 54,000 baseballs. In 1919, the year before Chapman’s beaning, it had used about 22,000.
Players today may know little, or nothing, of Mays and Chapman, but they don’t need to. The threat of a fastball to the head, and what could happen, is understood as a workplace hazard. Giambi compares the rare fastball to the head to the every-play brutality of the NFL.
“You end up getting smoked and you’re kind of out of it,” he says. “Everybody hears the stories about guys getting their careers ruined, but I don’t know—it’s just one of those things you don’t think about, I guess, like being a race-car driver and going fast. It’s just part of the game.”
If hitters cannot manage that fear, they cannot play. But pitchers must also find a way to cope with their power to inflict damage. Walter Johnson always understood that his pitches could be lethal, ever since his semipro days as a teenager out West. This is how a breathless fan described Johnson to the Senators in 1907:
“The boy throws so fast you can’t see ’em…and he knows where he is throwing the ball, because if he didn’t, there would be dead bodies strewn all over Idaho.”
Johnson was in the majors by the end of that season, on his way to perhaps the greatest career any pitcher has ever had: 417 wins, a 2.17 ERA, 3,509 strikeouts, and a record 110 shutouts. If he had a weakness, Ty Cobb explained late in life, it was a fear of himself.
“I know Johnson was afraid he would hit and kill a batter,” Cobb said in a 1958 Sporting News story. “When he saw me crowding the plate, he would steer his pitches a little bit wide. I got some hits off him only because I knew he pitched wide to anybody who crowded the plate off him.”
As Johnson told writer F. C. Lane in 1925: “The bean ball is one of the meanest things on earth and no decent fellow would use it….The bean ball pitcher is a potential murderer.”
Johnson was plenty dominant and proved himself to his manager right away. So did Feller, another phenom, who said in his memoir that it would have been “outrageously criminal or immoral” to deliberately bean a hitter.
“If a manager had ordered me to stick a ball in a batter’s ear,” Feller wrote, “I would have told him to stick it in his own ear.”
Yet for much of baseball history, pitchers often had to pass a manager’s toughness test. Spahn starred in the Boston Braves’ farm system in 1942, but the major league manager, Casey Stengel, ignored him because Spahn refused an order to throw at a hitter.
“Warren wouldn’t knock a guy down like Casey said,” Spahn’s teammate Lew Burdette told the former commissioner Fay Vincent in We Would Have Played for Nothing, an engrossing oral history of the era. “He said, ‘You’re gutless,’ and sent Warren back down to the minors.”
Spahn pitched just four games for a bad Braves team that season, then left for three years in the military. He went on to win 363 games and help the Braves beat Stengel’s Yankees in the 1957 World Series. Years later, Stengel finally apologized for the slight.
As the fastest pitch and the easiest to control, the fastball offered the perfect vessel for a primitive show of guts. As a rookie for the A’s in 1967, Rick Monday took a fastball to the face from Gary Peters of the White Sox. Fifty years later, Monday could press his index finger on the point of impact, an inch or so to the right of his nose, and still feel pain. Just before he blacked out, Monday said, he could hear Chicago’s manager, Eddie Stanky, screaming from the dugout.
“The next time I faced Peters was in Chicago again, and Stanky was yelling again: ‘Knock him down!’ ” Monday says. “The first pitch was right here [close to his head] and I took it. Next pitch, I ducked—it was over my head and broke the bat.”
After Monday swung at the next pitch, he says, he flung his bat at Peters to show he would not back down.
“Because they wanted to see, as a young player, how long it took you to get up, if you got up, and if you’d ever bother them again,” Monday says. “It was a game about intimidation, and you’d get away with it.”
Being mean was just part of a pitcher’s job. Most did not want to cause injury, but these were hardened competitors with little to no financial security, fighting for their careers. A high and tight fastball had a clear purpose, with no apologies.
“I wasn’t really throwing at them, but I didn’t care whether I hit them or not,” Bob Gibson says, distilling the intimidator’s mind-set. “Today they dare you to come inside, and if you do, the umpire kicks you out of the ballgame: ‘Oh, you’re throwing at somebody!’ No, I’m not throwing at him. If I threw at him, I would hit him.”
Doug Griffin, a Red Sox infielder, took a Nolan Ryan fastball to his helmet in April 1974. Griffin would one day tell the Herald News of Fall River, Massachusetts, that it felt “like a train going through my head, a loud whistle,” a sensation that lasted two weeks. He missed two months but singled twice off Ryan the next time they met.
To Ryan, inside pitching just isn’t what it used to be.
“Well, I think it’s been taken out of the game a lot,” he says. “What we considered pitching inside versus what they think pitching inside is today is totally different. And it seems to me like a lot of pitching inside nowadays is cutters. So it’s just changed; the game goes in phases like that.”
Ryan cited the aluminum bat as a critical factor in the way pitchers learn to use their fastball. Ryan, who was born in 1947, never once faced a hitter with an aluminum bat. In the mid-1990s, when he served as a volunteer coach for TCU, Ryan was startled by its impact.
“I had trouble getting my pitchers to pitch inside,” he says. “You could pitch inside and a guy can still hit the ball off the handle and be very successful, so a lot of pitchers didn’t want to pitch inside.”
Gossage sings lead in the chorus of former players lamenting what the game has become. But his crass language shouldn’t obscure his points. The best lesson he ever received, he said, came from the man he called the greatest player he ever saw: Dick Allen, the AL Most Valuable Player for the White Sox in 1972, when Gossage was a 20-year-old rookie teammate. Throwing hard came naturally to Gossage; as a boy in Colorado Springs, he would kill rabbits and birds with rocks, just like J. R. Richard. But Allen taught him how to intimidate a hitter.
“He said the best thing you can do is knock one of those fuckers on their ass,” Gossage says. “The rest of that bench over there is watching. They don’t want any part of you. They know you’re going to establish in.
“Dick taught me to pitch in, right here,” Gossage continues, meaning the hitter’s lead elbow, just above the inside edge of the plate. “He said, ‘As hitters, we see this pitch and we panic, because it looks as big as a basketball, and we’ve got to get the barrel there and God can’t hit it. We identify this ball away from us and we may be able to get a bat on it, foul it off, or hit a ball down the right field line. But this ball in here, we gear up, we see it, and we can’t hold up.’
“The last thing these kids think about today is the first thing hitters used to think about: ‘I might get knocked on my ass.’ These guys would get killed today, because they don’t even know how to get out of the way of a ball. They have no clue. And then they take exception to it and they stare out at the pitcher. Back in the day they would have gotten drilled.”
Gossage says he hit only three batters on purpose: Andres Galarraga, whom he just didn’t want to face; Ron Gant, who had admired a long foul ball; and Al Bumbry, who had taken out two teammates with hard slides. But when he beaned Ron Cey in the helmet in the 1981 World Series, leaving the concussed Cey in a heap at the plate, it jolted Gossage severely.
Like McDowell with Mincher, Gossage stayed in the moment; he was working, too busy to consider the consequences. But it took him a month or two into the next season, he said, to feel comfortable letting loose with his fastball.
“When he was laying in the batter’s box, I thought he was dead,” Gossage says, before pivoting to an essential truth that can never be legislated out of the game. “There are inherent risks in baseball.”
* * *
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One inherent risk is simply the act of throwing a baseball, repeatedly, at high speeds.
“It’s definitely an unnatural motion—overhead, throwing like that, putting that kind of stress on your shoulder and elbow,” Justin Verlander says. “I mean, the natural motion is softball, underhand. Those girls or guys throw every day, they throw 200 pitches a day, they practice as long as they want. We can’t do that, because we get really sore.”
Likewise, Mike Mussina is convinced that pitching overhand is unnatural.
“We don’t walk around with our arms over our head,” he says, drawing the same softball comparison as Verlander. “There’s no unnatural stress throwing a ball underhand, but there’s unbelievable unnatural stress throwing a ball overhand, and that’s just how it is. So every pitch you throw is stress on your body that it really wasn’t born to have.”
In a 2015 study, doctors at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit found that while high velocity does not, by itself, endanger the ulnar collateral ligament, throwing too many high-velocity pitches does. The study put the threshold at 48 percent; if you throw a greater percentage of fastballs than that, you’re adding significant risk to your UCL.
A 2013 article in Nature, the weekly science journal, explained that while chimpanzees sometimes throw objects, only humans do so with high speed and accuracy. This ability helped early hunters survive—but the species of baseball pitcher was eons away.
“Paleolithic hunters almost certainly threw less frequently than modern athletes, who often deliver more than 100 high-speed throws over the course of a few hours,” the study says. “Unfortunately, the ligaments and tendons in the human shoulder and elbow are not well adapted to withstanding such repeated stretching from the high torques generated by throwing, and frequently suffer from laxity and tearing.”
Precisely, says Dr. Glenn Fleisig, the research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute. The motion itself is not the issue.
“Throwing overhand is natural; windmill pitching is not,” he says. “You know what my proof is? Do you remember when your son was two and you rolled the ball to him, and he picked up the ball and kind of pushed it with his shoulder toward you? Did he do windmill pitching? No. Humans, especially males, we like to pick up things and throw them. If you and I went to the lake and were gonna throw a rock, I wouldn’t do a windmill throw. I would do an overhand throw. And my friend who doesn’t do any sports, if I gave him a rock, he’d still throw overhand. So, basically, throwing overhand has been around as long as people have, and throwing overhand is natural. Throwing balls and rocks and things, that’s natural. But throwing 100 throws as hard as you can every fifth day is not natural. When there’s too much of that, that’s when the injuries happen.”
Baseball America once ran a cover of Steve Avery—who starred for the Braves in the early 1990s before injuries hit—with his left arm painted gold. Some young pitchers are like that, born with the precious gift to fire thunderbolts, the separator between ordinary and special. The ordinary arm will never dispense thousands of pitches, and probably never get hurt. But a special arm is vulnerable, pointing its owner to glory, despair, or both.
Sometimes a pitcher does not even know what he possesses. That is how it was for Jarrod Parker the first time he threw a baseball 98 miles an hour. It was a rainy day, the first start of his senior year of high school in Indiana. Parker was already a pro prospect, and when he left the game, he looked at his father for a signal of how hard he had thrown on the scouts’ radar guns. His father held up eight fingers.
“And I’m like: ‘Eighty-eight? Well, it’s cold, whatever, it’s early,’ ” Parker said in 2014, in the Oakland Athletics’ clubhouse. “And he was like, ‘No—98.’ It never feels that much different between throwing a pitch at 88 or 98. You can’t see it.”
Soon Parker was a top 10 pick in the nation, but his arm just could not withstand its own heat. He had Tommy John surgery in the minors to repair a torn ulnar collateral ligament. After two strong seasons for the A’s, including a club-record 19 starts in a row without a loss, Parker tore his UCL again. As he tried to recover, he fractured his elbow. Twice.
How many kids dream of the chance to match up against Verlander in the playoffs, as Parker did twice? Without question, he made it. Yet his career also embodies the sad paradox facing developing pitchers: you’ve got to throw hard to get signed, but throwing too hard, too often, too young is a recipe for breakdown. As UCL injuries interrupt or end more and more professional careers, the majority of Tommy John surgeries—56.8 percent, according to a 2015 study cited in The Arm, Jeff Passan’s brilliant exploration of the epidemic—are now performed on teenagers.
In the early 2000s, after the Red Sox fired him as general manager, Dan Duquette ran a youth sports academy in Massachusetts. While children of a previous generation typically played multiple sports, Duquette noticed that they now tended to play just one, because of pressure to make their high school team.
“As these kids specialize, they’re trying to throw harder before they’re mature enough to throw hard, before their bodies can withstand the stress of it,” he says. “And they’re throwing on a year-round basis. So the one thing that is clear is that you need a rest and recovery time after the season’s over, and if you want to condition your arm for a long season, you should do a long-toss program before getting on the mound when the season starts.”
Alan Jaeger, the pitching trainer who advocates long-toss programs, draws a direct correlation between that exercise and velocity. If someone can throw a ball 300 feet, Jaeger says, he can pitch at 86 to 92 miles per hour. At 350 feet, he insists, the corresponding velocity is 93 to 97.
“Think about everybody’s arm as a treasure chest, and there’s treasure in there based on their size and weight and DNA,” Jaeger says. “We don’t know what kind of treasure’s in there, but we’d like to find out.”
For most of baseball history, it was assumed that the foundation of that treasure—the fastball—could not be taught. To a large degree, that is true. How else to explain cases like Matt Bush, who was chosen first overall by San Diego in the 2004 draft, one spot before Verlander?
Bush threw 96 mph in high school, but the Padres took him as a shortstop—and Bush couldn’t hit. He floated to the Rays’ system and showed promise as a pitcher, but was sent to prison for more than three years after driving under the influence and nearly killing a motorcyclist at spring training in 2012. Three years later, at a work-release program in Jacksonville, he would pitch in the parking lot of a Golden Corral restaurant, using a concrete parking block to push off with his back leg. The ball exploded from his arm, with accuracy. The next year he was a vital member of the Rangers’ bullpen, armed with one of the hardest fastballs in the majors.
One of the game’s most dominant closers, Billy Wagner, threw 100 mph with the wrong hand. Wagner was always small, and when he was five years old, he was roughhousing with a bigger kid named Chip, tossing around a hat like a football. (“We didn’t have a football,” he explains. “We had a hat.”) Chip fell on Wagner and broke his right elbow. Wagner threw left-handed while wearing a cast, then got the cast off and broke his right elbow again when he fell off the monkey bars. He kept throwing as a lefty. Things worked out.
“I can’t do anything left-handed other than throw,” Wagner says. “I can’t hold a pencil. I almost poke myself in my eye with my left hand if I’m trying to eat. It’s crazy. For God to bless me and say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna throw 100 miles an hour left-handed’—it’s just not something that happens every day.”
The majors’ fastest pitcher, Aroldis Chapman, started on his path without even trying. As a boy in Cuba, he did not burn to throw fastballs for a living.
“I wasn’t into baseball, it wasn’t a big deal for me,” he says, through an interpreter. “I was a first baseman, just kind of messing around a little bit. This coach decided to put me on the mound. They’re all looking for pitchers, and one day he goes, ‘Hey, Chapman, give it a try!’ I wasn’t really feeling it, but I was out there and I started throwing hard.
“The rest is history. No more first baseman.”
In 2010, as a 22-year-old rookie for the Reds, Chapman threw a pitch 105 miles per hour, the highest ever recorded. He would soon have a tattoo of a flaming baseball with the digits “105” inked on the inside of his left wrist. In 2016, a month after recovering from a blown save to win Game 7 of the World Series for the Cubs, Chapman signed with the Yankees for five years and $86 million. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a trailblazer.