by Tyler Kepner
Instead it was Branca who threw the fateful fastball that Bobby Thomson lashed into the left field seats—the celebrated “Shot Heard ’Round the World” that gave the Giants the pennant. We’ll never know how Thomson might have handled Erskine’s curve, but the Giants were stealing signs, so he might have hit that, too.
In any case, it was around this time that Erskine’s pitch all but buried the tired debate about its veracity.
“TV came in around the late ’40s and there was a show early on, Burgess Meredith was the emcee, called Omnibus,” Erskine explains. “They sent a crew to Ebbets Field one day and they asked for me and Preacher Roe, who was a left-hander who threw an overhand curve, to come out early. The purpose was to film us throwing a curveball, and to prove or disprove whether a ball actually curved.
“So we got ready to go out there, and I took a new baseball and scuffed it up a little bit in order to make sure I had good bite on it. So I warmed up and the director of this film stood behind me and said, ‘I’m not a baseball guy, so I don’t know what I’m looking for here. Could you throw me a couple of curveballs so I could see what it is I’m trying to film?’ So with this scuffed-up baseball I threw an overhand curveball and it broke big. And this director says, ‘My God, is there any doubt?’ So he was a novice at seeing pitches, but the first one he saw: ‘Holy cow! There’s no question!’
“So they put that show on, Preacher threw from the left side and I threw of course from the right side, and then they used this dotted line that was superimposed somehow on the film. And you could basically say, well, there is no doubt: yes, a rotating pitch can break out of a straight line and be a curveball.”
As Erskine described the mechanics of the curveball, he spoke of using the middle finger to apply pressure to the ball, lead the wrist, and help generate tight rotation. The index finger is almost in the way, he said, which reminded him of a character he met in the “3-I” League (Iowa, Indiana, Illinois), where he played in 1946 and ’47.
“One of the greatest all-time pitchers that I met when I was in the minor leagues was Mordecai Brown,” Erskine says. “He lived in the Terre Haute House—that was the Phillies’ affiliate—and he would come down and talk to us in the lobby, show us his hand, where he had this farm accident and it took away not only his first finger of his right hand, it even took the knuckle. So he had a hand that had three fingers—naturally, his nickname was ‘Three Finger’ Brown—and it gave him the ultimate best use of that second finger for the curveball, because the first finger was out of the way completely.
“He was a real gentleman, always dressed in a shirt and tie. Naturally, an old gentleman by that time, and we were just kids in the minors. But we were fascinated to talk to him, and he was anxious to show us his hand, tell us how he learned to pitch without the first finger, or even the first knuckle. It gave him the ultimate advantage if you want to throw that curveball with lots of tight rotation. The second finger became his first finger. So he must have had a wicked curveball.”
Indeed he did, and his story captivated fans. Mordecai was five years old, helping his brother cut food for horses at their uncle’s farm in Nyesville, Indiana, when his right hand slipped into the feed chopper. The accident mangled every finger, and a doctor amputated the index finger below the second joint. A few weeks later, his hand still in a splint, Mordecai and his sister were playing with a pet rabbit, trying to make it swim in a tub. Mordecai lost his balance and smashed his hand on the bottom of the tub, breaking six bones.
It was a brutally painful, almost slapstick way to form the perfectly gnarled curveball hand. Nobody could mimic Brown’s curveball.
“When Brown holds the ball in that chicken’s foot of a hand and throws it out over that stump, the sphere is given a peculiar twist,” wrote the Chicago Inter Ocean in 1910, at the height of Brown’s fame with the Cubs. “It behaves something like a spitter. It goes singing up to the plate, straight as a drawn string, then just as the batter strikes at it, it darts down like a snake to its hole.”
On his way to the Hall of Fame, Brown went 49–15 with a 1.44 ERA across the 1907 and 1908 seasons. He won all three of his World Series games in those years, allowing no earned runs over 20 innings to lead the Cubs to consecutive championships. He died in 1948, shortly after he would have met the young Carl Erskine. In 2003, Bill James and Rob Neyer ranked Brown’s curveball as the second best in the history of the game. The best, they said, belonged to Sandy Koufax.
* * *
————
In January 2014, I was chairman of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. In this role, I emceed and helped plan our annual awards dinner. Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer would be receiving their Cy Young Awards, and I sat them on the dais on either side of Koufax, who was there to present for Kershaw. I thought all three would enjoy one another’s company. Sitting just to Kershaw’s right, by the lectern, I noticed throughout the evening how engaged the young pitchers were with Koufax, how easily they chatted. For Scherzer, it was a master class on the curveball.
“My God, could you imagine a better person in life to ever talk to about throwing a curveball?” Scherzer told me a year later, at spring training with the Nationals in Viera, Florida. “I literally sat there on my iPhone just writing down notes: ‘How are you doing this, what do you do on that?’ There’s definitely some principles I still think about from that conversation, what you want to do with the shape, how you want to spin the ball, the mental approach to it. Those were really good conversations.”
Scherzer had learned the curveball midway through the 2012 season with the Detroit Tigers. His pitching coach, Jeff Jones, drilled Scherzer on throwing his signature slider slower and slower and slower until it morphed into a curve, which is just what Scherzer needed against left-handers. His power slider broke toward them, dropping into their “nitro zone,” he said, with speed too close to his fastball. A slower option, with more of a vertical drop, could be effective against hitters from both sides.
This is a big reason many organizations implore their prospects to master the curve before the slider. It is a pitch that no hitter—even perhaps the greatest ever—wants to see.
“Ted Williams used to call once a month and we would chat about the team,” said Dan Duquette, the former Red Sox general manager. “So the day after I traded Aaron Sele, Ted calls me up. He goes, ‘OK, hot shot, why in the hell are you trading the best curveballer in the American League?’ I said, ‘Well, he didn’t want to pitch in Boston.’ He goes, ‘I don’t give a damn, he’s got a good curveball! Let me tell you something: that curveball can get out a left-hand hitter just as well as it can get out a right-hand hitter! Now don’t be trading those guys when you get ’em!’ ”
Williams spent his whole career with the Red Sox and never faced Koufax, a career Dodger. Their primes did not overlap, anyway. In 1960, when Williams retired, Koufax went 8–13 with a 3.91 ERA and 100 walks. It was his sixth season of mediocrity. The next six would be some of the greatest in the history of baseball.
In those six seasons, Koufax went 129–47 with a 2.19 ERA. He won five ERA titles, four strikeout titles, three Cy Young Awards, and two World Series MVP awards. He was unquestionably aided by the tall mound at Dodger Stadium, where his career ERA was 1.37, two runs better than it was everywhere else. He reigned from that perch till his very last strikeout in the 1966 World Series.
“I go up there and Koufax throws me the first high fastball: shooo,” the hitter, Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer, says now. “Then he throws me the curveball and it looks the same—the same!—and John Roseboro catches it on the ground. And I’m going, this is Sandy Koufax.”
Palmer’s at-bat happened right after the second fly ball in a row that center fielder Willie Davis lost in the sun. Those errors cost Koufax the game and he never pitched again, retiring at age 30 with an arthritic left arm, a decade before medical advancements c
ould have saved his career. The memory of his curveball is seared in the minds of his helpless foes.
“It sounded like a little tornado, bzzzzz,” Orlando Cepeda told Jane Leavy, Koufax’s biographer. “So fast and noisy, it scared you.”
Koufax has giant hands, and when he opened his glove wide from the stretch, savvy hitters knew he was gripping his curveball. Usually, it didn’t even matter. Koufax understood biomechanics decades before the industry, and knew how to propel his body to the plate with maximum efficiency and force. The curveball, he told a rookie teammate in his final season, is not very complicated.
“He said it’s an elbow pitch, and you come up over the top and pull down hard on the front of the ball, like you would on a fastball, where you pull down hard on the back of the ball,” Don Sutton says. “On the curveball you’re doing the same thing but you’re just pulling down hard on the front of the ball.”
Koufax’s wisdom on the curveball echoed the words of Henry Roper, an old minor leaguer who was Sutton’s sixth-grade teacher in Molino, Florida. Sutton had started Little League just the year before, as a shortstop, but decided to be a pitcher because they seemed to have the most fun. He brought his glove to school every day and played catch with Mr. Roper. He never once took a mound without a curveball, and the pitch never bothered his arm.
“I think it’s one of the worst-taught pitches in baseball, because we’re teaching people to get out front and pull the window shade and turn the doorknob,” Sutton says. “Those are all great phrases, but you’re doing it with an empty hand. The simplest way I was taught was the curveball is a karate chop with a ball in your hand. So load up at a 90-degree angle with your upper arm and your lower arm and throw the karate chop, and the ball will come out spinning.”
Sutton would go on to pitch for 23 seasons, finishing with 324 victories, including a club-record 233 for the Dodgers. He is in the Hall of Fame, like Bert Blyleven, who learned the curve, indirectly, from Koufax. Born in Holland, Blyleven moved to California as a boy, and his father took him to a Dodger game to see Koufax face Juan Marichal. Even from the upper deck, Blyleven could see the vicious drop on the Koufax curve. It captivated him, and he would listen with his father to Vin Scully calling games on radio.
“I used to keep score just when Koufax and Drysdale pitched, because I liked writing down the strikeouts,” Blyleven says.
He liked collecting them, too. Blyleven practiced his curveball against a wall, visualizing it breaking the way Scully described, making sure his thumb was on top of the ball on release, to impart that last bit of hellacious spin. At 19 he was in the majors with the Twins, and when he retired at 41, he had 3,701 strikeouts, trailing only Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton. The career leader in strikeouts by a hitter, Reggie Jackson, fanned 49 times against Blyleven, by far his most frequent tormentor.
“You didn’t hit it,” Jackson says of the Blyleven curve. “He had to hang it to hit it. The quickness of the break, the speed of the pitch, the velocity, whatever the term—the break was big and it was hard. It was electric.”
There is no shame in saying this for Jackson. Even the best hitters, with the biggest egos, can be helpless to handle a pitch from the gods. Just ask Mike Schmidt, the best third baseman in major league history, about Ryan’s curveball.
“Well, I could hit Nolan’s fastball,” Schmidt says. “I couldn’t hit his curveball in a million years for a base hit. And over the years, in probably 40 or 50 at-bats from him, I probably saw 100 curveballs—hanging, snapping off the table for strikes, in the dirt—whoom, whoom, they’re everywhere, and I don’t think I ever swung at one, because it was starting behind your head, you know.”
Schmidt rose from his seat in the lobby of the Phillies’ training complex in Clearwater, Florida. He assumed his familiar right-handed stance, and flinched at the imaginary Ryan curve.
“I was always doing this,” he says, then adds he was still astonished at breaking up a Ryan no-hitter in the ninth inning by actually hitting that dastardly curve. “I don’t know why it happened or how it happened, but: curveball, hit it up the middle. Maybe one of the few curveballs I hit up the middle my whole life. So his curveball to me was the most intimidating pitch to have to deal with at all. From a right-hander’s standpoint, it was ridiculous. Ridiculous.”
Ryan developed a changeup near the end of his career. But for much of his first 20 seasons, he threw only the fastball and curve. Like Koufax with the wide glove, Ryan telegraphed his curveball by grunting when he threw a fastball. If he didn’t grunt, the curve was coming. Hitters had no time to react, anyway.
Ryan found stardom after his December 1971 trade from the Mets to the Angels. The biggest reason was the Angels’ pitching coach, Tom Morgan, who smoothed his mechanics, allowing him to stay on top with his curveball.
“In my delivery I was a rusher, because when I got in trouble I tried to throw harder,” Ryan says. “So what you do is you just develop a pattern of rushing your delivery and not allowing your arm to catch up with your body. That’s not how you throw harder or a sharper curveball. So understanding what I had to do from a mechanical standpoint, and then being able to implement that consistently, my curveball got better as my delivery improved.”
For an extraordinarily hard thrower, like Koufax, Ryan, or Dwight Gooden, the curveball can be the ideal complement. Alan Ashby, who caught Ryan in Houston and struggled to hit Gooden, said it was almost impossible to be ready for two vastly different pitches that started from the same spot.
“They had that curveball that came out of the same, almost eye-high location all the time,” Ashby said. “It’s always that in-between that kills us mediocre hitters. You couldn’t hit the fastball because they had that curveball, and you couldn’t hit the curveball because they had that fastball.”
Roy Halladay reached the majors with a knuckle-curve, and nearly threw a no-hitter with it in his second career start, in 1998. Back in the minors after that, he learned a more traditional curveball from Chris Carpenter, and found he could control it better: throw it softer for a strike, or pull it harder to finish in the dirt.
“I could throw a fastball for a strike in any count, whether I was cutting it or sinking it, and then I was able to throw a curveball in any count, whether it be 3–2, 3–0, 3–1,” he said. “If I could throw it in any count knowing it was gonna be for a strike, that played so much into a hitter’s head, knowing they can’t sit on any pitch, ever, 100 percent convinced it’s gonna be a fastball.”
Al Leiter, a power lefty known for hard fastballs and cutters, decided he had to apply this principle to have a chance in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series for the Marlins. He watched video of David Wells and Andy Pettitte, other lefties who had attacked the powerful Indians lineup. Leiter determined that his very first pitch would have to be a curveball, reasoning that he would disrupt the Indians’ timing by startling them with something soft.
He got the pitch over, and Omar Vizquel took it for a strike. Leiter pitched well, the Marlins won, and two years later, with the Mets in a tiebreaker for the National League Wild Card at Cincinnati, he did it again with a shutout.
“You have all these guys speeding up, looking for 90 to 93 inside, and here I’m throwing a 78-mile-an-hour slow curveball that wraps around the back side of the plate, getting called strike one,” Leiter says. “And now it’s like, ‘Oh shit, you’ve got 78 that wraps around the back door, outer half, and I still gotta look inside because you’re gonna bust me in and break my bat?’ When I had that combination, those are the games I was nailing it.”
* * *
————
No pitch elicits more colorful comparisons for the way it is thrown than the curveball. There is the karate chop, as Don Sutton says. “Like a gun,” says A. J. Burnett, who learned his knuckle-curve—he always called it his hook—from his grandpa. A pitching coach, Gil Patterson, compares the motion to arm wrestling. When Barry Zit
o threw his curve, Patterson says, “If the catcher didn’t catch it, you felt like it would boomerang and come back to you.” Adam Wainwright, the curveball master for the St. Louis Cardinals, uses a nickname for the pitch, Uncle Charlie, in his Twitter handle.
“It’s like you’re hammering—or fishing, casting a line,” Mike Mussina says. “That’s what you’re doing.”
Bob Tewksbury, a control artist of the 1990s, would practice as a boy with a tennis ball can, flipping it end-over-end so the rotation mimicked a 12-6 curveball. Drew Storen, the former closer for the Nationals, used a hockey puck for the same purpose. Tom Gordon’s father taught his son the curveball by placing a bucket six to eight feet behind a seven-foot fence. Gordon would stand about six feet from the fence, make a backwards C with his fingers, rotate his thumb upward, and dump curves into the bucket, over and over. He practiced so much he killed the tree he used as a rubber.
“I had to plant another one,” Gordon says.
With the Royals in 1989, Gordon finished second in AL Rookie of the Year voting to Gregg Olson, another right-handed curveball master. Olson, a closer for the Orioles, would work on his form by spinning a paper cup—smoothly, longways, not end-over-end. If it didn’t wobble, it had the right spin.
Olson played for the Dodgers at the end of his career, long after his All-Star prime, when he rendered helpless some of the game’s best left-handed hitters (Ken Griffey Jr., Don Mattingly, and Rafael Palmeiro combined to go 3-for-33 off him). Olson would set his grip by locking his fingertip around a seam. Koufax, he said, showed him a better way.
“His hands were enormous compared to mine,” Olson says. “He would take his middle finger and slide it down along the seam that he wanted. And then he would shove the finger against that seam so the side of the finger is now flush up against the seam. If you grab a baseball and do that, the baseball is just dying to spin out of your hand. So I did that my last couple of years—that’s what I teach kids now—and it’s an amazing difference if you just grab that baseball. I wish I would have had that early on. That would have been hours of amusement.”