by Tyler Kepner
But the pitch still makes for a different kind of day for everyone. A game of incredible speed is suddenly played in slow motion. Some hitters would rather avoid it altogether. Their typical theory on trying to hit it? See it low, let it go; see it high, let it fly.
“You have to wait as long as possible—and then explode,” said Jesse Barfield, who had four homers off Hough but was 3-for-25 against the Niekros. “If you’ve played Slo-Pitch Softball, you know what I’m talking about. So you treat it almost like that. Wait, wait, wait—and then explode.”
You look like a fool if you miss, but the explosions can live forever. Reggie Jackson’s third home run in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series came off a knuckler from Hough. Barry Bonds’s record seventy-third homer in 2001 came off a Dennis Springer knuckleball. Aaron Boone, who had been 1-for-10 off Wakefield, belted his knuckler for the pennant-winning homer in Game 7 of the 2003 AL Championship Series.
A year later, though, facing elimination in Game 5 of the ALCS, Wakefield tiptoed through shutout innings in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth, surviving two passed balls and beating the Yankees. He would start the opener of the World Series when the Red Sox won their first title since 1918.
“The challenge is that you need to know going in there’s gonna be walks, there’s gonna be stolen bases, and there’s gonna be passed balls,” Francona says. “As a manager, if you can’t handle that, you have a chance to miss out on a really good pitcher. So I kind of learned early: take your hands, put them under your butt and sit on them, and stay out of the way. And you’d look up and Wake would be pitching into the seventh or eighth inning.”
Most managers cannot afford to do that; few pitchers can throw a knuckleball like Tim Wakefield or will ever come close. College and high school coaches want to win, not give away games as an aspiring knuckleballer learns his quirky craft. A low minor league setting is the best laboratory, but even there, teams tend to see more potential in the waves of hard-throwing prospects they draft every year.
But the pitch will survive, because the aggravation is worth it—and deep down, baseball people like it. When Sparks pitched, umpires routinely tossed him knucklers when they gave him a new ball. (John Shulock and Greg Kosc had especially good ones.) Conventional pitchers might not need the knuckleball, but they envy it just the same. Says Chuck Finley, the longtime Angels lefty, “Every starting pitcher would love to go out there for just one game and throw nothing but knuckleballs.”
And for all its unpredictability, throwing the knuckleball takes the kind of toughness widely admired by the smartest people in the game.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for Wake because he goes out on the mound and fights,” Pedro Martinez said in Wakefield’s book. “If he doesn’t have a good knuckleball, he ain’t got shit. But he fights.”
When all else fails a pitcher—when the gun runs out of bullets and the blade on the sword turns dull—he can always try a slingshot. Why not? There’s really nothing to lose. It probably won’t work, and he probably won’t understand it, anyway.
“You could throw two knuckleballs that look the same, have no spin coming out, but they do two different things,” Steven Wright says. “One might move all over the place and one might not do anything. Like, how does that happen?”
Wright laughed. He was riding the knuckleball to an All-Star season, and even he was completely baffled.
“That’s the beauty of it, man,” he says. “When it’s working, it’s fun as hell. When it’s not working, you just chuck and duck.”
THE SPLITTER
Through the Trapdoor
I was 12 years old the first time I visited the Hall of Fame. I remember noticing the tag on the inside of George Brett’s hat: 7¼. This astonished me. I wore fitted hats all the time back then, and my head size was 7⅜. I had a bigger head than George Brett.
This had no practical application, of course. All it really meant was that, if George Brett and I ever found ourselves at one of those hat stores in the mall, and we both wanted to buy the same hat, we would never have to fight for the last one—an unlikely scenario, for sure, but at 12 it sort of mattered. My head was already bigger than the head of a grown-up baseball superstar. How about that!
This feeling came to me again, almost 30 years later, when talking with Dennis Eckersley about the split-finger fastball. Eckersley’s Hall of Fame career spanned the era of the split-finger craze: from the mid-1970s, when the pitch was still evolving from its forkball roots, through the late 1990s, when injury fears dimmed its popularity. Eckersley had thrived with precision command of a fastball and slider, but never mastered a changeup. A right-hander, Eckersley yearned for a pitch that would dive straight down, or down and away from left-handers. He just did not have the fingers for it.
“You know how some guys carry around softballs so they can split their fingers?” he said. “I actually had the doctor make a cast for me. I strapped it on, and I’d have my two fingers in there for a while. I’d drive around with that cast on in the off-season. That’s how sick I was!”
Sometimes, Eckersley said, the pitch would work for him in the bullpen. But it was never consistent enough to use in the ninth inning, when there’s no room for error, and remains a fanciful wish, a superpower beyond his reach. If only he could have split his fingers like…me?
In the course of our talk, I held my index and middle fingers in front of me, like a flat peace sign, the way a pitcher would before straddling the commissioner’s signature on either side of a baseball’s seams. Eckersley howled.
“That’s a major split!” he cried. “I can’t do that!” Brian Anderson, Eckersley’s broadcast partner that day and the brother of a former major league pitcher, stood nearby. He split his fingers, too. “This is as far as I can go,” Anderson said. His spread was much narrower than mine. “You don’t want to hurt something there,” Eckersley told me, admiringly. But it didn’t hurt at all.
I felt a little like George Costanza on Seinfeld, when he learns he would be a perfect hand model. Really, these hands? Was the great Dennis Eckersley—an A+ source on this kind of thing—actually telling me my fingers were better equipped to throw the split-finger fastball than his?
Well, yes and no. Eckersley is enthusiastic about a lot of topics. I’ve also shaken hands with enough major leaguers to know that my fingers—while apparently quite flexible—are pretty stubby next to theirs. And nearly everyone I’ve talked to about the splitter says long fingers are essential, locking the pitch in place to keep it from flying away.
Functionally, then, my better-than-Eckersley finger spread is useless. Just as my big head would not help me hit .390 like George Brett, my freakish fingers would not help me harness the magic of Bullet Joe Bush, Shigeru Sugishita, Elroy Face, or Bruce Sutter.
When it comes to that final name, especially, I am not alone. Of the millions of people who have ever thrown a baseball, Sutter stands alone as the master of the split-finger. Few pitches in the game’s history are as synonymous with one man as the splitter is with Sutter. Like Mariano Rivera would do with the cut fastball, Sutter took an existing pitch, modified it, and inspired a generation of imitators.
But while others could at least mimic Rivera’s method of throwing the cutter, Sutter was almost a singular phenomenon in the history of his pitch.
“Nobody could throw it the way he threw it,” says Roger Craig, the coach most synonymous with the splitter. “I could never learn to throw that, or teach that. Bruce Sutter’s really the one.”
* * *
————
History assigns a prominent place to Craig for the sudden rise—and sharp demise—of the split-finger fastball in its modern form. He deserves the acclaim, but context is important. Before Roger Craig, there was Fred Martin. He taught the pitch to Sutter, and the two of them showed it to Craig. Without Martin, the splitter would never have taken off the way it did.
/> Because of Martin, there is a plaque in Cooperstown for Sutter, with the split-finger fastball mentioned in the very first line. Because of Martin, there is a dream home for Sutter on Red Top Mountain in Georgia, with a Cy Young Award displayed in the man cave. One day in 2016, Sutter was repairing a broken drawer and found a black-and-white photo of Martin, some four decades old, holding up a baseball with his right hand. Wearing a Cubs uniform as the sun splashes his craggy face, Martin looks not at the camera but at his creation: the grip he taught Sutter, with the index and middle fingers stretching to hold the ball on either side of the seams, like prongs supporting the diamond of an engagement ring.
For Sutter, the pitch was just as precious and far more valuable. Without it, he never would have pitched above Class A. Sutter learned it in 1973, when his future was bleak. His manager that season, Walt Dixon, wrote this in a report to his bosses: “Bruce Sutter will make the major leagues when a communist regime is ready to take over this country.”
Martin was not the kind of guy who dealt in sarcasm. And Sutter was not the kind of pitcher who gave up easily—on baseball, anyway. He had dropped out of Old Dominion because he wanted more time to play ball. He went back home to Pennsylvania and worked at a printing shop in Lancaster, where a local meatpacker sponsored a semipro team called Hippey’s Raiders. The draft was over, but a Cubs scout, Ralph DiLullo, noticed Sutter’s enormous hands. He gave the kid the last $500 from his annual bonus budget.
“When I saw those hands,” DiLullo told writer Gerry Fraley years later, “I said to myself, ‘Wow, that kid can do something with those hands.’ ”
Back then, nobody linked long fingers with the splitter, because Sutter hadn’t thrown it yet. Martin had, as a kind of changeup, but nobody really noticed. As a 31-year-old Cardinals rookie in 1946, Martin jumped to the Mexican League and thrived for parts of two seasons. But he was barred for a year upon his return and spent almost all of the 1950s in the minors. He managed for a year in the Cubs’ chain and then became a coach—in the majors for a while, but mostly in the minors, where he met Sutter.
Sutter had tried to learn a slider in 1972, but it hurt his elbow after just two pro games. Back home that winter, he paid a doctor to reroute a pinched nerve in his elbow; knowing he was expendable, Sutter planned not to tell the Cubs. He confessed the next spring, when the Cubs nearly cut him, and his gumption saved his job. The Cubs kept Sutter more for his will than his talent, and assigned him to play for Dixon in Quincy, Illinois, where he was the mop-up man in blowouts. “You might as well have a D on your hat,” Dixon told him one day, “because you’re in for the duration.”
Like most organizations then, the Cubs had one pitching coach for the entire minor league system. Theirs was Martin. He would visit the affiliates every month and show the pitchers several ways to throw each pitch. They would work on the pitches until his next visit, experimenting with grips in hopes of unlocking something worthy of the majors.
“He showed us all how to throw the split-finger,” says Sutter, who quickly realized he had an edge. All his life, Sutter had thrown breaking pitches by applying pressure with his index finger instead of his middle finger. It was counterintuitive, and it wasn’t much help on the curve or the slider, but it felt right. With the splitter, Sutter found a pitch that was meant to be thrown like a fastball, but required a dominant index finger to generate its straight-down—or down-and-away-from-a-lefty—movement. Sutter did not split his fingers very far apart or wedge the ball too deep between them, as he would have if throwing the slower forkball. With his thumb positioned to the side, Sutter squirted the ball through, imparting it with a devastating tumble. Sutter said he made one small adjustment the first day Martin showed him, moving his index finger just a bit off the left seam, and never changed it again.
“I’d like to tell you I had to work at it,” Sutter says, “but it broke right away.”
It did take Sutter time to control the pitch, to learn when to make it do what. His overall performance at Quincy was ordinary—10 hits per nine innings and a 4.13 ERA—and fellow farmhands wondered if he would have a roster spot in 1974. Luckily, he had an advocate.
“He wouldn’t have made it out of spring training had it not been for Fred Martin,” says Mike Krukow, a teammate who would also go on to a long career. “He said, ‘Give this guy a chance.’ But then Bruce broke camp, and they were only gonna give him until June when the new draft came in. If he didn’t show anything by then…well, he tore it up. It was amazing.”
As he got to know Sutter, Krukow was not surprised. Whatever Sutter did—shooting baskets, playing pool, throwing darts—his fine motor skills were incredible. He was perfectly suited for this quirky new pitch, the only man Krukow ever saw who could manipulate it with such precision, commanding the pitch to the left or the right, into or out of the strike zone, depending on the pressure he applied to his index finger.
“He brought that pitch into baseball in such an impactful way that if you didn’t try it, you were an idiot,” Krukow says.
Sutter was in the majors for good by 1976, and Martin was his confidant, building a bond with positive reinforcement and a trust forged over dinners at his Phoenix home in spring training. As his wife cooked, Martin would open scrapbooks and spin stories, with the toughness of a coal miner’s son but the softness of a favorite uncle. He spoke often of his years in Mexico, and being blackballed, and shared the nuances of the craft: how to deal with rain, or a hot hitter, or a bad umpire. He promised his pitchers they would never allow three homers in a row—because after two, they should drill the third guy.
“He was from Oklahoma, and he was always real suntanned, looked like his skin was dried out,” Sutter says. “Looked like one of those Old West cowboys, always had the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It was just different times.”
In the Hall of Fame, Sutter represents the Cardinals. He played four seasons in St. Louis, led the league in saves three times there, and closed down Game 7 of the 1982 World Series by striking out Milwaukee’s Gorman Thomas—with a high fastball, actually. But his greatest years were really his five with the Cubs. Sutter had more saves, a better ERA, and a better strikeout rate with Chicago, where he won his Cy Young Award in 1979.
His pitch was a revelation. Sutter was the closer—or fireman, as the job was known then—by the end of his rookie season. Joe Coleman, a veteran forkballer, set up for Sutter and was amazed by how different their seemingly similar pitches behaved. Coleman’s forkball hardly spun at all, dropping almost like a knuckleball. But Sutter’s splitter, Coleman said, spun like a helicopter. Pete Rose said flatly that the pitch was impossible to hit.
“I had never seen a pitch like that, ever—nor had anybody, because his was thrown with incredible vertical variance,” says Ted Simmons, who faced and caught Sutter. “So visually it’s starting at your forehead and you say it’s high and then vvoomp, right in the middle. Then he throws it right in the middle and, bang, you go after it like a fastball and when you start to swing it dives vertically, and the ball’s in the dirt.”
When Sutter threw his best splitters, he never even saw them drop; his head would bob precisely as the pitch fell through the trapdoor. If he kept his head up to watch it, it meant he was not finishing his delivery and getting the proper whip at the end. When he struggled in those early years, he would ask the Cubs to fly in Martin for a few days. Sutter needed the reassurance of a calm mentor, and trusted him implicitly.
“You’re gonna get a lot of help when you’re struggling, and if you don’t have someone you trust, you’re gonna get confused and change something else,” he says. “That’s what you always have to worry about. With Fred’s personality, he knew what to say around me to get me relaxed. He knew hollering at me is not gonna work. Bullshitting me is not gonna work. You had to tell me something that I believe that’d work. He had that knack.”
One of Martin’s visits was in San Diego
, on a Cubs road trip. As Sutter got loose in the bullpen for an early mound session, Roger Craig, then managing the Padres, asked Martin about the split. They went to the bullpen and Sutter showed Craig the grip. Sutter’s pressure points made that precise pitch unique to him, Craig thought. But the up-close look greatly intrigued him: this was a fast forkball that tumbled.
Martin would not live long enough to see where Craig would take the pitch. As Sutter embarked on his Cy Young season, Martin, 63, was dying of cancer. The Cubs played only day games at Wrigley Field then, and Sutter and some teammates would visit Martin in the hospital after they played. Sutter was there when Martin died on June 11, 1979.
“We were kids; we just thought he was sick,” Sutter says, softly. “We didn’t think he was going to die.”
“In a way, it hurts you more than when you lost an actual relative, because of what he meant to us,” Krukow says. “I mean, he was our guy. You had that feeling of emptiness and loneliness.”
Sutter would find another mentor in Mike Roarke, a different Cubs minor league instructor who would later coach him in St. Louis. Sutter would leave the Cardinals for a six-year contract with the Braves in 1985, but by 1988 he was finished. He had a pinched nerve in his shoulder, and when he came back too soon from arthroscopic surgery, he tore his rotator cuff. His special pitch went with it, forever.
“I never threw it again, really, where I could throw it right,” Sutter says. “No, I couldn’t. You had to get your arm in position. You had to get your arm up quick, and I couldn’t do that anymore. I lost those muscles in my back, part of the rotator cuff, those muscles were pinched off by that nerve again at the end, so I never could get my arm in position to throw it the right way.”