by Tyler Kepner
Does he miss it?
“It’s one of those things—you don’t miss the pain,” Sutter says. “I mean, I was in a lot of pain when I left. In fact, I started keeping balls, I think, when I was at 290 saves. I didn’t know which one was gonna be my last one, because, man, I was hurt. But I got through it, I got to 300 and that was the last pitch I ever threw.”
His last pitch was a fastball, alas, for a swinging third strike past Roberto Alomar. Sutter joined Rollie Fingers and Goose Gossage as the only pitchers with 300 saves, and made it to Cooperstown in 2006. In his speech, he said he would never have reached the majors without learning Fred Martin’s pitch. The pitch did not change how the game was played, Sutter told the crowd, but it represented a new way to get hitters out. Everyone who uses it, he said, owes Martin a measure of thanks, because he taught it first.
“I know he has a crowd around him right now,” Sutter said, “and he’s showing someone how to hold the split-finger.”
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The splitter, as taught by Martin, applied by Sutter, and imitated by pitchers ever since, stands on its own as a pitch. But it sprang from a diverse lineage, with traces of the changeup, the knuckleball, and the sinker running through its yarn. Buck O’Neil, the Negro Leagues legend and the first black coach in the majors, thought the splitter was a myth—it moved so viciously, he said in Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball, it must have been a spitter.
The splitter is sometimes referred to as a forkball, because a pitcher splits his index and middle fingers into a V to throw both pitches. But if there’s open space at the bottom of the V, it’s the faster-moving splitter. If the bottom of the V is flush against the ball—that is, tucked farther back in the hand—it’s the slower-moving, nearly spin-less forkball.
“Fred knew it was different than the forkball,” Sutter says. “Actually when I first got called up and I went to Pittsburgh, I met Elroy Face, and Elroy showed me how he held his. He said it was more like a knuckleball. His was slower and it didn’t spin a lot, where mine had a lot of spin. Mine had a backup spin, like a backup slider. It had a dot, but it was going in the opposite way. The slider’s breaking right to left. My ball would break left to right most of the time.”
After that final out in 1982, Keith Hernandez was the first to embrace Sutter and catcher Darrell Porter, rushing over from first base to start the celebration. Mostly, though, Hernandez and Sutter were rivals—and Hernandez owned him, going 15-for-35 with seven walks. He said he tried to think of Sutter as just another sinkerballer.
The pitch does sink, and the differences can be subtle. In 2015, closer Jeurys Familia helped the Mets to the World Series with an arsenal of sinkers and splitters to go with a slider. Familia said he simply threw the splitter like the sinker, but spread his fingers a bit more. Just as the sinker would, the splitter helped Familia against lefties in particular.
“His splitter’s like 96 and it sinks a foot,” catcher Travis d’Arnaud explains. “His two-seamer’s like 99 and it sinks half a foot.”
Familia’s velocity was extreme—“He’s a freak,” says Oakland reliever Blake Treinen, whose own freakish 100-mile-an-hour sinker once made him an answer on Jeopardy!—but d’Arnaud’s sketch holds up: a splitter is indeed slower than a sinker, and drops more. It is not as slow as a changeup, but like a changeup, it is slower than a fastball and tends to drop away from the opposite-hand hitter…unless it doesn’t.
“The split was somewhat unpredictable at first,” says Chuck Finley, a 200-game winner, mostly for the Angels in the 1990s. “Sometimes it worked as a cutter, and then as a screwball. I don’t believe, at the time, a lot of lefties were even throwing one.”
Finley is indeed one of the few left-handers associated with the splitter, an oddity that makes it a little like the knuckleball, which is also thrown almost exclusively by right-handers. Because lefties are harder to find, they tend to get more chances to stick, and rarely must resort to a last-chance trick like the knuckler or splitter. Lefty relievers invariably need a breaking ball that moves away from a lefty hitter; once they have that to go with a fastball, there’s usually little need for a third pitch.
If they do try one, it’s usually a changeup. If that doesn’t work, the splitter can be another option.
“The only reason I throw it is because I can’t throw a changeup,” says Chasen Shreve, a left-handed Yankees reliever. “I tried for years and I couldn’t do it, so my college pitching coach said, ‘Try this’—and the first one I threw was just ridiculously good.”
Finley, too, learned the splitter only after exhausting all attempts at a changeup. He was suited for it because he threw from a high angle, which a pitcher must do with the splitter so his fingers get on top and yank it down. (Mark McGwire faced Finley more than any other pitcher, and hated it. “He was nasty,” says McGwire, who hit .188 against him. “He was 6-6 and straight over the top, so he was actually even taller. Nasty.”)
Many masters of the split-finger turned to the pitch for the same reason as Finley and Shreve. Ron Darling’s hands were too big for the changeup. John Smoltz threw his changeup too hard. Dan Haren could never turn over his wrist comfortably, and begged the Cardinals to let him throw his old high school splitter in the minors.
“They said as long as you don’t abuse it, you can throw it,” Haren said. “I started throwing it quite a bit—low-A, high-A—and I got to the big leagues quick.”
Haren stayed for 13 seasons and made three All-Star teams. By the end, in 2015, he guessed that there were so few pitchers who threw the split-finger, he could probably name them all. Even fewer threw the forkball, which is harder to control because of the way it almost knuckles as it drops. It also requires even longer fingers, which can be a problem. As a young catcher in St. Louis, Todd Zeile would call for forkballs from Jose DeLeon, who threw them in a way that made his thumb bleed when he scratched it after release.
“The fingernail on the index finger of his throwing hand was always a little bit longer and sharper because his hands were so big, and he tried to dig into the side of the ball to get a little extra traction,” Zeile says. “And then when he’d follow through—if you think of following through like holding a peace sign—he’d snap his wrist, and his index finger would snap down and cut the side of his thumb.
“After three or four innings, it was almost inevitable. They put New-Skin and stuff over it, but they could never put a bandage on it because it wasn’t allowed. So if he lasted long enough and if his forkball was effective, he’d be bleeding at some point past the fifth. What you used to be able to see, when he was having effective games, is he’d dab his thumb on the right side of his pant leg and have a blood spot. People thought it was coming from his leg, but it was coming from the cut on his thumb.”
Finger strength is central to the forkball’s best-known origin story. The first pitcher known to throw it was Bert Hall, for a Class B team in Tacoma on September 18, 1908. The local paper, the Daily Tribune, referred to it as a “fork ball,” and The Seattle Times described its motion as wiggling, writing that it “beats all the spit-ball and knuckle ball combinations to death.” Hall apparently learned the pitch from the team’s player-manager, Mike Lynch, who had experimented with it but found that it tired his fingers. Hall, who had worked as a plumber and had a strong wrist, was more effective with it and briefly reached the majors, with the Phillies in 1911. He pitched in just seven games, returned to Tacoma, and took his funky new pitch back with him.
The forkball needed a more successful pitcher than Hall to market it, and Bullet Joe Bush could have been the guy. After winning championships with the 1913 A’s and the 1918 Red Sox, Bush hurt his arm and could no longer throw curveballs. With a diminished fastball in 1920, he needed a new pitch to survive. A furious Ty Cobb insisted it was a spitball, but umpires found no wet spot. Bush—who would star for the Yankees’ first championshi
p team, in 1923—had actually found a forkball, but would not divulge his secret until years later.
“It was while I was experimenting on different deliveries that I placed the ball between my index and middle fingers, resting the bottom of the sphere on my thumb, and threw it,” Bush told The Saturday Evening Post in 1929, as quoted by Rob Neyer and Bill James. “I discovered that the ball took a funny hop. I tried it again, moving my thumb to the inside of the ball. It took another peculiar hop as it passed over the plate. I repeated the same thing a number of times, moving my thumb in different positions under the ball and noticed that it broke over the pan in all sorts of strange ways.”
Bush said he worked on the pitch so much that his fingers and thumb would get sore—even though his hand was large. “A pitcher with a small hand would have great difficulty controlling this pitch,” said Bush, who claimed to be the pitch’s inventor and the first to call it the forkball.
Yet Bush proved to be an unwilling publicity agent. By keeping quiet about his pitch until retirement, Bush kept a competitive advantage but prevented its spread. It was not until the 1940s that another pitcher would be widely known for the forkball: Tiny Bonham, who used it to help the Yankees win two World Series. His time in the Bronx overlapped with Joe Page, a lefty reliever who closed out the championships of 1947 and 1949.
That was just about it for Page, who struggled the next season but made it back for a few games with the Pirates in 1954. That spring he met a right-hander named Elroy Face, who had been hit hard as a rookie the year before, when he threw only a fastball and curve. Branch Rickey, the legendary executive, told Face he was sending him to a minor league team in New Orleans, with instructions to learn an off-speed pitch. Face noticed that the forkball seemed to be working for Page, so he tried it.
“It took half the season to stretch the fingers to get the ball back in there,” Face says. “At night my fingers used to ache a little bit from trying to throw it, trying to get it spread out.”
Once he did, Face says, he never lost the feel. Like so many practitioners, Face had big hands, which he used in his post-baseball job as a carpenter at Mayview State Hospital in Pennsylvania. Retired at 88, he said in 2016 that he could still comfortably grip his pitch the way he did as a premier reliever. His highlight was an 18–1 season in 1959, followed by a World Series title with Pittsburgh the next year. He holds the Pirates’ record for games pitched, with 802.
Page appeared just seven times for the Pirates, and not very effectively. His pitch, it turned out, was not the same one Face had admired in the spring of ’54. When the men compared grips years later, Face noticed that while his fingers touched only leather, one of Page’s always touched a seam.
In practice, Face says, his forkball served the same purpose as a changeup. He aimed for the middle of the plate, down, and let the ball sink whichever direction it wanted. Deception was everything.
“It worked as a good changeup with the same motion,” Face says. “If they were looking for that, I could throw the fastball by ’em. And if they were looking for the fastball, they were out in front.”
Face would teach his changeup/forkball to a contemporary, Lindy McDaniel, who would last 21 seasons in the majors. But the pitch, he remembers, was not in the arsenal of another National Leaguer of the era: Roger Craig, a righty who won big with the Dodgers (two championships), lost big with the Mets (46 defeats in two years), and became the most vocal acolyte and influential teacher the pitch has ever known.
“He got all the credit for the pitch,” Face says. “But I don’t think he ever threw the forkball.”
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Roger Craig didn’t teach the forkball, either. He has always, always emphasized that the split-finger fastball is a different pitch, and still makes sure to include the word fastball in its name; if pitchers think fastball while throwing it, they will do so with fastball arm speed and deceive the hitter. But, yes—Craig threw many pitches, and the forkball was not among them.
“I had a pretty good fastball, a good curveball and slider, and I threw kind of a straight change, palmball type pitch,” Craig says. Then he tore his rotator cuff—in the final game ever played by the Brooklyn Dodgers, on the road in Philadelphia in 1957—and everything changed. Unable to rely on pure stuff, Craig lasted nine more seasons, mainly by commanding a sinker. His experiences would serve him well.
Craig was the first pitching coach for the Padres, in 1969, before a stint with the Astros in the mid-1970s. It was there, he said, that he first began experimenting with the pitch that would become the splitter. Craig’s meeting with Martin and Sutter came when he returned to San Diego later in the decade, around the time he was also running a baseball school.
“I’d have kids 17, 18 years old, starting to put some pop on the ball, and they were looking for a changeup pitch,” Craig says. “Actually, they were not looking for it. When you see you can throw hard enough, that’s all you want to throw.”
Yet sooner or later, Craig knew, those kids would need to learn an off-speed pitch. And if they tried on their own, he feared, they would hurt themselves. Craig wanted to show them something safe, and the split-finger fastball required no manipulation of the wrist. It was just a fastball with a wider grip.
Craig became pitching coach for the Tigers in 1980 and taught the pitch to Milt Wilcox the next season. Wilcox was throwing it in the bullpen one day in Oakland in 1982, with Jack Morris watching. Morris was a star by then, but his slider had started to flatten and he needed an out pitch. In his previous start, in Anaheim, he had been torched for six runs without a strikeout. Wilcox showed Morris his grip.
“So I’m getting loose and I throw about 20, and nothing,” Morris says. “I was about ready to quit and he goes, ‘Put your thumb on the side this time, make sure you get your hand out in front, pull through out here.’ So I threw about three more and the fourth one was just—whomp, straight down. And immediately I go, ‘Holy shit, this is like cheating. If I get this down, there ain’t nobody alive gonna hit it.’ And two starts later I was throwing it in games.”
Morris would go on to win more games than any other pitcher in the 1980s, and reach the Hall of Fame in 2018. Robin Yount, who rarely struck out, whiffed more times off Morris than any other pitcher, and said the splitter made Morris a star.
“That pitch alone took him to greatness,” Yount says. “It was one of those pitches I never could recognize, because it always looked like a fastball to me. I swung at plenty of bouncing split-fingers from that guy. Most good hitters can recognize pitches early; you see the ball leave the pitcher’s hand and can realize what the pitch is by the rotation. And a split-finger just didn’t have the look of anything else.
“Now, in saying that, a lot of guys tried to throw them, but only a handful could really throw them well.”
Many in that handful learned under Craig. The 1984 Tigers rolled to a championship, going 7–1 in the postseason with all of their starters—Morris, Wilcox, and Dan Petry—throwing the split-finger fastball. The pitch itself became a star.
“Most people believe Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player ever—I wonder if he could have hit the split-finger fastball.” Morris said after beating the Padres in Game 4 of the World Series, for his second complete game victory. “Ty Cobb? I’ve seen his swing. I know he couldn’t hit it!”
Craig temporarily retired after the World Series, but his pitch had helped win a championship, and everyone wants to imitate a winner. A year before Buddy Ryan’s “46” defense made him a celebrity coach with the Chicago Bears, the split-finger gave Craig the same status. He was not shy about explaining it, and even wrote a book chronicling the 1984 season.
In it, Craig explains that Wilcox threw the pitch on his fingertips, while Morris—who refers to it today as a forkball, not a split-finger fastball—tucked it back in his palm. He instructs readers not to grip the ball too d
eeply.
“The important thing is to assume a grip which feels comfortable and allows you to throw strikes,” Craig wrote. “You can concentrate on the thumb once you feel comfortable gripping the ball with your middle and index fingers. Try to manipulate the thumb by imparting a little pressure upon release of the ball. This will give the pitch a tumbling effect. You also can curl the fingertips of your middle and index fingers, especially the index finger. That friction will give the pitch even more of a tumbling effect.”
The tumble was essential, and so baffling that perhaps only a five-time batting champion with 20-12 vision could make it seem easy to hit. Wade Boggs had more at-bats off Morris and Dave Stewart than any other pitchers in his Hall of Fame career. He hit .363 off them.
“I could see the tumble, and if it started out up, it was gonna be a strike, but if they threw it down in the zone it was gonna tumble out of the zone,” Boggs said. “So that was the thing. But when my eyes started to go bad, I couldn’t see the tumble anymore.”
That made Boggs like most hitters, who struggled to identify just what they were seeing. Was it a fastball, or maybe a changeup, and where did that drop come from? The effect was so devastating, and so well-chronicled, that at one point George Steinbrenner offered Craig and his wife an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii if Craig would tutor the Yankees’ pitching coach. Craig declined.
In September 1985, on their way to the only 100-loss season in franchise history, the Giants hired Craig as manager. Attendance at his first game was 2,668. The important stuff happened beforehand, anyway.
“The first day I took all our pitchers down to the bullpen and I told them I’m not gonna push this on anybody, I’m gonna show everybody how to throw it and if you can learn to throw it, good, it could help the ball club,” Craig says. “Anyway, I asked one pitcher who said he’d never thrown it before and it was Mark Davis. I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna use you as my example.’ So I got him on the mound and instead of having him throw a fastball with the seams, the two-seamer, I opened his fingers about an eighth of an inch. I said, ‘Throw another fastball,’ and I kept opening his fingers on every pitch until he had it out about, oh, three-quarters of an inch or something, and from then on he couldn’t throw the ball as hard, but it would go down a little bit.”