by Tyler Kepner
Two years later, with San Diego, Davis made the All-Star team. The next year he won the NL Cy Young Award. By then the Giants had become a winner, with a division title in 1987 and a pennant in 1989. And the splitter, as they would say years later, had gone viral.
Even at the time, it stood out as a quintessential ’80s fad. In The New Yorker, Roger Angell likened the splitter to the Rubik’s Cube. In Sports Illustrated, Ron Fimrite compared Craig’s faith in the pitch to “the way Cap Weinberger believes in Star Wars—as the ultimate defense weapon.” Hands across America—big hands, anyway—were letting those splitters fly. Heck, even the era’s best hitter, Tony Gwynn, showed off his splitter grip for his 1986 Topps baseball card.
“I think it is the pitch of the future,” Angels closer Donnie Moore told the Los Angeles Times in April 1986. “I think it’s going to be a pitch like the slider was. Now almost everybody throws a little slider. I think in years to come, it’s going to be the pitch.”
Moore, once a Cubs farmhand, had learned the splitter from Fred Martin. His pitching coach in the Braves’ system, the great Johnny Sain, encouraged him to trust it. Yet while the pitch made Moore an All-Star, he hung it at the worst moment, to Boston’s Dave Henderson when the Angels were one strike away from the 1986 World Series. Henderson golfed it over the left field fence for a homer and the Red Sox soon claimed the pennant. Moore questioned his pitch selection after the game: “Maybe if I had tried to blow it past him, we’d be drinking champagne right now,” he said.
(Moore’s life unraveled in the years to follow. In 1989 he shot his wife, who survived, and then shot himself to death—an act of madness that almost certainly had much more to do with a history of domestic violence than with an errant split-finger fastball.)
Usually, the splitter was responsible for moments of glory. Red Sox lefty Bruce Hurst learned it from Craig before a game in 1984, and used it to beat the Mets twice in the 1986 World Series. The Blue Jays made the playoffs four times, and won their first World Series, with Tom Henke and his splitter locking down the ninth. Stewart’s forkball helped him to four consecutive 20-win seasons and the MVP award in the 1989 World Series for Oakland—against Craig’s team.
The Giants could not blame Craig for teaching Stewart the pitch. Stewart learned his forkball by modifying a splitter grip Sandy Koufax had shown him with the Dodgers at spring training in 1982.
“Sandy had really helped me with my mechanics when I was younger, and he told me, ‘Hey, look, I want you to split your fingers a little bit and that should give you more downward movement on the ball,’ ” Stewart says. “I started experimenting a little more, and the split-finger that Sandy had pretty much taught me to throw, I changed it into a fork.”
But it took a while. Traded the next year to Texas, Stewart shelved the pitch at the insistence of manager Doug Rader. His career sputtered and he drifted to the Phillies, who released him in May 1986. Signed by his hometown A’s two weeks later, Stewart finally unleashed the forkball in Tony La Russa’s first game as their manager, on ABC’s Monday Night Baseball in Boston that July. Roger Clemens was 14–1 at the time, but Stewart beat him—the first of his eight victories over Clemens, without a loss, after joining the A’s.
Oakland’s championship rotation included two other starters, Mike Moore and Bob Welch, who threw Stewart’s pitch. That was how it spread, from one master to others, alluring to both failing and thriving pitchers.
Mike Scott was failing: through the 1984 season he was 29–44 with a 4.45 ERA for the Mets and the Astros. With Craig temporarily retired, the Houston general manager, Al Rosen, asked him to tutor Scott for a few days. Scott entered Craig’s San Diego baseball school as a washout, and left as an ace.
“The first couple, three days, he says, ‘I just can’t,’ ” Craig says. “He didn’t have a good breaking ball but he had that good, live fastball and he said, ‘I can’t get it.’ I said, ‘You’re getting it, you’re getting it, just give it a couple more days.’ He came up with one of the best in baseball.”
Scott quickly became Craig’s most celebrated protégé, and he thanked him with a division-clinching no-hitter in 1986—against the Giants. Historically Scott belongs more to the family of (alleged) scuffballers, but his influence on the splitter could be felt long after his last game in 1991.
Scott taught the splitter to Clemens at a golf event after the 1986 season, when both pitchers won the Cy Young Award. Clemens did not use it for a while; he was winning big with a slider as the main complement to his fastball. But by the late 1980s and early ’90s Clemens had turned to the pitch he called “Mr. Splitty”—and won five of his record seven Cy Young Awards after doing so.
“It’s a devastating pitch to have,” Clemens says. “It’s game-changing. It’s a huge out pitch if you need it. I consider it to be a violent pitch, even though it’s not violent on your arm the way I throw it. I don’t hook a seam.”
In a game of 110 pitches, Clemens guessed, he would throw 20 or 30 splits. But hitters always thought he threw more, he said, because that was the third-strike pitch they would see on the highlights. To Clemens, the key to the pitch’s deception was its presentation out of the hand.
“They see your fat wrist,” he says. “When you throw breaking balls, you’ve got a thin wrist. But you see fat wrist on heater and split.”
Naturally, learning a splitter did not work for everyone. Of all his pupils, Craig said the one with the best split was a right-hander named Randy O’Neal, who spent seven undistinguished seasons with five teams and lacked a respectable fastball to go with it. Other pitchers simply didn’t have the hand for it. When Steve Carlton joined the Giants in 1986, Craig could not impart his new trick.
“Steve Carlton had real small hands for a big guy, and he just could not get his fingers spread apart,” Craig said. “He used to sit during the game and have the trainers tape his fingers apart on a baseball and keep it in there the whole game trying to stretch it out. But he never really could get it. You have to have a little bit better than average-sized hand to throw a good one.”
Mostly, though, the enduring memory of the Giants’ staff under Craig is a procession of pitchers with dive-bombing splitters. When Craig arrived, the Giants’ best reliever was a right-hander named Scott Garrelts, who had actually learned the splitter the year before, in winter ball. In Craig, he had a mentor who could refine it and the license to use it as often as he wanted.
Garrelts wanted to use it a lot. In 1984 he had a 5.65 ERA, but armed with the splitter in ’85, the same hitters who owned him seemed helpless. He made the All-Star team and threw the split at 90 miles an hour. Tony Gwynn called Garrelts’s splitter the best he ever saw; when Garrelts was at his sharpest, from 1985 to 1987, he held Gwynn to one hit in 18 at-bats.
“The thing with how Roger taught it is, obviously, split the fingers—but then it was more, you’d snap your wrist out, more like a fastball,” Garrelts says. “The way I was throwing it, it was good and bad. I was really pronating—like, really hard. And the good thing was I had a lot of movement, a lot of downward movement, a lot of movement away also. The bad thing was: it’s not so good on your arm. But there’s that risk-reward. Those ’85, ’86, ’87 seasons, especially being in the bullpen, I could throw really, really hard but I could definitely tell it was hard on my elbow.”
Garrelts also threw his slurvy breaking ball in a way that stressed his elbow, which would eventually require Tommy John surgery. When he recovered from that, his shoulder gave out. Garrelts never threw a major league pitch in his 30s, but by then he had won an ERA title, started twice in the World Series, and spent parts of 10 years in the majors. He did what he had to do.
“If you need that pitch, you’d better throw it, because you don’t want to look back 15 years from now and think, ‘Maybe I should have thrown it,’ ” Garrelts says. “That’s the decision everybody’s got to make.”
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Bobby Valentine managed in Japan in 1995. At the end of the next season, he began a long stint managing the Mets. When Valentine returned to Japan as a manager in 2004, he recognized something that had largely disappeared from the American game: the splitter.
“It was a noticeable difference, because they just never discontinued the process,” Valentine says. “We were similar in the ’80s and early ’90s, a similar amount of guys throwing it, I’ll bet. And then we stopped, and they continued.”
Major league teams overreacted, Valentine said, when split-finger maestros like Garrelts, Scott, and Sutter got hurt. The panic never spread overseas, Valentine says, partly because the mind-set behind the splitter was deeply embedded in Japanese baseball culture. It is the perfect substitute for the changeup.
“The reason the Japanese throw it as opposed to a straight changeup is because they don’t think you should throw a slower pitch without movement,” Valentine says. “It’s just part of the pitching vernacular: slower pitches move, faster pitches are straight; it’s just the way the Japanese baseball brain works. They’ll use a split, some form of a split, because they know it’s a very similar arm stroke and the only thing that’s different is the placement on the ball, which will propel the ball forward and also relieve the force behind the ball, so therefore you can’t throw it as fast as your arm speed would dictate.”
Hideki Matsui, who left Japan to join the Yankees in 2003, said his biggest adjustment as a hitter was facing so many changeups; the pitch was indeed rarely thrown in Japan, but nearly everyone threw a splitter. Japanese pitchers who preceded Matsui to the majors—Hideo Nomo, Shigetoshi Hasegwa, Kazuhiro Sasaki—brought the split with them. So did others who followed, like Hiroki Kuroda, Junichi Tazawa, and Koji Uehara.
“I used to only throw sliders and I wanted to expand my repertoire, and that’s how I started throwing the pitch,” says Uehara, the former Boston closer, whose splitter struck out St. Louis’s Matt Carpenter for the final out of the 2013 World Series. Uehara’s inspiration?
“With me it’s Hideo Nomo,” he says. “And with older generations there was a player called Shigeru Sugishita. I’ve only heard of him; I’ve never seen him throw. But he was supposed to have a really devastating splitter.”
Sugishita threw his last pitch in 1961, long before Uehara was born. Known as the God of Forkballs, he was a three-time winner of the Sawamura Award as Japan’s best pitcher. In 1954, for the Chunichi Dragons, he was also the Central League’s MVP, going 32–12 with a 1.39 ERA across a staggering 395⅓ innings. Then he was MVP of the Japan Series. A god, indeed.
Sugishita turned 91 in 2016, when my friend Gaku Tashiro of Sankei Sports asked him a few questions for this book. Sugishita said that he learned the forkball at Meiji University in 1948, after first trying a knuckleball as an off-speed pitch. A coach noticed he had longer fingers than most pitchers and suggested the forkball, then thrown by only a few U.S. pitchers.
He took to the pitch instantly. The next year, Sugishita was pitching for the Dragons, and in 1950 he led his league in strikeouts. Nobody else, he said, was throwing the forkball.
“My advantage was that my two fingers are able to open widely,” he told Tashiro, explaining that he got about three feet of vertical drop on the pitch. “It was helpful to grip the ball and to throw it with no spin. Sometimes the catcher could not catch my forkball because it was breaking too much.”
Sugishita’s forkball inspired the next generation of Japanese pitchers. By the mid-1970s, kids who had grown up in the 1950s were using the pitch in force. Helping their effort was that, for many years, the Japanese baseball was slightly smaller than the one used in MLB, making it a bit easier to throw for a split.
“Oh yeah, everybody threw it in Japan,” says Clyde Wright, who pitched three years for the Yomiuri Giants after his major league career ended in 1975. “Young kids coming out of high school, all of ’em threw it. Everybody threw it. You get two strikes on you, you knew you were gonna get some kind of split-finger.”
Ty Van Burkleo, a future major league hitting coach who played in Japan from 1988 to 1991, said: “It got to the point where, 3–1, I’m sitting forkball. If they threw me a fastball, I was like, ‘Challenge me!’ ”
Tazawa, a future top setup man in the majors, was born in 1986 and said that in his youth, nearly every Japanese pitcher threw a split. Things changed, he said, after Nomo joined the Dodgers in 1995. Interest in Major League Baseball exploded, and with easier access to the American game, young pitchers started learning changeups, two-seamers, and so on.
American hitters, though, were confounded by the splitter, and have largely continued to flail away at it. While no Japanese pitcher has won a Cy Young Award, several have been dominant relievers or slotted comfortably into the front of winning rotations. Nomo started the All-Star Game as a rookie—he struck out Kenny Lofton and Edgar Martinez on splitters in the first inning—and went on to pitch two no-hitters.
The pitch’s decline in popularity in the United States makes it less familiar to hitters.
“I don’t think American and Latin kids see it anymore, because nobody teaches it,” says Brian Bannister. “It’s very, very rare, because of the perceived health risk, that a kid is willing to put his career on the line, not even knowing if it’s true or not. And so it’s not taught, therefore the hitters never see it; they don’t get opportunity to practice against it. So in Japan, where it’s taught more prevalently—it’s taught like a changeup and everybody throws one—a lot of those pitchers have come over and had a ton of success because it’s a lost pitch.”
What is largely lost here is still ingrained in the Japanese game. Americans who sign there are generally told that they must learn the pitch. When Chris Leroux joined the Yakult Swallows in 2013, he could not throw the split without pain. He altered his arm angle and was bombed in five starts. But his teammate Tony Barnette, a career minor leaguer in the U.S., had a different experience.
“I had tinkered with it in junior college and even a couple of times in the minor leagues, but it was never really a pitch I took seriously,” Barnette says. “Then I went over there and they kind of hammered it home. My pitching coaches said, ‘Let’s try the split, let’s try the split.’ They kept introducing it. Ended up being the right decision.”
Barnette spent six years in Japan, finishing with 41 saves in 2015. At 32, with a sharp splitter but no major league experience, he signed a two-year, $3.5 million contract with the Texas Rangers. His ERA as a rookie was 2.09, and he appeared in every playoff game.
The splitter didn’t hurt his arm, and even if it did, Barnette said, he would still throw it.
“Some people say the split causes Tommy John—now all of a sudden nobody’s throwing splits, and guess what, they’re still having Tommy Johns,” Barnette says. “It’s not a science. I don’t think it has any more pressure than any other pitches I throw. It feels pretty comfortable, it feels pretty natural—and at this point in my career, what do I care? It’s getting late in the game. I’m gonna use what I got, how much I’ve got, until I don’t got it no more.”
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To prove the point that the splitter must be dangerous, pitchers often suggest that you spread your index and middle fingers as wide as possible.
“You’ll get this incredible tenseness in your forearm, just physically spreading your fingers,” says Ron Darling, who still could not resist throwing a lot of splitters in his prime with the Mets. “I consider it, in the short run, an incredible pitch. In the long run, I think it thwarted the length of my career.”
Mike Mussina is also suspicious of the splitter, because of how tightly the pitcher must grip the sides of the ball. Then again, Mussina said, his hand is not really big enough to throw the pitch, and he rarely did. When his Yankee teammate Andy Pettitte tried to throw spli
tters in early 2002, the pitch hurt his elbow and led Pettitte down a dark road: in his recovery, he has admitted, he briefly resorted to human growth hormone.
When John Burkett pitched in Triple-A for the Giants, his pitching coach suggested he use a splitter to get Craig’s attention and earn a promotion. The plan worked, but in time the pitch caused a grinding sensation in his elbow; once, Burkett said, his hand actually throbbed on the mound from a forearm spasm. Ken Hill, later Burkett’s teammate in Texas, also felt a strain from the pitch and was rarely effective after age 32. Hill could not say for sure that the splitter caused his trouble, but it sure sounds painful.
“I’d get to a certain pitch count, my arm would be on fire,” Hill says. “Right in the elbow.”
Then there are cases like Chuck Finley, who logged more than 3,000 innings and said his hand was so big that gripping the splitter did not stress his fingers at all. Finley’s wrist and elbow stayed loose and the pitch never hurt his arm. Nor did it bother Curt Schilling, who lasted through age 40 and was at his best in October, still strong after long seasons. Schilling used the splitter to become the only pitcher ever with more than 3,000 strikeouts and fewer than 750 walks. Don’t tell him the pitch is dangerous.
“I think it’s one of the easiest pitches in the world on your arm, because you don’t change anything,” Schilling says. “You don’t manipulate the ball with a split, you just split your fingers. It literally is what it sounds like—you throw your fastball and split your fingers. I don’t have to curl my wrist, I don’t have to spin the ball. My elbow doesn’t do anything other than what I do on my fastball for the most part. It’s the easiest pitch to learn, easiest pitch to teach, and in my mind one of the easiest pitches to throw.”