by Tyler Kepner
Clemens, Morris, and Stewart also had long careers. Jack McDowell, the 1993 AL Cy Young Award winner for the White Sox, was done at 33, but he has cited a surgical error that caused nerve damage. Sutter’s pinched nerve, he said, came from a birth defect. Scott, who was finished at 35, refused to blame the splitter.
“I know it’s one of the theories out there, but I guarantee you that it didn’t shorten my career,” he told ESPN in 2003. “People were having arm problems with it, which I really have a hard time believing because it’s basically a fastball with the fingers split on the baseball. It’s no different from throwing a fastball.”
Craig draws a distinction between the pitch he taught and the forkball that preceded it.
“I never had a guy go all the way down,” Craig says, referring to a ball pushed back in the palm. “That’s like the forkball, and how many forkball pitchers do you remember? Elroy Face, Lindy McDaniel—they put it so deep they put some pressure on your arm. But the split-finger, if you throw it right, the way I taught it, you might hurt your arm—but you might hurt your arm throwing a rock.”
Dr. Glenn Fleisig said there was no scientific data to cast the splitter as inherently dangerous. Yes, it might cause pain for some pitchers, but that doesn’t mean the risk is universal. Sometimes, a splitter might only seem to cause an injury.
“Maybe it was the amount of pitching, total,” Fleisig says, “and it just showed up on the splitter.”
The industry doesn’t want to take a chance. In 2017 only three of the 58 pitchers who qualified for the ERA title threw a split even 10 percent of the time: Masahiro Tanaka, Kevin Gausman, and Ricky Nolasco. Of the other 55 starters, according to FanGraphs, only three tried a splitter even once.
Yankees pitching coach Larry Rothschild says coaches would rather emphasize a changeup than a splitter, since the pitches work similarly. Even so, he could not say for sure that the splitter was any riskier than a hard slider—and besides, he added, fastballs might cause the most arm tension, anyway. Late in 2016, one of Rothschild’s starters, Nathan Eovaldi, was found to need a second Tommy John surgery. Eovaldi threw splitters with 23 percent of his pitches, but said he had no plans to stop doing so when he returned.
A generation earlier, Bryan Harvey said the same thing. A two-time All-Star closer with a devastating splitter, Harvey would wrap his fingers around a softball in the clubhouse; he did not have big hands but was determined to make the most of what he had. In May 1994, before Harvey returned from an elbow injury with the Marlins, Gordon Edes asked him if the pitch caused the pain.
“All I know is that I’m going to keep throwing it,” Harvey said. He was 30 years old and would pitch just five more games in his career.
In an industry forever trying to solve the riddle of pitching injuries, stories like that stand out. The split-finger fastball is like a breed of dog that bites a few famous people. Word gets around and people avoid the breed altogether. There are plenty of other dogs to choose from.
Garrelts, who coaches kids in Shreveport, Louisiana, says people tend to ask him the same two questions about his career: Did you throw a no-hitter, and did you pitch in the World Series? He laughs and says he lost a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth and lost two starts in the World Series.
What about the pitch that made him famous for a while, the unhittable pitch that swept through his generation?
“Nobody’s asked anything about the splitter,” Garrelts says. “Nobody.”
THE SCREWBALL
The Sasquatch of Baseball
The final line on Christy Mathewson’s Hall of Fame plaque is the most concise, exquisite bit of prose in the museum: “MATTY WAS MASTER OF THEM ALL.” It is presented as a quotation, though the source is lost to time, if there ever was one. Perhaps it was just accepted gospel about Mathewson, the only member of the Hall’s first class in 1936 who never lived to see the building. Mathewson was exposed to poison gas as an Army captain in France during World War I and spent the last years of his life fighting tuberculosis. It was a sad ending to a towering life that needed no embellishment. Mathewson really was the master.
No pitcher in baseball history has as many wins as Mathewson (373) with an earned run average so low (2.13). Only one man with even 250 wins (Lefty Grove, with 300) had a better winning percentage than Mathewson’s .665. He led his league in strikeout-to-walk ratio nine times and threw three shutouts for the Giants in the 1905 World Series. More than that, though, Mathewson had a story: at a time when many ballplayers were mostly hard-bitten, poorly educated ruffians, Mathewson was a dignified, Christian gentleman from Factoryville, Pennsylvania, where, as a boy, he honed his famous control by throwing a ball—three inches wide—through a four-inch hole in the door of his father’s barn. Mathewson went on to Bucknell, where he played sports but also sang in the glee club and belonged to the campus literary society. He was a man of letters beyond his many Ks; at the height of his fame, in 1912, Mathewson wrote a book that gave a detailed look at what happens on the field and why.
He called it Pitching in a Pinch—and what he did in that spot was throw his famous fadeaway, the pitch now known as the screwball.
“Many persons have asked me why I do not use my ‘fade-away’ oftener when it is so effective, and the only answer is that every time I throw the ‘fade-away,’ it takes so much out of my arm,” he wrote. “It is a very hard ball to deliver. Pitching it ten or twelve times in a game kills my arm, so I save it for the pinches.”
Mathewson, a right-hander, continued: “Many fans do not know what this ball really is. It is a slow curve pitched with the motion of a fast ball. But most curve balls break away from a right-handed batter a little. The fade-away breaks toward him.”
In two paragraphs Mathewson defined the pitch forever, describing its effect on the pitcher and the hitter. He also added just enough mystery to cloud exactly what this pitch really is. Using a fastball motion to disguise a slower pitch—one that moves into the same-hand hitter—is also fundamental to the changeup. But a changeup is not shaped like a curveball, and generally is not tough on the arm. So if the pitch is not a changeup or a curve, it’s something else. In the decades after Mathewson, it would be called the screwball, an oddity now all but extinct.
For years, the pitch was considered to be Mathewson’s alone. In 1934, a former teammate, Red Murray, told the Brooklyn Eagle that the fadeaway was so hard to learn, and put such strain on the pitcher’s wrist, that Mathewson was “the only man ever to master” it. Murray said Mathewson’s inspiration had come from umpiring freshman games at Bucknell and wondering if he could make a curveball spin in reverse. Maybe so, but Mathewson himself cited an early teammate, Dave Williams, with giving him the idea for the fadeaway in 1898. Williams could not control the pitch well—he would make just three appearances in the majors, for the team now known as the Red Sox in 1902—but he showed Mathewson how to throw it.
“I was trying to work my way through college by pitching for a team in a little Pennsylvania mountain town called Honesdale,” Mathewson told the Chicago Inter Ocean in 1910. “One day I saw a left-handed amateur throwing the ball with that peculiar reverse twist. I thought it might help me, so I learned it, but I worked at it steadily for five years before I got it perfected.”
Mathewson, who referred to Williams by name in other sources, went on to distinguish his pitch from that of Virgil “Ned” Garvin, a turn-of-the-century journeyman who pitched for six teams in seven seasons.
“All the sporting books credit old Virgil Garvin with being the inventor of the fade-away,” he said. “Well, maybe he was, but [Williams] had never heard of Virgil Garvin in all his life. He simply stumbled onto it by chance just as I had stumbled onto him.”
When Mathewson joined the Giants in 1900, at age 19, he showed off his pitches for George Davis, the shortstop and manager, in practice. Davis immediately rejected the roundhouse curve, a pitch Mathewson
called his pride and joy. Mathewson tried a tighter curve—a drop ball—which impressed Davis, who asked if he had anything else.
“I’ve a sort of freak ball that I never use in a game,” Mathewson said. It was his fadeaway, which he hadn’t even named and could rarely control. But he broke off a beauty to Davis, who swung and missed by a foot. Eyes bulging, Davis asked for another, and missed that one, too.
“That’s a good one!” Davis declared, as recalled by Mathewson for St. Nicholas magazine in 1912. “That’s all right! It’s a slow in-curve to a right-handed batter. A change of pace with a curve ball. A regular fallaway or fadeaway. That’s a good ball!”
Other Giants were similarly amazed, and Davis told Mathewson to practice the pitch diligently so he could control it for the future. He would pitch just six times that season, with more walks than strikeouts, but soon began a captivating magic act on the mound: a no-hitter in 1901, a 30-win season in 1903, those record three World Series shutouts in 1905, and so on. All along, Mathewson eagerly shared the secrets of his fadeaway: turning over his hand, snapping his wrist away from his body—it was all there, in print or in person, waiting to be imitated.
“Many times I have tried to teach other pitchers in the Big League—even men on opposing clubs—how to throw this ball,” he said. “But none have ever mastered it.”
* * *
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A richer origin story than the Dave Williams version involves Rube Foster, a Hall of Famer best known for organizing the Negro National League in 1920. Foster was a top pitcher before that, and John McGraw, as Giants manager, is said to have recruited him to help his pitchers. A legend persists that Foster then taught Mathewson the fadeaway, though the evidence clearly contradicts this. Even so, the fact that Foster also threw it, with great success, supports Rob Neyer’s theory that nobody really knows who used it first. John Clarkson and Tim Keefe were well known for changing speeds in the 1880s, like another ace of that time, Mickey Welch, who said late in life that he recognized Mathewson’s fadeaway as the same pitch he had used.
“Just about anybody could have invented it,” Neyer wrote. “Once everybody realized that you could make a baseball curve that way by twisting your wrist this way, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to realize that reversing the process should be possible, the result being what we might call—and what might actually have been called—a ‘reverse curve.’ ”
“Reverse curve” is the most accurate shorthand for screwball, a baseball term that long ago crossed over into everyday life. In the 1930s, the prime of the great Giant lefty Carl Hubbell, “screwball” came to describe a specific genre of Hollywood comedies: battle of the sexes, often with a woman’s madcap antics upending a stuffy man’s world. In his book about Depression-era films, Andrew Bergman wrote that “screwball comedy,” like Hubbell’s famous pitch, was “unconventional, went in different directions and behaved in unexpected ways.”
By that description, the knuckleball would fit better. But screwball just sounds right, as it does when describing a personality type: eccentric at best, deranged at worst. If someone is known as a screwball, he’s not a reliable guy, and it’s not a reliable pitch, either. The definition has become self-fulfilling: it’s so bizarre and deemed such a health risk that pitchers use alternatives—the changeup, mostly—to achieve the same result. The pitch has all but vanished from the majors over the last three decades, so much so that the Hall of Fame slugger Jim Thome, who played 22 seasons, said he had heard of the pitch, but never seen it. The screwball, in that way, is the Sasquatch of baseball: believed to exist but with no credible evidence from many experts.
The record does show that Thome batted once against a Reds left-hander named Daniel Ray Herrera, grounding out in 2009. Herrera made 131 appearances from 2008 to 2011, and without the screwball, he would have made none. He used it because he could not throw a changeup, and it distinguished him just enough to give him his modest career.
Herrera’s quirky profile fit the pitch: he is 5 foot 6, and at the time of his debut, no pitcher had been shorter in more than 50 years. He is also the only major leaguer ever to attend Permian High School in Odessa, Texas, best known as the featured football program in Friday Night Lights.
“When I was in high school, they actually tore down the outfield fence so they could have spring football practice,” Herrera says. “So our center field and right field would be just dirt pits from the guys rustlin’ around on the ground out there.”
In college, at New Mexico, Herrera found that his changeup moved sideways, almost like a sinker, without the downward fade he needed. He tried pronating his wrist more deliberately, and found that the more he did it, the more over-the-top spin he imparted on the ball. Herrera snapped down with his wrist, just as he would for a curveball, but in the opposite direction. His command was shaky, but he knew a good weapon when he saw it: this new pitch had curveball spin but ran away from a right-hander. The oddity alone made it valuable.
“When I started throwing it, everyone kept calling it a changeup, a changeup,” he says. “And in the back of my head I kept saying: ‘A changeup doesn’t move like this; a changeup doesn’t spin like this.’ I actually didn’t classify it as a screwball when I started throwing it. I just knew it was something different, and hopefully I could work with it in the future.”
It took 1,345 picks and 45 rounds in the 2006 draft, but Herrera was finally chosen by the Rangers. Within two years he was pitching in the majors for the Reds, relieving Aaron Harang—who is 13 inches taller—against a stacked Phillies lineup. In his first inning, he struck out a power-hitting lefty (Ryan Howard) and a power-hitting righty (Pat Burrell). Jamie Moyer, the ageless Philadelphia left-hander, sought out Herrera before the next day’s game.
“You have to show me how to throw that pitch,” Moyer cried, before Herrera could even say hello. “I need to revive my career!”
Herrera was stunned. Here he was, with one game in the majors, and a veteran of two decades had noticed him, just because of the screwball. It would be a recurring theme in Herrera’s brief career. Pitchers would regularly ask him for guidance, but none could repeat what he did. They usually weren’t flexible enough to get their arm over their head, as Herrera did. And if they could, they couldn’t throw anything else from that slot.
“Daniel really had to clear his head to get into that position,” says Bryan Price, who coached Herrera with the Reds. “It’s hard to throw other pitches of similar quality from such a dramatic position, because the head has to clear to get on top of the ball to such a degree. From what I’ve seen, from the guys I’ve had who’ve thrown screwballs, it would be very difficult to have quality secondary pitches—meaning fastball command or a breaking ball—off that pitch.”
Some pitchers, like Mike Norris, are born to throw the screwball. Don’t think so? Go grab a household item, like a ketchup bottle or a paper cup. Chances are you pick it up with your palm turned in, toward you. Norris says he always did this the opposite way, with his palm turned away from his body. His mother, Lulu, worried he would drop the milk when he lifted it from the kitchen table. Norris never did.
As an amateur, Norris was practicing one day at Balboa Park in San Francisco when he noticed an unmistakable figure off in the distance: Juan Marichal, the star Giants righty with the impossibly high leg kick and nasty screwball. Norris did not ask for an autograph, but for his screwball grip. Marichal obliged, and in 1980 Norris went 22–9 and nearly won the Cy Young Award. His trick was a screwball thrown at three speeds, with such deception that his manager, Billy Martin, called it a dry spitter.
“Mine was an optical illusion,” Norris says. “So with the arm speed, it looked like a fastball, then the seams started turning over, going the other way, and it looked like it just stopped in midair. It moved about two feet, and I could throw it from one side of the plate to the other. So this is why they’d have difficulty hitting it, because the
y’re throwing their hands at it and it’s not there yet. Now it’s starting to go down, and the velocity as it goes down is incredible. It’s even harder going down than it is going away.”
With Norris’s screwball drifting and dropping away from them, left-handers hit just .185 off him in 1980. Yet Norris’s description of the pitch, and the way he threw it—the further back in his palm, the slower it was—again evokes the changeup. The pitches are close cousins, often mistaken for twins. The Reds once had two lefties, Tom Browning and John Franco, who threw a pitch with the same action. But Franco’s came from a circle-change grip, so his was called a changeup. Browning used a two-seam grip, pulling his thumb down to impart the slashing movement away from a righty. His was called a screwball but served the same purpose, and helped him pitch a perfect game in 1988.
“My fastball was probably major league average, if that, although some guys may say it was never that,” Browning says. “But [my screwball] complemented it so much that it allowed my fastball to look better, look firmer, because they had to stay back a little bit in case I came with the changeup—or the screwball.”
Warren Spahn, whose 363 wins are the most ever by a lefty, basically carved out a second prime—in his late 30s and early 40s—by perfecting an off-speed pitch that flummoxed right-handed hitters. The pitch was widely known as a screwball, and that’s what Joe Torre, his catcher at the end, also calls it.
But here’s Roger Angell describing Spahn teaching the pitch in spring training in 1987. Angell calls it a sinker-screwball, but it accurately describes a circle change: “His left thumb and forefinger were making a circle, with the three other fingers pointing up, exactly as if he were flashing the ‘O.K.’ sign to someone nearby. The ball was tucked comfortably up against the circle, without being held by it, and the other fingers stayed up and apart, keeping only a loose grip on the pill. Thrown that way, he said, the ball departed naturally off the inside, or little-finger side, of the middle finger, and would then sink and break to the left as it crossed the plate.”