K

by Tyler Kepner

  Spahn’s late-career dominance was nearly unprecedented; he is the only pitcher in the last century with two 20-win seasons after turning 40. He missed three years to military service in his early 20s, saving wear on his arm at a critical age. His father, Ed, a wallpaper salesman, emphasized momentum in his son’s delivery, transferring weight from back to front with an exaggerated leg kick that Spahn believed protected his arm.

  “Dad had a theory about pitching,” Spahn told The Washington Post in 1955. “He used to say if you learned to throw properly you could pitch forever without hurting your arm. He was right, too.”

  If it was, indeed, a screwball that Spahn threw, it certainly didn’t hurt him. And while the screwball’s most notorious victim is thought to be Carl Hubbell, consider that Hubbell’s arm trouble might have been caused by piling up four seasons in a row with at least 300 innings—and besides, he did pitch past his fortieth birthday and go down as an all-time great.

  “I’ve heard about how he inverted his arm in a weird way, and when I was younger I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna play for 10 or 15 years, and then what if my arm does that?’ ” Herrera says. “I always kind of looked at the angle of it, but nothing has ever changed. My arm hasn’t twisted inward like that. So maybe it is a legend, who knows? But I think I’d make that sacrifice—and then just write upside down with my left arm.”

  * * *

  ————

  Ah, the inverted arm of Carl Hubbell. You might think Hubbell’s staggering success would be a powerful selling point for the screwball. For a decade (1929–38) he had 195 wins, a 2.81 ERA (best in the majors), and two Most Valuable Player awards. He dominated the Senators in the 1933 World Series, allowing no earned runs across 20 innings, and the next summer he used the screwball to strike out five Hall of Famers in a row at the All-Star Game: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin.

  Alas, physical deformity trumps all that. Hubbell, nicknamed “Meal Ticket” for the Depression-era Giants, blamed his own meal ticket for the way his arm bent awkwardly at his side, turned out to the left as if in perpetual follow-through on a screwball. Jim Murray—who once wrote that Hubbell “looks as if he put it on in the dark”—shared this anecdote in the Los Angeles Times after Hubbell’s death in 1988:

  The screwball was not really a pitch, it was an affliction. I met Hubbell only once. He was in his late 60s but still the gaunt, spare, Gary Cooperish character I remembered as a kid. I gave him a ride to the airport on his way to scout some phenom in Northern California for the Giants.

  “Tell me,” I asked him, “was that screwball that hard a pitch to throw? Hard on the arm?” Hubbell laughed. And rolled up his sleeve. He showed me a left arm you could have opened wine with. It should have had a cork on the end of it. I whistled. Why did he risk it? Hubbell laughed again. “In those Depression days, you would have let them twist your neck for a living. An arm was nothing.”

  The screwball gave Hubbell a career—and like Mathewson, he was inspired by another pitcher with just a sliver of time in the majors. Claude “Lefty” Thomas appeared in seven games for Washington in 1916, but otherwise spent 18 pro seasons in the minors. Near the end of his wandering, with the Des Moines Demons of the Class A Western League in 1925, he caught the attention of Hubbell, then with the Oklahoma City Indians and just starting his career.

  In an interview in his clip file at the Hall of Fame, Hubbell mentions that Thomas made pitching seem so easy. Others could throw harder, but Thomas just flipped sinkers down and away to right-handers for harmless ground balls. Hubbell decided to pitch the same way.

  “I must have had the right kind of instincts to pick him,” Hubbell said. “It’s like learning to walk: monkey see, monkey do. I picked the right monkey.”

  As he worked on the sinker, Hubbell found he could get more spin when he turned the pitch over with his wrist at the end. This was the screwball, christened as such by the Oklahoma City catcher Earl Wolgamot. As Hubbell told The New York Times’ George Vecsey in 1984, Wolgamot caught the pitch in warm-ups one day and called it “the screwiest thing I ever saw.”

  Hubbell said he could tell right away the pitch was unnatural—“my elbow had to fly up just as I turned it loose”—and, apparently, so could the Tigers. At spring training with Detroit in 1925, coach George McBride forbade him from using it, insisting it would ruin his arm. Ty Cobb, then Detroit’s manager, may have ordered McBride to say this, though Hubbell said he never actually spoke to Cobb, who was gone when the Tigers released Hubbell in 1928, without ever letting him pitch in an exhibition game.

  Hubbell moved on to the Beaumont Exporters of the Texas League. He decided the only way to distinguish himself was to use the screwball, whether it hurt him or not. That June Beaumont played in Houston, site of the Democratic convention, and a delegate named Dick Kinsella took in the game. Hubbell pitched a four-hitter, impressing Kinsella, a scout for the Giants and a friend of McGraw, who was still their manager.

  According to author Frank Graham, Kinsella called McGraw and told him of his discovery. He warned McGraw that Cobb had rejected Hubbell because the screwball might damage his arm, but McGraw laughed it off. He had managed Mathewson, after all.

  “That’s a joke,” McGraw said. “When Matty was pitching it, they called it a fadeaway and it never hurt his arm. If there isn’t anything wrong with him, I’d like to know more about him.”

  Kinsella agreed to follow Hubbell around for a while, leaving the convention for a more promising prospect than the Democrats’ nominee, Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. Smith would lose in a landslide to Herbert Hoover that November, but Kinsella secured the contract of a pitcher who would win prodigiously, long after Hoover left office.

  Hubbell was the National League’s MVP in 1936, guiding the Giants to the World Series with a 26–6 record and a major-league-best 2.31 ERA. The screwball was a big part of his mystique.

  “I’ve tried never to let pitching success turn my head; but it has twisted my arm,” Hubbell wrote the next spring in a story for This Week magazine. “This left ‘salary wing’ of mine hangs from my shoulder strangely, with the palm facing out and backward. Because of this strange twist, I can throw a screwball with ease. The screwball, a reverse curve which breaks, in my case, away from a right-handed batter instead of toward him, as a southpaw’s natural hook does, has ruined many pitchers’ arms. However, although it has ‘swiveled’ my arm at the elbow, it never hurts.”

  Alas, by the next summer, just after his 200th career victory, Hubbell could no longer raise his arm to his shoulder without elbow pain. A doctor in Memphis removed bone chips and a calcium deposit on the joint, and Hubbell believed he knew the reason.

  Before the 1940 season, he told an interviewer that the ban on spitballs—by then nearly two decades old—had forced pitchers to “invent freak deliveries” to do their jobs. The balls they were using, meanwhile, were slick and shiny, because umpires quickly discarded any ball that might be scuffed. Hubbell insisted it was murder on that salary wing:

  “These unorthodox pitches result in a great strain on the arm. Take my screwball, for instance—the peculiar twist I must give it if I hope to fool anybody with it is the reason for those splintered bones I had in my elbow.”

  Hubbell remained a useful pitcher in his final four seasons, finishing 253–154 in a remarkable career that made him an inner-circle Hall of Famer. Even so, Hubbell was never interested in passing down the screwball; a teammate who tried it, Cliff Melton, was also bothered by elbow pain. The hazards to Hubbell were ever present in that mangled throwing arm, at once the best and worst advertisement the screwball ever had.

  * * *

  ————

  The screwball had its moments after Hubbell’s dazzling prime. The Cardinals’ Harry Brecheen beat the Red Sox three times in the 1946 World Series. Luis Tiant—the father of the future Boston ace—finished his ca
reer in Cuba, where he threw one of the best screwballs the island has ever seen. Verdell “Lefty” Mathis, a star in the Negro American League in the 1940s, used screwballs to thwart one of the game’s great sluggers, Josh Gibson. Mathis loved facing lineups stacked with right-handed hitters—including Gibson, whose Cooperstown plaque says he hit nearly 800 homers.

  “I always used the screwball on Gibson, low and away,” Mathis told the author John Holway. “He never hit a home run off me.”

  In popular lore, though, the screwball still belonged to Hubbell. In Players’ Choice, the 1987 book that polled hundreds of ex-players on various topics, Hubbell got about four times as many votes for best screwball as any other pitcher. Still, there were prominent pitchers who featured it in their arsenal, including Juan Marichal, who was yet another Giants Hall of Famer.

  Marichal had first been intrigued by the screwball at Class A in 1959, knowing that Ruben Gomez had thrived with it in the majors. He asked Andy Gilbert, his manager in Springfield, Massachusetts, how to throw it, learning that the pitcher must break his wrist the opposite way as he does for a curveball. For Marichal, though, there was a handicap: he could not throw the screwball sidearm, as he did for his other pitches. He had to throw it overhand.

  That would be a challenge, but as a right-hander, Marichal believed he had to try it. Candlestick Park opened in 1960 and favored left-handed hitters, meaning he would need a pitch that broke away from them. He picked it up quickly, and in 1962 began a string of eight All-Star seasons in which he averaged more than 21 wins per year. Even those who hit him well, like Joe Torre, admired Marichal’s wide repertoire.

  “He would throw you a fastball, a curveball, a screwball; he had a big curveball and he threw a slider—and then he threw everything [sidearm] too, except the screwball,” Torre says. “I tried not to look at his delivery because he had that big leg kick and he threw basically stiff-arm. But he was remarkable, because with the wild windup and the big leg kick, his control was better than anybody else’s. He could throw the ball over a rosin bag, I guarantee it.”

  Marichal’s most famous game was his marathon duel with Spahn at Candlestick in 1963. Marichal twirled 16 shutout innings and Spahn 15, until Willie Mays bashed a hanging screwball for a game-ending home run. Marichal would pitch 12 more seasons, finishing 101 games above .500, though a championship eluded him; he made just one appearance in the World Series.

  That was in 1962, when Ralph Terry played the hero for the Yankees. Four years later, Terry was barely hanging on, trying to learn a knuckleball at the instructional league for the Mets. There he met a plucky young lefty named Frank Edwin “Tug” McGraw, who had lost 16 of his 20 major league decisions. Terry went golfing with McGraw, and passed on a tip that would one day help two franchises win their first World Series.

  McGraw had a clean, overhand delivery, and Terry thought the screwball would be a good fit. He had learned it from Spud Chandler, the 1943 AL Most Valuable Player for the Yankees, who had once coached Terry with the Kansas City A’s. Terry remembered how Marlin Stuart, an otherwise ordinary righty in the 1950s, had humbled the great Ted Williams with screwballs. Williams generally owned Terry (career average: .455), but on June 20, 1958, Terry retired him three times in a row with screwballs.

  “That’s a good pitch,” Williams told Terry after the game. “Don’t use it all the time.”

  That was the screwball’s reputation: a valuable weapon that must be conserved, for fear of injury. And while McGraw picked up the pitch from Terry in about 10 minutes—“Man, he had it, just like Warren Spahn, right over the top,” Terry says—he met the same kind of resistance Hubbell had found decades earlier.

  A Mets coach, Sheriff Robinson, would not let McGraw use it. Yet Terry’s explanation made sense to McGraw, who used the pitch in the minors and felt no soreness. As McGraw wrote in his first autobiography:

  What Ralph Terry had taught me was to rotate my arm in such a way as to get opposite rotation from every other breaking pitch. When you throw the baseball over the top of your head or ear, it makes just as much sense to turn your wrist inside-out. If you put a clock in front of you, you twist the ball toward three o’clock. It turns your whole arm all the way back to your shoulder. By the time you release it you lose some velocity, but the ball breaks away from a right-handed hitter instead of toward him the way a curve does. The fastball will tail away from a right-handed hitter, and a curve will break into him. But this one broke away and destroyed his timing.

  Sounds good, but the Mets were not convinced. They buried McGraw in the minors for all of 1968, then left him unprotected for three rounds of the expansion draft. He went unclaimed, and the next spring they finally relented and let him throw screwballs. McGraw instantly became an ace reliever, struck out Hank Aaron to help save a playoff game, and won a championship ring with a team forever known as the Miracle Mets.

  McGraw also met Hubbell that season, at an Old-Timers’ Game at Shea Stadium. They compared screwball grips and noticed they gripped the pitch differently to get the same action. McGraw held his parallel to the seams, Hubbell across them.

  “We came to the conclusion that it’s not so much how you hold it in your hand as how you release it,” McGraw wrote. “You know, the way a guy holds the ball, against the seams or with them, is just a matter of comfort. But what counts is the thing that gives the ball its final rotation.”

  The screwball became integral to McGraw’s persona. He was the epitome of the lovable screwball, thumping his glove on his thigh as he bounded off the mound between innings, leading an orchestra in a dramatic reading of “Casey at the Bat.” In the 1970s he even authored a nationally syndicated comic strip about a team of misfit players. Appropriately, he called it Scroogie.

  As McGraw’s fastball waned, he called it his Peggy Lee—as in, “Is That All There Is?” There were variations to the fastball, and McGraw named them, too. The Bo Derek, he said, “had a nice little tail on it.” The Cutty Sark sailed, the John Jameson went straight (like Irish whiskey), and the gopher ball was his Frank Sinatra pitch—as in, “Fly Me to the Moon.”

  The most important pitch McGraw ever threw came for the Phillies in the ninth inning of Game 6 of the 1980 World Series, with two out and the bases loaded. Police dogs circled the field at Veterans Stadium to keep the fans from rushing the turf. McGraw noticed the K-9 Corps and instantly made the connection: here he was in the ninth, needing a K.

  Somehow, the silly thought relaxed McGraw. He ran the count full to the Royals’ Willie Wilson, setting him up for a screwball. Wilson hesitated just long enough on his swing, flailing at the high fastball to end it.

  McGraw exulted, whirling his left arm like a windmill and bouncing as he turned to third base and caught Mike Schmidt in his arms. Seventy-five years after Mathewson’s fadeaway had carried the Giants to a championship, the screwy pitch from a screwy lefty had delivered the Phillies the title.

  * * *

  ————

  McGraw’s success highlighted the last peak era for the screwball. It had briefly made Mike Norris an ace in Oakland, and in 1984, Willie Hernandez would use it to win the AL Most Valuable Player award while leading Detroit all the way. Hernandez had learned the screwball two years earlier from Mike Cuellar, the former star lefty for the Orioles.

  But the true locus for the screwball, in these years, was Dodger Stadium. In 1974, the Dodgers’ Mike Marshall won the NL Cy Young Award with one of the most mind-bending seasons in major league history: a record 106 relief appearances, with more than 200 innings, while leading the Dodgers to the pennant. Seven years later, Fernando Valenzuela carried them to the championship, becoming the only pitcher ever to win the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards in the same season. Both men featured the screwball as their primary weapon, but had little else in common.

  Marshall was a right-handed reliever from Michigan. He does not work in organized baseball and co
ndemns its understanding of pitchers. Valenzuela was a left-handed starter from Mexico. He has broadcast the Dodgers in Spanish since 2003 and remains extraordinarily popular, at once familiar and larger than life.

  The Dodgers share a spring training complex with the Chicago White Sox, whose former manager Robin Ventura said the one pitch he had always wanted to face was Valenzuela’s screwball. Ventura, who grew up in California, was in junior high when Fernandomania swept through the game in 1981. He was playing in the majors a dozen years later, when Valenzuela pitched for the Orioles.

  “That was the only time in my career that I went to the plate and thought, ‘I’m just going to watch this—from, like, right here, I’m going to watch it, because I want to see it,’ ” Ventura says. “Not even a thought of hitting it. I was gonna purposely just sit and watch. He didn’t throw that hard back then, but just that action of when he turned it over, it was still a good pitch.”

  Careers like Marshall’s and Valenzuela’s, marked by uniquely memorable peaks, tend to reinforce the screwball’s reputation as an outlier kind of pitch. There is a reason Mathewson and Hubbell both used the word “freak” to describe it. Marshall’s last manager in the majors, Joe Torre, describes him like this: “He was a freak of nature, because he threw every single day.”

  This is nonsense to Marshall, who has a PhD in exercise physiology from Michigan State and has devoted his life to kinesiology, the study of human movement. He threw a pitch that supposedly destroys the arm, yet endurance was his hallmark. As a rookie with Detroit in 1967, Marshall threw his slider the usual way—releasing it over the top of his index finger—and his elbow hurt so much he could not raise it to brush his teeth. His studies, supported by his use of high-speed film, showed him that the proper way to pitch—the only way to do so safely, he insists—was to pronate on everything. And pronation—that is, a counterclockwise turn—helps the screwball.