K

by Tyler Kepner

  “So we went to Sarasota to play an exhibition game and Tom Seaver was gonna pitch against him; Tom was with the White Sox. I said, ‘Tom, I got a guy I’d like you to talk to,’ so I took him over there. First thing Tom Seaver said is: ‘I’m gonna talk to you, and I don’t want you to open your mouth till I tell you. Kid, how do you hold your fastball?’ He said, ‘With the seams.’ Tom said, ‘Well, you might as well go home right now because you ain’t gonna be worth a shit. You want to be good?’ ”

  Fischer laughed: “Roger listened this time. After that I had no trouble with him anymore. He went all four-seam fastball, he got faster and faster and faster. Holy Christ!”

  Seaver did understand the value of the sinker. In his book The Art of Pitching he explains that low pitches are effective because the batter cannot hit a ball squarely if he sees only its top half. He describes how he turns the ball on its side a little, applies pressure with the outside of his index fingertip, instead of from the middle finger, and lets the ball move down and in on a right-hander. But this “turned two-seam fastball,” as Seaver called it, was not his preferred option. He saved it, he wrote, for “when the good riding fastball has deserted me.”

  The two-seamer is fine if it’s all you’ve got, and it’s handy for a double play. A few Hall of Famers were known more for sinkers than four-seamers, like Grover Cleveland Alexander, Bob Lemon, Don Drysdale, and Greg Maddux, who mastered everything. Maddux didn’t even call it a sinker or a two-seamer, and didn’t think about diminished velocity.

  “Whatever,” Maddux says. “I called it a fastball—a two-seam fastball that runs in front a little bit. That was just my fastball. I threw as hard as I could.”

  Maddux envisioned an X on both edges of the plate, and tried to throw pitches that followed those lines: in and away on one side, in and away on the other side. With four possibilities—both directions on both sides—the hitter could never account for them all. His only hope would be to read the movement, yet with Maddux, the pitch would go right for the sweet spot and then veer away, as if magnetically repelled. Steve Stone, the Cy Young Award winner who broadcast Cubs games when Maddux reached the majors, said this action sent Maddux to Cooperstown.

  “Late movement,” Stone said. “If you have gradual movement, they’re gonna knock the crap out of you. Late movement is the whole thing.”

  Maddux called the sinker “the furthest strike from the hitter’s eyes—a little bit harder to see, a little bit harder to hit.” His successor in baiting hitters with it would be Roy Halladay, a Cy Young Award winner for the Blue Jays and the Phillies. The pitchers had strikingly similar rate statistics: Maddux averaged 8.5 hits allowed per nine innings, 1.8 walks per nine, 6.1 strikeouts per nine; for Halladay, it was 8.7, 1.9, and 6.9.

  Demoted to Class A in 2001, after 33 starts across three seasons in the majors, Halladay reinvented himself, dropping his arm angle to three-quarters, which made his fastball naturally scoot a few inches to the third base side. This was a relief to Halladay, because the straighter fastball unnerved him; he felt he had to be too perfect with it. The sinker—coupled with the cutter, which he perfected later in his career—helped free Halladay from anxiety.

  “Before I felt like if I wasn’t on the corners, I was in trouble,” Halladay said in March 2017. “With the sinker I could basically start it middle of the plate and just let it run. And as a young pitcher not able to really throw the ball anywhere I wanted all the time, it allowed me to throw a sinker on that side that was running to their hands, and then a cutter that was either running away from a righty or into a lefty. Everything was running away from the plate.

  “So it really just gave me so much—it gave me the ability to be aggressive, to go after guys and challenge them, knowing that the ball’s moving. Even if I could get it to move three or four inches going either direction, I’m missing the barrel, and that was my only goal. I wanted them to swing at every pitch, I wanted them to put it in play, but I was trying to stay off the barrel.”

  Luke Scott, then of the Orioles, once demonstrated this for me by his locker at Camden Yards. I was covering the Yankees and a pitcher named Darrell Rasner had gotten off to a good start. Rasner was not overpowering, but for a while he was quite effective and I asked Scott why. He explained why pitches off the barrel are hit so weakly, which I knew but had never seen illustrated quite this way.

  Scott held a brown bat in the air, perpendicular to the ground. In his other hand he held a pink bat, parallel to the ground. Holding the brown bat steady, he lightly tapped the pink bat against it, starting around the middle and proceeding down. For several inches, the brown bat barely moved.

  Then, for only two or three inches just before the name on the barrel, it jumped, as if spring-loaded. It was like finding the jelly inside a doughnut—this part was different. This was the sweet spot. And then, for the last few inches, the bat seemed dead again.

  Connecting squarely on the barrel can make the ball seem weightless. So when it runs off that sweet spot, and the hitter buries it into the ground, the ball can seem heavy, unable to be lifted, like an anchor plunging to the bottom of the sea.

  Here’s how catcher Mickey Owen described the sinker of Bill McGee, a sidearmer for the Cardinals in the 1930s and ’40s, to Baseball Magazine in 1941: “He throws a ball that seems like a cannon ball when it comes into a catching mitt.” Some three decades later, the Yankees’ Thurman Munson said Mel Stottlemyre’s sinker felt like it weighed 100 pounds.

  Randy Jones, Brandon Webb, Dallas Keuchel, and Rick Porcello won Cy Young Awards by throwing heavy sinkers, and Chien-Ming Wang was a runner-up. Kevin Brown made six All-Star teams and earned baseball’s first $100 million contract with a sinker that brimmed with rage.

  “He looked vicious,” said Torii Hunter, the former star outfielder. “I mean, he looked like a cowboy that wants to draw on you on the mound. He cut his sleeves, he was jacked. He had that sinker with teeth. It was coming at you like this”—Hunter chomped his teeth vigorously, like a rabid dog—“ready to bite your bat off.”

  If forced to choose, a sinkerballer wants movement over velocity. For some, the terminology is important. Brad Ziegler, a longtime reliever, makes a conscious effort not to think of his sinker as a fastball—because “fastball,” to Ziegler, means “try to throw it hard.” The harder he throws, the flatter his pitch becomes, and that means a line drive or worse.

  Avoid the barrel, and the pitcher will usually win the encounter. An even better plan is to avoid the bat entirely, but that’s not always possible against the world’s best hitters, and seeking strikeouts is an easy way to run a high pitch count. Halladay—a seven-time league leader in complete games—couldn’t fathom why so many pitchers throw balls with two strikes. He knew why—they want to entice a jumpy hitter to swing at something he can’t touch—but he also knew that good hitters take those pitches.

  “I felt like with two strikes—0–2, 1–2—if they didn’t swing at it, it was gonna be strike three,” Halladay said. “I wanted something that they either had to swing at and put in play, or it was gonna be a strike. It’s changed a lot in the way people think about pitching: they want to stay just off the plate and avoid contact.”

  Orel Hershiser used a term that defines the sinker mentality: bat stimulus. Hershiser, a slightly built Dodgers righty, won 204 games but is best known for a glorious two-month stretch in 1988. He finished that regular season with a record 59 consecutive scoreless innings, then started the postseason with eight more. His breathtaking ledger from that September and October: an 8-0 record, 0.46 ERA, eight complete games and seven shutouts in 11 starts, plus a save. He was MVP of the NLCS and the World Series, lifted to the sky after vanquishing a powerful Oakland team to win the Dodgers’ last title. Hershiser’s mind-set, described decades later over lunch before a Dodger broadcast, is the perfect distillation of the sinkerballer’s creed.

  “Because I didn’
t really consider myself a strikeout pitcher, I thought, ‘OK, then really it’s about contact—but it’s really about weak contact,’ ” Hershiser says. “And then it’s also about pitch count and being able to complete games and get deep into games. So what you’re looking for is early, weak contact, and the best way to get that is movement.

  “But you also have to give the hitter something to start the bat. So for me it was about bat stimulus. I’ve got to give him something visually that he likes, and then I’ve got to make it move. Greg Maddux would say, ‘Make strikes look like balls and make balls look like strikes.’ That’s pitching. And there’s two ways to really get a hitter out, which is to convince him what’s coming and throw the opposite, or convince him what’s coming, throw it, and put it in a hard place to hit.”

  Moving down and tailing off the plate, the sinker is a model of expedience, producing quick outs or, at worst, a bunch of singles. To Rogers, the Expos’ first great pitcher, down and in to a righty was the magic quadrant of the strike zone. He wanted his sinkers there, and his fingers pointed the way. Rogers’s goal was to drive the ball down to that area, and by pointing there when he threw, he accentuated the pressure on the ball with his index finger.

  One of Rogers’s earliest coaches was Cal McLish, an old right-hander from Oklahoma who was part Choctaw, part Cherokee and had perhaps the most mellifluous full name in the annals of baseball: Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish. His message to Rogers was simple: “All right, son, just get out in front and get whippy!”

  Rogers did not know what that meant, and McLish never had much to add—but there was a lot of truth in it. McLish had thrown sinkers and knew the late life essential to the pitch came from a whippy sort of arm action at release, an almost imperceptible turning over of the wrist.

  The one McLish lesson that did help Rogers was a primer on the slider. It was a pressure pitch, the coach explained; turn the fingers in and apply pressure on the middle finger, and you’ve got a slider, sweeping down and away from a right-hander. In that case, Rogers thought, shouldn’t the reverse hold true for a sinker?

  He already had calluses on his index finger, and the middle finger just seemed to be getting in the way when Rogers pronated his wrist as he let the ball go. What if he shifted his fingers slightly, so the index finger applied pressure on the outer side of the left seam, and the middle finger sat on the white, touching no seams, just along for the ride?

  That adjustment sent Rogers on his way, and he became a preeminent ground ball specialist. Elbow surgery in 1978 helped refine his mechanics, and also caused just enough drop in velocity to give his sinker even more fade.

  This was the pitch Rogers threw in the decisive fifth game of the 1981 NLCS, with the season on the line against the Dodgers. He had been a playoff star that fall, beating the Phillies twice, the Dodgers once, and collecting 80 of a possible 81 outs—though just 10 by strikeout, typical of a sinkerballer. Now he was on in relief, for the top of the ninth inning of a 1–1 game at frigid Olympic Stadium.

  It was a Monday—Blue Monday, as it has forever been known in Montreal, describing four things at once: the mood of the fans, the day of the week, the winning team’s color, and the hero of the game. Rogers faced four batters. Steve Garvey popped to second. Ron Cey flied out to deep left. Then came Rick Monday, with Pedro Guerrero on deck.

  “I did not throw a single pitch mechanically correct until the three pitches to Guerrero, after the adrenaline was out of my system,” Rogers said. “I was just overthrowing everything. I was a top-down pitcher. I had to be tall and then down, tall and then down. And I was losing the angle of the mound because I was so pumped up in the bullpen. I was throwing the ball hard, as hard as I could throw it, maybe 91.”

  Rogers said he was not bothered by pitching in relief. It was just his excitement, with a pennant at stake, that hurt him. He wishes he had faced Monday with a man on base.

  “It probably would have been a great service to me if either Cey or Garvey had gotten a base hit, because what would it have done? You go in the stretch,” Rogers said. “Then it takes the windup out of the picture, and that’s what I was overdoing.”

  An overthrown sinker never has time to dive into that special quadrant, the one where Rogers imagined his finger pointing. Monday swung hard at the 3–1 pitch and smoked it high over center field. It cleared the blue wall as he rounded first, leaping and punching the icy air with his fist.

  Guerrero struck out, but it didn’t matter. The Dodgers got the final three outs to win the NL title, on their way to a World Series victory. The Expos never made the playoffs again. The sinker had sunk them.

  * * *

  ————

  Montreal could have used a closer like Zach Britton. In 2016, Britton converted all 47 save chances for the Orioles, plus another in the All-Star Game, which he finished by using his sinker for a double play grounder from slugger Nolan Arenado. Britton’s 0.54 ERA that season was the lowest ever for a pitcher with at least 65 innings.

  Britton honed his sinker by using a contraption first created by Branch Rickey, the visionary architect of the Brooklyn Dodgers. One of Rickey’s most promising pitchers in the late 1940s was Rex Barney, a hard-throwing right-hander who fired a no-hitter in 1948 and twice started games in the World Series. He was also among the wildest pitchers in baseball history, and Rickey devised a system of strings for the bullpen mound in Vero Beach, Florida, to help his control.

  “Creating a visible strike zone in the pitcher’s mind, regardless of where the batter may be standing in the batter’s box, helps a pitcher throw to the intended spot,” Rickey wrote, in personal papers that were later published. “Pitching to the strings will accelerate the mastery of control, and pitchers, particularly the young ones, should be given ample opportunity to use them.”

  Rickey gave specific installation instructions: two six-foot poles driven 12 inches into the ground, with a system of strings to be moved up or down to pinpoint a particular zone. The Dodgers had just moved their spring operations to Vero Beach, and the Rex Barney strings became a fixture there, long after he was gone.

  Barney never did find his control; he threw his last pitch in 1950 but stayed in the game for decades, serving as the Orioles’ public address announcer until his death in 1997. Ten years after that, a young Britton was toiling in the Baltimore farm system when a coach, Calvin Maduro, tried to teach him a cutter. Maduro used an unconventional, curveball-like grip—but when Britton tried it, the pitch would not obey. It was supposed to move in on a righty, but instead darted down and away. Maduro was dumbfounded but told Britton to go with it.

  “Pitching’s so weird, because everyone’s arm action is different,” Britton says. “Even though it may look the same, it’s different—their bodies are different, the way they put pressure on the ball is different. That grip is a good sinker for me. If I gripped it like a two-seamer, it probably wouldn’t even move.”

  Britton’s sinker got him to the majors, but he mostly struggled as a starter. He switched to the bullpen in spring training 2014, when the Orioles introduced a new pitching coach, Dave Wallace. Britton had worked with strings before; Rick Peterson, the Orioles’ former minor league pitching guru, also believes in them. But in Wallace, Britton had a genuine Dodgers disciple to guide him.

  Wallace had a brief major league career in the 1970s and established himself as a coach in the Dodgers’ system. He used the strings—portable now, if still cumbersome—as a tool in other jobs, with the Mets and the Braves. In the spring of 2014, Wallace and Dom Chiti, the bullpen coach, encouraged Britton to use the strings for every bullpen session, and to throw only sinkers.

  Britton had been too wild as a starter. He needed better command of his sinker, and Wallace moved the knots within the strings to an area about six inches square, low and away. That is the critical spot, to Wallace; get the ball down and away, consistently, and everything else will
be easy by comparison. He has another name for his tiny zone: a quality major league strike.

  “We usually give a guy 20 throws, and a lot of guys don’t get 10,” Wallace says. “But what you find out is if they get eight, there’s another five or six that are real close, because of the level of concentration.”

  For Britton, it was a revelation. Visualization, he found, was everything. If he wanted to throw the sinker for a strike, he would aim it at the equipment logo on the catcher’s chest protector, just below the neck, and the movement would take it to the zone. If he wanted to throw it for a ball, he would aim it at the catcher’s shin guards, and the movement would carry it to the dirt, for a chase.

  Soon enough, Britton was threading his sinker through the strings about seven out of 10 tries. He took the pitch into games, and familiar hitters, used to getting ahead of him, were suddenly behind in the count. That made them vulnerable to his sinker off the plate—and Britton knew how to get it there, because he knew how his ball should behave.

  “That drill really helped me understand what my pitch is actually doing,” Britton says.

  * * *

  ————

  Orel Hershiser had worked with the strings as a young pitcher for the Dodgers, and his intellect helped him last 18 seasons in the majors. For much of that time he kept a copy of Robert K. Adair’s book, The Physics of Baseball, in his travel bag. Yet he also grasped the benefits of a rudimentary teaching tool.

  “The strings are amazing,” he says. “They’re stationary, and as a pitcher, your head’s not always still. So you might think you just threw a good pitch, but you don’t actually know. Or maybe you’re being led to believe it was good by the catcher, the way he caught it—but you didn’t necessarily see where the catcher’s set up, or maybe the catcher’s lazy. But with the strings, when the ball hits it right there on the corner, it rattles, and you know you just threw a ball and it hit the corner.