by Tyler Kepner
“Your vision can lie to you, and the strings helped you get your eyes lined up, that you’re actually throwing a correct pitch. It’s the combination of the visual, mental, and physical.”
That is what Ferguson Jenkins had discovered, too, as a teenager in Chatham, Ontario, in the late 1950s. Every Tuesday and Thursday in the winter, Jenkins would throw to a strike zone of movable strings at a local gymnasium—not at full strength, just hard enough to study and internalize the way his ball should move.
Jenkins would become the greatest pitcher in Chicago Cubs history. With command of a sinker allowing him to last deep in games, Jenkins threw at least 289 innings in seven different seasons, mostly for the Cubs. Every time he did, he earned at least 20 wins.
“I used the top of the ball, where the printing’s at, and my fingers were close together,” Jenkins says. “A great pulling pitch. All you do is pull it backwards. Pull it hard, and you get that sink.”
Jenkins was 284–226 with a 3.34 ERA and made the Hall of Fame. Tommy John was 288–231 with the same ERA, and has never come close. John is mostly known for the revolutionary 1974 elbow surgery that bears his name, but he also honed his pitching savvy with strings.
When John was a boy in Indiana, he scavenged for soda bottles and used the redemption money on a pitching book by Bob Feller. In it, Feller described how to set up a strike zone made of strings, like Rickey’s contraption at Dodgertown. John’s father built it for him in the backyard.
“The top string would be mid-thigh or just above mid-thigh; the bottom string would be about six inches below the knee; the inside string would be on the outside half of the plate and the outside string would be about six to eight inches off the plate,” he says. “That was my strike zone, and that’s what I threw to. I didn’t want the high strike—I wanted to concentrate on throwing the ball low and away, low and away.”
At 18 John signed with Cleveland, and at 20 he was pitching in the majors, throwing nothing but sinking fastballs and curves. He gripped both the same way and always pitched in a hurry: get the ball and throw it, no time to fiddle with grips. In his seventh full season, with the White Sox, John learned a slider from new pitching coach Johnny Sain. He practiced it so much that his fastball suffered, and John turned to Ray Berres, an old catcher who had been his first pitching coach in Chicago.
“I was hoping you would call,” Berres barked. “Stick that fucking slider up your ass! Never add a pitch if it’s gonna make your existing pitches worse!”
After Dr. Frank Jobe’s famous operation in 1974—in which he used a tendon from John’s forearm to replace his torn ulnar collateral ligament—John pitched for 14 more seasons. He was 46 when he made his 700th and final career start. Only one other lefty, Steve Carlton, has ever made more.
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To impart even more sink, while adding a dash of funk to make up for diminished velocity, some pitchers drop to a submarine angle. Usually, though, it’s nobody’s first choice.
Darren O’Day figured his baseball career was over when he failed to make the team as a freshman at the University of Florida. But a friend asked him to play for a men’s league the next summer, and as O’Day played catch with his brother to get ready, he fooled around with a sidearm angle. Just like that, he had the kind of sinking action he never could get overhand. He went on to become an All-Star setup man for Baltimore.
“If you throw it right, you can get an element of topspin that you can’t get overhand, and you’re usually not throwing quite as hard, either, so the ball’s going to sink more,” O’Day says. “The big thing about it is hitters just aren’t used to seeing it, so they can’t pick up the spin as easily.”
An unfamiliar motion can help a pitcher enormously; some recent aces, like Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Jake Arrieta, Madison Bumgarner, and Chris Sale, use deliveries so distinct that hitters have little basis for comparison. And just a split second of indecision further shifts the advantage to the pitcher.
Submariners are not as rare as knuckleballers, but they belong in a similar category. They do something different, hear predictable taunts from opposing fans—“This isn’t softball” is a popular one, Brad Ziegler says—and frustrate hitters with a method most players use as a lark.
On a team flight with the Tigers in l995, the Hall of Famer Al Kaline approached Mike Myers, a soft-throwing, overmatched rookie. Kaline noticed that Myers was around the strike zone a lot and thought he needed a different look to succeed. He asked Myers if he had ever dropped his arm angle. Of course, Myers replied.
“I always threw sidearm in the outfield anyway, just screwing around, for fun,” Myers says. “Like how every second baseman throws a knuckleball.”
Myers tried the low angle—not quite submarine, where the pitcher releases from so low that his knuckles almost scrape the dirt, but close enough—and it worked. He led the majors in appearances the next two seasons and would pitch almost 900 career games. Hitters would tell Myers that his 80-mile-an-hour sinker looked about 15 mph faster because he set it up with slow, Frisbee-like sliders.
The forefather of all modern sidearm slingers is Grover Cleveland Alexander, who went by Pete and was also called “Ol’ Low & Away.” Alexander—born in 1887, during the first of President Cleveland’s nonconsecutive terms—earned 373 victories, tied with Christy Mathewson for third all-time. Alexander, who pitched mostly for the Phillies and the Cubs, had a reputation as one of the game’s fastest workers. That was consistent with his pitch, the sinker bearing down and in on right-handers.
“What’s the use of doin’ in three pitches what you can do in one?” he said, as quoted by Martin Quigley in The Crooked Pitch. Indeed, Alexander was so efficient that he led his league in innings seven times and twice won both ends of a doubleheader, both times with two complete games. A teammate and opponent, Hans Lobert, described Alexander’s best pitch this way to Lawrence Ritter in The Glory of Their Times:
“He had little short fingers and he threw a very heavy ball. Once, later on, when I’d moved over to the Giants, Alex hit me over the heart with a pitched ball and it bore in like a lump of lead hitting you. I couldn’t get my breath for ten minutes afterward. Matty was just as fast, but he threw a much lighter ball.”
(Ivan Rodriguez, the Hall of Fame catcher, described a similar sensation many years later. The fastest pitcher he ever caught, Rodriguez said, was the Tigers’ Joel Zumaya, whose ball felt light. But when Rodriguez caught sinkers from a young Kevin Brown in Texas, the ball felt so heavy he worried it would shatter his thumb—inside his glove.)
Alexander surely threw harder than most of his era, but also understood the advantage of being unusual. As he said in Baseball Magazine, in an undated clip quoted by Rob Neyer, “I believe that the side arm motion is much more baffling to the batter than the overhand delivery. For that reason I have developed the side arm delivery and have cultivated it so that I have it down pretty well.”
In 1926, at age 39, Alexander clinched the Cardinals’ first World Series with a performance so heroic that Ronald Reagan would play him in a 1952 film, The Winning Team, chronicling Alexander’s triumph over alcoholism and epilepsy. In the series, Alexander beat the Yankees in Games 2 and 6, then came into Game 7 from the bullpen and struck out Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded. That’s the end of the movie, but it was really just the end of the seventh inning; the game actually ended when Babe Ruth, of all people, was caught stealing second. Ruth’s rationale was the ultimate compliment to Alexander: he needed to be in scoring position, he believed, because there was no way the Yankees could get two more singles to score him from first. And good luck hitting that sinker in the air for extra bases.
The Yankees recovered in grand style, sweeping Pittsburgh in the 1927 World Series to cement their status as the most fearsome team of all time. Their pitching star was another sidearming sinkerballer: Wilcy Moore, a 30-year-
old rookie, who had turned to the style after breaking his arm two years earlier, closed out Game 1 and went the distance in the finale.
Moore was a hybrid, a spot starter who also finished games in relief. He led the AL in saves three times—before that statistic was created—and was an early forerunner of the sidearming late-inning stoppers who would follow decades later. Two, Kent Tekulve and Dan Quisenberry, are forever intertwined. Neither threw hard, but neither was defined that way, either.
“Watching Quisenberry as a kid, they didn’t have radar guns on the TV,” says Brad Ziegler, who grew up in Kansas City and would imitate Quisenberry with Wiffle balls. “It wasn’t about that at the time. It was about getting outs. You get outs, you’ve got a shot to pitch.”
Submarine pitchers generally work only in relief, so the manager can pick their spots (say, to get a double play) and take advantage of their durability—which comes mainly from not throwing very hard or throwing many pitches. Everyone in the ballpark knows the aim of a submariner: to sink the ball and get the batter to hit it on the ground. By inviting contact, though, a pitcher also invites chaos if those grounders find holes. Some teams would rather avoid the style altogether.
It should be no surprise, then, that Tekulve and Quisenberry were not drafted. Neither, for that matter, was O’Day. Ziegler was released and pitched for an independent team before the A’s signed him and eventually changed his angle. Those four submariners overcame the collective rejection to pitch about 3,000 games in the majors.
Before he could pitch in his first, in 1974, Tekulve had to listen to an old scout over beers after a game in Double-A. Tekulve had thrown sidearm all his life and found immediate success in the minors with the Pirates. But the scout, George Detore, told him his sinker would never trick big league hitters unless it moved better in the strike zone. More sophisticated hitters, Detore insisted, would take his good sinkers, which were off the plate, and hammer the flat ones in the middle.
“So I started experimenting with stuff,” Tekulve says. “The first thing you do is you go up to three-quarters, like a normal human being—but I went up there and it was a total disaster. If I was throwing it 82 miles per hour, it was a lot, and it was perfectly straight. Eighty-two miles per hour and perfectly straight is defined as batting practice. So that didn’t work.”
From three-quarters, Tekulve was missing his topspin, the furious rotating action that propelled the ball down and forced hitters to bury it into the dirt. Throwing in the outfield a bit later, he thought of Ted Abernathy, a longtime major leaguer who had pitched for Tekulve’s hometown Reds. Tekulve swung his arm lower, almost to the ground—and unlocked the pitch that would make him the game’s all-time leader in relief appearances when he retired in 1989.
“The very first one I threw, I knew—this is it,” Tekulve said. He was throwing it harder, and the ball was diving at precisely the right spot: three feet in front of the plate, after the hitter had committed himself to swing, a fat strike until its final tumble. “From that day forward, I knew what the sinker was and what it was gonna be—and it was gonna be good.”
Tekulve was 27 by the time he made his debut. He soon became an expert on angles and grips and their effects on the movement of a baseball delivered from below. If he raised his fingers by 45 degrees—instead of pointing them straight down—Tekulve could produce a more dramatic tailing action into a right-hander. “The revolutions still matched up,” he says, matter-of-factly, meaning that the moment of deception, the critical three-foot mark, would still be the same.
Tekulve would close out the 1970s, saving Game 7 of the World Series for the Pirates in his 101st appearance of the season. Tekulve’s final sinker did not do much—he described its flight to me with a farting noise—but Baltimore’s Pat Kelly could only lift a harmless fly ball to center. As the Orioles nursed their defeat, their first base coach, Jim Frey, could not shake the memory of Tekulve’s quirky dominance. Named as the new manager of the Royals, Frey decided to find his own version. At an off-season banquet, he asked Tekulve for a favor.
The Royals’ bullpen in 1979 had allowed more than five runs per nine innings. Its best performer, oddly, was a rookie with a funny name and a sidearm delivery. He had managed only 13 strikeouts in 40 innings, but his control and ability to generate grounders offered promise. Frey wondered if Tekulve could help Quisenberry with his mechanics in spring training.
Quisenberry had started throwing sidearm as a senior at the University of La Verne, in California, because his arm had grown tired from the workload of 194 innings. But the motion ran in his family: Quisenberry’s older brother, Marty, had been a submarine pitcher who was scouted, though not signed, by the Royals.
When no team drafted Dan, either, his coach called the scout who had once shown interest in Marty. The Royals, it turned out, needed a pitcher for their Class A team in Waterloo, Iowa. Their bonus offer was a Royals bat, pen, and lapel button. Quisenberry accepted.
“I was really pretty excited,” he told Sports Illustrated, “especially about the lapel button.”
Quisenberry started and finished his first game for Waterloo in 1975. It was the only start of a career that lasted until 1990. Quisenberry became a star, as he would tell it, immediately following his tutorials with Tekulve—one in Fort Myers and another in Bradenton in that spring of 1980.
“We want this guy to be like you,” Frey told Tekulve, as Quisenberry recounted it to Roger Angell. “He throws a little like you already, but basically he doesn’t have shit.”
Quisenberry went on to tell Angell all the ways Tekulve helped him: how to bend at the waist and extend his front leg, how to land with a hop to keep from falling over. He was wild and uncomfortable, he said, bouncing balls everywhere. But the coaches liked the extra movement on his sinker.
By the World Series, in which Quisenberry pitched in all six games of the Royals’ loss to the Phillies, he had taken to calling the sinker his “Titanic pitch”—it sinks to the bottom—and crediting Tekulve with his transformation. Years later, Tekulve said Quisenberry was simply being kind.
“I did not change very much at all with Quisenberry,” Tekulve says. “He was pretty much in the right place. He had the sink late. He didn’t throw it as hard, but he didn’t have as many revolutions, so therefore he still had it sinking at the right spot. There were only a couple of very minor things I suggested to him, and I think probably what benefited him more than anything else, as a young guy coming in, was having somebody who had just had success in the last World Series—somebody that did it—tell him, ‘Hey, you’re right.’ ”
Many years later, Tekulve would encourage Ziegler in a similar way, reminding him not to fear hitters, because they never like to face a submariner. That was clearly true for Quisenberry, who thanked Tekulve by sending a pair of plaid socks—the quintessential gift for Dad—to Three Rivers Stadium as a Father’s Day gift in 1980.
That season began a stretch of six in which Quisenberry averaged more than 35 saves. He did his best to live up to the contract he made with his sinkers.
“Have I ever told you about my agreement with the ball?” Quisenberry asked Angell, who said no. “Well, our deal is that I’m not going to throw you very hard as long as you promise to move around when you get near the plate, because I want you back. So if you do your part, we’ll get to play some more.”
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The Cubs retired No. 31 in honor of two pitchers, Greg Maddux and Ferguson Jenkins, who both finished their careers with more than 3,000 strikeouts and fewer than 1,000 walks. Only two others in history—Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez—have ever done this, and Jenkins was the first.
Jenkins joined the Cubs in a trade from the Phillies in April 1966, the same month Maddux was born. He was 23 and had made a few relief appearances, but no starts. That July the Cubs signed another former Phillie, Robin Roberts, for the final stop of his Ha
ll of Fame career.
Roberts was 39, the oldest player in the National League, and he also helped coach the Cubs’ pitchers. He preached the importance of the sinker to Jenkins, imparting two main lessons culled from more than 600 starts in the majors: the hitter wants a ball up over the plate, and doesn’t really want to swing at the first pitch. With such impeccable control, Jenkins forced hitters to swing early, for fear of falling behind. He knew how he wanted them to hit.
“A sinker down over the plate, and down around the knees, was something that was gonna help me get guys to hit on top of the ball—not through the ball,” Jenkins says. “And I had a good infield, guys with good gloves who knew what to do.”
With Ron Santo at third, Don Kessinger at short, Glenn Beckert at second, and Ernie Banks at first, Jenkins had far better infielders and a smoother playing surface than he’d ever had in the minors. That eased his transition after his trade, and he won 20 games in 1967, his first full season as a starter. From that year through 1980, Jenkins would lead the majors in victories.
He did it, essentially, by becoming Roberts’s clone. The sinker allowed them both to zip quickly through innings. Their control made them prone to home runs—only Jamie Moyer surrendered more than Roberts and Jenkins—but it tended to minimize damage. Jenkins also hated allowing walks because he much preferred to pitch from the windup.
Maddux did much of his bullpen work from the stretch, reasoning that his pitches with men on base would matter most. He joined the Cubs as a rookie in 1986, three years after Jenkins retired, and took his stylistic cues from Hershiser, another right-hander with a similar build and intuition about the craft. Asked in 2015 why he trusted his two-seamer and used it so often, Maddux replied: “Well, I saw Hershiser do it.”