K

by Tyler Kepner

  Maddux watched Hershiser whenever he could, delighting in the way he defied the traditional wisdom of coaches, who warned against pitching down and in to left-handers.

  “I guess I was just stubborn enough not to believe them,” Maddux says. “It was a pitch I was capable of throwing, and I saw Hershiser use it. As a young player I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to do it, too.’ ”

  Maddux’s first role model was his older brother, Mike, who would have a long career as a major league reliever and coach. As teenagers in Las Vegas, they were tutored by a retired scout named Ralph Medar. He believed they would play professionally but knew that was not the main goal.

  “In order to have success at a high level, you’re going to rely more on movement than velocity,” Maddux says, quoting Medar. “He taught me at a young age it was movement, location, the ability to change speeds—and then velocity, in that order, which I think still holds true today.”

  Medar switched Maddux from a four-seam fastball grip to a two-seam grip, and lowered his arm angle from high- to low-three-quarters. Maddux became entranced by the movement of his fastball, which would start at the hip of a left-hander and curl back to clip the inside corner for a strike. He would execute a pitch and ask Medar how it moved, not how fast it went.

  Maddux was a senior in high school when Medar died of a heart attack. But the Cubs’ scouting report on Maddux, before the 1984 draft, reflected the lessons Medar had imparted: “He throws 86–89 consistently with very good movement,” wrote the scout, Doug Mapson. “His movement isn’t a gradual tailing type but a quick, explosive, bat-breaking kink.”

  Mapson wrote that if Maddux (then just 5 foot 11, and almost done growing) were more physically imposing, he could have been the first overall pick. The Cubs passed on him anyway at No. 3, taking a strapping college left-hander, Drew Hall, who would win just nine games in his career. They grabbed Maddux in the second round (at pick number 31) and he would win 355—the most of anyone who started his career after Jackie Robinson integrated the majors in 1947.

  “Maddux had the 100-mile-an-hour mind,” says his agent, Scott Boras, who first saw Maddux in high school. “He had insights to the game that people with raw physical talents weren’t even close to.”

  Pitching for the Braves in 1995, Maddux began the World Series by beating Hershiser and the Indians with surgical mastery: a complete game two-hitter on 95 pitches, with no walks or earned runs. He was at his best, soon to win his fourth consecutive Cy Young Award and, for the second season in a row, scoring at least 260 in ERA+, a metric that measures ERA against league average, adjusting for ballpark factors. Only one pitcher—Bob Gibson in 1968—had come close to that figure in the last 80 years. Close, but not better.

  While some aces overpowered hitters with muscle (Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson), Maddux simply gripped his best pitch the usual way, along the narrow seams, “nothing different than a kid in Little League,” he says. He was a virtuoso at calling his own game, knowing precisely how to read hitters’ swings; on the bench, he would predict exactly where a batter would hit a ball. He set up hitters to get themselves out, and the sinker was his kill shot, best fired with two strikes.

  “I usually threw it after a cutter,” he says. “I had a cutter that I would start for a strike and end up as a ball, and I had a fastball that started in as a ball and ended up as a strike. I very rarely ever threw that two-seam fastball inside unless I threw a cutter or two before it. A hitter remembers the last pitch probably better than any pitch he’s seen out of my hand.”

  Maddux started throwing the cutter in earnest in 1992. He was off to a very good start in his career, with the first four of his record 16 consecutive 15-win seasons, but he needed a complementary pitch to make his sinker more effective. He tried the cutter against the first batter he faced that year, the Phillies’ Lenny Dykstra. It came in on Dykstra but did not dart back over the plate, as usual. Instead, it kept slicing.

  “He checked his swing and it hit him on the wrist—and it broke his wrist,” Maddux says. “Lenny said to me, ‘Hey, when did you start throwing a cutter? I thought it was gonna move back over the plate!’ That was when I recognized: ‘OK, yeah, this is gonna work.’ ”

  Maddux won that game, on his way to 20 victories in his first Cy Young season. He moved to the Braves in free agency and returned to the Cubs in 2004, when he earned his 300th victory. He remembers the precise moment, with the Dodgers at age 42, when he knew it was time to go.

  “I threw this ball, it was absolutely perfect,” Maddux says. “It came out of my hand just the way it’s supposed to, down and away, painted the corner, and I took a peek up there at the radar gun and it said ‘82.’ And I went, ‘Whoa.’ It was a strike. I mean, it was a meaningless 1–0 fastball. It wasn’t like strike three. It was just, everything was absolutely perfect and I just—I lost too much speed.

  “Do you have to throw hard to win? No. Do you need to throw hard enough to compete? Absolutely. And I think I just lost too much speed to be able to go out there and compete.”

  Maddux has never called velocity meaningless. It ranks fourth on Ralph Medar’s list, but it is still on there. Maddux personified efficiency: six times, he threw a nine-inning shutout in fewer than 90 pitches, doubling the total of any other pitcher in the last 30 years. But he does rank tenth in career strikeouts, with 3,371, and he never wanted hitters to connect.

  If they did, at least, Maddux’s best pitch was the balm. It took the sting out of contact. On the day he was introduced as a Hall of Famer, in January 2014, Maddux summarized the essence of his success: “Have a good moving fastball that does something the last 10 feet, and be able to locate. That’s what gave me an opportunity to win.”

  Maddux won more times than anyone alive, through precision, intuition, and unrelenting confidence in a pitch that exemplifies restraint. If a pitcher trusts brains over brawn, trusts his defense, and trusts the long game—even today—he will understand this succinct summary of the virtues of a sinking fastball.

  “You throw strikes,” Maddux says, “and they stay in front of the outfielders when they hit it.”

  * * *

  ————

  At least, they used to. Pitchers from Maddux’s generation—like Derek Lowe, the former Boston standout—have noticed the decline of their best pitch. They still praise its virtues but acknowledge that hitters have adjusted.

  “The strike zone’s changed, and the swing path of hitters has changed,” Lowe says. “A lot of these hitters are taught to swing down-to-up, so [the sinker] goes right into the current swing path. The game today is velocity, so a lot of people say, ‘If I could throw 95 with a four-seamer or 92 with a two-seamer, I’m gonna throw 95.’ It is a dying art.”

  In 2017, major league pitchers threw almost 23,000 fewer two-seamers and sinkers than they had in 2011. Of the 10 playoff teams in 2017, only one ranked in the top third in percentage of two-seamers and sinkers: the Twins, who lost the AL Wild Card Game. Most teams, like the champion Astros (twenty-first), ranked in the bottom third of such pitches.

  Charlie Morton collected the final out of that season on a grounder to second by the Dodgers’ Corey Seager. That was fitting for Morton, a 33-year-old veteran whose sinkers had earned him the nickname Ground Chuck, but it was also misleading. Morton—the first pitcher ever to win two Game 7s in the same postseason—had a career year by throwing harder than ever before, elevating his fastball and using more curves. He had grown tired of relying on batted balls to succeed.

  “I was a sinker guy, throwing 60, 70 percent sinkers, and they were hitting my sinker,” Morton explained during the ALCS. “So the game plan has changed. The idea that I’m going to make these guys put the ball in play and try to induce soft contact, that’s out the window….

  “Lefties, I’m not trying to do that. I’m not trying to let them hit the ball. At least, I’m not trying to encourage them to
hit the ball. Before, the assumption [was that if] you have a good sinker, you can get the ball on the ground. That wasn’t the case.

  “Lots of four-seams, curveballs, and cutters.”

  Morton was only reacting to the adjustments many hitters made in the middle of the decade, when teams started aggressively shifting infielders to gobble up grounders, and the balls themselves suddenly turned livelier. Major League Baseball denied any changes to the ball, but the fundamental calculus of hitting had evolved. Batters finally seemed to understand the folly of hitting down on the ball, their popular philosophy echoing Dave Duncan: there’s no slug on the ground.

  “You see hitters trying to do damage more on certain pitches that, in the past, it was accepted they weren’t gonna try to do damage on—like the sinker,” the veteran Brandon McCarthy says. “More guys are capable of hitting that and elevating it. Not everyone’s successful at it, but it’s a different approach than we saw years ago. Historically, there were guys that were pure roll-over candidates down there. They were easy outs. Now they can elevate that ball, get under it, and drive it.”

  More than ever, it seems, teams want fastballs with a high spin rate, the kind that stay true through the zone, rather than sinkers. With coaches emphasizing a swing’s launch angle and downplaying the risk of strikeouts, sinkers, as Lowe says, fall right into the barrel of the bat. Al Kaline says modern hitters know where to look for the ball, because the shoulders-to-knees strike zone of his day is long gone.

  “Pitchers can’t hit the corners all the time, and that’s why there’s so many home runs, because the hitters have a very small strike zone to look at right now,” says Kaline, a 3,000-hit man for the Tigers. “That’s why you see everybody uppercutting the ball, because they know everything’s gonna be down low.”

  Hitters set a record with 6,105 home runs in 2017, and they continued their assault in the World Series with a record 25 in seven games. Yet pitchers who had made a living with sinkers still believed in the pitch. Can’t today’s hitter just dig it out of the dirt and golf it into the stands?

  “No, not a good one,” says Tommy John, who would still rather throw a sinking fastball at 86 mph than a straight one at 93. “I mean, I couldn’t pitch to these guys today, because I’m 75 years old. But I would take my chances with ’em. They don’t see pitchers like that anymore.”

  * * *

  ————

  Most pitchers want the other fastball, at least at first. Curt Schilling stumbled through three organizations until 1992, when the Phillies’ pitching coach, Johnny Podres, asked to see his fastball. Schilling used a two-seam grip, the only one he had ever known. Podres suggested a four-seamer, and Schilling, who craved power and precision, found the pitch he’d been missing.

  Yet he also knew, from studying a rival, that velocity was not everything. A darting, well-placed sinker led a superior pitcher’s portfolio.

  “Early in my career I tried to figure out why Greg Maddux was so much better than me,” says Schilling, who threw much harder. “He was good because he changed speeds, number one, and he made the ball move in both directions on both sides of the plate. You could not sit on a spot; you could not sit on a pitch. I knew I wasn’t gonna throw a two-seamer at that point, so my game plan became: find the hitter’s hole and throw the ball there. To do that, I needed to throw the four-seamer, because I needed to know where the ball was gonna be when it crossed the plate.”

  Schilling envied the Maddux two-seamer, but once he found the four-seam fastball, he never threw the old one again. He figured it was wiser to devote his attention to one kind of fastball, not divide it between two. The decision reinforces the image of the two-seamer as the little brother of fastballs, a weaker version of the same thing that still wants in on the action. He can’t survive on brute strength, so he has to be cunning. He might have a chance to play, but given a choice, you wouldn’t pick him first.

  No coach would change a pitcher who can make the ball sink violently, down and away from the opposite-hand hitter, like a bowling ball spinning toward the gutter. But the general rule, now more than ever, is that pitchers sink the ball because they have to.

  If you’ve got a big fastball, you’d better use it.

  THE CHANGEUP

  A Dollar Bill Hooked on a Fishing Line

  “The changeup is an artistic pitch,” Bobby Ojeda says, and not all pitchers are artists. Anyone would envy its results, those feeble, flailing hacks off the front foot from a hitter fooled by a pitcher’s arm speed. But every changeup is the product of hard-won patience, and the maturity to accept a counterintuitive mind-set. The hitter brings a bat to the cage match. The pitcher brings a feather duster.

  Ojeda pitched 15 seasons in the majors after learning the changeup from Johnny Podres, who used it to bring the Brooklyn Dodgers their only championship, in 1955. It was Ojeda’s lone off-speed option, because the curveball shredded his elbow. For pitchers with other choices, the delicate brushstrokes of the changeup can be maddening to master.

  “Most guys, if they’re trying to learn something and it’s not instant success, they just stick it in their back pocket,” says Jamie Moyer, the everlasting lefty who learned his changeup at Saint Joseph’s University from Kevin Quirk, an alum who was pitching in the minors. “I don’t know how many times I threw the changeup over the guy I was playing catch with, either over his head or five feet in front of him, because the grip was so awkward for me. But you spend enough time with it, it becomes part of you. I play catch with my son in the driveway now, and I go right to it. It’s not quite the same pitch, but that feel comes back.”

  Between innings, while warming up, pitchers signal for the changeup by opening their glove hand as if gripping a grapefruit. They might then pull the glove back an inch or two, as if pulling the string on a toy. Think of a dollar bill hooked on a fishing line, resting on the ground. The pitcher is the guy who yanks it back, just out of reach of the sucker who thought he’d found easy money. That is the changeup.

  Throwing it takes not just guile and artistry but courage. Consider your trusty, hardworking index finger. Now try throwing a baseball without using it very much. If that finger could talk, it would question your sanity: You sure you don’t need me for this? The pitcher must block out that noise.

  “I stood on the mound in instructional league and Johnny helped me with the grip,” says Frank Viola, another 15-year lefty who learned from Podres. “We played around with it and he said, ‘Throw it.’ I kid you not: I don’t think I got it halfway to home plate. It just went straight into the ground. And I’m like, ‘You gotta be kidding me, Johnny, there’s no way!’ He just said, ‘Trust me, it’s gonna come together.’ ”

  After several years of practice, it did come together for Viola, just as it has for so many others with the right combination of genetics, gumption, and guts. Cole Hamels, a star lefty for the Phillies and the Rangers, thinks of turning off his most important muscles to do it.

  “It’s like you dead-arm it,” Hamels says. “That’s what I try to tell people: fastballs are strong, changeups are dead. So if you can grasp that concept of how to control and deaden something in your body, then you’re able to get the basic idea.”

  Arm speed sells the pitch. The hitter sees fastball from the motion of the arm and the spin of the ball, which sputters as it crosses the plate, fading away from a right-handed hitter when thrown by a lefty, and vice versa. It is typically 10 miles an hour slower than the same pitcher’s fastball, a cousin of the screwball, splitter, and sinker that has grown in acceptance as pitchers use it more.

  Throwing slowly to disrupt hitters is nothing new. Long before Bugs Bunny did it in a famous 1946 cartoon—the term “Bugs Bunny changeup” still evokes a helpless slugger swatting at air—Connie Mack made it the secret weapon for his Philadelphia A’s.

  Down the stretch in 1929, with the A’s sure of winning the pennant, Mack called an a
ging pitcher, Howard Ehmke, into his office at Shibe Park. He sat Ehmke down and told him they would have to part. The crestfallen Ehmke, who was 35 and in his fourteenth major league season, replied that he had always wanted to pitch in the World Series.

  “Mr. Mack,” he declared, “there is one great game left in this old arm.”

  Mack was delighted to hear it, and shared his plan. What he meant, he told Ehmke, was that he wanted him to stay behind on the next A’s road trip, to study the Chicago Cubs as they played the Phillies. The A’s would be meeting the Cubs in the World Series, and Mack wanted Ehmke—not the great Lefty Grove—to start the opener.

  As Red Smith related in a tribute to Ehmke, Cubs manager Joe McCarthy had a premonition of what Mack might do. As McCarthy told another writer, Ring Lardner, “We can hit speed. But they’ve got one guy over there I’m afraid of. He’s what I call a junk pitcher.”

  It was Ehmke, and his array of slow-moving pitches baffled the powerful Cubs and their three future Hall of Fame hitters—Rogers Hornsby, Hack Wilson, and Kiki Cuyler. Ehmke set a then–World Series record with 13 strikeouts in a complete game, 3–1 victory. It was the last game Ehmke ever won, and the A’s prevailed in five.

  The changeup goes against a hitter’s macho instinct. The fact that it is marketed as a fastball, but in fact is something else, was once seen, by some, as a sign of weakness by a pitcher afraid of a challenge. This is absurd, because it takes a special kind of nerve to throw slowly on purpose. But not too long ago, a pitcher who beat a hitter with a changeup could expect an insult in return.

  On August 1, 1978, the Reds’ Pete Rose came to the plate with two out in the top of the ninth inning at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium. Rose had hit in 44 consecutive games, the longest streak since Joe DiMaggio’s record of 56 in 1941. He was hitless in the game, a blowout loss to the Braves, and was facing Gene Garber, a sidearming closer with a peculiar habit of turning his body completely to the center fielder while delivering a pitch. This was not the quirk that bothered Rose, though. What bothered him is that, with two strikes, Garber threw him a changeup. Rose whiffed to end the streak.