by Tyler Kepner
“A 16–4 game and Garber’s pitching me like it was the seventh game of the World Series,” Rose fumed to reporters later. “In that situation, most guys try to throw hard, or get you with sliders. They won’t try to jerk you around.”
For Garber, it was clear what he would throw with the crowd on its feet and history in the balance. The changeup was his best pitch, as it would become for more and more pitchers in the coming years. As Mario Soto, a star for the Reds in the early 1980s, would say in 2015: “That is the pitch right now in baseball. Any pitcher in the major leagues right now that doesn’t have a good changeup, he’s gonna get in trouble.”
Even the hard throwers envy it. Sometimes, the fruitless pursuit of a changeup becomes a joke; every spring training, the Yankees’ Mariano Rivera would report that he was trying to learn a changeup, to laughs from the beat writers. The hot-tempered Kevin Brown even tried to pick it up from Moyer and Doug Jones, his cerebral changeup-throwing Orioles teammates, in 1995.
“We went to Boston for a four-game series and Kevin said, ‘Show me how to throw a changeup, I think I could throw a good one,’ ” Jones says. “I told him, ‘You’ll need a year and a half to really be consistent, but I’ll show you some really simple ways to throw it and we’ll see what it looks like.’ And for four days we’d play catch every day, and he would throw a good one and then two bad ones, and a good one and three bad ones, then a good one. And after four days, he said, ‘I can’t throw the changeup, I quit.’ I said, ‘Well, OK.’ He really didn’t want a changeup. But that’s how we learn things.”
Jones learned his changeup, or at least observed its grip for the first time, from a future fictional closer. Willie Mueller pitched briefly for the Brewers in 1978 and 1981 but is best known for a role in Major League as Duke Simpson, the menacing Yankees reliever. Bob Uecker, playing broadcaster Harry Doyle, noted that Duke was so mean, he threw at his own kid in a father-son game.
Like Mueller, Jones pitched for Milwaukee only briefly—four games in April 1982, just long enough to say that he had reached the majors, and to know he didn’t belong. The Brewers let him go two years later, after a rough season spent mostly at Double-A. Jones was 27 and satisfied that he had at least worn a big league uniform. It was more than he could have expected in high school, when he threw so softly that his father—a sprint-car driver, no less—told him speed was overrated: “Remember, the harder you throw the ball, the less time you have to duck.”
Jones never threw hard. He had carved out a professional career with a well-located sinker, but could not master the changeup. Mueller threw it to him one day while playing catch in the outfield, and Jones asked to see the grip. It was the first time he had seen a three-finger changeup, with the middle and ring fingers on top. It planted a seed.
In 1985 Jones found work with the Indians, driving a beat-up Camaro from Southern California to spring training in Tucson. He broke down in Blythe, talked his way into a parts store that had closed, bought a carburetor, and chugged in at two in the morning. Jones turned the car over to a friend of a friend who sold things on consignment. The extra cash helped.
He made a team: Double-A again, in Waterbury, Connecticut. One night in New Britain, Jones was told to pitch the last three innings of a game. He wore himself out firing fastballs—such as they were—in his first inning. How would he get through two more? He thought of the changeup, and it worked. Jones struck out five of the next six batters. He was on his way, even if the Indians didn’t notice for a while.
A few weeks later, manager Jack Aker—an old fireman for the Kansas City A’s—met with Jones in the bullpen. His bosses had told him to ask Jones if he wanted to coach the next season.
“I about fell off the bench,” Jones says. “I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. I said, ‘I think I’ve figured out something, and I’d like to run with it right now. But thanks for asking.’ ”
His persistence paid off. Jones returned to the majors in September 1986—more than four years after his previous game—and found so many ways to manipulate his changeup that he really had three variations, including one that would start at the hip of a left-handed hitter, then loop softly over the inside corner for a strike.
His deception helped him earn a spot on five All-Star teams, if not much respect. In 1988 Jones became the first pitcher ever to earn a save in 15 consecutive appearances. Topps commemorated the feat with a “Record Breaker” card that featured Chris Codiroli—a different Indians righty with a walrus mustache—on the front. In 2006, Jones received only two votes for the Hall of Fame and was dropped from the ballot. The same year, Bruce Sutter received 400 votes to gain induction. Their final career save totals: Jones 303, Sutter 300.
Jones is hardly the only changeup artist to be underestimated. Jamie Moyer, too, was urged to become a coach while pitching in the minors. He declined the offer and, at 49 years old in 2012, became the oldest pitcher in major league history to record a win. Moyer finished with 269 victories, one more than Jim Palmer. But like Jones, Moyer, too, slipped off the Hall of Fame ballot after just one year.
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In the courtyard outside the Hall of Fame Library are statues 60 feet, 6 inches apart: Johnny Podres and Roy Campanella, the hallowed Brooklyn battery of 1955. Podres beat the Yankees twice in that World Series, on his twenty-third birthday in Game 3 and again in Game 7, with a 2–0 shutout in the Bronx.
The statues, linked by a stone pathway in the grass and sculpted by Stanley Bleifeld, symbolize the unity of pitcher and catcher. Yet before the cathartic final pitch of 1955, Podres and Campanella disagreed.
“Campy had called for a fast ball, but I’d shaken him off,” Podres wrote that winter, in a piece for The Saturday Evening Post. “It was the only time I did that the entire Series.”
Podres would spend decades as a coach proving the wisdom of his uncanny instincts. He chose wisely for the winning pitch—a changeup, dutifully beaten into the ground by Elston Howard. Pee Wee Reese scooped it at shortstop, fired to Gil Hodges at first base, and the Bums at last were kings. As the World Series MVP, Podres got a Corvette.
Four days later, he was back home in upstate Mineville, New York. It was there that his high school principal had once persuaded a friend who scouted for the Dodgers to come see the town’s young phenom. Podres responded by throwing a no-hitter against Ticonderoga, enticing the Dodgers to offer him $6,000—more than his father’s annual salary working in the mines. After the World Series, a hometown parade brought more gifts: a new shanty for ice fishing, and a 24-inch television set for Podres’s mother. She put it in the room where Johnny was born.
Podres would help pitch the Dodgers to more championships in Los Angeles, and he worked for the organization when they won another in 1988. Owner Peter O’Malley was so elated then that he treated the organization to a vacation in Rome for a week. Podres quickly grew restless.
“We were going to Pompeii, my wife and I on the bus with Pods, and he said, ‘Hey, Guy, let’s go to the race track,’ ” says Guy Conti, another pitching coach in the Dodgers’ system. “I said, ‘Pods, my wife would kill me if I got off this bus and decided, in Pompeii, to go to the race track!’ But that was him. He was just a down-to-earth man. He wasn’t no big shot, he was just Johnny Podres.”
Podres retired from playing after the 1969 season—when he pitched, naturally, for the Padres—but he could throw the changeup for decades, demonstrating it for his pupils with the Padres, Dodgers, Red Sox, Twins, and Phillies. Conti marveled at the way Podres could whip his left arm, as if throwing a fastball, and then spit out a pitch that seemed to suspend itself in midair. Logically, you knew it was impossible, but Podres’s pitching could defy reason.
“He was convinced his changeup rose, and you didn’t doubt him,” Bobby Ojeda says. “It’s against the laws of physics that any ball rises; they don’t rise, it’s impossible. B
ut he was convinced he rotated the shit out of that changeup so much that it rose.”
Ojeda did not know Podres’s background when he first started working with him as a Red Sox farmhand in Elmira, New York, in 1978. But he could tell that this was a true baseball guy: a big gut, a cigarette, and a no-nonsense presence, gruff but encouraging, that commanded respect and awe. He’s probably done a lot in this game, Ojeda thought, because he really knows his stuff.
Twenty years later, not much had changed. Ryan Madson was 17 years old, assigned to Martinsville, Virginia, for rookie ball with the Phillies. Madson already threw a changeup, taught to him by Fletch Jernigan, a coach he had met at age nine who learned the grip from a story he read in the Orange County Register. Madson would throw the pitch and Podres would make a big show, taking off his cap, stopping the bullpen session. “Did you see that!” he would say, as Madson beamed. He knew then that he had a real weapon—and Podres, most likely, had discovered something besides a major league changeup.
“He had a knack to be able to tell real early in a young pitcher’s career, in the minor leagues, whether he’d be able to pitch in the big leagues or not,” says Dave Wallace, who coached with Podres in the Dodgers’ system. “He recognized character, makeup, competitiveness, balls—whatever you want to call it, he just knew.”
Wallace turns his voice to a smoker’s growl, imitating Podres:
“He would say to me: ‘That guy’s gonna pitch in the big leagues!’—or he would say, ‘Wait till the lights come on and he’s gonna melt!’ ” Wallace shook his head. “It might take a couple of weeks or a month, but he had an innate ability to recognize if you had ‘it’ or not. It was unbelievable.”
If Podres believed in you, he would not give up. He understood that every pitcher—even those of identical height and weight—has a different physiology. But if a pitcher had “it,” Podres would persist until he brought it out.
In time, the Podres changeup would have a profound impact on cities starved for championships, just as it had on Brooklyn in 1955. Viola would use it in 1987 to bring the Minnesota Twins their first World Series crown. Pedro Martinez—who learned it from Conti, who learned it from Podres—would use it to help the Boston Red Sox win the 2004 World Series, their first title in 86 years.
In 2005, a half century after his own precious moment, Podres shared his memories with Jim Salisbury of The Philadelphia Inquirer. His best pitch in Game 7 was the fastball, he said, “hard stuff all day” in the Bronx shadows until that final changeup to Howard. He was glad the ground ball went to Reese, the veteran captain, who had played for the Dodgers since Podres was in grade school.
“I know it meant a lot to a lot of people,” said Podres, who would die in 2008, at age 75. “Sometimes when I’m home doing nothing, I put the video in. I get the feeling that I’m young again. What a time that was.”
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Stu Miller never closed out a World Series. In popular lore, he is best known for a balk in a 1961 All-Star Game at windswept Candlestick Park. Miller was not really blown off the mound—he swayed a bit—but the incident came to symbolize the notorious conditions then for baseball in San Francisco.
Jim Palmer, the Hall of Famer for the Orioles, has a more fitting memory of Miller from 1965. The Orioles called Miller “Bullet,” mocking his low- to mid-80s fastball. But the pitch looked a lot harder because Miller paired it with his generation’s best changeup.
“I’m 19, I’m in the bullpen, and we’re at Dodger Stadium playing the Angels,” Palmer says. “I’m standing at home plate, pretending I’m a hitter. He’s throwing his changeup and I know it’s coming. I’m striding—and then he throws a fastball, up and in, and I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. The difference between his fastball and changeup was unbelievable.”
Palmer can still see the Yankees’ Tom Tresh (2-for-22 against Miller) swinging wildly, and futilely, at Miller’s changeups—while Mickey Mantle knelt in the on-deck circle, laughing. Mantle hit his 500th homer off Miller, but otherwise was 2-for-17. Harmon Killebrew, the mighty Twins slugger, was just as bad.
“I can’t remember anybody else throwing like that,” says the Yankees’ Bobby Richardson, who also struggled with Miller. “He’d turn his neck and you’d be out in front of everything. John Blanchard would sit on the bench and say, ‘I’m not going up there, he’s gonna make me look foolish.’ ”
Miller bobbed his head as he delivered the pitch, adding an extra dash of hesitation and confusion. It was not on purpose, he would insist, but it helped the effectiveness of a pitch he learned in Class D with the Cardinals at the urging of manager Vedie Himsl.
“He said, ‘You have to come up with a change-up. And the key is to make it look like a fastball,’ ” Miller told Dan Brown of the San Jose Mercury News. “That’s all he said. And I thought, ‘That sounds good.’ I went out and threw one and he said, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ It came that naturally.”
Miller pitched 16 seasons, mostly for the Giants and Orioles. He had 153 saves, won a league ERA title, and left an impression of invincibility on a pitcher bound for Cooperstown.
“Of all the guys that I’ve seen—Mariano, Jeff Reardon, Eckersley—you could load the bases up, and unless Tony Oliva was hitting, I’d take Stu Miller and his changeup over any of them,” Palmer says. “Over any reliever I’ve ever seen. You could not time it. It was just incredible.”
(Oliva, a three-time batting champion, hit .538 off Miller. In baseball there is always an exception.)
Miller pitched for the Orioles’ first championship team in 1966. Their third World Series title—and last, to date—came in 1983. Catcher Rick Dempsey was the most valuable player and Scott McGregor pitched a shutout in the clincher. Both had come to Baltimore seven years earlier in a trade with the Yankees. It was not the Yankees’ only contribution.
As a high school pitcher in El Segundo, California, McGregor learned a changeup from Tom Morgan, a Yankee reliever from the 1950s who scouted in Southern California. McGregor modified the grip to a palmball, a pitch thrown pretty much as it sounds: from deep in the palm, enveloped in fingers. It spun the same as his fastball, but nearly 15 mph slower.
As a Yankees farmhand, though, McGregor threw fastballs, curveballs, and occasional cutters. It got him to Triple-A, but his manager there, the future Hall of Famer Bobby Cox, stressed that he would not reach his potential unless he developed his changeup. McGregor knew how to throw the pitch but could not quite grasp the mind-set.
“The hard thing to do is go to the big leagues and say, ‘OK, I’m gonna throw it a little slower,’ ” McGregor says. “You go, ‘Really? I figure I gotta throw it harder.’ But they don’t care how hard you throw it. You’ve just got to learn how to get the change of speeds.”
For McGregor that meant three distinct speeds—curveball, fastball, changeup—from the same arm motion. His was a fun windup to imitate: he would raise his hands over his head, swing them down over his right knee, and then spread them behind his back, like a bird taking flight, pausing there before whipping his left arm through. Earl Weaver, McGregor’s first manager with the Orioles, had implored him to keep his curveball below 70 miles an hour, and the “funky-ass deceptive motion,” as McGregor calls it, was the only way to do it.
With it, though, McGregor had his repertoire: a fastball in the 80s, a changeup in the 70s, and a curve in the 60s. Ken Singleton, the Orioles’ right fielder, marveled at how all the pitches looked the same from his vantage point, and hitters were also confused. In McGregor’s eight-year prime (1978–85), only Ron Guidry won more games in the AL.
McGregor starred in the 1979 postseason, but the Orioles blew a three-games-to-one lead in the World Series and lost to Pittsburgh. Four years later, they held the same lead before Game 5 at a different Pennsylvania ballpark, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. McGregor strode through the visiting dugout and told his team
mates not to worry: “I got this,” he said.
He threw only one curveball—to bait Joe Morgan, who had homered twice off curves in the series—and otherwise mixed changeups and fastballs in a 5–0 triumph. There were 67,064 fans at the Vet for the twilight start, the highest attendance for a World Series game in the last half century, yet few crowds could ever have been so quiet. I was there, and by the end, McGregor had so thoroughly humbled the Phillies that many fans had left. I scrambled to the front row behind first base for the final inning, and watched McGregor’s oddly subdued reaction when Cal Ripken Jr. snagged Garry Maddox’s soft liner to end it.
“They show the last out and the kids always tease me,” says McGregor, now the Orioles’ pitching rehab coordinator in Sarasota, Florida. “They go, ‘Show us what you did, Mac!’ Because I throw it, I put my glove under my arm and give a little fist pump. You’re in such a mode where you can’t think about it. I kept pushing it out of my brain the whole time. I couldn’t think, ‘If we win this thing, we’re the world champs!’ ”
McGregor was just 29, but in five years he was finished. Arm speed comes from a sturdy shoulder, and by 1987 his was loose and sore, incapable of producing the speed variance that had made him a star. When he took the mound at the Metrodome on April 27, 1988, the Orioles were 0–19 for the season. As the Twins ravaged McGregor, Ripken came to the mound and asked if he was throwing the changeup.
“They’re all the same speed anymore,” McGregor told his shortstop. “Just back up a little bit. You might be a little safer.”
There was a runner on base with two out in the fourth inning when manager Frank Robinson removed McGregor—just in time. Had the next batter homered off him, McGregor’s ERA would have been stuck at 4.00 forever. Instead he finished at 3.99, with a career record 30 games above .500, a World Series ring, and the memory of overpowering hitters his way.