K

by Tyler Kepner

  “You remember that All-Star Game?” says Kelvin Herrera, the star reliever who was nine that summer. “Filthy!”

  Herrera says his country came to a stop when Martinez pitched; it felt like a national holiday every five days. In time Herrera would come to throw changeups under pressure in October, and earn a World Series ring of his own with the Royals. But he understood that Martinez’s pitch was a singular sensation.

  “If you see Pedro’s hand, it’s like, so flexible,” he says. “Pedro’s changeup is unique. You cannot have that one.”

  * * *

  ————

  The best pure hitter to make his debut after 1939—that is, after Ted Williams—was Tony Gwynn. Across two decades for the Padres, from 1982 to 2001, Gwynn hit .338 and won eight batting titles. He came to bat 323 times against Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Pedro Martinez, and struck out just three times.

  Yet Glavine held Gwynn to a .303 average—outstanding for most hitters, but far below Gwynn’s standards. Gwynn thought Glavine’s changeup never seemed to reach the plate. When Glavine complimented Gwynn on his plate coverage, Gwynn responded this way:

  “You make it tough on me because lefties aren’t supposed to throw changeups to lefties, and you do.”

  Glavine, who won 305 games in his Hall of Fame career, was not alone in that strategy; it also worked well for Jamie Moyer, among others. But it defies convention for a left-hander to throw a slow pitch down and in to a lefty—the danger zone for pitchers, exactly where many left-handed hitters want it. Glavine said he still had not mastered that skill in 1991, when he won his first Cy Young Award.

  The caricature of Glavine is that he lived on the outside corner and rode soft stuff to Cooperstown. His athleticism tends to be downplayed. As a high school senior in Billerica, Massachusetts, Glavine was chosen in two drafts: in the second round by the Braves and in the fourth, as a center, by the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings. Five rounds later, the Kings took Luc Robitaille, a future Hall of Famer.

  Glavine got to pro ball without a changeup. Two years later, in Double-A, he was using a forkball and winning. The Braves had signed a veteran catcher, Ned Yost, to guide their pitching prospects. Yost was unimpressed by Glavine’s forkball, which bounced at the plate but fooled anxious, overmatched hitters. Their conversations went like this:

  Yost: “Tommy, you gotta get a changeup.”

  Glavine: “Changeup? My split’s awesome.”

  Yost: “Tommy, your split sucks. You get to Triple-A and the big leagues, those guys are gonna freakin’ spit on that thing and it’s gonna be worthless for you. You gotta get a changeup.”

  “Well, he didn’t believe me,” said Yost, whose plainspoken bluntness would one day help him as a manager. “He went to Triple-A and started getting his ass whupped, and I remember he lost 17 games his first or second year in the big leagues with that split. He started throwing that changeup and it took him to the Hall of Fame.”

  Glavine’s first hint that Yost was right came from Bo Jackson, then a Memphis Chick, who launched a mammoth blast off Glavine’s forkball in the summer of 1986. His 7–17 record for the Braves in ’88 also signaled his need for a true out pitch—and it rolled right up to him the next spring in West Palm Beach, Florida. In the outfield during batting practice one day, Glavine picked up a ball that slipped in his hand as he went to toss it back. Gripping it with his middle and ring fingers—not his index finger—Glavine’s toss faded down and to the left, just the way a lefty’s changeup should.

  He quickly deduced the happy accident: removing his index finger from the top of the ball was like stepping off the accelerator. With just the third and fourth fingers to guide the pitch, Glavine had a built-in change of speed. He no longer had to slow his arm down to produce it.

  “I could throw that pitch as hard as I wanted to, and it just didn’t come out the same,” Glavine says. “That’s the reason it was so deceptive, because my arm speed and everything was exactly the same as it was on my fastball. I didn’t have to manipulate anything.” By 1991 the pitch had become Glavine’s safety valve: on days when his other stuff was lacking, the changeup was always there, giving him a chance to win. Yet he still did not consider himself a complete pitcher. As good as his changeup was, he obeyed the old taboo—and it frustrated him.

  “I didn’t handle lefties the way I handled righties, in large part because I didn’t throw my changeup to lefties,” Glavine says. “So I was eliminating my best pitch against left-handed hitters. I finally got fed up with it and said, ‘Why can’t I throw changeups to lefties? It’s my best pitch.’ ”

  Glavine started doing it, and the Braves kept winning. He sold himself on the idea for good in spring training in 1994, his first as a teammate of Fred McGriff, the left-handed slugger acquired the previous summer. Glavine asked McGriff, who had hit him well, what he thought about a lefty throwing changeups to a lefty.

  “It seems like a good idea,” McGriff said. “I don’t know how I could keep it fair.”

  Glavine tried it in practice against McGriff, who unloaded on the pitch and crushed a long drive—but foul, over the first base seats. Just a loud strike.

  “So that’s kind of the mind-set that I had: if I can get it in there and throw it right, yeah they might kill it, but I just don’t see how they can keep it fair, and it’s one more thing for them to think about,” Glavine says.

  “It was the same with righties. I didn’t pitch in all that much, but when I went in, it was always a fastball. Well, heck, if I can throw a changeup in to a right-hander and make him start thinking: When it comes in here, I don’t know if it’s hard or soft, just like they had to do when I was pitching away—man, that would open up a whole other can of worms for me.

  “I remember one of the first times I threw it in to a right-hand hitter was Scott Rolen, when he was with the Phillies, and I saw him after the game and he’s like, ‘Are you kidding me? Now I gotta worry about that pitch inside? At least inside it was a matter of guessing, but I only had to guess hard. Now I gotta guess hard or soft? And I gotta guess when you’re going in there?’

  “So those are all the kinds of reactions I was looking for, and when I got them it was kind of like: ‘OK, I’m onto something.’ ”

  Glavine’s continual evolution helped him pitch past his 42nd birthday. He even won another Cy Young Award, in 1998, when he narrowly edged another changeup master bound for Cooperstown.

  * * *

  ————

  The 1998 season was Trevor Hoffman’s best. He led baseball with 53 saves, part of a career collection of 601. He earned the first of seven All-Star selections and helped the Padres win the pennant. The lyrics to Hoffman’s anthem, “Hell’s Bells” by AC/DC, forecast doom for all who dared to face him: thunder, hurricane, lightning, death.

  With Hoffman, though, the intimidator’s ultimate weapon—the blazing fastball—was a memory by then. It left him forever on a beach in Del Mar, California, in August 1994, just after the players’ strike began. Tossing a football with friends, Hoffman dove for a pass in the surf and felt a pang in his shoulder. Then, in a beach volleyball game, he dove for a ball in the sand, like an outfielder in full extension for a sinking line drive. Hoffman heard a distinct pfffft sound, he says, “like air coming out of a tire.” He had torn his rotator cuff.

  The mid-90s fastball that had catapulted Hoffman to the majors in 1993—less than three years after converting from shortstop with the Reds in Class A—would never return. The long off-season gave Hoffman time to strengthen his arm so he could pitch in 1995 and delay surgery. It also gave him time to think.

  “It expedited the transition every power pitcher has to make—they have to learn how to pitch and develop other pitches,” Hoffman says. “I still felt like I was going to throw as hard, I still gave it the same effort level, but the gun didn’t read it. It kind of forced me into thinking,
‘What are you gonna do now to get people out?’ ”

  Hoffman never started a game in the majors, but he had started just enough in the minors to be forced to experiment with secondary pitches. A Reds scout, Larry Barton, had shown him a grip for a circle change, but the pitch was ordinary, like his curveball and slider, and Hoffman did not trust it. He always feared it would slip from his hand.

  With the Padres in 1994, Hoffman’s catch partner was Donnie Elliott. They were not too different, a pair of right-handed relievers for a last-place team who had already played for a few organizations. Hoffman asked how Elliott threw his changeup, and learned the basis for a grip that would make him a star.

  Elliott, who would pitch only once in the majors after 1994, had invented a grip in which his index finger and thumb pinched a seam on the left side of the ball. For Hoffman, it felt like sliding his body from the wooden arm of a couch to the soft pillows in the middle. The ball was centered better in his hand with Elliott’s grip, allowing Hoffman to engage his thumb, index finger, and middle finger—the most reliable steering digits.

  Hoffman could spot his diminished fastball with impeccable command, and he deadened his changeup by shoving it deeper in his palm. He began to use this combination in earnest in 1995, throwing a fastball around 90 miles an hour and a changeup, at times, around 72.

  “He had so much of his hand on it,” says Robin Ventura, who was 0-for-5 with four strikeouts against Hoffman. “He threw it, you’d see it, and then it would disappear for a second—and then it would keep coming.”

  Hoffman converted 88.8 percent of his career saves, a figure almost identical to Mariano Rivera’s 89.1. But postseason success eluded Hoffman, who made it to the playoffs just four times in 18 seasons. He pitched only one game in the World Series and blew the save. All that time as a closer and he never experienced the defining moment of the position: leaping into the catcher’s arms to end the baseball season.

  Yet Hoffman’s attitude about it could serve as a model for dealing with disappointment, and goes a long way to understanding the ethos of an athlete. Everyone wants to win a title, but perhaps more important is earning the chance to compete for it. Hoffman did that in 1998, even without a championship ring as the prize.

  “I’ve kind of gotten over wishing for it,” he says. “I had my opportunity. I was in the ’98 World Series. We had Game 3 with a chance to close it down, and I didn’t. It’s not really a wish for another opportunity, having been there. I just didn’t seize the moment.”

  The Padres had lost the first two games in New York against the dynastic Yankees, who had gone 114–48 in the regular season. Back in San Diego, the Padres led by a run in the top of the eighth with a runner on first and no outs. With AC/DC’s bells clanging and 64,667 fans roaring and waving towels, Hoffman trotted in from the bullpen. He got one out, then issued a walk.

  Scott Brosius came to the plate, having homered in his previous at-bat. He checked his swing on a curve for strike one, then took two changeups in the dirt for balls. Hoffman never threw him another.

  After the second changeup, the Padres’ pitching coach, Dave Stewart, visited his pitcher on the mound. Brosius pulled a fastball foul down the third base line, then smashed another—89 miles an hour—over the center field fence for a three-run homer. The Padres never recovered. Hoffman had been beaten, but not with his changeup.

  “The 2–2 fastball that I threw to Scott Brosius in the World Series—that’s probably the optimal time that I should have thrown it, and I didn’t,” Hoffman says. When nudged, he added why. “You know what? Dave Stewart came out one time the whole year, and it was in that moment. He came out and said, ‘We need to be aggressive here.’ I threw a pitch that I probably shouldn’t have.

  “But that’s the way it goes. At least it was a strike. If he missed it or swung through it or took it, it was gonna be a strike.”

  It was, and it went a long way. The single most important changeup of Trevor Hoffman’s career is the one he never threw.

  * * *

  ————

  Stephen Strasburg remembers sitting in the left field seats as a teenager at Petco Park and peeking into the Padres bullpen to watch Hoffman warm up. He recognized the artistry of Hoffman’s changeup but could not repeat it quite that way.

  “He let it fall off the fingertips and almost, like, paintbrush it down,” Strasburg says. “You have to have a tremendous feel of the baseball to be able to do that, and for me, I have to throw everything off of my fastball. I have to throw everything as hard as I can.”

  Strasburg learned his changeup at San Diego State from the Aztecs’ pitching coach, Rusty Filter, but there was no reason to use it much in games. The point would be to keep hitters off his high-90s fastball, but they never proved they could hit that pitch, anyway. Strasburg blitzed through college with 375 strikeouts in 243 innings. He was picked first in the 2009 draft by the Nationals, who promoted him to Washington a year later.

  That season, Ivan Rodriguez caught all but one of Strasburg’s starts. Rodriguez, who would retire the next season with the record for games caught, thought Strasburg’s changeup was even better than his celebrated curveball. Strasburg threw it about 90 miles an hour, which was still sometimes 10 mph slower than his fastball.

  Most major leaguers could handle that pitch, on its own, but not when they had to respect a changeup, too. Rodriguez encouraged Strasburg to finally use the pitch he had never needed.

  “I trusted whatever he called, absolutely,” Strasburg says. “I would throw it down and they’d be so geared up for the fastball, they’d see that and it’d disappear. I’d get a lot of swings and misses that way.”

  Another San Diego boy needed the changeup simply to have a chance. Cole Hamels—a high school freshman in the fall of 1998—had also watched and admired Hoffman while growing up in San Diego. He recognized the way Hoffman tormented hitters with a pitch they knew was coming. If Hamels’s peers also noticed, they were not trying to learn it.

  “Guys were really trying to learn split-fingers and sliders, anything else besides the changeup,” Hamels says. “They wanted to see instant results, and the changeup’s not instant results. While you’re learning it, you’re spiking it into the ground or you’re hanging it and guys are crushing it. With a slider or a curveball, you see right away how it’s really affecting a hitter. So guys are more attracted to the instant success as opposed to the long-term success, and you start to see that some guys just don’t like to work as efficiently or as diligently as it takes to be able to succeed at something.”

  Hamels was playing the long game. He threw only 81 or 82 miles an hour as a freshman at Rancho Bernardo High School, and did not make the varsity team. But the school’s star at the time, a junior named Matt Wheatland, was thriving with the changeup. Wheatland would play for Team USA at a tournament in Taiwan on his way to becoming a first-round draft pick of the Tigers. Hamels, sufficiently impressed, learned Wheatland’s changeup from his coach, Mark Furtak.

  Hamels thought the pitch might compensate for his late-blooming velocity and give him a varsity spot as a sophomore. He was right, but had no idea just how effective his changeup would be.

  “We had a ton of scouts at all of our games, big tournament games, all these potential first-round picks—and I was able to make guys swing and miss by a mile,” Hamels says. “And that’s where I’m like, ‘Hmm, that’s weird. Why are they missing so bad?’ So I’m like, ‘OK, I’m gonna do it again,’ and they would miss by a mile again. They’re not making the adjustment. I was bouncing them and guys were swinging. I’m like, ‘Well, I guess this pitch is really deceptive.’ ”

  Hamels injured his left arm that summer when he ran into a parked car playing touch football. When he tried to pitch that night, he fractured his humerus bone. A few years earlier, Furtak had been at the game in San Diego when Tom Browning, the stalwart Reds left-hander, suffered
the same injury. Browning had 123 career victories at that moment and never won again. Hamels feared for his future.

  “This is not a normal arm,” Furtak told doctors at the hospital. “You need to do something special.”

  Doctors inserted two rods in the humerus. Hamels missed a year. But he grew two inches, to 6 foot 3, and when he returned as a senior, he could finally throw his fastball in the low 90s. He trusted in his changeup throughout his recovery.

  “For that whole year, I still kind of knew that would be the easiest pitch, because it’s not a lot of stress on the area,” Hamels says. “You’re not trying to muscle and engage and jack everything around. So mentally, I was like: at least I know I can always throw this pitch.”

  He has never stopped. Hamels went undefeated as a senior in 2002 and signed with the Phillies as a first-round pick. Six years later, he was MVP of the World Series. Seven years after that, he was traded to the Rangers and led another team into October.

  The stuff he had in high school, Hamels guessed, would not make him a first-round pick anymore. There is too much emphasis on velocity, he said, too many travel-ball programs he worries will burn out top prospects, endanger their arms, or both.

  “Every generation’s gonna get better and better; you never know when it’s gonna stop,” Hamels concedes. “But every generation’s gonna keep pushing the limit.”

  There may well be a limit to how fast a human being can throw a baseball. There will never be a limit to the joys of fooling the world’s best hitters with something slow.

  THE SPITBALL

  Hit the Dry Side