The Roger Angell Baseball Collection Part 25

"Oh-oh," Kittle said. "Now he's p.i.s.sed. See him stompin' around out there. He's talking to himself again." Kittle half rose and shouted something in Spanish to Andujar. "Go full circle!" he roared. "Keep the ball down, hombre!"

Joaquin, struck dumb, stared around the stadium in confusion-I think for a moment he looked straight up at the sky. Then he spotted Kittle and waved his glove. The next two pitches were good breaking b.a.l.l.s, and then he struck out the batter with a fastball to end the half inning.

"There," said Kittle. "That's the pistola. He's still got it."

"I think you should have been part of the deal," Rig said. "This man"-he grabbed Kittle by the knee-"this man and I played together on the Spokane Hawks in 1938," he went on, to John Henry and me. "He was a pitcher, and I was a kid shortstop. That was a B League, and it was my first professional team. Wes Schulmerich was finis.h.i.+ng up his career there." He shook his head. "Nineteen thirty-eight..."

The split-finger fastball is baseball's Rubik's Cube of the eighties-a gimmick, a supertoy, a conversation piece, and a source of sudden fame and success for its inventor. It is thrown at various speeds and with a slightly varying grip on the ball, but in its cla.s.sic mode it looks like a middling-good fastball that suddenly changes its mind and ducks under the batter's swing just as it crosses the plate. The pitch isn't exactly new-nothing in baseball is exactly new. A progenitor, the forkball, was grasped in much the same fas.h.i.+on, between the pitcher's forefinger and middle finger, but tucked more deeply into the hand, which took off spin and speed-a "slip-pitch," in the parlance. Elroy Face, a reliever with the Pirates, was its great pract.i.tioner in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and he put together an amazing 181 won-and-lost record (all in relief) with it in 1959. Bruce Sutter-like Face, a right-handed relief specialist-came along with the first so-called split-finger fastball a decade ago while with the Cubs, and has employed it (and very little else by way of repertoire) to run up a lifetime National League record of two hundred and eighty-six saves, with a Cy Young Award in 1979; he later moved along to the Cardinals and is now with the Braves and in temporary eclipse, owing to a sore arm. The Sutter pitch seemed not only unhittable but patented, for no one else in the game has quite been able to match his way of combining the forkball grip with a mid-delivery upward thrust of the thumb from beneath, which imparted a deadly little diving motion to the ball in flight. Here matters rested until 1984, when Roger Craig, a pitching coach with the Tigers, imparted his own variant of the s.-f. fb. to several members of the Detroit mound staff, with instant effect. Craig went into retirement after that season (he has since unretired, of course, and manages the Giants), but he is an affable and enthusiastic gent, who loves to talk and teach pitching. He is tall and pink-cheeked, with a n.o.ble schnoz; as most fans know, he has endured every variety of fortune on the mound. Callers at his home near San Diego that first winter of retirement included a good many opportunistic pitchers and pitching coaches from both leagues who were anxious to get their hands on the dingus. Most prominent among them-now, not then-was Mike Scott, a large but as yet unimpressive pitcher with the Houston Astros (the Mets had traded him away after 1982, at a time when his lifetime record stood at 1427); he spent a week with Craig and came home armed with Excalibur. With the new pitch, he went 188 in 1985 and 1810 last year, when he won a Cy Young Award after leading the majors with three hundred and six strikeouts and a 2.22 earned-run average. He capped his regular-season work with a no-hitter against the Giants, clinching the Astros' divisional pennant, and then zipped off sixteen consecutive scoreless innings while winning his two starts in the champions.h.i.+p series against the Mets, to whom he surrendered but one run over all. Indeed, the other great "what if" of this past winter (along with second-guessing the way the Red Sox played the tenth inning of Game Six in the World Series) is the speculation about the Mets' fate in the playoffs if they had been forced to face Scott for a third time, in a seventh and deciding game.

"The split-finger is mostly a changeup," Keith Hernandez told me in St. Petersburg. "It can be thrown in different ways, so you can say it's really a three-speed changeup, with the fork-ball action as the other half of it. Scott can make it run in or out, but when he throws it inside to me he throws it hard. It has so much velocity on it that it's a real fastball for him, plus it goes down. It just drops off the table. Sutter's was the best until this one, but Scott has perfected it. He has tremendous command over the pitch-he never makes a mistake." (Mike Scott, it should be added, might not agree with this generous appraisal, for Hernandez hits him better than anyone else in the league: .377 lifetime, according to the Elias Baseball a.n.a.lyst.) Roger Craig told me that both Scott and Morris throw the split-finger at eighty-five miles an hour or better-faster than anyone else, although Scott Garrelts, a fireballing reliever on Craig's Giants, is now approaching that level. "Jack has his fingers up higher on the ball than Mike does," Craig said. "Mike's got the ball as far out in his hand as you can get it. He throws it about sixty or seventy percent of the time now, and there was a stretch at the end of last year when he was just unhittable. The pitch was a phantom-you'd swing and it wasn't there." (A good many batters in the National League are convinced that Mike Scott also imparts another sort of witchcraft to the baseball, by scuffing it in some secret fas.h.i.+on, in contravention of the rules. Steve Garvey told me that retrieved b.a.l.l.s Scott has thrown often show a patch of lightly cut concentric circles on one of the white sectors-something that might be done with an artificially roughened part of his glove or palm. Garvey made a little sidewise gesture with his hand. "That's all it moves," he said, smiling. "It's enough.") Craig-to get back into the suns.h.i.+ne here-said that the best thing about the split-finger is that it can be thrown at so many different speeds. "It depends on where you've got it in your fingers, on how you c.o.c.k your wrist-on a whole lot of things," he said. "But the ultimate is when it comes out off the tips of your fingers-they just slip down along the ball on the outside of the seams-and the ball tumbles. That's the great one, because it's the opposite spin from the fastball. People keep telling me it isn't really a fastball, but I keep saying it is, because I want that pitcher to throw it with a fastball motion. Dan Petty, back with the Tigers, used to let up on it, because it was in the back of his mind that it was an off-speed pitch, but that's wrong. Here-gimme a ball, somebody."

We were sitting out on a bullpen bench in left field on a s.h.i.+ning morning in Scottsdale-Craig and I and one of the Giants' beat writers. Craig has large, pale, supernally clean hands-Grandpa hands, if Grandpa is a dentist-and when he got a ball he curled his long forefinger and middle finger around it at the point where the red seams come closest together. "I start with my fingers together like this, and I say 'fastball'...'fastball'...'fastball'"-he waggled his wrist and fingers downward again and again-"but I have them go this way each time: just a bit wider apart. By the time you're out here"-the fingers were outside the seams now, on the white, slippery parts of the ball-"you're throwing the split-finger. There's a stage where it acts sort of like a knuckleball, but it'll come. You've started."

Craig told us that he'd discovered the pitch back in 1982, while he was coaching fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys in California. He takes great pleasure in the fact that several older or middle-level professionals have saved their careers with the pitch (Milt Wilc.o.x, a righty with the Tigers, was one), and that subvarsity high-school and college pitchers have made the team with it. Superior pitchers sometimes resist it, by contrast. "Jack Morris thinks he's the greatest pitcher who ever lived," Craig said. "He has that great confidence. He insisted he didn't need it, even though he was getting killed with his changeup. So I said, 'Do me a favor. Pitch one game and don't throw a change-throw the split-finger instead.' He did it, and it was a two-hitter against the Orioles."

When Craig arrived at Candlestick Park in September of 1985, as the Giants' new manager, he took all the pitchers out of the bullpen on his second day and asked for a volunteer who had never essayed the split-finger. Mark Davis, a left-hander, came forward, and Craig sent the rest of the staff down to stand behind the catcher. "Well, in about twenty, twenty-five pitches he was throwing it," Roger said, "and all my other pitchers were thinkin', Well, if he can do it, I can do it. That way, I didn't have to go out and try to convince them one by one." Everybody on the Giants throws the pitch now, and one of Craig's starters, Mike Krakow, went 209 with it last year-his best year ever. Craig hasn't counted, but he believes that thirty or forty percent of the pitchers in the National League have the pitch by now, or are working on it. Five of the Dodgers' staff-Welch, Hers.h.i.+ser, Niedenfuer, Young, and Leary-employ the pitch, and the American League is beginning to catch up. Gene Mauch, the Angels' pilot, told Craig this spring that all his pitchers would be working on it this year.

I suggested to Roger that he should have registered the split-finger, so that he could charge a royalty every time it's thrown in a game, and his face lit up. "That would be nice, wouldn't it?" he said. "Just kick back and stay home, and take on a few private pupils now and then. That would be all right! But I've stopped teaching it to other teams. About ten pitching coaches called me up last winter and asked if they could come out and pick it up, but I said no. And there was this one general manager who called me up and said he'd send me and my wife to Hawaii, all expenses paid, if I'd take on his pitching coach and teach it to him. It's too late, though-I already showed it to too many guys. Dumb old me."

Not everybody, in truth, picks up the split-finger quickly or easily, and not all split-fingers are quite the same. Ron Darling, the Mets' young right-hander, mastered the delivery last summer, after a long struggle, and when he did, it became what he had needed all along-a finis.h.i.+ng pitch, to make him a finished pitcher. (He was 156, with a 2.81 ERA, for the year, along with a hatful of strong no-decision outings.) He has never talked to Roger Craig, and, in fact, his split-finger started out as a forkball taught to him by pitching coach Al Jackson at the Mets' Tidewater farm club in 1983. But Darling, who has small hands, could never open his fingers enough to grasp the ball in the deep forkball grip, so it became a split-finger delivery instead. (Craig told me that some pitchers he knew had even gone to bed at night with a ball strapped between their fingers, in an attempt to widen their grip.) Darling had very little luck with the pitch at first, but kept at it because of Jack Morris's example-especially after Morris pitched a no-hitter against the White Sox at the beginning of the 1984 season.

"The whole idea about pitching-one of the basics of the art-is that you've got to show the batter a strike that isn't a strike," Darling said. "More than half-much more than half-of all the split-fingers that guys throw are b.a.l.l.s. They drop right out of the strike zone. That's a problem, because you might have a great split-finger that moves a lot, and the batter is going to lay off it if he sees any kind of funny spin. So you have to throw it for a nice strike now and then. Hitters adjust, you know. Most of the time, you're going to throw the pitch when you're ahead in the count. But sometimes I throw it when I'm behind, too. All you have to do is make it look like a fastball for at least half the distance. A lot of times last year, I'd try to get a strike with a fastball and then throw a split-finger strike. If it does get over-and this began to happen for me for the first time last year-it rocks the world, because then here comes another split-finger and the bottom drops out, but the guy still has to swing. He has no other choice. n.o.body can afford not to swing at that pitch-unless he's Keith Hernandez. Umpires don't call third strikes on Keith."

K for Koufax: Each year, I notice, one particular old player's name pops up again and again in baseball conversations. I don't understand it. This year, it was Sandy Koufax. Roger Craig told me that he and Koufax were among the old Dodgers who had turned up at Vero Beach for a thirtieth reunion of the 1955 Brooklyn World Champions, and that Sandy immediately began asking him how to throw the new split-finger pitch. The next afternoon, he summoned Craig over to watch him working off a mound. "Well, first of all, Sandy was throwing the fastball at around eighty-five miles an hour," Craig said. "He was in great shape, as usual, and he just did it naturally-no effort at all. I couldn't get over it. He was working on the split-finger, of course, though, and already he had it down pretty good. You know how long his fingers are. Sandy was pretty excited, and after a while he told me he was going to unretire and get back into the game as a pitcher again. I said, 'Jesus Christ, man, you can't do that! You're fifty years old!' But I thought he really meant it for a while, and so did Buzzie Bavasi and some of the others who heard him. I guess somebody talked him out of it in the end, but I almost wish they hadn't. Wouldn't that've been something!"

At Winter Haven, Eddie Kasko, the Red Sox' director of scouting (and a former manager of the Bosox), was talking about Sandy, too. He had a couple of friends from Ma.s.sachusetts in tow-fans down to watch the Sox in training-and at one point he told us about a day back in the early nineteen-sixties, when he was an infielder with the Reds, and he and Whitey Lockman and Ed Bailey were sitting together on the bench, watching Koufax in action for the visiting Dodgers.

"Sandy is just chewing us up out there, putting down the batters in rows with that tremendous fastball," Kasko said, "but Ed Bailey keeps saying, 'Well, he don't look like nothing special to me. That pitch isn't much. I wish they'd give me just one crack at him.' Ed loved to pinch-hit, you know-he thought there wasn't anybody he couldn't hit. Well, a little later we're way behind in the game, and Hutch sends Bailey up to bat against Sandy, and it's one, two, three strikes, you're out. Eddie swings three times and doesn't come within a foot of the ball. He walks back to the dugout and sits down, and after a while I give Whitey a little nudge and I say, 'Well, Ed, what do you think now?' And Bailey turns around, all red in the face, and says, 'He's too straight!' Whitey says, 'Yes-and so is a .30-.30.'"

Both leagues rang up strikeout records last year-a phenomenon attributable at least in part to the split-finger-and what one makes of this depends on whether one thinks like a batter or like a pitcher. Roger Craig smiled when I asked him about it and said, "I can't call it bad." Hernandez said, "What I'm concerned with is that the sixties brought us the slider, and now here's the eighties and this pitch. What's going to happen in the nineteen-nineties? What's going to happen to us. .h.i.tters? The slider was a much harder pitch to hit than the curveball, and in the end they had to change the strike zone in order to even things out a little. The only thing on our side now is that the hanging split-finger is a great pitch to hit. It's just sitting up there on a tee for you."

The change that Hernandez alluded to-a historic proceeding in baseball, which has rarely altered its essential rules and ancient dimensions-came just after the season of 1968, when the two leagues showed a combined batting average of .236. Carl Yastrzemski won the A.L. batting t.i.tle with an average of .301 that year, and in the same summer a rookie pitcher-the Mets' Jerry Koosman-accounted for seven shutouts, Bob Gibson achieved an earned-run average of 1.12 (a modern record), and g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry and Ray Washburn threw no-hitters on consecutive days in the same ballpark. The batters were dying. The remedy, put into effect the following year, was to cut down the strike zone by a couple of inches, top and bottom, and to shave the pitching mounds from fifteen inches to ten inches above field level. Offensive statistics picked up almost at once (National League hitters batted .253 last year, and those in the A.L. .262), but many contemporary hitters believe that their eventual return to form was mostly because the batters began to recognize the slider a little sooner and to attack it with more success. I have also heard them say that the same thing will happen after they've seen the split-finger pitch more often. They may be whistling in the dark. For one thing, most pitchers who have mastered Craig's Little Jifry say that they don't know exactly where the pitch is going to end up once it has been launched; in this respect, at least, it resembles the knuckleball to some degree. We'll see.

I asked Marty Barrett (of the Red Sox) and then Wally Backman (of the Mets) how many split-finger pitches each of them sees, and what they told me suggests that the pitch is much less employed, or less trusted, in the A.L. Both Barrett and Backman are bantam-size contact hitters (well, Barrett has a bit of power: he hit thirty-nine doubles last year) who bat second in power-laden lineups, which means that pitchers tend to work them with extreme care. Barrett told me that he didn't run into many split-finger pitches, perhaps because the pitchers were afraid that they'd get behind in the count and end up walking him. "I think the pitch is for bigger guys, who aren't as selective and will probably go to swinging at pitches that end up being b.a.l.l.s," he said. "I get more fastb.a.l.l.s. If Jim Rice got the pitches I get, he'd hit seventy home runs."

I told Backman what Marty had said, and he was surprised. He said he saw the pitch often. To be sure, if the leadoff man got on base just ahead of him he wouldn't be served many breaking b.a.l.l.s, but whenever the Mets were behind late in a game the whole lineup would probably see the split-finger. "A lot of times, the split-finger is a ball," he said, "but even if you know that, it's hard to lay off it sometimes. I just think there are more guys in our league who are throwing the thing."

A further ingredient in the s.h.i.+fting batter-vs.-pitcher wars is the indisputable evidence that in the past four or five years, the umpires in both leagues have responded to the breaking-ball and sinkerball epidemic by lowering the strike zone. There was no plan to this; it just happened. The high fastball-the old Koufax or Seaver hummer that crossed the plate at the level of the batter's armpits, which is still the official ceiling of the strike zone-would probably be called a ball today, and umps today are also calling a lot of strikes on pitches that cross below the knee-level demarcation. Contemporary umpires are handing out quick warnings on brushback or knockdown pitches as well, and as a result the batters feel free to take a better toehold up at the plate and swing hard at low pitches away-"diving at the ball," in the new jargon. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, Don Drysdale, the old Los Angeles intimidator, has said that modern-day batters are less wary when up at bat, and he and some other thoughtful baseball people warn that one of these days somebody is going to get beaned by an inadvertent high, inside pitch. On the other hand, it is the lower strike zone that also makes the batters so vulnerable to the split-finger's skulking little ways, because so few of them will trust the umpire to call a ball on a pitch that ends up below the strike zone.

To return to the slider, there is very little agreement about its origins but unanimity about the fact that it is easy to throw and hard to hit. Bill Rigney says that it caught on in the National League in the early fifties, after Don Newcombe's sudden flowering with the Dodgers. "Erskine and Branca had those big old wide-breaking curveb.a.l.l.s, but then suddenly here was Newk with his hard pitch," he told me. "It only broke about this much, but it was a bear. It just took over the league. It was easier to control than a curveball-you could throw it for strikes-and the batters hated it. I remember riding in the team bus before the 1948 All-Star Game, and Ted Williams was asking us, 'What's this new thing over in your league-this slider?' Well, he found out about it, too. A lot of batters used to put it down, you know-they called it a nickel curve-but they still couldn't hit it."

The slider is admired but mistrusted, for the evidence seems clear that it can destroy a pitcher's arm. The Dodgers discourage its instruction in their minor-league clubs, and a great many baseball people think it can permanently damage kid pitchers who begin to fool with it at the Little League and Pony League levels. "I like the slider," Herm Starrette told me, "but I'd teach it last to a young pitcher, if at all. It's a great pitch to throw when you're behind in the count and want to throw some kind of breaking ball. But it will hurt your arm unless it's thrown properly. I teach the loose-wrist slider-the Steve Carlton pitch. It has a shorter, quicker break, and it moves downward. The stiff-wrist slider is what you call the cut fastball. It's a flat slider."

Pitchers say that the standard slider is thrown overhand, with the forefinger and the middle finger slightly off center on the ball, and that the proper wrist action gives the ball the same spiral imparted to a pa.s.sed football. The fingers are off center on the cut fastball, too, but the pitch, launched with a full fastball motion, results in a brusque, twisting action of the elbow and forearm that shortens the delivery-and, in time, a career.

"Right-handed pitchers can do better with the cut fastball against a left-handed hitter than against a right-handed hitter, because for the right-handed hitter the ball comes in on the same plane as the fastball, and you have a chance to get more wood on it," Starrette went on. "But if your slider breaks across and down to a right-handed batter, you've got a chance he'll miss it or b.u.mp the ball on the top half for a ground-ball out. If you're a right-hander facing a left-handed batter...well, most left-handed batters are low-ball hitters, so if you throw the stiff-wrist slider-that cut fastball-up and in, you can get by with it, because it's on the small part of the bat, in on the fists. And that's why pitchers go back to it, even if it's dangerous for them. Anything that works will be used, you know."

The slow or sudden ruin of an arm and a livelihood is on every pitcher's mind, and examples of crippled careers are to be found on all sides, although fans and pitchers alike prefer not to notice them. Steve Garvey believes that the near-epidemic of torn rotator cuffs (it is the section of muscle that encircles the arm in the same fas.h.i.+on, and at approximately the same site, as the seam that attaches a s.h.i.+rt-sleeve to a s.h.i.+rt) arises from pitchers' trying to throw too many different deliveries, and from overthrowing in crucial game situations. "You see a lot of guys who used to throw hard who have lost a few miles an hour on their fastball after a couple of years," he said. "Then they go to other stuff, to compensate, and they get into trouble. Stress comes into it more than it used to, because there's so much more money to be made in the game. The desire to win in important situations has gone way up."

Craig, for his part, claims that his split-finger special will be kinder to pitchers in the end, for it is thrown with a full, easy fastball motion. "h.e.l.l, you can hurt your arm throwin' a pebble or a rock, or flyin' a d.a.m.n kite," he said at one point, "but there's less chance of it this way." Other coaches and managers (Sparky Anderson is among them) are dubious, and say that we'll have to wait and see about the long-range effects of the split-finger. One pitcher showed me that if you repeatedly split your throwing fingers apart you will feel a twinge in your upper forearm, and said that he does exercises to compensate. Any overhand pitching motion is probably unnatural, for that matter. Joe Rudi believes that the spitball (still illegal, and still in the game, of course, because it works so well) is the most dangerous delivery of all. "You're gripping the ball off the seams, which is to say your fingertips have very little resistance, nothing to pull down against," he said. "When that part of the ball is wet, the ball suddenly comes flying out of there, and there's nothing left-no resistance at all. Your arm accelerates exactly at the point when it's begun to decelerate, and that's a great way to blow it out for good. It's like when you go to pick up a bag of groceries, only there's nothing in the bag. You go oops-and you've thrown out your back. I don't let the outfielders on my team throw the ball any kind of a funny way, even when they're fooling around in practice. A lot of young players have no idea how vulnerable the arm really is. It's a delicate mechanism."

In 1980, by the way, a wonderful young Oakland pitching staff, featuring Mike Norris, Rick Langford, Matt Keough, Brian Kingman, and Steve McCatty, led the American League in complete games (by a mile) and earned-run average, but after three years all but McCatty were gone, with their careers in tatters. One popular theory for the debacle was that Billy Martin and his pitching coach, Art Fowler, allowed the youngsters to stay too long in too many games (the A's had almost nothing in the way of a bullpen), but another theory claimed, or whispered, that Fowler had taught the kids the spitball. It's hard to be sure.

Scroogie: The first screwball pitcher I ever saw was Carl Hubbell, the great-the word fits here-Giants left-hander of the nineteen-thirties, who, along with Joe DiMaggio, became my earliest baseball hero. I recall the thrilling moment at the Polo Grounds when my father pointed out to me that Hubbell's left arm turned the wrong way around when it was at rest-with the palm facing out, that is-as a result of his throwing the screwball so often and so well. (The ball is delivered with the hand and wrist rotating in an unnatural direction-to the right for a lefthander, to the left for a right-hander-and the pitch breaks wrong, too. It's what pitchers call "turning it over.") I couldn't get over Hubbell's hand; it was like meeting a gladiator who bore scars inflicted at the Colosseum. Since men, I have talked with Hubbell a few times-he's a thin, stooped elderly gent who lives in Mesa, Arizona-and whenever I do I can't help stealing a glance at his left hand: it still faces the wrong way. The prime screwballer of our time is Fernando Valenzuela, of the Dodgers. His pitching arm looks perfectly normal so far, I'm sorry to say. Last summer, I ran into Warren Spahn, the old Boston Hall of Famer, in the visiting-team dugout at Fenway Park. He was there for an Old Timers' Game-he's a regular at these events-and he was wearing an old Braves uniform, with that tomahawk across the chest; he played twenty years for the Braves, eight of them in Boston ("Spahn and Sain and pray for rain") and the rest in Milwaukee, and his lifetime three hundred and sixty-three victories are still the most compiled by any left-hander. Spahn, a leathery, wiry, infallibly cheerful man, was sitting with some of the Ibxas Rangers (they would play the Bosox that afternoon, once the exhibition innings were over), and in no time he had begun teaching his famous sinker-screwball delivery to another left-hander-the veteran Mickey Mahler, who was trying to stick with the Rangers as a middle-innings relief man.

"Look, it's easy," Spahnie said. "You just do this." His left thumb and forefinger were making a circle, with the three other fingers pointing up, exactly as if he were flas.h.i.+ng the "OK" sign to someone nearby. The ball was tucked comfortably up against the circle, without being held by it, and the other fingers stayed up and apart, keeping only a loose grip on the ball. Thrown that way, he said, the ball departed naturally off the inside, or little-finger side, of the middle finger, and would then sink and break to the left as it crossed the plate. "There's nothing to it," he said optimistically. "Just let her go, and remember to keep your hand up so it stays inside your elbow. Throw it like that, and you turn it over naturally-a nice, easy movement, and the arm follows through on the same track." He made the motion a few times, still sitting down, and it certainly looked easy-easy but impossible.

Spahn went off to join some other uniformed geezers, and I asked Mahler if he intended to work on the pitch, now that he'd had it from the Master.

"Oh, I don't think so," he said. "I'm trying to learn the screwball from our pitching coach, and this would mess me up for sure." He seemed uncomfortable, and after a couple of minutes he told me that a little earlier he and Spahn had been standing near the stands and some kids there had asked him, Mickey Mahler, for his autograph. "They asked me-not Warren Spahn," he said. "Can you believe that?" He was embarra.s.sed.

I don't like to see young pitchers get their hearts broken in spring-training games, but it's much worse when it happens to somebody you know and remember and care about-to a veteran, I mean. In Winter Haven, the starting pitcher for the Tigers one afternoon was Frank Tanana, a thirty-three-year-old lefty with fourteen years' service in the majors. Like many fans, I remembered him as a slender, dazzling left-hander when he first came up with the Angels. He led the league then with two hundred and sixty-nine strikeouts in 1975, and went 1910 the next year, and the year after that his 2.54 earned-run average was the best in the league. (A scout told me once that as a teenager Tanana had played in a high-school league in and around his native Detroit, where two strikes on a batter retired him and three b.a.l.l.s meant a walk. "n.o.body touched him there-it was just a mismatch," the scout said. "Everybody got home for supper early that spring.") But Tanana went down with a rotator injury in 1979 (his pitching motion was across the body-a dangerous habit for a fastballer), and he was a different sort of pitcher after that. He lost eighteen games for the Rangers in 1982, but then he began to do better. He is smart, and he knows the corners, and he has become a master at changing speeds. Over the last four years, he won forty-six games and lost forty-seven while toiling for the Rangers and then the Tigers, but there was more arm trouble last year. Against the Red Sox, in his outing at Winter Haven, he gave up ten runs on eleven hits, and couldn't quite get the last out in the third inning. When he left, he raised his cap to the Boston fans just before he disappeared into the dugout, and got a nice little hand in return. I hated it.

The Sox' opponents the next afternoon were the Montreal Expos, a team that has systematically stripped itself of most of its expensive stars and is engaged in filling out its roster with youngsters and retreads. Len Barker threw three pretty fair middle innings for the visitors, giving up a lone run on three hits, but I felt edgy the whole time he was out there. A hulking, six-foot-four flinger with blazing speed, Barker had a brief time in the sun with the Indians at the beginning of this decade, when he led the American League in strikeouts two years running. Early in the 1981 season, in a game against the Blue Jays, he achieved the ultimate rarity, a perfect game: no hits, no walks, no runs, n.o.body on base. His occupational injuries began in 1983, and ultimately required extensive surgery on the elbow of his pitching arm, and he never had a successful or pain-free season after that. He moved along to Atlanta in time, and spent all of last summer with Indianapolis, a Cla.s.s AAA minor-league team, but his most common address was the disabled list. He didn't make the team this year, it turned out; the Expos gave him his release just before the season started, and his career may be at an end at last. Another rotator-cuff casualty, Bruce Berenyi, gave it a last try this spring with the Expos, but the pain was too much, and he announced his retirement a few days after camp opened; he had been with the Mets and, before that, the Reds, but he never returned to form after shoulder surgery two years ago. He was a hard thrower, too. Bob McClure, a left-handed ten-year man who has worked mostly out of the bullpen, hung on and made the Expos' opening-day roster-an exception in this unhappy litany, for he has made do in the majors ever since his rotator-cuff trauma in 1981. His spring wasn't exactly carefree, however: just before the regular season began, he gave up nine runs to the Yankees in two-thirds of an inning of work, during a grisly 23V7 blowout at Fort Lauderdale.

Earlier, when I was out in Arizona, the Athletics had announced that Moose Haas, a prime starter for them last year until he was side-lined by bursitis, was suffering from a pulled muscle in the rotator cuff of his pitching shoulder and would be unable to start the season. And then, a bare day or two before the season began, Pete Vuckovich announced his retirement from baseball, thus terminating a distinguished eleven-year career that included a Cy Young Award in 1982, when he put together an 186 season for the Brewers, which helped take them into the playoffs and the World Series that fall. A torn rotator cuff got him the following spring. I was in the Brewers' camp at Sun City the day it was announced, and I well remember the waves of dismay that went through the clubhouse that afternoon-dismay but perhaps not surprise, for it was known that Vukey had pitched in great pain during the final stages of the pennant race the year before. In late September, two days after receiving a cortisone shot in his shoulder, he somehow went eleven full innings against the Red Sox, throwing a hundred and seventy-three pitches, and won the game. (I reported on this unhappy business at the time.) Vuckovich underwent extensive shoulder surgery early in 1984 and sat out the entire season. He was never sound again, but he just wouldn't give up. As scarcely needs saying, he is a man of enormous determination, pride, and stubbornness. The Brewers demoted him a year ago, but he refused to report to the minors; then he changed his mind and went to Vancouver after all, when he threw well enough (a 1.26 ERA in six games) to be invited back to the Brewers again in September. Now it's over for him.

Vuckovich and Haas and McClure were on the same Brewer pitching staff in the early eighties, and so was Jim Slaton, who also suffered a rotator-cuff injury but eventually recovered. So was Rollie Fingers, the slim, flamboyant relief pitcher who won his Cy Young in 1981 but could not pitch for the team in the playoffs or the World Series in 1982, because of an injury to his forearm that forced his retirement three sad seasons later. And so on. I don't think we should draw any particular conclusions about the Milwaukee club of that time, beyond its famous combativeness and pride, but the point I am getting at here is that all the pitchers just mentioned, with the exception of Berenyi, came up in, and mostly pitched on, American League clubs. To go back a bit, we should also remind ourselves that the 1980 Cy Young Award winner in the American League-Steve Stone, who won twenty-five games and lost seven for the Orioles-was forced into retirement by elbow miseries after but one more summer's work. When three successive Cy Young winners in the same league-Stone, Fingers, and Vuckovich-together arrive at a point when none of them is able to throw a pitch in combat, the award suddenly begins to take on the meaning of a Purple Heart.

Tony Kubek, the NBC baseball commentator, often points out that the designated-hitter artifice, which was adopted by the league in 1973, allows a manager to stay with his starting pitcher for as long as he seems to be pitching effectively, even though his team may be behind in the game, and, furthermore, that A.L. pitchers have to make a larger number of high-level, high-strain pitches per game, because they are facing an additional dangerous bat in the lineup in the person of the designated hitter. Kubek remembers asking Catfish Hunter about the D.H. rule when it was first enacted (Hunter pitched in the A.L. exclusively), and the Cat said, "Well, it's going to make me a lot more money, and it's going to shorten my career by about two years"-a dazzling prognostication, it turned out, for Hunter's number of games won, complete games, and innings pitched suddenly rose after 1973 (he led the league in all three categories in 1975) and then almost as quickly dwindled, when arm miseries overtook him. By 1979, he was down to 29 with the Yankees, and by the next year he was gone, at the age of thirty-three.

Steve Garvey, another thoughtful mikado of the pastime, is also convinced that the designated-hitter rule has been a stroke of very bad fortune for the A.L. pitchers. "Because there's no pinch-hitter, the good starting pitchers stay in the game longer and run into more of those stressful late-inning situations-a men-on-base, close-game crisis, where they'll be throwing that much harder just when their arms are getting tired and are most vulnerable," he said. "There are very few easy batters in big-league lineups now, and in the American League, of course, the pitcher never gets to pitch to the other pitcher. There's no rest for him, I mean. Count up the good American League starters we've lost these past few years and see. It's not a situation you want to think about."

Perhaps we should think about David Bush instead. Last year, in the midst of spring training in Arizona, David felt some minor and then not so minor twinges of pain in his right shoulder, and finally consulted Mark Letendre, the Giants' new trainer, who had just ascended to the post. Letendre poked and pulled and then diagnosed a mild rotator-cuff injury ("My first rotator cuff!" he exclaimed to Bush), and suggested anti-inflammatory drugs and rest. Bush, who is a veteran baseball-beat writer with the San Francisco Chronicle, refused to baby himself, and did not miss a single deadline ("I'll play through pain," he said stoutly), and there is some hope that he may have made a complete recovery. When I inquired about the possible source of the injury, David finally confessed that it might have happened when he heaved his wife's clothesbag up on his shoulder the morning she was flying back to the Bay after a conjugal visit to Scottsdale. Lesly Bush, a stylish lady, does not travel light.

The Hook: New fans always want to know what the manager is saying to his pitcher when he goes to the mound to take him out of a game. The answer is: Nothing much. There are four or five new baseball books out every week, it seems, and soon, I don't doubt, there will be an anthology of pre-shower epigrams. In Scottsdale, I saw a thin Athletics right-hander named Stan Kyles give up a walk and single in the fifth inning. Then he walked three batters in a row-walking himself to Tacoma, in effect. Eventually, manager Tony LaRussa showed mercy and got him out of there, and when the game was over I asked LaRussa what he'd said to Kyles. "I said it looked like he'd run into a moving target today," Tony said.

Bill Rigney told me once that one day in his first summer as a major-league manager he went out to the mound in the Polo Grounds to yank a veteran Giants relief man named Windy McCall, who had got n.o.body at all out during his brief stint that day. Rig said, "I walked out there and I said 'How are you?' and McCall said 'Great. How the h.e.l.l are you?' So I never asked that question again."

I took a drive across the desert to visit the Indians in Tucson-in particular, to watch their two new genuine stars: Joe Carter, who rapped twenty-nine home runs last year and led both leagues with a hundred and twenty-one runs batted in; and Cory Snyder, the phenom soph.o.m.ore, who, by sudden consensus, is said to have the best outfielder's arm in the majors. The Indians are trying to deal with an unaccustomed emotion-hope-and may make a real run at the leaders in the American League East. The most hopeful Indian of them all, I found-by far the most cheerful pitcher I talked to this spring-was Tom Candiotti, a youthful-looking, almost anonymous twenty-nine-year-old right-hander, who had been informed the day before by Tribe manager Pat Corrales that he would be the team's opening-day pitcher. A year ago, Candiotti was invited to Tucson for a look-see by the Indians, in spite of his most ordinary seven-year prior career, pa.s.sed mostly in the bushy lower levels of the Milwaukee organization. He had a scattered 66 record while up with the Brewers, but had spent all of the previous, 1985 season in the minors; three years before that, he sat out an entire season after undergoing elbow reconstruction. Cleveland wanted to look at him because of some gaping vacancies on its own pitching staff and because Candiotti had experienced some recent success while throwing a knuckleball in a winter league in Puerto Rico. His early adventures with the flutterball in the American League last summer were a bit scary-he was 36 by mid-June-but he finished up with an admirable 1612 record, including seventeen complete games. Only scriptwriters fas.h.i.+on turnabouts like that, but Candiotti's help had come from a more reliable source-Phil Niekro, a forty-eight-year-old knuckleball grand master (only four other men in baseball history were still active players at his age), whom the Indians picked up on waivers when the Yankees released him just before the 1986 season got under way. Niekro had won his three-hundredth game at the end of the previous season, and he went 1111 for the Tribe last year, his twenty-third in the majors; Candiotti and everyone else on the club gave him much of the credit for the younger man's wonderful record as well.

"Knucksie is my guru," Candiotti told me. (Knucksie is Niekro: sorry.) "He coached me during every game and in between. Last year-early last year-I was trying to throw the knuckleball hard all the time. It was a nasty pitch but tough to control, so I was always in trouble-30, 21. He said, 'Listen, that's not the way to do it. First of all, you want the batter to swing at it. You don't want to go 32 all day. So take a little off it, make it look tempting to the batter as it comes up to the plate.' I did that, and after a while I began to get a little more movement on my slower knuckler. I haven't come close to mastering anything yet, the way he has, but I'm better."

The knuckleball looks particularly tempting if you are a lizard or a frog. It is thrown not off the knuckles but off the fingertips-off the fingernails, to be precise-which renders the ball spinless and willful. It meanders plateward in a leisurely, mothlike flight pattern, often darting prettily downward or off to one side as it nears the strike zone, which results in some late and awkward-looking flailings by the batter, sudden belly flops into the dust by the catcher, and, not uncommonly, a pa.s.sed ball or a wild pitch. It is the inelegance of the thing that makes it so unpopular with most managers, I believe (some of them call it "the bug"), but some distinguished and wonderfully extended careers have been fas.h.i.+oned by wily Merlins such as Wilbur Wood, who had two twenty-four-victory seasons in the course of his seventeen-year tenure (mostly with the White Sox) in the nineteen-sixties and seventies; Charlie Hough, of the Rangers, now in his eighteenth year in the big time; and, of course, Hoyt Wilhelm, who went into the Hall of Fame after twenty-one years of knuckling, with a record-let's say "all-time" this once: with an all-time-record one thousand and seventy game appearances. The pitch, in short, is unthreatening to a pitcher's arm, and I have often wondered why it isn't practiced and admired more widely.

Candiotti, an agreeable fellow, told me that Niekro had emphasized that it was absolutely necessary for a knuckleballer to field his position well and to learn how to hold the runners close (Niekro's pickoff move is legendary), since the bug is unhurried in its flight and tends to spin weirdly when nubbed along the ground. "The pitch takes its time, you know," Tom said. I asked how much time, and he said that his knuckleball had been timed between forty-eight and seventy-one miles per hour last year. "Seventy-one is slow, you understand," he said. "You just can't believe how easy on your arm this pitch feels. Knucksie keeps telling me that I'll go through a lot of frustrating days with the knuckleball, and sometimes you'll get racked up. But the thing to do is stay with it."

Niekro pitched against the Giants that afternoon in beautiful little Hi Corbett Field, and tried his d.a.m.nedest to stay with the pitch. It was a bright, windy afternoon (the knuckleball becomes even more flighty in a breeze, or else refuses to perform at all), and Phil gave up four runs, including a couple of walks and two doubles, in his three-inning outing. The pitch seemed to arrive at the plate in stages, at the approximate pace of a sightseeing bus.

Niekro, whom I found in the Indians' empty clubhouse after his stint, was not much cast down. "I haven't thrown a real knuckleball all this spring training," he said. "It's too dry here, and the wind keeps blowing. I can't sweat. Just can't get it right. If the knuckleball ain't there, I'm a ma.s.s of confusion. I can't defend myself with a fastball or a slider, like other pitchers. It seems like it takes me a little longer to find it each spring."

He sounded like a man who had been going through his pockets in search of a misplaced key or parking-lot stub, and it came to me that I had sometimes had this same impression when listening to Dan Quisenberry, the Kansas City sidearm sinker-bailer, talk about his odd little money pitch. Niekro said that this feeling around for the perfect knuckleball-this sense of search-was a year-round thing with him. "You've got to sleep with it and think about it all the time. It's a twenty-four-hour pattern," he said. "The margin for error is so slight, and it can be such a little-bitty thing-your release point, the ballpark, your fingernails, the ball you've just gotten from the umpire. If anything is a fraction off, you might not have a thing out there." He crooked his fingers and waggled his wrist. "It's hunt and peck, all year long."

Niekro is lean and gray-haired, with an easy manner and a sleepy sort of smile. Watching him take off his spikes and his elastic sock supporters and the rest, and tuck his gear into his square-top travel bag (the club was going on a road trip the next day), I was reminded of an old-time travelling salesman repacking his sample case. Niekro is unhurried and precise in everything he does. I have never seen a neater ballplayer. Something else about him surprises you, too, but you can't quite figure it out at first: he is a grownup.

He told me that helping Candiotti had been a treat for him, because the young man had exactly the right makeup for the job. "He knows his limitations," he said. "He changes pitches better than I did when I was his age. I used to go: Bang-here's a knuckleball. Bang-here's another. He's really pitching: Go at one speed, go at another. Take a little off. Throw one knuckler to set up another one. But he's sort of like me, at that. I won my first game in the big leagues at the age of twenty-six, and he won his at the age of twenty-five. So he's right on track."

Niekro's lifetime record is an herb garden of statistics-three twenty-game-or-better winning seasons, two years when he lost twenty games (he combined the two in 1979, when he won twenty-one games for the Braves and lost twenty), and a 174 record in the summer of his forty-fourth year: the best percentage in the league that season. He has thrown a no-hitter, he has struck out four batters in a single inning, and he has thrown four wild pitches in one inning and six in one game. Almost any day now, he and his brother Joe, who is a starting pitcher for the Yankees, will set another record when they surpa.s.s g.a.y.l.o.r.d and Jim Perry's lifetime total of five hundred and twenty-nine victories by pitcher brothers. Joe, who also throws the knuckler, is forty-two, and has won two hundred and fourteen games.

"I learned my knuckleball from my daddy," Phil said, "but Joe was a different kind of pitcher at first. He had a three-quarter mediocre curveball, a fastball, and a slider, and he was just getting by in the major leagues. I think he was on his way down when he said, 'Oh, h.e.l.l-all right,' and he went into his back pocket and began throwing the knuckleball, too. It took him three or four years to make the transition, but once he got it he was as good a pitcher with the knuckleball for eight or nine years as there'd ever been in baseball."

I asked Niekro if he was ever tempted to giggle when one of his pitches danced away from a batter for strike three.

"Oh, no-you can't do that," he said. "I won't ever laugh at him, but I'll laugh with him sometimes, if I see he's laughing over it. We'll have a little fun out there." He gave me a glance, and said, "You know, there's lots of guys can throw the d.a.m.n knuckler for fun. It ain't all that hard to pick up. But here's a game: You're out on the mound, here's the strike zone, and there's a man standing there with a bat in his hand. It's a 32 count, there's a man on third base, or maybe the bases are loaded, and now you've got to throw the knuckleball over the plate on pitch after pitch after pitch-because he's sure as h.e.l.l going to foul some of them off. You just go back to it and throw it for another strike, and that's not fun. That's a little different."

Niekro got up and pulled off his sweats.h.i.+rt. He is trim and narrow, and his body doesn't show his years. He is famous for never doing conditioning sprints, never running at all, and when I mentioned this he smiled and said, "I've never run the ball across the plate yet." An old joke. "I stretch and I do just about ever'thing else," he said, "but I don't do weights. It's just that much more muscle to tighten up when you've finished for the day. Maybe those big boys can throw the ball harder, but when the game's over you see them iced down from their wrists to their hips. I never ice. Well, maybe I did about four times in my career, but I can't exactly remember the last time. Maybe I'm getting old."

Grumpy: Some of us were eating our cold-cuts lunch off paper plates in the Cardinals' pressroom before a Cards-Blue Jays game in Al Lang Stadium, when I noticed that the small, snub-nosed man sitting next to me was Birdie Tebbetts, the old-time Tiger catcher; he also managed the Reds, the Braves, and the Indians. Tebbetts is seventy-four years old, and scouts for the Indians. He listened to our conversation about pitches and pitchers, and muttered, "Sometimes I watch one of these young pitchers we've got, and I tell my club, "This man needs another pitch. By which I mean a strike.'"

There is a lot to this game. as my trip began to run out, I realized how many aspects of pitching I hadn't gone into yet, or hadn't asked enough about-what it takes to break in as a major-league pitcher, and how great a part luck plays in the kind of pitching roster and the kind of club a rookie is headed for, for instance. Pete Rose said that it was often easier for a youngster to make it up to the majors in the middle of a season, if the chance came, because his control would be better than it was in the spring. What about b.u.m steers-poor advice from a pitching coach, or the wrong advice for that particular pitcher? Charlie Leibrandt, a first-rate left-hander with the Royals, told me that the Cincinnati coaches had insisted that he was a power pitcher, a fastballer, when he tried to catch on with the Reds some years ago, because they were a team that specialized in big hard throwers. He had four scattered, so-so seasons with the team, then went back down to the minors, and when he came back, with the Royals, it was as a breaking-ball, control sort of pitcher, and he felt at home at last. "I remember being on the mound at Riverfront Stadium and hearing the ball popping over the sidelines while the relief pitchers warmed up to come in for me," he said cheerfully. "I was about to be gone again, and somebody in the dugout would be yelling 'Throw strikes!' and I'd think, Oh, strikes-so that's what you want! Why didn't you say so?" I also wanted to talk with the Mets about how they bring along their young pitchers, because they seem to be so good at it. And someday I want to sit down with a first-cla.s.s control pitcher and go over a video of a game he has just pitched, and make him tell me why he chose each pitch to each batter, in every situation, and how it related to what patterns he had thrown before that.

The business of strength came up a lot in my conversations, I noticed-which pitchers lasted, and why, and whether young pitchers today were in better shape than their predecessors twenty or thirty years ago. Almost everybody said yes, they were in better shape today, and probably stronger, too. Aerobics and weight work and a much better understanding of nutrition came into that, of course, and so did plain genetics; ballplayers are all noticeably bigger and taller than they used to be-you can see it. But I heard some interesting opinions to the contrary.

Jim Kaat, the deep-chested left-hander who pitched twenty-five years in the majors (he is one of the few players at any position who have performed in the big leagues in four calendar decades), told me that he'd been wondering about the decline of the fastball pitchers-the burners-and about why so many pitchers of his generation, like g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry, Nolan Ryan, and Phil Niekro, had lasted so long. "One of my theories is that we did a lot of work by hand when we were kids," he said. "Mowed the lawn, washed the car, shovelled snow, and walked. I used to walk everywhere." (Kaat grew up in Zeeland, Michigan, on the western edge of the Michigan peninsula.) "Now you see kids who haven't logged as many sandlot innings as I did, and when they come into baseball you don't know how big they're going to be. When I was eighteen, my body was developed."

Mel Stottlemyre, the old Yankee wizard who is now the pitching coach for the Mets, said, "There's no doubt that there are fewer good arms than there used to be. For one thing, a lot of young pitchers start throwing breaking b.a.l.l.s when they're too young, and they don't develop their bodies the way they could have. That's going to take a toll. I think there's less plain throwing than there used to be-just throwing the ball back and forth with your neighbor or your brother. There are more things for kids to do now, so they end up not playing catch. You see kids in Little League who aren't strong enough to pitch at all, hardly, and there they are, throwing breaking b.a.l.l.s. There's nothing I hate worse than to see a Little Leaguer with his arm in ice-but I've seen that a lot." (Mel Stottlemyre's twenty-one-year-old son Todd, by the way-or perhaps not by the way-is a pitcher with the Toronto organization; he is still a year or two away from the majors but is considered one of the great young prospects in the country.) Other pitching people I talked to did not quite agree. Dave Duncan, the pitching coach for the Athletics, said, "I'm sorry, but I just don't go along with that idea about the old days. Oh, young players and pitchers may have lost some of that sandlot toughness, but baseball is taught so much better now, with all that work on body strengthening and conditioning, that I think skill and muscular development are way ahead of what they were when I first came along."

I put this question to Tex Hughson, the commanding old Red Sox righty of the nineteen-forties-he is seventy-one now, but still long and cowboy-lean; he used to raise quarter horses near San Marcos, Texas-and at first he went along with Duncan and that group. He was sure that young players at the college and minor-league levels were far stronger and better developed than they had been in his time. But then I mentioned what Jim Kaat had said-what I think of as the Walk-to-School Factor-and he did a turnabout. "Why, that's so," he said cheerfully. "Course it is. I walked to school every day-three miles on a gravel road in Kyle, Texas, throwin' rocks the whole way. Maybe I picked up some control that way, and developed my arm. Chunked at everything. But if it was bad weather my mother would drive us in our old Model A Ford." And I'd heard somewhere that Roger Clemens also walked three miles to school-it's always three miles, never two or three and a half-when he was a kid.

I didn't know what to think, but in time it came to me that, of course, it is mental toughness that matters most of all to a pitcher: n.o.body would disagree about that. I was strengthened in this conviction by a talk I had with Bob Ojeda, the left-hander picked up by the Mets in a trade with the Red Sox, who played such a sizable part in his team's triumphs last summer and last fall. Ojeda is midsize and tightly put together. His uniform fits him perfectly-not a rumple or a wrinkle on the man or his clothes. He looks dry-cleaned.

When I asked how he would describe himself, he said that he was a man who had to work at his work-think ahead of the hitters, concentrate on control, and come inside on the batters. This last can be a long lesson for lefties at Fenway Park, where Ojeda first came to full command, because of its horribly proximate left-field wall. He told me that he had talked to Roger Craig over the winter (not about the split-finger, for Ojeda already possessed a peerless changeup, which he throws by choking the ball back in his hand), and Craig had said to him at one point, "You're a pitcher."

"That meant a lot to me," Bobby O. said. "If I hadn't learned some things over the years, I wouldn't be here. When I say I'm a pitcher, I'm thinking of guys like Mike Flanagan and Scott McGregor, of the Orioles. I always tried to watch how they worked, how they set up the hitters. Or Steve Carlton, if he was on TV. I remembered how they pitched in certain situations, how they changed from what they'd done before, because of what the game situation was-man on first, men on first and second, and the rest. To me, it doesn't matter if you strike out ten guys in a game. But if you've got the bases loaded and n.o.body out, and then you get your first strikeout and then a ground ball, how big was that strikeout? That's the kind of stat players notice. Tommy John sometimes gives up six, seven, eight hits in a game, but only one run, and that is the number that counts."

I told Ojeda that his victory over the Astros in the second game of the playoffs had been the sort of game I enjoy most-a first-cla.s.s ten-hitter-and he grinned. "That's right-it was," he said. "There are always days when every ground ball is going to find a hole. Days when you have to reach back a little. It all comes down to how many runs you give up. I look at the runs-not whether they're earned or not. You look in the paper, and if you've lost it'll say 'Larry Ojeda.'" ("Larry" for "loser," as in a line score or box score: "L: Ojeda.") "A run is a run, and you try to prevent those. There's so much strategy that goes into that. Each day is different. Each day, you're a different pitcher. Consistency is the thing, even if it's one of those scuffle days. When I've started, I've been very consistent, and that's something I'm proud of. I led the league in quality starts last year-you know, pitching into the seventh inning while giving up three runs or less. That means something to me."

He said that breaking into a new league, with unknown batters, hadn't been especially difficult for him. "I was as new to them as they were to me," he said. He doesn't believe in extended studies of the opposing team's batters before the game. "I see them up at bat-where they are in the box, how they stand-and it clicks into place: Oh, yeah-you're that one. It's the situation that matters more than the batter-there's always the situation. Maybe this particular batter doesn't like to pop people in-maybe he bats .300 but only has fifty runs batted in. Then, there are the guys who bat .260 unless there are men on base. Then they're much, much tougher up at the plate. Those are the guys I respect."

Like who, I asked, and Ojeda said, "I don't want to name them-I don't want to think about them-but I know who they are, and they know who they are. No, there really are some great, famous. .h.i.tters that I don't mind seeing up at bat in certain situations, because I know those are the situations they don't like."

Ojeda relishes being on a World Champion team. "I can't get over what we did last fall," he said seriously. "When you grow up in this sport, all you hear is people talking about what they're going to do if they ever get into a World Series. But that's just talk-we went out and did it. I like the chance to do things. It's 'This happened,' and then there's no more talk. Back when I was a kid, I had those dreams of playing in a World Series someday, but so what? Every player in this clubhouse and every player in all the twenty-five other camps right now had those same dreams. But those other guys don't know how they'd do, and we know. To get there and then win it-that's the thing. Because who knows if you'll ever have another shot? If I'd still been with the Red Sox-If you'd gotten there and then you didn't win it, if you'd made some bad mistakes like some of their guys did-major mistakes!-and then you began to think you'd never get that chance back, because you'd never be there again...I don't think I could stand that."

Two days after this, I found myself in the visiting-team dugout at Al Lang Stadium, in St. Pete, where, surrounded by Pirates, I watched a steady downpour of rain and waited for the game to be called, as, indeed, it shortly was. I didn't care, I decided. My trip was almost over and I was feeling a little baseballed out, and I was pretty sure there wasn't much more about pitching that I could pick up on this particular afternoon. Sitting on the bench just to my left was Syd Thrift, the Pittsburgh general manager, and after a few moments' conversation we simultaneously recalled that we had both been at Ypsilanti, Michigan, for a college doubleheader on an afternoon in May, 1976, and had watched Bob Owc.h.i.n.ko pitch the first game for Eastern Michigan University, and Bob Welch, then a college junior, pitch the second. I had gone there in the company of a scout named Ray Scarborough, whom I was preparing to write an article about, and Thrift, a friend of Scarborough's, was there scouting for the A's. "That was a day!" Thrift said now, for both Owc.h.i.n.ko and Welch, of course, had later matriculated as long-term major-league pitchers.

Thrift and I chatted about the Pirates a little, and then (he had been holding a baseball in his hands and turning it slowly this way and that) he said, "How many times do you think a ball rotates between the time it leaves a pitcher's hand and the time it crosses the plate? A fastball, let's say."

I was startled, for Thrift could not have known that I had been thinking about pitches and pitchers all month.

"I have no idea," I said. "A lot, I guess. Fifty rotations?"

"That's what everybody thinks," Thrift said with relish. "Everybody is way too high. It turns over only fourteen to sixteen times in that s.p.a.ce, which is amazing, because your eyes tell you something quite different. We had no notion until we did those measurements back at the academy in about 1970. We had cameras set up, and on a background screen we marked off the distance from the mound to the plate into four fifteen-foot segments, but even then we couldn't figure out those rotations until somebody came up with the idea of painting half the ball black