Quote of the Day (Mark Kramer, on Baseball’s Tommy John)

“Tommy John is an American hero in his own right, esteemed by millions of baseball fans. He has entered a kind of timeless boyhood that seems especially appropriate to the clockless game of baseball. He's not the oldest pitcher pitching; he's not in the teary final months of a long career; he continues to be good and never was the best; he's neither outrageous nor electrifying during interviews. What he has done is endure and gather admiring fans through 20 seasons of play, while sharing with the public his religious convictions and dramatic off-field struggles—the surgical repair of his injured pitching arm, the near death of Travis. He is a hero for the age of the born again and the silent majority. Blessed with athletic talent and a picture-book family, driven by self-discipline and piety, given to forthrightness and modesty, abstemious among colleagues sometimes given to excess, he has become a national demonstration that around these parts, love of church, country and family is still what gets rewarded.”—American sportswriter Mark Kramer, “The Timeless Boyhood of an American Hero,” The New York Times, Sept. 11, 1983

I can count on the fingers of one hand my encounters with current or retired baseball players, but one was Tommy John. I saw him in early 1982 in a restaurant-bar in Fort Lee, NJ called Clams Casino—something of a hangout for alumni of my high school, as a friend worked as a bartender there.

It was still relatively early in the season, before John was traded from the New York Yankees, and he was at the restaurant a bit late in the evening following a game. Fans quickly gathered around the star pitcher, with many asking after his two-year-old son Travis, who the prior year had been in a coma for 19 days following an accident. 

John was gracious to everyone giving him their best, even though it was interrupting time I’m sure he would have preferred with his family.

I think many people saw the pitcher on multiple other occasions reacting similarly: with modesty, grace and gratitude for what he’d been given.

I flashed back to that evening over a week ago, when I read John’s farewell and thank-you to Yankee fans. He was unable to attend the annual Old Timers’ Game that weekend because he was in hospice care.

So it was no surprise that he died at age 83 this past weekend from bladder cancer, nor that tributes poured in for him from those he thrilled while on the mound or touched in personal encounters.

I can think of only one other Yankee, Lou Gehrig, whose name is tied so closely to modern medicine. The Hall of Fame first baseman gave his name to the neuromuscular disease that took his life; John, to a career-saving medical specialty that helped him—and later, countless other pitchers—return to the mound.

All credit to Dr. Dr. Frank Jobe, the Los Angeles Dodgers team surgeon who developed and performed the innovative technique in 1974. 

But John was not merely a passive recipient of another’s genius. He took the risk of this surgery, then put in the long, countless hours to make sure he could not only return to baseball, but with the same or greater mastery than he had before.

In this respect, John was a revolutionary figure in the evolution of the game. But I chose the quote that leads off this post to illustrate that paradoxically, he was also a throwback.

The two people mentioned in this article as the southpaw’s heroes, Billy Graham and Richard Nixon, illustrate his religious and political conservatism.

But John came of age before the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle or social media when athletes, no matter what their personal beliefs, did not go out of their way to proclaim them, and when fans could care less what their heroes thought so long as they helped the team win a championship.

As a starter who managed to excel even without a 100-MPH fastball, John was a throwback in another sense. His career is confounding to modern pitching coaches and sabermetricians who urge starters to throw as hard as they can for five or six innings before turning the ball over to a battery of relievers expected to hold the lead with similar hummers.

In contrast, John believed in going deep into games and, when possible, even completing them. He didn’t have to throw overwhelming heat; he could make his admittedly underwhelming fastball drop like a sinker, and his curve bit the inside or outside corner. More often than not, hitters swore at their ineffectuality in grounding out.

John’s death has left many of his baseball contemporaries arguing with greater urgency the case for his eventual enshrinement in Cooperstown. If that push is like others posthumously propelling Dick Allen and Ron Santo into major league baseball’s Valhalla, he might have a real chance this time.

(The source of the image accompanying this post, of Tommy John around 1981, is the New York Yankees via tradingcarddb.com.)

Quote of the Day (Robert Francis, on the Pitcher’s Art: ‘Eccentricity’)

“His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
 
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.”—American poet Robert Francis (1901-1987), “The Pitcher,” from The Orb Weaver (1961)
 
When I read these lines, the pitcher that came to mind for me was Greg Maddux (pictured), a remarkably consistent pitcher who thrived despite not throwing a terribly hard fastball (ranging from the high 80s to low 90s in MPH). 

As a youngster, this future Baseball Hall of Famer recalled in a 2007 interview, his coach “worked with me when I was 15 years old, and he taught me that movement was more important than velocity. He helped me make the ball move and sink as opposed to seeing how hard I could throw it.”
 
His 78-pitch complete game in July 1997 was just one example of how he worked, using pinpoint control and an ability to outthink batters to hamstring the Chicago Cubs lineup that day.
 
His intelligence particularly impressed his peers on the mound, according to Ed Graney’s July 2007 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “No one thought the game better than Maddux. No one understood how to take advantage of its perplexing components more than he did.”

Quote of the Day (George Plimpton, on One of His Many Embarrassing Moments Pitching to All-Stars)

“In baseball parlance they speak of a pitch ‘getting away’ from the pitcher. As I came through the delivery of my curve, I failed to snap my wrist sufficiently and my hook got away from me in majestic style—sailing far over both [batter Frank] Robinson and [catcher Elston] Howard's heads to the wire screen behind home plate. If it had hit a foot or so higher, the ball would have caught the netting of the foul screen and run up it to the press boxes. It was such an extraordinarily wild pitch that I felt I had to make some comment; what I'd done was too undignified to pass unnoticed, and so once again I hurried off the mound calling out, ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ Howard and Robinson gazed out at me, both startled, I think, perhaps even awed by the strange trajectory of my pitch, which was wild enough to suggest that I had suddenly decided to throw the ball to someone in the stands. The embarrassment was intense.”— American “participatory journalist,” literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman George Plimpton (1927-2003), Out of My League: The Classic Account of an Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball (1961)

Even if a sweep occurs during the upcoming World Series, the Fall Classic is scheduled to end in the first week of November. Over 60 years ago, when players were not as wealthy as today’s millionaires, they might engage in barnstorming tours abroad—or play closer to home in an exhibition game.

It was in one such example of the latter—a post-Series game at Yankee Stadium of all-stars fronted by Mickey Mantle (for the American League) and Willie Mays (for the National League)—that George Plimpton latched onto one of the great sports journalism stints. While the team with the most total bases would split $1,000 (chump-change now, but not in those pre-free-agent days), Plimpton would pitch a first “unofficial” inning to baseball’s luminaries.

As a tween, I watched Plimpton! Shoot-Out at Rio Lobo, a TV one-hour documentary demonstrating his brand of “participatory journalism”—in this case, playing a gunman in the 1970 John Wayne western Rio Lobo.

The Duke’s repeated on-air insult of the amateur actor—“Pimpleton”—was still probably nowhere near as mortifying as what the author-editor encountered when he took the mound at The House That Ruth Built. Out of such acute embarrassment came Out of My League, as hilarious as it was insightful.

Out of a simple set of rules for his inning—no umpire, no walks—Plimpton’s agony was constructed. Amazingly, he retired two batters before the others learned to wait him out and find a pitch they could whack.

As he watched his pitches fly in every direction past catcher Elston Howard (“flung with abandon and propelled by a violent mixture of panic and pent-up anxiety let loose”) when they weren’t sent screaming into the outfield by hitters, the 31-year-old Plimpton undoubtedly felt this was more audacious and foolish than editing The Paris Review.

After what he endured at the hands of the NL All-Stars, Plimpton didn’t have the strength to continue against their AL counterparts. At his typewriter, however, he was more philosophical: “I suffered a steady stream of humiliations … what happened to me is bound to happen when an amateur is thrown into the company of professional athletes. It is inevitable.”

That didn't stop Plimpton from trying his hand at other wild stunts as he pursued "participating journalism": playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions and goalie for the Boston Bruins, boxing against light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, performing with the New York Philharmonic, and photographing Playboy models.  

Even while chuckling at Plimpton’s mound misadventures, though, I couldn’t help but think that he had conveyed something that the fan in the stands or at home can barely appreciate: how hard it is to make a baseball do your bidding.

In certain weather conditions, even seasoned professionals find it difficult just to get an adequate grip on the ball. In a Sports Illustrated interview last year, Mets slugger Pete Alonso was even willing to give pitchers a pass on sticky substances for that reason: “I don't want 99 mph slipping out of someone's hand because they didn't have enough feel for it."

Pitchers who experience a loss of control may suffer the loss of their roster spot, their career—or, in its way, a Plimpton-style humiliation on the pitcher’s rubber, this time listening to thousands of booing fans.

Since last year, for instance, Aroldis Chapman has gone from closer for the Bronx Bombers to bullpen odd-man out to being left off the postseason roster—largely because, for whatever reason, he could not pitch a baseball with his onetime feared velocity, nor compensate with pinpoint location.

In the late 1990s, I got to see Plimpton at a lecture and book-signing event for his oral biography of Truman Capote, at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. I was glad to see that he was as wry in his remarks about the literary life as he was 3½ decades before about facing baseball’s greatest hitters.

(The photo of George Plimpton accompanying this post was taken on Dec. 12, 1977 by Bernard Gotfryd.)

This Day in Baseball History (Don Drysdale, Dodger Heat Hurler, Born)

July 23, 1936—Don Drysdale, a pitcher who used a sidearm delivery, blazing football and brushback pitch to command the strike zone and earn a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame, was born in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, Calif.

It took me a while to find a photo that caught the mound essence of this legendarily intimidating righthander for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. Ninety-five pictures out of a hundred showed a handsome man with a genial smile, a guy that Hollywood featured in a Leave It to Beaver episode (the star chats with The Beav long distance) or as a guest on the TV western The Lawman.

The photo accompanying this post comes closer to a starter who described his own personality this way: "I hate all hitters. I start a game mad and I stay that way until it's over."

Even that quote might not be sufficient. Drysdale could look so mad, you’d think he suspected you of robbing the food from his family’s table.

Drysdale might put a batter on his rear end in retaliation for an opposing pitcher hitting his teammate. He might send a hitter to the ground for stepping in and out of the batter’s box, as he did with the Phillies’ Wes Covington. Or he might engage in a form of psychological testing, as he explained in retirement in a 1979 interview with Dave Anderson of The New York Times: “The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid, and if he is timid, he has to remind the hitter he's timid."

Yet Drysdale could also render great players nervous, such as Mickey Mantle. "I hated to bat against Drysdale,” the Yankee centerfielder admitted. “After he hit you he'd come around, look at the bruise on your arm and say, 'Do you want me to sign it?'"

Even without the brushback pitch, Drysdale possessed enormous skills or physical assets that led many to predict success for him early on. There was his 6-ft.-5-in. frame, for instance, which gave batters less time to react to his pitches; his sidearm motion, “all spikes, elbows and fingernails,” according to a 1962 Sports Illustrated profile, which also termed it “an enfilading action against plate-crowding right-handers”; and a fastball that he threw consistently in the mid-90s.

Yet, for a while, the pitcher who became famous for playing with hitters’ fears couldn’t conquer his own. Even after helping the Dodgers win their first World Series in Los Angeles in 1959, Drysdale would rage against himself over a mistake, then lose his concentration and, perhaps, the game. Only with the 1962 season, when he notched a 25‐9 record and a Cy Young Award, did he finally break through and really fulfill his vast promise.

With lefthander Sandy Koufax, Drysdale formed one of the great starting pitching tandems in history. They also acted as a team against Dodger management, with each holding out for a $500,000 three-year contract. The fact that Dodgers Vice President Buzzy Bavasi finally came to terms with them, at a time when management held the upper hand in baseball, derived from their crucial leadership in the prior four years, when the Dodgers won two World Series championships.

Drysdale was forced to retire midway through 1969 because of a rotary cuff injury. (“A torn rotator cuff,” he noted at the time, “is a cancer for a pitcher and if a pitcher gets a badly torn one, he has to face the facts, it's all over, baby.") Only the season before, he had achieved another extraordinary mark: 58 straight scoreless innings (including six straight shutouts), a record that would not be bested until another Dodger pitcher, Orel Hershiser, came along 20 years later.

After retiring, Drysdale became a broadcaster for the White Sox, Rangers, Expos, Angels and Dodgers. While other pitchers had exceeded his 209 career victories, few were his equal at his zenith. It was recognition of that fact that led to his eventual induction into Cooperstown in 1984. Nine years later, his second wife, Ann Meyers, was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame, making them the first couple to achieve induction into the Hall of Fame from any of the four major American sports: football, hockey, basketball and baseball.

The couple did not have long to enjoy this dual honor. Less than two months after Ann’s induction, Drysdale died of a heart attack in Montreal at age 56. He was remembered as a fearsome competitor within the lines and an easygoing, quotable raconteur outside them.

Flashback, September 1968: Gibson Gem Caps Career Year on Mound

St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson capped a career year for himself—and major-league pitchers in general—by blanking the Houston Astros 1-0, at Busch Stadium on September 27, 1968—his 13^th shutout of the season, the first time a National Leaguer had recorded that many since 1916.

This same season, Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers set a consecutive-innings scoreless streak record (surpassed by Orel Hersheiser 20 years later); Denny McLain became the last 30-game winner to date; and Juan Marichal, in a relatively forgotten performance, won 26 games while pitching 328 innings. But it was Gibson’s statistical and psychological dominance that made 1968 “the Year of the Pitcher.” He not only was a unanimous winner of the NL Cy Young Award, but also won the Most Valuable Player award.

For an idea of the great right-hander at this personal peak, you can start with this excerpt from a 1980 Roger Angell profile, “Distance,” in The New Yorker:

“Everything about him looked mean and loose—arms, elbows, shoulders, even his legs—as, with a quick little shrug, he launched into his delivery. When there was no one on base, he had an old-fashioned full crank-up, with the right foot turning in mid-motion to slip into its slot in front of the mound and his long arms coming together over his head before his backward lean, which was deep enough to require him to peer over his left shoulder at his catcher while his upraised left leg crooked and kicked. The ensuing sustained forward drive was made up of a medium-sized stride of that leg and a blurrily fast, sling-like motion of the right arm, which came over at about three-quarters height and then snapped down and (with the fastball and slider) across his left knee.”

The picture accompanying this post completes the motion. The force of the follow-through has not only taken Gibson off his feet, but well toward third base—seemingly way out of position to field a bunt. But that proved increasingly unlikely, not only because the ball, like so many others he hurled around this time, is at the high end of the strike zone and blindingly fast, but because the pitcher was a nine-time Gold Glove Award winner, not to mention a superb athlete who had been a Harlem Globetrotter before he settled on baseball as his profession.

This is what the 32-year-old pitcher looked like on the mound. What it leaves out is the view from the plate, where one batter after another meekly waved his bat at pitches. In fact, it might be said that while everyone else in the park was playing baseball, Gibson excelled at Fear Factor.

There was, for instance, his competitive streak—highly pronounced in any major leaguer, utterly ineradicable in him. "I've played a couple of hundred games of tic-tac-toe with my little daughter and she hasn't beaten me yet,” Gibson told Angell. “I've always had to win. I've got to win." Seventeen years after hanging up his spikes, Gibson sent a brushback pitch against Reggie Jackson in an Old-Timers Game. It didn't escape anyone's notice that at the same event the year before, Mr. October had hit a home run off him. Even now, the proud old Cardinal couldn't bear to be shown up.

That desire also fed on fierce pride (even teammates didn’t offer encouragement on the mound, lest he scare them away), resentment over racism still experienced by most black athletes in the civil-rights era, and a Darwinian instinct for survival of the fittest. If you were seeking a competitive edge against Gibson by crowding the plate, you could expect a fastball boring in you. Who did you think you were? He owned the corners of the plate.

If you celebrated after a homer, the outcome would be even more dangerous. Today, if they had the unenviable task of facing Gibson, instead of watching their handiwork sail over the fence, David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez would be on their rear ends—and thankful that was the only thing to happen to them. "When I knocked a guy down, there was no second part to the story," Gibson remembered.

Remember the score of this particular victory: 1-0. Many pitchers today would want to sue for such lack of run support. But a single run was often all Gibson needed to get the job done, because in 24 of his 34 starts, he allowed zero runs or only one run. His earned run average for 1968—1.12, the second-lowest ever in the National League--became one of the best-remembered baseball stats of the 20^th century. Over 99 innings in June and July, he allowed only two runs. The Cardinals weren’t a hard-hitting team, but each time he took the mound he gave them another shot of repeating as NL champs.

In addition, Gibson was about to extend his mastery into October. In his first start in the World Series, he made the Detroit Tigers look very foolish as he recorded 17 strikeouts.     

Gibson was truly King of the Mound in 1968, and in the off-season the lords of baseball monkeyed with the rules to ensure that neither he nor any other pitcher would reign with such dominance again, lowering the pitching mound from 15 to 10 inches.   

There is yet another sense in which we’ll never see his like again: Gibson set the mood and the pace for games that year. He never dawdled or agonized on the mound, demanding balls back immediately from catchers—and, partly because, after several years, he had learned to throw the curve almost as well as his fastball and slider, he wasn’t about to beat himself with walks, either. The result: fans and players could enjoy a great afternoon game and be done by 3:30, in plenty of time for other activities.

In recent years, Gibson seethed when he would be held up as an exemplar of winning through intimidation for modern pitchers. (And well he might: in the case of Roger Clemens and who knows how many others, their headhunting tendencies derived at least partly from the aggression fueled by performance-enhancing drugs, not from following any markers laid down by a classic pitcher.)

They missed the larger point: Gibson entered Cooperstown in 1981 because he refused to be conquered by adversity. As a ghetto child whose father died before he was born, he was diagnosed with a heart murmur. His career was repeatedly threatened: by a fractured leg (1962), severely damaged elbow (1966), broken other leg (1967). In the deciding game of the 1964 World Series, he was running on fumes in the last couple of innings against the New York Yankees, but he gutted out the complete-game victory. In explaining why he did not resort to a reliever—a move today’s managers would have made without a second’s thought—manager Johnny Keane gave one of the best tributes ever made to a champion: “I had a commitment to his heart.”

Flashback, September 1916: Mathewson and Brown, in a Twilight of Mound Gods

The image of Ted Williams clubbing a home run in his final at-bat remains powerful just because it is so different from the way great players normally leave the diamond. Far more typical was the 10-8 game won by the Cincinnati Reds on September 4, 1916, against the Chicago Cubs. Fans hoping for the kind of pitchers’ duels fought the decade before by the starters, the Reds’ Christy Mathewson (pictured here) and the Cubs’ Mordecai “Three-Finger" Brown, were gravely disappointed.

They would have felt far worse had they known that this would be the last time either future Hall of Famer pitched in the major leagues. It wasn’t simply that Mathewson and Brown had once pitched with skill, but with determination and heart. At a time when many baseball players were not just rough around the edges, but even borderline disreputable, these pitchers proved that character counted for something, too.

There’s a sterling post about Mathewson by Callum Hughson on the blog Mop-Up Duty. I particularly like the quote that begins the profile: “Christy Mathewson talks like a Harvard graduate, looks like an actor, acts like a businessman and impresses you as an all-around gentleman.”

It’s possible that no pitcher has dominated his league to such an extent for such a long stretch as Mathewson during his glory years with the New York Giants. Thirteen seasons of at least 20 victories each would leave him with a total of 373 wins for his entire career. Particularly noteworthy was his remarkable control, demonstrated by a ratio of three strikeouts to every walk.

“Matty” may have had his best year in 2008, when he achieved the pitcher’s equivalent of the Triple Crown, leading the National League in wins (37), strikeouts (259) and earned run average (1.43).

We come now to one of the great paradoxes of baseball: how an articulate player deemed the embodiment of the Frank Merriwell ideal of the clean-cut, handsome, noble sportsman could bond with his fiery manager, John McGraw. One quality united the two more than any other, I think: a competitive streak a mile wide. You can see it, along with his extraordinary intelligence, in an off-the-field anecdote related by Hughson: I.e., playing chess at the Pittsburgh Athletic Club against 12 opponents simultaneously--and beating them all!

A number of sources (Hughson included) points to Mathewson’s six-foot-plus frame as the reason for his nickname, “Big Six.“ I prefer an alternate explanation: that, like New York’s famous “Big Six” fire-engine company, Mathewson could end any emergency quickly.

Mathewson’s specialty was his “fadeaway,” what later generations would call a screwball. He saved it largely for tough spots, chiefly because of the wrenching effect its motion left on his arm.
The money pitch of Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown (the middle name an indicator of the year of his birth) was also painful to throw: a curveball that Ty Cobb judged “the most devastating” he ever faced. Brown, however, would grit his teeth and bear the pain to his fingers: after losing two of them in a childhood accident on the family farm, after enduring a youth spent laboring in the mines, he could withstand anything.

“Three-Finger” was the inevitable nickname given to Brown, but given his importance to the Cubs, he might more justifiably have been called “The Neutralizer.” If 2008 was Matty’s best season, so it was Brown’s, as he compiled a 27-9 record. Most amazingly, Brown had Matty’s number, winning six straight games at one point against him. And, in the game that broke Giant fans’ hearts, playing before a Polo Grounds crowd so vociferous that he and his teammates needed a police escort, he shut down Matty and the New Yorkers by getting the victory on the last game of the season.

By 1916, age had taken its toll on the two. Brown had been traded by the Cubs following an injury-plagued 1912 season, then had bounced around among the Reds and the upstart Federal League’s Chicago Whales and St. Louis Federals before returning to the Cubs to finish out the string. After his own subpar 1915 season, Matty was traded to the Reds and became their manager midway through the following year.

As manager, Mathewson inserted himself into only one game: the one against Brown, called by Lee Allen in The Cincinnati Reds “probably the most sentimental hurling duel every staged." The two starters gutted it out in going the distance, but in the modern era of middle relievers and closers, they surely would not have figured in the final score.

But Brown would beat Mathewson in a more important contest: the amount of years left alive. Mathewson’s service in World War I came to a horrifying end when he was exposed to poison gas during a training exercise in France. He died in 1925.

Brown spent much of the last two decades of his life operating a gas station—rather a different fate from the financial nirvana that today’s most mundane hurlers earn--and was dead a year by the time Cooperstown finally got around to enshrining him in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But he didn't need that kind of recognition. To his teammates, he was a wonder of guile and guts.