The Books: Baseball: A Literary Anthology; “Pitchers and Catchers,” by Moe Berg

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Baseball: A Literary Anthology

I was born into being a baseball fan. It was a requirement for being an O’Malley. (More specifically, it was Red Sox Nation that was the requirement). I watched the games, understood the rules, could participate in the event. But when I realized – maybe through listening to my Dad and my Uncles talk – that the players were not just beautiful thoroughbreds in white uniforms who could do these amazing feats – that instead, they all had a roster in their mind, of every player on every OTHER team, and all of that information was at their fingertips, so that they could then make choices about what to throw in a clutch situation… it blew my mind. It was the strategy element of it that was so revelatory to me, because as an observer (and I’m talking as a 7, 8 year old kid), I couldn’t SEE the strategy – in the same way that you can SEE it in football. What baseball looked like to me was … a neatly set-up game, everyone in their place, and then what happens after that is sheer luck. Everyone can throw, hit, run. But beyond that … who the hell KNOWS what could happen out there. It blew my MIND when I heard my Dad talking about pitchers and stuff like, “Well, he can’t throw low and on the inside to HIM …” If you could imagine a 7-year-old girl doing a double-take, eyes wide, that would be me. “Wait … why can’t he throw low and on the inside?” “Because he knows that so-and-so has a 5 to 1 chance of hitting a home run if it’s low and inside … and because the last time they faced each other, so and so did blah blah blah in the same situation …” You know, that kind of monologue. As a child, those casual comments from my Dad, rattled off at me as though I would know what he was talking about, as though I already understood that aspect of baseball, changed the entire game for me. It LOOKED different after that. Its mysteries had cracked open for me. It became even MORE beautiful and impressive. Those guys out there weren’t just thoroughbred athletes who could do miraculous things. They were highly calibrated computer nerds, the computer being all the stats in their head. I understood that the catcher made signs to the pitcher. But beyond that, I hadn’t really considered the miracle of what that really meant. I’m actually still not over the miracle of the pitcher, and I’ve been watching baseball my whole life. To be able to whip a ball into that tiny space, to be able to place it carefully – low inside, right, left – depending on who’s at bat, who’s on base, the history of the batter, etc. etc. … all of this seemed so otherworldly in expertise … so beyond the level of normal human intelligence and skill … well, it still blows me away.

The following essay, “Pitchers and Catchers,” by Moe Berg, is pretty famous. In 1941 the editor of the Atlantic Monthly reached out to Moe Berg (who was then a coach for the Red Sox, his playing career over) and asked him to write an essay about baseball. Moe Berg had studied modern languages in undergrad at Princeton, and then attended Columbia Law school before going off to play professional baseball. Because yeah, that’s normal.

Guy was an egghead. He was known as a brainiac. Most ballplayers are tremendous brainiacs about the game and their own position, but Moe Berg was a BRAINIAC brainiac.
He spoke many languages, including ancient obsolete ones like Latin and ancient Greek. His teammates razzed him about his smarts. He was an okay player, but his understanding of baseball was world-class, as you can see in the essay excerpted below. (Many players who have that world-class understanding can’t put it into words.) Moe Berg also worked for the OSS (which would eventually become the CIA) traveling to Yugoslavia as a spy, collecting information for the U.S. government. This experience eventually led to a 1976 book about Moe Berg with a title that is one for the history books of Awesome:

Moe Berg’s essay “Pitchers and Catchers” goes into the psychological and physical qualities that go into the guys who play those positions. And since it’s written by Moe Berg it contains sentences such as: “The catcher is the Cerberus of baseball.” God, I love it. The section on “catchers” is superb but the following excerpt is from the pitchers section. Here, he talks about adaptability being “the hallmark” of any big-league hitter – and how that adaptability must translate into the pitcher’s role. It’s a dance between the two. Berg uses a critical moment/choice in the stellar career of pitcher Lefty Grove as an example of what he is talking about.

Here’s the excerpt.

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. “Pitchers and Catchers,” by Moe Berg

The game is carried back and forth between the pitcher and the hitter. The hitter notices what and where the pitchers are throwing. If the pitcher is getting him out consistently, for example, on a curve outside, the hitter changes his mode of attack. Adaptability is the hallmark of the big-league hitter. Joe Cronin, playing manager of the Red Sox, has changed in his brilliant career from a fast-ball, left-field pull hitter to a curve-ball and a right-field hitter, to and fro through the whole cycle and back again, according to where the pitchers are throwing. He has no apparent weakness, hits to all fields, and is one of the greatest ‘clutch’ hitters in the game. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Like Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove was a fast-ball pitcher, and the hitters knew it. The hitters looked for this pitch; Lefty did not try to fool them by throwing anything else, but most of them were fooled, not by the type of pitch, but by his terrific speed. With two strikes on the hitter, Lefty did throw his curve at times, and that, too, led almost invariably to a strike-out. In 1935, Lefty had recovered from his first serious sore arm of the year before. Wear and tear, and the grind of many seasons, had taken their toll. Now he had changed his tactics, and was pitching curves and fast balls, one or the other. His control was practically perfect. On a day in that year in Washington, Heinie Manush, a great hitter, was at bat with two men on the bases. The game was at stake; the count was three balls and two strikes. Heinie stood there, confident, looking for Lefty’s fast ball. ‘Well,’ thought Heinie, ‘it might be a curve.’ Lefty was throwing the curve more and more now, but the chances with the count of three and two were that Lefty would throw his fast ball with everything he had on it. Fast or curve – he couldn’t throw anything else; he had nothing else to throw. Heinie broke his back striking out on the next pitch, the first fork ball Grove ever threw. For over a year, on the side lines, in the bullpen, between pitching starts, Lefty had practiced and perfected this pitch before he threw it, and he waited for a crucial spot to use it. Lefty had realized his limitations. The hitters were getting to his fast and curve balls more than they used to. He wanted to add to his pitching equipment; he felt he had to. Heinie Manush anticipated, looked for, guessed a fast ball, possibly a curve, but Lefty fooled him with his new pitch, a fork ball.

Here was the perfect setup for out-guessing a hitter. Lefty Grove’s development of a third pitch, the fork ball, is the greatest example in our time of complete, successful change in technique by one pitcher. When a speed-ball pitcher loses his fast one, he has to compensate for such loss by adding to his pitching equipment. Lefty both perfected his control and added a fork ball. Carl Hubbell’s screw ball, practically unhittable at first, made his fast ball and curve effective. Lefty Gomez, reaching that point in his career where he had to add to his fast and curve ball, developed and threw his first knuckle ball this year. Grove, Gomez, and Hubbell, three outstanding left-handers, – Grove and Gomez adding a fork ball and a knuckle ball respectively to their fast and curve balls when their speed was waning, Hubbell developing a screw ball early in his career to make it his best pitch and to become one of the game’s foremost southpaws, – so you have the build-up of great pitchers.

At first, the superspeed of Grove obviated the necessity of pitching brains. But, when his speed began to fade, Lefty turned to his head. With his almost perfect control and the addition of his fork ball, Lefty now fools the hitter with his cunning. With Montaigne, we conceive of Socrates in place of Alexander, of brain for brawn, wit for whip. And this brings us to a fascinating part of the pitcher-hitter dynamic. Does a hitter guess? Does a pitcher try to outguess him? When the pitching process is no longer mechanical, how much of it is psychological? When the speed of a Johnson or a Grove is fading or gone, can the pitcher outguess the hitter?