The Books: Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, ‘On the Ball,’ by Roger Angell

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: Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, by Roger Angell.

Roger Angell is obsessed with pitching. Every baseball fan is obsessed with pitching. It seems such an impossible profession. Like, literally impossible. Take a small object, hurl it across the intervening space, and keep it inside the tiny strike zone. But within that strike zone there’s a hell of a lot of space. The pitcher dominates that space, owns that strike zone. A good pitcher knows every hitter on every team, and knows his weaknesses, his holes, his propensities. Does he always swing at the first pitch? Is he unable to get any part of the ball if it’s down and outside? Is he leftie? A pitcher has to be a master psychologist. He has to have variety in his pitches. (Or there are the anomalies, like Mariano Rivera, who basically threw one pitch. One extremely un-hittable pitch. Amazing.) There is the connection with the catcher, who calls the game (and Angell goes into the catchers in another essay in the collection), but it is the pitcher, and his control of the moment, that is paramount. You gotta get the job done. It’s a highly theoretical position, steeped in hypotheticals and alternate universe outcomes, all happening at the same moment. But at the end of the day, that pitch needs to go where you want it to go.

Sandy Koufax

I’ve been to major league games where two pitchers control the game. Those are the most boring games. Those are the games where nothing seems to happen – although EVERYTHING is happening. The games where no one can get on base. The pitchers grind the game to a halt. It’s a standoff. A white hat and a black hat meeting in some dusty corral, guns drawn. There’s a thrilling quality to that nothing-ness, because you realize that that solitary figure up on the mound is so dominant that no one can get a piece of anything that he throws. The best they can hope for is a foul ball.

I’m obsessed with pitchers, too, as I am obsessed with anyone who thrives in such a difficult job. Whose job is so mysterious, and so difficult for mere mortals, that it takes on an almost otherworldly aspect. There are so many different elements to the position, too.

Tim Wakefield

Roger Angell found, in his years interviewing ballplayers, that pitchers tended to be extremely chatty about their profession, they liked to talk about it, they were very articulate about how they thought about what they did. (In his experience, hitters were the opposite, and he counted only a few who could articulate how they did what they did, and what hitting a ball was all about. Ted Williams wrote a book about it, for example. I read somewhere that Ted Williams said that when a fast ball was coming down the pike at him, he saw it in slow motion. Obviously, that can’t literally be true, but for him, it WAS true. People have crazy gifts of perception sometimes, especially those with world-class hand-eye coordination. We can learn from such folks!) But anyway, Roger loved to drill pitchers about what they thought about up there, how they decided what pitch to throw, and for the most part, pitchers were awesomely forthcoming. (As I’ve mentioned before, his profile on struggling Pirates pitcher Steve Blass is a masterpiece.)

In “On the Ball,” published in the summer of 1976, Roger Angell thinks about the baseball itself, how small it is, how eloquent it is (it fits perfectly in your hand: it tells you what to do with it), and how amazing it is that these guys, these brilliant pitchers, can do what they do with that ball. He thinks about all of the different kinds of pitches, the weirdo mysterious devastatingly effective knuckleball (see above photo), the slider, the fast ball … he goes a bit into the history of these pitches, the guys who mastered them.

Here is an excerpt about the fastball and, concurrently, about hitting hitters with it on occasion. A warning. Get back, you.

Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, ‘On the Ball’, by Roger Angell

The smiling pitcher begins not only with the advantage of holding his fate in his own hands, or hand, but with the knowledge that every advantage of physics and psychology seems to be on his side. A great number of surprising and unpleasant things can be done to the ball as it is delivered from the grasp of a two-hundred-pound optimist, and the first of these is simply to transform it into a projectile. Most pitchers seem hesitant to say so, but if you press them a little they will admit that the prime ingredient in their intense personal struggle with the batter is probably fear. A few pitchers in the majors have thrived without a real fastball – junk men like Eddie Lopat and Mike Cuellar, superior control artists like Bobby Shantz and Randy Jones, knuckleballers like Hoyt Wilhelm and Charlie Hough – but almost everyone else has had to hump up and throw at least an occasional no-nonsense hard one, which crosses the plate at eighty-fie miles per hour or better, and thus causes the batter to – well, to think a little. The fastball sets up all the other pitches in the hurler’s repertoire – the curve, the slider, the sinker, and so on – but its other purpose is to intimidate. Great fastballers like Bob Gibson, Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax, and Nolan Ryan have always run up high strikeout figures because their money pitch was almost untouchable, but their deeper measures of success – twenty-victory seasons and low earned-run average – were due to the fact that none of the hitter they faced, not even the best of them, was immune to the thought of what a 90-mph missile could do to a man if it struck him. They had been ever so slightly distracted, and distraction is bad for hitting. The intention of the pitcher has almost nothing to do with this; very few pitchers are delivered with intent to maim. The bad dream, however, will not go away. Walter Johnson, the greatest fireballer of them all, had almost absolute control, but he is said to have worried constantly about what might happen if one of his pitches got away from him. Good hitters know all this and resolutely don’t think about it (a good hitter is a man who can keep his back foot firmly planted in the box even while the rest of him is pulling back or bailing out on an inside fastball), but even these icy customers are less settled in their minds than they would like to be, just because the man out there on the mound is hiding that cannon behind his hip. Hitters, of course, do not call this fear. They call it “respect.”