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
This is what I’m talking about! The minutia of technique! “The Arms Talks” is yet another of Roger Angell’s massive essays about one of his favorite topics: baseball pitchers. To re-cap (and I am sure there are more, these are just the essays in the collections I own):
“Distance”, about Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson.
“On the Ball”, about pitching, in general
“Gone for Good”, a haunting profile of Pirates pitcher Steve Blass who one day, seemingly overnight, forgot how to pitch.
“The Web of the Game”, not just about pitching, but includes a portrait of legendary pitcher Smoky Joe Wood
Angell couldn’t get enough. And when pitchers talk … it’s almost like they deepen the mystery of what they do. A really great pitcher knows why he does everything that he does (what pitch to choose and when), but it’s still so above and beyond what any mere mortal could even attempt … that they sound like superheroes when they talk. (This isn’t about a pitcher, but I am reminded of Ted Williams’ almost casual comment that he saw fastballs coming at him in slow-motion. His depth perception and hand-eye stuff was on some supernatural level, and so a 95 mph fastball appeared slow to him so he was able to hit it. You know, some things cannot be adequately explained.) Pitchers are the same way. I love listening to pitchers talk too, about how they do what they do, and so the pitcher essays from Angell are a delight. Because he talks to as many pitchers as he can find. They are perhaps not as chatty as catchers (Angell found that catchers, used to being underestimated or taken for granted, were DYING to talk to him about how they do what they do), and there’s a lonely isolation to the pitcher position that is not shared by other fielders. A pitcher is a unique and solitary figure.
Written in 1986, Mets-fan Roger Angell was still living on the high of the 1986 World Series, and his way of coping with that (and the inevitable let-down) by obsessing on the split-finger fastball, and what it had done to the game. Or, that’s part of it. He writes about the dominance of pitchers, the Golden Age of pitchers, which was so extreme that the batters stopped being able to hit anything at all, and the League made the revolutionary decision to lower the pitcher’s mound a little bit, even the playing field. A controversial decision to this day.
The splitter has been around from the start but it gained popularity in the 70s and 80s. Roger Craig (one of these fine young gentlemen pictured below) used it, and was also a pitching coach, so he passed on his knowledge and know-how. Angell speaks with Craig quite a bit for the essay. He’s quoted extensively.
The pitch is called a fastball but it’s not necessarily fast and that’s the most confusing thing about it. It’s almost like a chameleon, or like that moment in Master and Commander when they trick the ship up to look like a ruined burnt-out abandoned ship, in order to camouflage the fact that they were still all on board. In other words, the split-finger fastball looks exactly like a fastball to the batter, when actually it is not at all, and at the last second, it drops down to a lower level, making it impossible to get a piece of. You’re swinging at empty air. It masks its true nature, all the way down the line.
I’m with Angell: I love this shit.
So he sets out to figure out more about the split-finger ball, seen at the time as a “gimmick,” aa trend, a phase, the “pitch of the 80s.” But he wanted to learn more about it. That’s the section I’ll excerpt today.
Excerpt from Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader
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 strangle, and when he did, it became what he had needed all along – a finishing pitch, to make him a finished pitchers. (He was 15-6, with a 2.81 E.R.A., 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 balls. 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 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. Nobody can afford not to swing at that pitch – unless he’s Keith Hernandez. Umpires don’t call third strikes on Keith.”
Haha, nobody calls a 3rd strike on Keith Hernandez. Roger Craig story – He’s a jugeared rookie with Brooklyn in the ’50s, and his wife is first class knockout gorgeous. Don Newcombe says to the rook, ‘How’d an ugly guy like you get such a good looking wife?’ or words not quite as G-rated to that effect.
Ha!!
Have you seen Moneyball? In the first scene with all the scouts, talking about what players they like – one of them says he’s not sure such-and-such player is good, because his wife is unattractive. He may call her a dog, I can’t remember. One of the other scouts says, “What the hell does that matter” and the scout says, “Shows a lack of confidence.”
Obviously, this is no way to judge a ball player – who the hell cares – and that was basically the point of the scene – and emblematic of the attitudes Billy Beane was fighting – but still, I thought it was pretty funny.
Loved the Keith Hernandez line, too.
Money Ball was the best. Am rereading Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al now, in my humble the best baseball novel ever wroten (excuse my not so subtle homage to the narrative voice thereof)
I haven’t read that book! I probably should then, yes?
Re-read Moneyball just this past year, for the hell of it. Love it. It satisfies the giant nerd in me.
You Know Me Al is a comic gem treat for lovers of the first quarter of century number twenty. Narrator is a major league pitcher with the White Sox, pre-Black Sox scandal by 4 or 5 years. You’ll recognize several of his teammates’ names from said scandal and learn how to pitch to Cobb.
Oh, it sounds fabulous! I love Ring Lardner’s shorter pieces (the ones I’ve read anyway) – will definitely check it out. Thank you!
It may be hard for some to believe since we’ve been on top of the world for most of this decade, but it’s impossible to overestimate what Roger Craig meant to the San Francisco Giants. We had pretty much sucked for my entire viewing life as a fan, and all of a sudden this big guy arrives with his pitching wizardry and his infectiously positive “Humm Baby” attitude, and the next thing you know we’re contending and then, in 1989, in the World Series. Nothing will ever top winning 3 Series in 5 years, but every Giants fan will always have a spot in their heart for Roger Craig.
Jeff – amazing! He helped turn it all around! What a guy.
Couple of thoughts… Funny that even back in 86 young Ron Darling was both erudite and also already busting on Hernandez… All these years later they share the booth for Mets TV games and they’ve made many bad baseball seasons enjoyable with their interaction…at some point I believe in the mid to late 90’s teams started advising pitchers to stay away from the splitter because they felt it was the leading cause of the rise of elbow injuries- and it has pretty much disappeared from the game-then this summer over from Japan comes Mr. Tanaka to the Yankees and he has a wipeout splitter … Everyone was saying the splitter was going to make a comeback but alas he goes and injures his elbow doesn’t he?