The Sheila Variations

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.

This long essay could be counted as a New Yorker profile of Bob Gibson, pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1959 to 1975. Gibson was, famously, a very prickly individual with the press, and damn near unhittable as a pitcher. He had 17 strikeouts in a single World Series game. I am sure there are more fabulous stats out there, but I am not a sabermetrics aficionado (I wish I was – my brother and sister could rattle off a bunch of stats automatically). But the 17 strikeouts certainly sticks in the mind as an almost otherworldly accomplishment.

Gibson did not like talking with the press, or with members of other teams. Or even with members of his own team. He expressed discomfort with All-Star Games because he had to suddenly be teammates with guys he would pitch to a week later, and he didn’t want to be friends with them, he didn’t want to get close to them. He was an intimidating monster on the mound. Everyone talks about how frightening he was, and how scary/unforgettable it was to face off with him. I love his gravity-defying follow through. It’s like an attack.

Continuing on with his obsession with pitchers, Angell wanted to know more about Bob Gibson, as a player and a man. Gibson did not have a cozy relationship with the press. He would answer questions bluntly, without the ingratiating quality that many expected (and there was probably a lot of unconscious racism in the reaction to Gibson’s arrogant demeanor as well). At one press conference after a game, Gibson was asked if he was “surprised” that the pitch he threw at one point ended up closing out the inning – or something like that – and Gibson’s reply was: “I am never surprised by anything I do.”

Why a bunch of baseball writers would be shocked, SHOCKED, by a pitcher who had an arrogant personality, I don’t know.

Listen, this isn’t Sesame Street. This is competitive sports.

Baseball is a team sport, but being a pitcher is a different sort of position. It can be seen as a big mystery to those of us who do not pitch at a major league level (which means the most of us), but that’s why Angell is obsessed with it, especially those who are masters at it, like Bob Gibson. Angell wanted to get to the heart of this very “distant” man. What made him tick? How did HE think about pitching? How did HE analyze what he did?

It’s an extremely lengthy essay (written in 1980, when Gibson was retired and living back in his hometown of Omaha, where he owned a restaurant). Angell goes into Gibson’s career, the impressive stats, the crazy talent. He talks to teammates, to get a line on who he was as a pitcher, what it was that made him HIM. (And that’s part of the excerpt today. I love it when athletes talk about each other.) And then Angell went out to Omaha and spent a week with Bob Gibson, following him around, talking, observing.

It’s a glorious essay. Here’s just a short excerpt.

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

Joe Torre, the manager of the New York Mets, who played with Gibson from 1969 to 1974, is also a close friend. When I called on him late in June, in the clubhouse at Shea Stadium, and told him I was about to go west to visit Gibson, he beckoned me over to a framed photograph on one wall of his office. The picture shows the three friends posing beside a batting cage in their Cardinal uniforms, Torre, a heavy-faced man with dark eyebrows and a falsely menacing appearance, and McCarver, who has a cheerful, snub-nosed Irish look to him, are both grinning at the photographer, with their arms around the shoulders of Bob Gibson, who is between them; it’s impossible to tell if Gibson is smiling, though, because his back is turned to the camera. “That says it all,” Torre said. “He alienated a lot of people – most of all the press, who didn’t always know what to make of him. He has this great confidence in himself: ‘Hey, I’m me. Take me or leave me.’ There was never any selling of Bob Gibson. He’s an admirable man. On the mound, he had very tangible intangibles. He had that hunger, that killer instinct. He threw at a lot of batters but not nearly as many as you’ve heard. But he’d never deny it if you asked him. I think this is great. There’s no other sport except boxing that has such a hard one-on-one confrontation as you get when a pitcher and a hitter go up against each other. Any edge you can get on the hitter, any doubt you can put in his mind, you use. And Bob Gibson would never give up that edge. He was your enemy out there. I try to teach this to our pitchers. The more coldness, the more mystery about you, the more chance you have of getting them out.

“I played against him before I played with him, and either way he never talked to you. Never. I was on some All-Star teams with him, and even then he didn’t talk to you. There was one in Minnesota, when I was catching him and we were ahead 6-5, I think, in the ninth. I’m catching, and Tony Oliva, a great hitter, is leading off, and Gibby goes strike one, strike two. Now I want a fastball up and in, I think to myself, and maybe I should go out there and tell him this – tell him, whatever he does, not to throw it down and in to Oliva. So I go out and tell him, and Gibby just gives me that look of his. Doesn’t say a word. I go back and squat down and give him the signal – fastball up and in – and he throws it down and in, and Oliva hits it for a double to left center. To this day, I think Gibby did it on purpose. He didn’t want to be told anything. So then there’s an infield out, and then he strikes out the last two batters, of course, and we win. In the shower, I say, ‘Nice pitching,’ and he still doesn’t say anything to me. Ask him about it.”

Torre lit a long cigar, and said, “Quite a man. He can seem distant and uncaring to some people, but he’s not the cold person he’s been described as. There are no areas between us where he’s withdrawn. Things go deep with him. I miss talking with him during the season, and it’s my fault, because I’m always so damn busy. He doesn’t call me, because he never wants to make himself a pain in the ass to a friend. But he is my friend. The other day, I got a photograph of himself he’d sent me, and he’d signed it ‘Love, Bob.’ How many other ballplayers are going to do that? How many other friends?”

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.”