A Little More Baseball

Probably the best pitch in baseball is a well-located fastball, so some say.  Several pitchers have said without it, their other pitches couldn’t be effective. The interesting thing about the fastball are the variations it has on its trajectory to the plate. Any of the major league batters can handle a fastball if that is all there is, so the pitchers develop a variety of pitches to mix it up.

Some throw it with more spin on the ball. Tyler Kepner in his book K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches writes, “Don Sutton threw a level plane fastball that Tim McCarver found impossible to hit squarely.” It didn’t sink, it actually will rise as some proponents argue. Warren Spahn said, “If you throw enough and put enough backspin on the pitch, you get a fastball that goes against gravity.”

Looking back on my limited knowledge of the game, I claim Sandy Koufax as my favorite. After a quick search on the internet for the best pitcher of all time one site named The Big Train as number one: Walter Johnson. His record includes over 3500 strikeouts and 110 shutouts. Another says Christy Mathewson should be at the top. He was one of the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Some lists place Lefty Grove at the top, Nolan Ryan sits at the top of some, Cy Young gets favor, and on and on. Statistics, individual preferences, stories all enter in with naming people’s favorites. 

A random search on the internet found this video: “Top 10 Nastiest Pitches in MLB (Voted by players).” It shows pitchers throwing a variety of unhittable pitches, but number one was a slider and features Chris Sale with the Red Sox. Nasty is right.

We can talk about other pitches such as the splitter, curveball, screwball, sinker, and cutter, but I find “the wet one” or “the slippery pitch” of interest, i.e. the spitball. There’s a rather sad story about a pitcher who was good at throwing it, but when he admitted to it, it cost him dearly. Apparently, those who throw one don’t want to admit it, but Preacher Roe wanted that $2000 the Sports Illustrated in 1955 offered him to talk about his using the spitball.  

The story goes like this. A few players were sitting around talking and Preacher Roe reportedly   asked their opinion as to whether he should go ahead with the interview. The extra money would pay for some repairs on his house. Most of them told him to go ahead, that is except for Carl Erskine who disagreed, although he didn’t speak up. Roe did the article, received his payment but finally realized what it cost him. Later he spoke with Erskine admitting it ruined his chances for being voted into the Hall of Fame.

The pitch was outlawed in 1920, but pitchers have found a variety of ways to disguise its use. Probably the most famous “modern day” spitballer is Gaylord Perry. Perry denied throwing the spitter as a player, but he titled his autobiography Me and the Spitter. Perry confessed that he’d even put Vaseline on his pants zipper because umpires would never check there. Unlike Preacher Roe, Perry is in the Hall of Fame.

Scuffed balls are in the same category as the wet one. The mud ball enters into the vocabulary, too, when a pitcher tries to get a little dirt clinging to the ball. Kepner quotes Warren Spahn regarding game 5 of the 1957 World Series: “Did you ever notice how many times Whitey (i.e. Ford) used to tie his shoelace during the game? Because Lew Burdette taught him to throw a mudball. And he’d wet the ball and put it on the ground and it was a little heavier on one side than the other, and he’d make the ball move because of that.”

Spahn related as to not having luck with throwing the spitball and used it just once where he gave up a homerun. Burdette tried instructing him, “You got to have two wet fingers and a dry thumb.” These athletes are so competitive that some will try anything to get an edge against the batter.

It has just been pitchers who’ve gotten the attention on these couple of past articles. None of the fielders or the batters received attention. They will have to wait until another time. Baseball carries a rich heritage in this country. Its origin is a bit unclear but a sportswriter named Henry Chadwick is often called the "Father of Baseball" for his early reporting on and contributions to the development of the game.

We’ve heard a great deal about Abner Doubleday being the inventor of baseball, but it’s more complicated than that. Some historians say its ancestry reaches into the 18th century as played in two English games - rounders and cricket. Whatever its lineage and history, it’s a sport loved by many people in the U.S.

We’ll end with a few facts gleaned from various sources, such as the first baseball game was held on June 19, 1846. Called the first because it was played according to the Knickerbocker’s Twenty Rules of baseball which included three outs per inning. Game 4 of the 1971 World Series was the first scheduled World Series game to be played at night. 

In 1929, the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians started their seasons with uniform numbers on their jerseys. Since the Yankees were rained out on opening day, so honors fell to the Indians becoming the first MLB team to wear numbers in a game. 

The song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was written in 1908 and has become the unofficial anthem of American baseball. And we’ll conclude with this. The longest game of baseball was 25 innings between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Chicago White Sox on May 8, 1984. The White Sox won by a score of 7-6. The game was stopped after 17 innings with the score tied 3-3 so the two teams could rest. The game finally ended in the 25th inning with a Harold Baines home run.