Posted on 04/04/2010 6:22:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
When I was in tenth grade we had a senior pitcher who could throw in the 90s. Aspirin tablets. He really did make the ball look smaller. Glad I never had to face him, because he was wild, sometimes hit half the other team in a game, and his BBs would tail up and in to a right-handed hitter. Ended up getting a scholarship to Michigan State, and convinced me that baseball wasn't a career option.
LOL, not just the chest. I'm talking about what Don Drysdale used to call "chin music".
He was notorious for throwing, not just AT batters, but at their heads, or mighty close. Threw a side-armed fastball that had RH batters bailing out even when it was in the strike zone! I'll never forget him and Sandy Kofax.
you don't wreck a catcher's career during an all-star game.
I haven't put too much faith in sports medicine "experts" since Mike Marshall's 106 game season. Every time he entered a game, Vinnie would explain that the reason Marshall could pitch so many games was because he was an expert in kinesiology and of course, Marshall blew out his arm just like the rest of us expected.
Back in the 80s, there was an excellent Sports Illustrated article that explored longevity in pitchers. The author's thesis was that it very much correlated into how many pitches a pitcher had thrown before age 25. The two bold predictions in the article (that then aces Fernando and Orel Hershiser's days were numbered) both came true.
The way Ryan fits in was that he was really, really wild in his earliest seasons and it took him some time to learn to control his fastball. In the meantime, he did not get assigned an ace-type pitching role until he was in his late 20s. As a result, his arm was given time to develop and it lasted him a long, long time. (Tom Seaver is another who didn't pitch a whole lot when he was very young).
My prediction, based on the same thinking is that MATSUZAKA Daisuke, as gifted a pitcher as he is, will not be around for very long. The Lions worked him very hard before he got his free agency and he was very much overpriced.
I don't have a problem with inter-league play. When it was introduced in Japan, they had a serious problem. The Pacific league was facing getting dropped to four teams with Orix and Kintetsu both on the verge of going under. Still, playing a full season against only five other teams presents a certain lack of variety.
I find it verging on the comical watching managers who have never had to manage baseball suddenly find themselves with a pitcher in the batting order and questioning standard techniques like a double switch after pinch hitting for the pitcher, etc.
It was even better in the Japan Series a couple of years ago. The Seibu Lions manager had evidently read the statistical study that "proved" that placing the weakest hitter at #7 in the batting order produced the most runs. Sports writers had a field day poking fun at him ...
Of course, questionable statistics or no, the 9th position will always go to bat fewer times than anyone else. I suspect that the lack of depth in the average bullpen (Pacific League champion Seibu Lions being no exception) tends to make pitching substitutions and pinch hitting for the pitcher a terrifying prospect.
Koufax (who was one of my childhood sports heroes) was also one of the few men who ever had a sports stadium built around him. He was close to unbeatable in Dodger Stadium, but only a pretty good pitcher everywhere else ...
After he retired, Mickey Lolich said his arm hurt all the time, yet he was able to last many years in spite of all the 300-inning seasons. Jack Morris looked like he was going to throw his arm off his shoulder on every pitch, but he was another workhorse who lasted a long time.
I can’t see the pic (blocked), but I can only guess that’s it’s Nolan Ryan pummeling Robin Ventura while he has Ventura in a headlock. What a great moment...
That’s the one. Great moment in sports! LOL
Best payback pitches I can recall was Penny hitting A-Rod for that punk bitch Chambermaid hitting Red Sox players and Tori Hunter picking up the ball and nailing the pitcher who had just hit him in the ribs right in the kneecap....The Penny plunk kind of rivals what the Mets did to Ron Santo in 1969---Santo had developed a habit of jumping and clicking his heels on the field after Cub wins and it got under the skins of a lot of National League clubs. But when Cub pitcher Bill Hands opened a critical game during that pennant race by nailing Tommie Agee (who dusted off and hit one over the fence, anyway), Jerry Koosman waited for Santo's turn at bat and drilled him. Cub reserve catcher Gene Oliver would remember it years later: "We knew Santo was going on his ass." Aside from the Koosman pitch showing the Cubs (and just about everyone else) that the Mets meant business, it put an end to Santo's bush act.
Deadliest payback I can remember: The one that triggered the infamous Marichal-Roseboro brawl down the 1965 pennant stretch. The Dodgers and Giants were going at it in a bristling pennant race and, though they tried to keep the two pitchers from facing each other to get a better edge for themselves, this time they couldn't avoid a Sandy Koufax-Juan Marichal matchup. Which was great for the fans: the two best pitchers (there but for Koufax would Marichal have won at least two of the Cy Young Awards Koufax picked up in those years) in the league going at each other.
The prelude to the contest was a round of back-and-forth brushbacks that continued when Marichal brushed back Maury Wills and Ron Fairly early in this game. Koufax---who wasn't big on retaliation (he preferred to intimidate by sheer domination)---didn't let that stop him from pushing Willie Mays back off the plate. When Marichal batted for the first time, Koufax sent him a little message, too. No biggie. That's baseball.
But what happened next was Roseboro---who admitted later that he didn't think Marichal had gotten enough of the message---let a Koufax pitch get past him. When he retrieved the ball to throw it back to Koufax, he threw it right past Marichal's ear . . . with Marichal having no idea it was coming until it passed his head so closely. This is the part nobody sees in the infamous film clip that survives of what happened. Marichal whipped around in a flash screaming at Roseboro . . . and Roseboro, who had martial arts knowledge and wasn't afraid to use it, advanced toward Marichal with his heavy mask off and appearing to be in position that its owner was ready to swing it if necessary. That is when Marichal poleaxed him with his bat. Without excusing what Marichal did, in his position he was probably thinking he had an armed madman---who'd just tried to take his head off without warning as it was---on his hands and needed to defend himself.
Out poured both dugouts and bullpens, and Willie Mays managed to pull Roseboro from the pile and toward medical help. (He also managed to hit a three-run homer off Koufax when the game finally got underway again. Shaken though he was by the brawl, Koufax refused to use it as an excuse. When asked why Mays hit that shot off him, Koufax shrugged. "He's Willie Mays, that's why.")
Marichal got suspended ten games and the Dodgers screamed bloody murder over its leniency . . . but the suspension hurt the Giants more than anyone thought: it cost the Giants two Marichal starts in a close pennant race which they lost by . . . two games.
The postscript: Not only did Marichal and Roseboro patch it up in due course---the incident was completely out of character for both men, but Marichal in particular, who was known as a friendly fellow whose wife swore he never woke up on the wrong side of the bed and who was an inveterate practical joker (the word was that if you were fool enough to buy your wife or girl friend a bottle of perfume on the way to the ballpark and left it prominently enough in your locker, Marichal was liable to load it with a stink bomb)---but when Marichal got snubbed for the Hall of Fame in his first try (he should have been a no-questions-asked first-ballot Hall of Famer; he was the best righthanded pitcher of the 1960s), Roseboro himself took up the cause and campaigned for him. When Marichal got elected on his third try, he thanked Roseboro publicly for the campaigning. When Roseboro was dying a few years ago, one of the first and last to visit him was Marichal.
At Roseboro's funeral, Sandy Koufax was one of the eulogists. "Juan," he addressed Marichal in the front pew directly, "you would have loved pitching to John Roseboro." Marichal smiled and nodded.
the great Don Drysdale made it clear....you hit one of mine, I hit two of yours and he NEVER failed...........another bugaboo of Drysdale’s was the intentional walk..he loathed it..........irregular wind up....quarter speed and for 4 pitches. he said...one pitch....hit em, next !It almost makes you wonder whether Drysdale's attitude didn't cost him as much as it enhanced him, especially when his teams needed most for him to be a pitcher and not an enforcer. Did you know: Don Drysdale in the pennant races does not have a performance record---except possibly for 1965---that you would expect of a Hall of Fame pitcher whose teams have been in a fair number of pennant races and that, whenever he had the chance to beat the team his team needed most to beat, he never won?
I was rather amazed to learn about that myself. I'd seen Drysdale pitch at the height of his career. He'd beaten my New York Mets often enough (well, I guess that was doing it the easy way in those years); he may not quite have been Sandy Koufax but married to Koufax they were the deadliest one-two pitching punch I ever saw until a) Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich in 1968-69; and, b) the advent of Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling in Arizona.
On the other hand . . .
Writing his book about the Hall of Fame, Bill James did some research, triggered because in reviewing Drysdale's basic record he concluded that, by itself, it didn't really look like a Hall of Fame record. If that were true, then could you find some kind of tight performance result (say, in games decided by a single run or games whose final scores were 1-0) or pennant race performance that would justify putting Drysdale in the Hall of Fame when his record was actually lesser than a lot of pitchers who weren't in the Hall of Fame and weren't likely to get there?
Well, James looked it up, and these were the results: In one-run games, Drysdale's lifetime record was 45-40; in games whose scores were 1-0, Drysdale's record was 9-8. In the tightest games of his life, Don Drysdale was barely a .500 pitcher. (Koufax? He was 51-28 in one-run games lifetime and 11-3 in 1-0 games.)
Against fellow Hall of Fame pitchers, here's Drysdale's lifetime record:
Against Juan Marichal: 3-10 (sixteen starts)
Against Robin Roberts: 6-4 (twelve starts)
Against Bob Gibson: 3-3 (nine starts)
Against Warren Spahn: 2-2 (seven starts)
Against Ferguson Jenkins: 3-0 (three starts)
Against Jim Bunning: 2-3 (five starts)
Against Nolan Ryan: 0-1. (one start)
Against Phil Niekro: 0-1 (one start)
Against Steve Carlton: 0-1 (one start)
Against Gaylord Perry: 0-0 (Drysdale only faced Perry twice in his career; one of the no-decisions was a game the Dodgers eventually won behind the bullpen, and Drysdale hadn't pitched well enough to win when he came out of the game. Interestingly, Perry as a Giant most often faced Don Sutton and Claude Osteen as Dodger opponents.)Against the Hall of Fame opponents, composite: 19-25. (Interestingly, he never faced Tom Seaver; Seaver came into the National League in 1967, while Drysdale retired early in 1969 when he blew his rotator cuff, an injury for which there was then little enough treatment. Drysdale pitched several games against the Mets in that period, including once against Nolan Ryan and once against Bob Hendley---the former Cub who nearly pitched a no-hitter on the backside of Koufax's perfect game---but somehow he never faced Tom Seaver or the Mets' number two man, Jerry Koosman.)
Even allowing the actual or alleged distortions of Dodger Stadium on behalf of pitching, Drysdale didn't win the games he should have or might have won given his run support, which was very good. In fact, Drysdale's lifetime run support in games when he was the pitcher of record was 4.12 per nine innings. (And you thought the Dodgers of that time were a bunch of bums who scraped for runs in the trash bin?)
Drysdale's winning percentage---.557---is not the winning percentage you should expect when you average 4.12 runs per nine innings in support of yourself as the pitcher of record and 4.07 runs per nine innings overall.
What was Drysdale's record in the pennant races---down the stretch (approximately 10 August until a) the Dodgers clinch the pennant; or, b) the Dodgers fall out of the race to stay)?
First, eliminate 1956 (he was a rookie who didn't pitch in any key games down the final stretch to result in a Brooklyn pennant), 1957 (the Dodgers were pretty much out of the race by August 1-3 and played horribly to finish their final season in Brooklyn, though Drysdale himself---interestingly---pitched brilliantly the rest of the way), 1958 (the Dodgers finished seventh their first season in Los Angeles), 1960 (they finished thirteen games out in fourth place), and 1964 (with Koufax out by mid-August thanks to what proved the arthritic elbow, after he injured the elbow sliding into second base in a game, the Dodgers fell out of the race practically overnight). So you're looking at 1959 (the Dodgers win the pennant), 1961 (they finish second behind Cincinnati), 1962 (they lose a three-game playoff to the Giants after finishing the race in a dead heat), 1963 (they beat the Cardinals by a six-game margin that was closer than it looked), 1965 (they beat the Giants by two), and 1966 (they beat the Giants by one on the final day).
Get ready. Remember: We're looking at Drysdale's performance down the stretch and against the one team the Dodgers most need to beat:
1959: Overall stretch---2-7/5.49 ERA in fourteen games. Against the Milwaukee Braves, the team the Dodgers most need to beat, and against whom they'd play in a three-game playoff: 3-3/3.50 in nine games all season. Those games included game two of that playoff (the Dodgers won the first game), when Drysdale faced Lew Burdette. Drysdale surrendered four runs in four and a third; the Dodgers were behind 4-2 when he came out and rallied to win.1961: Overall stretch---2-4/4.66 in twelve games. Against the Cincinnati Reds, the team the Dodgers most needed to beat, all season: 0-2/6.39 in six games, including a stretch drive game 27 August in which Drysdale squared off against a rookie named Ken Johnson (who would later pitch a losing no-hitter as a Houston Colt .45). Drysdale got murdered, the Reds won, 8-3, and the Dodgers lost a lead they never recovered.
1962: Overall stretch---4-5/2.87 in fourteen games. (Don't let the ERA fool you: he surrendered a fat volume of unearned runs that would have shot his ERA up above four if they'd been earned.) Against the Giants, whom they most need to beat, all season: 3-1/4.95. The Giants caught the Dodgers down the stretch while Sandy Koufax was down with his finger circulatory problem. Drysdale faced the Giants twice down the stretch, losing once while giving up five runs in six innings (including a pinch-hit three-run bomb by Willie McCovey) and getting no decision after the Dodgers were forced to rally to win when he surrendered five in seven and left down a run. Drysdale also pitched the second playoff game and left the game with the Dodgers in a 5-0 hole. The Dodgers rallied to win but lost the playoff in game three when a still-ailing, still-recovering Koufax had nothing left.
1963: Overall stretch: 5-5/2.03 in twelve games. (How many pitchers do you know pull down a 2.03 ERA and still turn up .500 pitchers?) Against the Cardinals all season: 1-1/3.04, eleven games. Drysdale faced the Redbirds once down the stretch and his opponent was Ernie Broglio, on the threshold of Chicago infamy (the Brock-for-Broglio deal would happen next season). He lost to Broglio, 3-2.
1965: Overall stretch: 8-2/2.54 in fourteen games. This is arguably the only stretch drive performance in which you could say Don Drysdale pitched like a Hall of Famer. On the other hand, against the Giants all season he was 2-2/2.33. He faced the Giants once down the stretch, squaring off against the fading Warren Spahn. The good news: Drysdale pitched eleven innings and came out with the game tied. The bad news: He'd surrendered five runs. (The Dodgers won the game in twelve innings. This game, by the way, opened the series that culminated in the Marichal-Roseboro dustup.)
1966: Overall stretch---5-4/2.27 in fourteen games. The Dodgers and Giants are going at it for the final time in the Koufax-Drysdale era. Against the Giants all season long, Drysdale was 0-4/3.41 in five games. Down the stretch?
a) He squared off against Marichal and lost, 6-2, on 27 August.
b) He squared off against Ray Sadecki, surrendered eleven hits in five and a third, and lost, 6-0.The final record down the stretch: 26-27/3.13.
The final record, overall, against the one team the Dodgers needed most to beat based on the aforesaid criteria: 9-12/3.93.
The final record, down the stretch alone, against the one team Don Drysdale's team needed most to beat in the seasons under review to stay in the race or win the pennant: 0-6/5.33 in twelve games.
Perhaps that's somewhat narrow, so you broaden the cut (as James did) to include all contending teams and not just the ones the Dodgers most needed to beat in those seasons. You may not like this result, either:
Against contenders other than the teams the Dodgers most needed to beat: 6-7/3.26
Against contenders including the teams the Dodgers most needed to beat: 6-13/4.17
One of those losses, in fact, may have helped cost the Dodgers a World Series in due course: On the final day of 1966, the Dodgers faced the Philadelphia Phillies in a doubleheader. Drysdale got the game one start with a chance to nail the pennant right there. He got strafed and the Dodgers lost. That forced manager Walter Alston to send Sandy Koufax---whom he'd been hoping to send out for Game One of the World Series---out for the nightcap on two days' rest yet again; Koufax pitched a gutsy game and beat the Phillies, 6-3. (How gutsy? Midway through the game, Koufax suffered a slipped disc in his back, gobbled a couple of extra painkillers and took extra raw Capsolin ointment, until the Dodger trainer and visiting former Dodger Don Newcombe got the novel idea of pulling Koufax from either end on the table like a tug-o-war rope until the disc slipped back into place.) It cost the Dodgers an early Series advantage when Drysdale went out for Game One and lost, then Koufax was undone in Game Two by the infamous Willie Davis errors, and the Orioles proved too much for Claude Osteen and Drysdale once more to handle, sweeping the Dodgers for their first rings.
(Did you know: Sandy Koufax's lifetime record in games he pitched on two days' rest is 14-4 with a 2.25 ERA and an opponents' batting average of .171 against him? Drysdale? 11-3/3.31/.244 opponents' batting average against him.)
Bill James wrapped it up well enough for me.
Drysdale doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame, in my opinion, unless we can show that his impact on the pennant races justifies ranking him higher than his overall record would indicate. But since he never beat the Dodgers' key opponent down the stretch, how can you even make that argument?Don Drysdale wasn't Bob Gibson, who proved that being a bit of an intimidator wasn't a detriment to crossing the river from goodness to greatness. He wasn't Sandy Koufax (nobody was), who proved that intimidation by domination was the best kind of intimidation. He wasn't Juan Marichal, who was somewhere between the two.A good pitcher.
A good man.
I hope I don't ever have to face him, if they play baseball up there. I imagine he'd work inside, even working inside the Pearly Gates.
He doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame
As Don Drysdale he was good enough as a pitcher and a man, and intimidating enough on the mound, even if Willie Mays, for one, would answer a Drysdale duster with a bomb. But he was surprisingly (underline that, gang) short enough of a genuine Hall of Famer. Not that he's the worst of his breed in the Hall of Fame by a long enough shot.
The way Ryan fits in was that he was really, really wild in his earliest seasons and it took him some time to learn to control his fastball. In the meantime, he did not get assigned an ace-type pitching role until he was in his late 20s. As a result, his arm was given time to develop and it lasted him a long, long time.Ryan's early wildness is true enough, but regardless of what you may have read or seen or heard, there was another factor involved in Ryan's protracted developmental stage: military service. Ballplayers were subject to the draft in those years and Ryan was one of them. He was missing periods at least twice or three times a season for two weeks' service to fulfill his draft obligations in his first couple of seasons; Tom Seaver, by contrast, had done his Marine hitch earlier. On the other hand, Ryan was getting plenty of relief work in those years, as well, and they weren't just single-inning gigs. (Most famously, he came in for Gary Gentry in the National League Championship Series early in the game and stopped the Braves cold enough for the win en route the sweep.)
As for Ryan's longevity, I'll give you a reminder you may not have remembered: The Mets' pitching coach in those years was Rube Walker, who emphasised leg strength as the primary source of pitching strength and endurance. It was a very rare developed-as-a-Met pitcher who experienced arm or shoulder trouble or shortened careers (Gary Gentry, the unsung hero of the 1969 World Series, was probably the most glaring anomaly) while Walker was running the pitching show for the team. Ryan, Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Jon Matlack later, enjoyed long careers thanks to Walker's tutelage.
(Tom Seaver is another who didn't pitch a whole lot when he was very young).That would be news to Tom Seaver. He came up in 1967 and was the National League's Rookie of the Year---he pitched in 35 games, went 16-13 with a 2.76 ERA. In his first three major league seasons, Seaver pitched in 107 games and rolled a 57-29/2.39. That was ages 22-24. Between ages 22 and 30, Seaver had only two seasons in which he started fewer than 34 games.
Mark Grace said Randy Johnson once hit him in the back with a 98 mph fastball. He said it bruised him on the front of his torso. Hydrostatic shock. Bet that one hurt for a few days.Randy Johnson's most explosive knockdown pitch
LOL, I didn’t even have to click the link to know what you were referring to.
But, I have to admit, as a recent fan to baseball I shake my head at what I have referred to in discussions with my brother as the games 'systemic lack of integrity'.
Why is cheating encouraged?
Why wasn't Sammy Sosa banned for life for corking his bat?
Why is it ok to scrub out the baseline of the batters box?
As a kid I loved Pete Rose. When I found out he gambled on baseball games he was managing I wrote him off. I probably watch 130+ games a year, but I really would like to know why baseball people think this stuff is ok?
Regards,
TS
The cheating, plus the multi-millionaire labor strikes, finally did me in.
I don't follow any professional sports any more.
LOL, I didn’t even have to click the link to know what you were referring to.But you clicked it. You know you did. ;)
But, I have to admit, as a recent fan to baseball I shake my head at what I have referred to in discussions with my brother as the games 'systemic lack of integrity'.You think this is recent stuff? I hate to be the wet blanket, and I wish people had remembered this before all the moral outrage of the past decade, but cheating is baseball's oldest profession. You'd be absolutely amazed at some of the subterfuge that's transpired down the decades, including but not limited to . . .Why is cheating encouraged?
Why wasn't Sammy Sosa banned for life for corking his bat?
Why is it ok to scrub out the baseline of the batters box?
As a kid I loved Pete Rose. When I found out he gambled on baseball games he was managing I wrote him off. I probably watch 130+ games a year, but I really would like to know why baseball people think this stuff is ok?
Babe Ruth---Yep. The Great Bambino from the Pure and Honourable Age of Baseball would have done anything for an edge. Including but not limited to corking a bat (Dave Henderson, then with the Seattle Mariners, caught on when spotting plugs in a few Ruth game bats traveling around the Show circuit in a Louisville Slugger exhibition of historic bats) and using a bat cobbled from four different slabs of wood. The latter (he was joined by Ken Williams, a bombardier for the St. Louis Browns) provoked an explicit American League rule against bats made of more than a single wood.
Ty Cobb---You've surely heard the legends of his sharpening his spikes? They weren't just legends.
The Shibe Park Grounds Crew---Aiding and abetting future Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn's adeptness at dropping bunts up the third base line to beat out for hits, they sculpted the foul line to prevent particularly slow rolling Ashburn bunts from crossing the foul line. "Ashburn's Ridge," the sculpting was nicknamed.
Whitey Ford---Toward the end of his career, trying to hang in there despite recurring elbow trouble, the Chairman of the Board had no few tricks up his sleeves or in his hands . . . or, in some cases, on his catcher's shin guards: Elston Howard became adept at scraping balls on the buckles of his shin guards before returning them to Ford. ("The buckle ball," Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four, "sang three choruses of Aida.") He also had a rasp in his wedding ring that he could use to scuff a ball. He even admitted to cutting a ball in an Old-Timer's Game: "I got tired of getting my jock knocked off."
Once upon a time, Ford threw a mud ball---that he didn't have to load up. Howard would load it up for him if the dirt around the plate happened to be a little extra wet and he could brush the ball against the dirt before returning it to Ford. (Bo Belinsky once said that, if you were pitching against Ford, you had a good chance of getting a mud ball to work with next inning if Ford got the final out of the inning on a strikeout and the ball would be tossed back toward the mound for you to use.)
Lew Burdette---The great Braves righthander was known as a fidgeter on the mound---but it may have had a purpose. Burdette was a tobacco chewer and would spit the juice to a certain spot next to the rubber, then fidget with his shoes, usually to retighten his laces. While bent over, he'd scoop up a little tobacco juice mud for the next pitch.
Mudcat Grant---For a certain period, Grant got away with throwing a soap ball: he'd rub some soap into the inside of his uniform shirt and, on particularly hot days, he'd have a little foam to apply to the pitch. The problem was the day he rubbed a little too much soap into his gray traveling uniform and the white soap foam was only too visible to the umps.
Norm Cash---Stormin' Norman won the 1961 American League batting championship with a loaded bat. The punch line: He showed one and all how to do it in a magazine article during the off-season, then used the same bat in 1962 . . . only to watch his average collapse a hundred points or so. (Cash is the same player who once dragged a piano leg to the plate for a bat when facing Nolan Ryan late in a game, saying it didn't matter what he was swinging that particular day . . . )
Preacher Roe---The elegant Brooklyn Dodgers' lefthander (he led the National League in winning percentage twice) confessed after his retirement, in a Life article called "The Outlaw Pitch Was My Money Pitch." He got away with it by taking advantage of the umpires' preoccupation with looking for all the little tricks and treats of the trade and just spat right into his glove. (Carl Furillo eventually told Roger Kahn for The Boys of Summer that Dem Bums knew when the spitter was coming: "When Preach touched the bill of his cap with two fingers, that was the signal. That's when we knew it was coming. When he did it with one finger, we knew he was faking.")
Classic matchup: Roe versus Eddie (Slow, Slower, Slowest) Lopat in a World Series. Lopat was no stranger to a little, shall we say, guile. Casey Stengel, Lopat's Yankee manager, admired watching the two of them go at it: Those fellas certainly make baseball a simple game, don't they? It makes you wonder. You pay these big fellas all that money to come out big and swing big and all. And [Roe and Lopat] give 'em a little o' this and a little o' that and swindle 'em.
Candlestick Swamp---The San Francisco Giants were getting so fed up with Maury Wills of the Dodgers apparently running a little extra wild on their pitchers that they instructed their grounds crew to apply a little extra watering down of the dirt around first base in a bid to slow Wills down. Enough watering down that the next time Wills merely took a lead off base, he looked as if he'd been fly fishing in the Everglades before he even thought of taking off or diving back to first.
Mike Flanagan---The Baltimore Orioles ace took Thomas Boswell aside once in spring training, picked up a fresh baseball, broke open a coat hanger, and cut three even gashes into the sweet spot on the hide, saying, "Any time I need four new pitches, I got 'em."
Graig Nettles---The one-time Yankee bombardier and third base acrobat had some novel ways of loading a bat, including a tube of mercury secreted down the barrel and four Super Mini-Balls (you remember those little black balls that would bounce about five stories when you tried to bounce one?) down the barrel. The latter embarrassed Nettles once when the bat broke and the little balls went bouncing wild all around the plate area.
Gaylord Perry---Pretty much all you have to do is mention the name. My personal favourite Perry story: One day in town, he ran into an umpire who'd spent the previous evening frisking him on the mound a few times. The ump and Perry had a friendly chat away from the office, so to say (Perry was personally a friendly fellow away from the park, even if he could be a crotchety ass at the park), and the conversation turned to the ump's son, who pitched in the Little League and whose team was getting clobbered regularly.
"Gaylord," the umpire said, "could you teach my son how you throw that thing?"
Tommy John and Don Sutton---What an earlier poster said of that matchup really happened. But here's what Lou Piniella really said on the dugout phone to George Steinbrenner: George, if I have the umpires check Sutton then they'll have the umpires check TJ and both of them'll be gone. Whatever they're doing, TJ's doing it better. So let's just let it go. The Yankees ended up winning the game, and a sportswriter covering it marveled afterward: Tommy John and Don Sutton? If anyone can find one smooth ball from that game he ought to send it to Cooperstown.
The batter's box---It isn't that "they're" allowed to scrub out the lines, it's that it's a little bit impossible to keep the lines intact when you have hitters running out of those boxes up to first base or coming down the third base line trying to score over nine innings of play. You could re-chalk the boxes in the fifth inning and they still have about a ten percent survival rate the rest of the game.
Mickey Mantle and Denny McLain---The legend you've heard is true: Mantle did get a gift pitch to slam for the bomb that would put him past Jimmie Foxx on the all-time home run list, the place Mantle dearly wanted to be when he knew he was going to retire after 1968.
When Mantle came up to hit---in the game where McLain pretty much had his 30th win in the bank---Tiger catcher Bill Freehan told the Yankee legend that he'd know what was coming on every pitch: "Denny wants you to have that homer." Mantle waggled his bat a couple of times for the precise location he really liked and finally drove one into the upper deck.
The postscript: The next Yankee hitter, Joe Pepitone, misinterpreted the Mantle homer and figured it meant McLain was feeling particularly generous. So Pepitone, a flake if ever there was one (and a badly tortured man, as it happend), waggled his bat to indicate where he'd like a pitch to drive. McLain smiled at Pepitone . . . and knocked him on his ass with the first pitch.
The cheaters---whether the petty criminals or the grand theft felons---are and always have been the minority. Though it wouldn't break my heart to see the spitter legalised again . . .
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