Part 25 (1/2)

”Oh-oh,” Kittle said. ”Now he's p.i.s.sed. See him stompin' around out there. He's talking to himself again.” Kittle half rose and shouted something in Spanish to Andujar. ”Go full circle!” he roared. ”Keep the ball down, hombre!”

Joaquin, struck dumb, stared around the stadium in confusion-I think for a moment he looked straight up at the sky. Then he spotted Kittle and waved his glove. The next two pitches were good breaking b.a.l.l.s, and then he struck out the batter with a fastball to end the half inning.

”There,” said Kittle. ”That's the pistola. He's still got it.”

”I think you should have been part of the deal,” Rig said. ”This man”-he grabbed Kittle by the knee-”this man and I played together on the Spokane Hawks in 1938,” he went on, to John Henry and me. ”He was a pitcher, and I was a kid shortstop. That was a B League, and it was my first professional team. Wes Schulmerich was finis.h.i.+ng up his career there.” He shook his head. ”Nineteen thirty-eight...”

The split-finger fastball is baseball's Rubik's Cube of the eighties-a gimmick, a supertoy, a conversation piece, and a source of sudden fame and success for its inventor. It is thrown at various speeds and with a slightly varying grip on the ball, but in its cla.s.sic mode it looks like a middling-good fastball that suddenly changes its mind and ducks under the batter's swing just as it crosses the plate. The pitch isn't exactly new-nothing in baseball is exactly new. A progenitor, the forkball, was grasped in much the same fas.h.i.+on, between the pitcher's forefinger and middle finger, but tucked more deeply into the hand, which took off spin and speed-a ”slip-pitch,” in the parlance. Elroy Face, a reliever with the Pirates, was its great pract.i.tioner in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and he put together an amazing 181 won-and-lost record (all in relief) with it in 1959. Bruce Sutter-like Face, a right-handed relief specialist-came along with the first so-called split-finger fastball a decade ago while with the Cubs, and has employed it (and very little else by way of repertoire) to run up a lifetime National League record of two hundred and eighty-six saves, with a Cy Young Award in 1979; he later moved along to the Cardinals and is now with the Braves and in temporary eclipse, owing to a sore arm. The Sutter pitch seemed not only unhittable but patented, for no one else in the game has quite been able to match his way of combining the forkball grip with a mid-delivery upward thrust of the thumb from beneath, which imparted a deadly little diving motion to the ball in flight. Here matters rested until 1984, when Roger Craig, a pitching coach with the Tigers, imparted his own variant of the s.-f. fb. to several members of the Detroit mound staff, with instant effect. Craig went into retirement after that season (he has since unretired, of course, and manages the Giants), but he is an affable and enthusiastic gent, who loves to talk and teach pitching. He is tall and pink-cheeked, with a n.o.ble schnoz; as most fans know, he has endured every variety of fortune on the mound. Callers at his home near San Diego that first winter of retirement included a good many opportunistic pitchers and pitching coaches from both leagues who were anxious to get their hands on the dingus. Most prominent among them-now, not then-was Mike Scott, a large but as yet unimpressive pitcher with the Houston Astros (the Mets had traded him away after 1982, at a time when his lifetime record stood at 1427); he spent a week with Craig and came home armed with Excalibur. With the new pitch, he went 188 in 1985 and 1810 last year, when he won a Cy Young Award after leading the majors with three hundred and six strikeouts and a 2.22 earned-run average. He capped his regular-season work with a no-hitter against the Giants, clinching the Astros' divisional pennant, and then zipped off sixteen consecutive scoreless innings while winning his two starts in the champions.h.i.+p series against the Mets, to whom he surrendered but one run over all. Indeed, the other great ”what if” of this past winter (along with second-guessing the way the Red Sox played the tenth inning of Game Six in the World Series) is the speculation about the Mets' fate in the playoffs if they had been forced to face Scott for a third time, in a seventh and deciding game.

”The split-finger is mostly a changeup,” Keith Hernandez told me in St. Petersburg. ”It can be thrown in different ways, so you can say it's really a three-speed changeup, with the fork-ball action as the other half of it. Scott can make it run in or out, but when he throws it inside to me he throws it hard. It has so much velocity on it that it's a real fastball for him, plus it goes down. It just drops off the table. Sutter's was the best until this one, but Scott has perfected it. He has tremendous command over the pitch-he never makes a mistake.” (Mike Scott, it should be added, might not agree with this generous appraisal, for Hernandez hits him better than anyone else in the league: .377 lifetime, according to the Elias Baseball a.n.a.lyst.) Roger Craig told me that both Scott and Morris throw the split-finger at eighty-five miles an hour or better-faster than anyone else, although Scott Garrelts, a fireballing reliever on Craig's Giants, is now approaching that level. ”Jack has his fingers up higher on the ball than Mike does,” Craig said. ”Mike's got the ball as far out in his hand as you can get it. He throws it about sixty or seventy percent of the time now, and there was a stretch at the end of last year when he was just unhittable. The pitch was a phantom-you'd swing and it wasn't there.” (A good many batters in the National League are convinced that Mike Scott also imparts another sort of witchcraft to the baseball, by scuffing it in some secret fas.h.i.+on, in contravention of the rules. Steve Garvey told me that retrieved b.a.l.l.s Scott has thrown often show a patch of lightly cut concentric circles on one of the white sectors-something that might be done with an artificially roughened part of his glove or palm. Garvey made a little sidewise gesture with his hand. ”That's all it moves,” he said, smiling. ”It's enough.”) Craig-to get back into the suns.h.i.+ne here-said that the best thing about the split-finger is that it can be thrown at so many different speeds. ”It depends on where you've got it in your fingers, on how you c.o.c.k your wrist-on a whole lot of things,” he said. ”But the ultimate is when it comes out off the tips of your fingers-they just slip down along the ball on the outside of the seams-and the ball tumbles. That's the great one, because it's the opposite spin from the fastball. People keep telling me it isn't really a fastball, but I keep saying it is, because I want that pitcher to throw it with a fastball motion. Dan Petty, back with the Tigers, used to let up on it, because it was in the back of his mind that it was an off-speed pitch, but that's wrong. Here-gimme a ball, somebody.”

We were sitting out on a bullpen bench in left field on a s.h.i.+ning morning in Scottsdale-Craig and I and one of the Giants' beat writers. Craig has large, pale, supernally clean hands-Grandpa hands, if Grandpa is a dentist-and when he got a ball he curled his long forefinger and middle finger around it at the point where the red seams come closest together. ”I start with my fingers together like this, and I say 'fastball'...'fastball'...'fastball'”-he waggled his wrist and fingers downward again and again-”but I have them go this way each time: just a bit wider apart. By the time you're out here”-the fingers were outside the seams now, on the white, slippery parts of the ball-”you're throwing the split-finger. There's a stage where it acts sort of like a knuckleball, but it'll come. You've started.”

Craig told us that he'd discovered the pitch back in 1982, while he was coaching fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys in California. He takes great pleasure in the fact that several older or middle-level professionals have saved their careers with the pitch (Milt Wilc.o.x, a righty with the Tigers, was one), and that subvarsity high-school and college pitchers have made the team with it. Superior pitchers sometimes resist it, by contrast. ”Jack Morris thinks he's the greatest pitcher who ever lived,” Craig said. ”He has that great confidence. He insisted he didn't need it, even though he was getting killed with his changeup. So I said, 'Do me a favor. Pitch one game and don't throw a change-throw the split-finger instead.' He did it, and it was a two-hitter against the Orioles.”

When Craig arrived at Candlestick Park in September of 1985, as the Giants' new manager, he took all the pitchers out of the bullpen on his second day and asked for a volunteer who had never essayed the split-finger. Mark Davis, a left-hander, came forward, and Craig sent the rest of the staff down to stand behind the catcher. ”Well, in about twenty, twenty-five pitches he was throwing it,” Roger said, ”and all my other pitchers were thinkin', Well, if he can do it, I can do it. That way, I didn't have to go out and try to convince them one by one.” Everybody on the Giants throws the pitch now, and one of Craig's starters, Mike Krakow, went 209 with it last year-his best year ever. Craig hasn't counted, but he believes that thirty or forty percent of the pitchers in the National League have the pitch by now, or are working on it. Five of the Dodgers' staff-Welch, Hers.h.i.+ser, Niedenfuer, Young, and Leary-employ the pitch, and the American League is beginning to catch up. Gene Mauch, the Angels' pilot, told Craig this spring that all his pitchers would be working on it this year.

I suggested to Roger that he should have registered the split-finger, so that he could charge a royalty every time it's thrown in a game, and his face lit up. ”That would be nice, wouldn't it?” he said. ”Just kick back and stay home, and take on a few private pupils now and then. That would be all right! But I've stopped teaching it to other teams. About ten pitching coaches called me up last winter and asked if they could come out and pick it up, but I said no. And there was this one general manager who called me up and said he'd send me and my wife to Hawaii, all expenses paid, if I'd take on his pitching coach and teach it to him. It's too late, though-I already showed it to too many guys. Dumb old me.”

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 struggle, and when he did, it became what he had needed all along-a finis.h.i.+ng pitch, to make him a finished pitcher. (He was 156, with a 2.81 ERA, 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 b.a.l.l.s. 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 nice 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. n.o.body can afford not to swing at that pitch-unless he's Keith Hernandez. Umpires don't call third strikes on Keith.”

K for Koufax: Each year, I notice, one particular old player's name pops up again and again in baseball conversations. I don't understand it. This year, it was Sandy Koufax. Roger Craig told me that he and Koufax were among the old Dodgers who had turned up at Vero Beach for a thirtieth reunion of the 1955 Brooklyn World Champions, and that Sandy immediately began asking him how to throw the new split-finger pitch. The next afternoon, he summoned Craig over to watch him working off a mound. ”Well, first of all, Sandy was throwing the fastball at around eighty-five miles an hour,” Craig said. ”He was in great shape, as usual, and he just did it naturally-no effort at all. I couldn't get over it. He was working on the split-finger, of course, though, and already he had it down pretty good. You know how long his fingers are. Sandy was pretty excited, and after a while he told me he was going to unretire and get back into the game as a pitcher again. I said, 'Jesus Christ, man, you can't do that! You're fifty years old!' But I thought he really meant it for a while, and so did Buzzie Bavasi and some of the others who heard him. I guess somebody talked him out of it in the end, but I almost wish they hadn't. Wouldn't that've been something!”

At Winter Haven, Eddie Kasko, the Red Sox' director of scouting (and a former manager of the Bosox), was talking about Sandy, too. He had a couple of friends from Ma.s.sachusetts in tow-fans down to watch the Sox in training-and at one point he told us about a day back in the early nineteen-sixties, when he was an infielder with the Reds, and he and Whitey Lockman and Ed Bailey were sitting together on the bench, watching Koufax in action for the visiting Dodgers.

”Sandy is just chewing us up out there, putting down the batters in rows with that tremendous fastball,” Kasko said, ”but Ed Bailey keeps saying, 'Well, he don't look like nothing special to me. That pitch isn't much. I wish they'd give me just one crack at him.' Ed loved to pinch-hit, you know-he thought there wasn't anybody he couldn't hit. Well, a little later we're way behind in the game, and Hutch sends Bailey up to bat against Sandy, and it's one, two, three strikes, you're out. Eddie swings three times and doesn't come within a foot of the ball. He walks back to the dugout and sits down, and after a while I give Whitey a little nudge and I say, 'Well, Ed, what do you think now?' And Bailey turns around, all red in the face, and says, 'He's too straight!' Whitey says, 'Yes-and so is a .30-.30.'”

Both leagues rang up strikeout records last year-a phenomenon attributable at least in part to the split-finger-and what one makes of this depends on whether one thinks like a batter or like a pitcher. Roger Craig smiled when I asked him about it and said, ”I can't call it bad.” Hernandez said, ”What I'm concerned with is that the sixties brought us the slider, and now here's the eighties and this pitch. What's going to happen in the nineteen-nineties? What's going to happen to us. .h.i.tters? The slider was a much harder pitch to hit than the curveball, and in the end they had to change the strike zone in order to even things out a little. The only thing on our side now is that the hanging split-finger is a great pitch to hit. It's just sitting up there on a tee for you.”

The change that Hernandez alluded to-a historic proceeding in baseball, which has rarely altered its essential rules and ancient dimensions-came just after the season of 1968, when the two leagues showed a combined batting average of .236. Carl Yastrzemski won the A.L. batting t.i.tle with an average of .301 that year, and in the same summer a rookie pitcher-the Mets' Jerry Koosman-accounted for seven shutouts, Bob Gibson achieved an earned-run average of 1.12 (a modern record), and g.a.y.l.o.r.d Perry and Ray Washburn threw no-hitters on consecutive days in the same ballpark. The batters were dying. The remedy, put into effect the following year, was to cut down the strike zone by a couple of inches, top and bottom, and to shave the pitching mounds from fifteen inches to ten inches above field level. Offensive statistics picked up almost at once (National League hitters batted .253 last year, and those in the A.L. .262), but many contemporary hitters believe that their eventual return to form was mostly because the batters began to recognize the slider a little sooner and to attack it with more success. I have also heard them say that the same thing will happen after they've seen the split-finger pitch more often. They may be whistling in the dark. For one thing, most pitchers who have mastered Craig's Little Jifry say that they don't know exactly where the pitch is going to end up once it has been launched; in this respect, at least, it resembles the knuckleball to some degree. We'll see.

I asked Marty Barrett (of the Red Sox) and then Wally Backman (of the Mets) how many split-finger pitches each of them sees, and what they told me suggests that the pitch is much less employed, or less trusted, in the A.L. Both Barrett and Backman are bantam-size contact hitters (well, Barrett has a bit of power: he hit thirty-nine doubles last year) who bat second in power-laden lineups, which means that pitchers tend to work them with extreme care. Barrett told me that he didn't run into many split-finger pitches, perhaps because the pitchers were afraid that they'd get behind in the count and end up walking him. ”I think the pitch is for bigger guys, who aren't as selective and will probably go to swinging at pitches that end up being b.a.l.l.s,” he said. ”I get more fastb.a.l.l.s. If Jim Rice got the pitches I get, he'd hit seventy home runs.”

I told Backman what Marty had said, and he was surprised. He said he saw the pitch often. To be sure, if the leadoff man got on base just ahead of him he wouldn't be served many breaking b.a.l.l.s, but whenever the Mets were behind late in a game the whole lineup would probably see the split-finger. ”A lot of times, the split-finger is a ball,” he said, ”but even if you know that, it's hard to lay off it sometimes. I just think there are more guys in our league who are throwing the thing.”

A further ingredient in the s.h.i.+fting batter-vs.-pitcher wars is the indisputable evidence that in the past four or five years, the umpires in both leagues have responded to the breaking-ball and sinkerball epidemic by lowering the strike zone. There was no plan to this; it just happened. The high fastball-the old Koufax or Seaver hummer that crossed the plate at the level of the batter's armpits, which is still the official ceiling of the strike zone-would probably be called a ball today, and umps today are also calling a lot of strikes on pitches that cross below the knee-level demarcation. Contemporary umpires are handing out quick warnings on brushback or knockdown pitches as well, and as a result the batters feel free to take a better toehold up at the plate and swing hard at low pitches away-”diving at the ball,” in the new jargon. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, Don Drysdale, the old Los Angeles intimidator, has said that modern-day batters are less wary when up at bat, and he and some other thoughtful baseball people warn that one of these days somebody is going to get beaned by an inadvertent high, inside pitch. On the other hand, it is the lower strike zone that also makes the batters so vulnerable to the split-finger's skulking little ways, because so few of them will trust the umpire to call a ball on a pitch that ends up below the strike zone.

To return to the slider, there is very little agreement about its origins but unanimity about the fact that it is easy to throw and hard to hit. Bill Rigney says that it caught on in the National League in the early fifties, after Don Newcombe's sudden flowering with the Dodgers. ”Erskine and Branca had those big old wide-breaking curveb.a.l.l.s, but then suddenly here was Newk with his hard pitch,” he told me. ”It only broke about this much, but it was a bear. It just took over the league. It was easier to control than a curveball-you could throw it for strikes-and the batters hated it. I remember riding in the team bus before the 1948 All-Star Game, and Ted Williams was asking us, 'What's this new thing over in your league-this slider?' Well, he found out about it, too. A lot of batters used to put it down, you know-they called it a nickel curve-but they still couldn't hit it.”

The slider is admired but mistrusted, for the evidence seems clear that it can destroy a pitcher's arm. The Dodgers discourage its instruction in their minor-league clubs, and a great many baseball people think it can permanently damage kid pitchers who begin to fool with it at the Little League and Pony League levels. ”I like the slider,” Herm Starrette told me, ”but I'd teach it last to a young pitcher, if at all. It's a great pitch to throw when you're behind in the count and want to throw some kind of breaking ball. But it will hurt your arm unless it's thrown properly. I teach the loose-wrist slider-the Steve Carlton pitch. It has a shorter, quicker break, and it moves downward. The stiff-wrist slider is what you call the cut fastball. It's a flat slider.”

Pitchers say that the standard slider is thrown overhand, with the forefinger and the middle finger slightly off center on the ball, and that the proper wrist action gives the ball the same spiral imparted to a pa.s.sed football. The fingers are off center on the cut fastball, too, but the pitch, launched with a full fastball motion, results in a brusque, twisting action of the elbow and forearm that shortens the delivery-and, in time, a career.

”Right-handed pitchers can do better with the cut fastball against a left-handed hitter than against a right-handed hitter, because for the right-handed hitter the ball comes in on the same plane as the fastball, and you have a chance to get more wood on it,” Starrette went on. ”But if your slider breaks across and down to a right-handed batter, you've got a chance he'll miss it or b.u.mp the ball on the top half for a ground-ball out. If you're a right-hander facing a left-handed batter...well, most left-handed batters are low-ball hitters, so if you throw the stiff-wrist slider-that cut fastball-up and in, you can get by with it, because it's on the small part of the bat, in on the fists. And that's why pitchers go back to it, even if it's dangerous for them. Anything that works will be used, you know.”

The slow or sudden ruin of an arm and a livelihood is on every pitcher's mind, and examples of crippled careers are to be found on all sides, although fans and pitchers alike prefer not to notice them. Steve Garvey believes that the near-epidemic of torn rotator cuffs (it is the section of muscle that encircles the arm in the same fas.h.i.+on, and at approximately the same site, as the seam that attaches a s.h.i.+rt-sleeve to a s.h.i.+rt) arises from pitchers' trying to throw too many different deliveries, and from overthrowing in crucial game situations. ”You see a lot of guys who used to throw hard who have lost a few miles an hour on their fastball after a couple of years,” he said. ”Then they go to other stuff, to compensate, and they get into trouble. Stress comes into it more than it used to, because there's so much more money to be made in the game. The desire to win in important situations has gone way up.”

Craig, for his part, claims that his split-finger special will be kinder to pitchers in the end, for it is thrown with a full, easy fastball motion. ”h.e.l.l, you can hurt your arm throwin' a pebble or a rock, or flyin' a d.a.m.n kite,” he said at one point, ”but there's less chance of it this way.” Other coaches and managers (Sparky Anderson is among them) are dubious, and say that we'll have to wait and see about the long-range effects of the split-finger. One pitcher showed me that if you repeatedly split your throwing fingers apart you will feel a twinge in your upper forearm, and said that he does exercises to compensate. Any overhand pitching motion is probably unnatural, for that matter. Joe Rudi believes that the spitball (still illegal, and still in the game, of course, because it works so well) is the most dangerous delivery of all. ”You're gripping the ball off the seams, which is to say your fingertips have very little resistance, nothing to pull down against,” he said. ”When that part of the ball is wet, the ball suddenly comes flying out of there, and there's nothing left-no resistance at all. Your arm accelerates exactly at the point when it's begun to decelerate, and that's a great way to blow it out for good. It's like when you go to pick up a bag of groceries, only there's nothing in the bag. You go oops-and you've thrown out your back. I don't let the outfielders on my team throw the ball any kind of a funny way, even when they're fooling around in practice. A lot of young players have no idea how vulnerable the arm really is. It's a delicate mechanism.”

In 1980, by the way, a wonderful young Oakland pitching staff, featuring Mike Norris, Rick Langford, Matt Keough, Brian Kingman, and Steve McCatty, led the American League in complete games (by a mile) and earned-run average, but after three years all but McCatty were gone, with their careers in tatters. One popular theory for the debacle was that Billy Martin and his pitching coach, Art Fowler, allowed the youngsters to stay too long in too many games (the A's had almost nothing in the way of a bullpen), but another theory claimed, or whispered, that Fowler had taught the kids the spitball. It's hard to be sure.

Scroogie: The first screwball pitcher I ever saw was Carl Hubbell, the great-the word fits here-Giants left-hander of the nineteen-thirties, who, along with Joe DiMaggio, became my earliest baseball hero. I recall the thrilling moment at the Polo Grounds when my father pointed out to me that Hubbell's left arm turned the wrong way around when it was at rest-with the palm facing out, that is-as a result of his throwing the screwball so often and so well. (The ball is delivered with the hand and wrist rotating in an unnatural direction-to the right for a lefthander, to the left for a right-hander-and the pitch breaks wrong, too. It's what pitchers call ”turning it over.”) I couldn't get over Hubbell's hand; it was like meeting a gladiator who bore scars inflicted at the Colosseum. Since men, I have talked with Hubbell a few times-he's a thin, stooped elderly gent who lives in Mesa, Arizona-and whenever I do I can't help stealing a glance at his left hand: it still faces the wrong way. The prime screwballer of our time is Fernando Valenzuela, of the Dodgers. His pitching arm looks perfectly normal so far, I'm sorry to say. Last summer, I ran into Warren Spahn, the old Boston Hall of Famer, in the visiting-team dugout at Fenway Park. He was there for an Old Timers' Game-he's a regular at these events-and he was wearing an old Braves uniform, with that tomahawk across the chest; he played twenty years for the Braves, eight of them in Boston (”Spahn and Sain and pray for rain”) and the rest in Milwaukee, and his lifetime three hundred and sixty-three victories are still the most compiled by any left-hander. Spahn, a leathery, wiry, infallibly cheerful man, was sitting with some of the Ibxas Rangers (they would play the Bosox that afternoon, once the exhibition innings were over), and in no time he had begun teaching his famous sinker-screwball delivery to another left-hander-the veteran Mickey Mahler, who was trying to stick with the Rangers as a middle-innings relief man.

”Look, it's easy,” Spahnie said. ”You just do this.” His left thumb and forefinger were making a circle, with the three other fingers pointing up, exactly as if he were flas.h.i.+ng the ”OK” sign to someone nearby. The ball was tucked comfortably up against the circle, without being held by it, and the other fingers stayed up and apart, keeping only a loose grip on the ball. Thrown that way, he said, the ball departed naturally off the inside, or little-finger side, of the middle finger, and would then sink and break to the left as it crossed the plate. ”There's nothing to it,” he said optimistically. ”Just let her go, and remember to keep your hand up so it stays inside your elbow. Throw it like that, and you turn it over naturally-a nice, easy movement, and the arm follows through on the same track.” He made the motion a few times, still sitting down, and it certainly looked easy-easy but impossible.

Spahn went off to join some other uniformed geezers, and I asked Mahler if he intended to work on the pitch, now that he'd had it from the Master.

”Oh, I don't think so,” he said. ”I'm trying to learn the screwball from our pitching coach, and this would mess me up for sure.” He seemed uncomfortable, and after a couple of minutes he told me that a little earlier he and Spahn had been standing near the stands and some kids there had asked him, Mickey Mahler, for his autograph. ”They asked me-not Warren Spahn,” he said. ”Can you believe that?” He was embarra.s.sed.

I don't like to see young pitchers get their hearts broken in spring-training games, but it's much worse when it happens to somebody you know and remember and care about-to a veteran, I mean. In Winter Haven, the starting pitcher for the Tigers one afternoon was Frank Tanana, a thirty-three-year-old lefty with fourteen years' service in the majors. Like many fans, I remembered him as a slender, dazzling left-hander when he first came up with the Angels. He led the league then with two hundred and sixty-nine strikeouts in 1975, and went 1910 the next year, and the year after that his 2.54 earned-run average was the best in the league. (A scout told me once that as a teenager Tanana had played in a high-school league in and around his native Detroit, where two strikes on a batter retired him and three b.a.l.l.s meant a walk. ”n.o.body touched him there-it was just a mismatch,” the scout said. ”Everybody got home for supper early that spring.”) But Tanana went down with a rotator injury in 1979 (his pitching motion was across the body-a dangerous habit for a fastballer), and he was a different sort of pitcher after that. He lost eighteen games for the Rangers in 1982, but then he began to do better. He is smart, and he knows the corners, and he has become a master at changing speeds. Over the last four years, he won forty-six games and lost forty-seven while toiling for the Rangers and then the Tigers, but there was more arm trouble last year. Against the Red Sox, in his outing at Winter Haven, he gave up ten runs on eleven hits, and couldn't quite get the last out in the third inning. When he left, he raised his cap to the Boston fans just before he disappeared into the dugout, and got a nice little hand in return. I hated it.

The Sox' opponents the next afternoon were the Montreal Expos, a team that has systematically stripped itself of most of its expensive stars and is engaged in filling out its roster with youngsters and retreads. Len Barker threw three pretty fair middle innings for the visitors, giving up a lone run on three hits, but I felt edgy the whole time he was out there. A hulking, six-foot-four flinger with blazing speed, Barker had a brief time in the sun with the Indians at the beginning of this decade, when he led the American League in strikeouts two years running. Early in the 1981 season, in a game against the Blue Jays, he achieved the ultimate rarity, a perfect game: no hits, no walks, no runs, n.o.body on base. His occupational injuries began in 1983, and ultimately required extensive surgery on the elbow of his pitching arm, and he never had a successful or pain-free season after that. He moved along to Atlanta in time, and spent all of last summer with Indianapolis, a Cla.s.s AAA minor-league team, but his most common address was the disabled list. He didn't make the team this year, it turned out; the Expos gave him his release just before the season started, and his career may be at an end at last. Another rotator-cuff casualty, Bruce Berenyi, gave it a last try this spring with the Expos, but the pain was too much, and he announced his retirement a few days after camp opened; he had been with the Mets and, before that, the Reds, but he never returned to form after shoulder surgery two years ago. He was a hard thrower, too. Bob McClure, a left-handed ten-year man who has worked mostly out of the bullpen, hung on and made the Expos' opening-day roster-an exception in this unhappy litany, for he has made do in the majors ever since his rotator-cuff trauma in 1981. His spring wasn't exactly carefree, however: just before the regular season began, he gave up nine runs to the Yankees in two-thirds of an inning of work, during a grisly 23V7 blowout at Fort Lauderdale.

Earlier, when I was out in Arizona, the Athletics had announced that Moose Haas, a prime starter for them last year until he was side-lined by bursitis, was suffering from a pulled muscle in the rotator cuff of his pitching shoulder and would be unable to start the season. And then, a bare day or two before the season began, Pete Vuckovich announced his retirement from baseball, thus terminating a distinguished eleven-year career that included a Cy Young Award in 1982, when he put together an 186 season for the Brewers, which helped take them into the playoffs and the World Series that fall. A torn rotator cuff got him the following spring. I was in the Brewers' camp at Sun City the day it was announced, and I well remember the waves of dismay that went through the clubhouse that afternoon-dismay but perhaps not surprise, for it was known that Vukey had pitched in great pain during the final stages of the pennant race the year before. In late September, two days after receiving a cortisone shot in his shoulder, he somehow went eleven full innings against the Red Sox, throwing a hundred and seventy-three pitches, and won the game. (I reported on this unhappy business at the time.) Vuckovich underwent extensive shoulder surgery early in 1984 and sat out the entire season. He was never sound again, but he just wouldn't give up. As scarcely needs saying, he is a man of enormous determination, pride, and stubbornness. The Brewers demoted him a year ago, but he refused to report to the minors; then he changed his mind and went to Vancouver after all, when he threw well enough (a 1.26 ERA in six games) to be invited back to the Brewers again in September. Now it's over for him.

Vuckovich and Haas and McClure were on the same Brewer pitching staff in the early eighties, and so was Jim Slaton, who also suffered a rotator-cuff injury but eventually recovered. So was Rollie Fingers, the slim, flamboyant relief pitcher who won his Cy Young in 1981 but could not pitch for the team in the playoffs or the World Series in 1982, because of an injury to his forearm that forced his retirement three sad seasons later. And so on. I don't think we should draw any particular conclusions about the Milwaukee club of that time, beyond its famous combativeness and pride, but the point I am getting at here is that all the pitchers just mentioned, with the exception of Berenyi, came up in, and mostly pitched on, American League clubs. To go back a bit, we should also remind ourselves that the 1980 Cy Young Award winner in the American League-Steve Stone, who won twenty-five games and lost seven for the Orioles-was forced into retirement by elbow miseries after but one more summer's work. When three successive Cy Young winners in the same league-Stone, Fingers, and Vuckovich-together arrive at a point when none of them is able to throw a pitch in combat, the award suddenly begins to take on the meaning of a Purple Heart.

Tony Kubek, the NBC baseball commentator, often points out that the designated-hitter artifice, which was adopted by the league in 1973, allows a manager to stay with his starting pitcher for as long as he seems to be pitching effectively, even though his team may be behind in the game, and, furthermore, that A.L. pitchers have to make a larger number of high-level, high-strain pitches per game, because they are facing an additional dangerous bat in the lineup in the person of the designated hitter. Kubek remembers asking Catfish Hunter about the D.H. rule when it was first enacted (Hunter pitched in the A.L. exclusively), and the Cat said, ”Well, it's going to make me a lot more money, and it's going to shorten my career by about two years”-a dazzling prognostication, it turned out, for Hunter's number of games won, complete games, and innings pitched suddenly rose after 1973 (he led the league in all three categories in 1975) and then almost as quickly dwindled, when arm miseries overtook him. By 1979, he was down to 29 with the Yankees, and by the next year he was gone, at the age of thirty-three.

Steve Garvey, another thoughtful mikado of the pastime, is also convinced that the designated-hitter rule has been a stroke of very bad fortune for the A.L. pitchers. ”Because there's no pinch-hitter, the good starting pitchers stay in the game longer and run into more of those stressful late-inning situations-a men-on-base, close-game crisis, where they'll be throwing that much harder just when their arms are getting tired and are most vulnerable,” he said. ”There are very few easy batters in big-league lineups now, and in the American League, of course, the pitcher never gets to pitch to the other pitcher. There's no rest for him, I mean. Count up the good American League starters we've lost these past few years and see. It's not a situation you want to think about.”