K Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Tyler Kepner

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover images: Topps® trading cards used courtesy of The Topps Company, Inc.

  Cover design by John Fontana

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kepner, Tyler (Baseball writer), author.

  Title: K : a history of baseball in ten pitches / Tyler Kepner.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018016158 | ISBN 9780385541015 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385541022 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Pitching (Baseball) | Pitchers (Baseball) | Baseball—United States—History.

  Classification: LCC GV871 .K46 2018 | DDC 796.357/22—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018016158

  Ebook ISBN 9780385541022

  v5.4

  ep

  For Jen

  “We’re not leaving in the seventh-inning stretch, are we?”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Slider: A Little Bitty Dot

  The Fastball: Velo Is King

  The Curveball: A Karate Chop with a Ball

  The Knuckleball: Grabbing the Wing of a Butterfly

  The Splitter: Through the Trapdoor

  The Screwball: The Sasquatch of Baseball

  The Sinker: The Furthest Strike from the Hitter’s Eyes

  The Changeup: A Dollar Bill Hooked on a Fishing Line

  The Spitball: Hit the Dry Side

  The Cutter: At the End, It Will Move

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  The kid hung in there as a rookie for the Mets: 11 wins, five losses, a 4.04 earned run average, and 170 strikeouts. But the next year he struggled, and then he got hurt, and soon he was traded to the A’s and the Twins. Finally he landed with his hometown team, the Phillies, where he stayed for many years, except for one season with the Indians.

  He retired with a record of 350–182, for a .658 winning percentage. He won five Cy Young Awards, made eight All-Star teams, and struck out 4,819. He was clearly one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history.

  * * *

  ————

  This was my life plan in 1986. I was eleven, the oldest a kid can be before reality invades his dreams. I can still throw strikes reliably for the New York media team in our annual games against Boston, and I can spin a loopy little curveball. My arm is never sore, because I don’t throw hard and never have.

  Before my lack of speed mattered, though, I believed in that handwritten stat sheet. I found it in a notebook a few years ago, in a box at my parents’ house. By then I was deep into this project, exploring the history and stories behind every pitch, from Christy Mathewson’s fadeaway to Clayton Kershaw’s slider. Seeing my scribbles through the prism of actual history, it struck me that, for some pitchers, real life surpassed my wildest ambitions.

  In my childhood baseball fantasy, where I could do anything I wanted, I still won fewer games than Greg Maddux. I had fewer strikeouts than Nolan Ryan, a lower winning percentage than Roy Halladay, fewer All-Star selections than Randy Johnson, fewer Cy Young Awards than Roger Clemens. I spoke with all of them, and hundreds more, for this book. I wanted to know how the masters did what they did, how they learned and applied their best pitches.

  Stardom is at their fingertips, literally. That’s the mystery and the madness of the craft. Even the slightest adjustment of a pitcher’s fingers can turn an ordinary pitch into a major league weapon. If your body and brain can withstand all the failure, you’d be foolish to ever quit the job.

  The pitcher is the planner, the initiator of action. The hitter can only react. If the pitcher, any pitcher, finds a way to disrupt that reaction, he can win. You need a little luck and relentless curiosity.

  By watching baseball up close for so long, and getting to know the men who play it, I can see that I was never like them. My fingers move better on a laptop than they do on a baseball, and I’m lucky I found a skill that allows me to move within their world. But I still wish that my younger self had recognized the baseball for the amazing plaything it is, diving and darting and sailing and sinking, with no instruction manual.

  In a different Pennsylvania town in the 1980s, another right-hander got it. Mike Mussina grew up in Montoursville, high in the mountains near Williamsport. On cold days he would throw against a cinder-block wall in his basement from about 30 feet away, under a dropped ceiling about six feet, eight inches high. He liked to experiment, and while he couldn’t come up with much, he knew what he was missing and how he could find it.

  “Listen, I didn’t leave high school with a fastball, curveball, slider, change, sinker—I had a fastball and a lazy curveball, that was it,” Mussina told me in the summer of 2016, over lunch at Johnson’s Café in Montoursville, where he still lives. “I came from small-town America. I didn’t see anybody else that did anything that I wanted to be able to do. But when I got to college and got to pro ball, now there’s other guys out there—Man, that’s a pretty good slider, I wonder how he does that? That’s a pretty good curveball, I’d love to be able to do that. And so you’re looking at other people, you’re stealing ideas and seeing if you can do it.”

  The Orioles drafted Mussina in the twentieth round out of high school, in 1987, but he wanted to learn more, on and off the mound. He hates to travel but chose Stanford University and graduated in three years. The Orioles chose him again in 1990, this time in the first round, and the next year he was in the majors. He stayed for 18 seasons by constantly evolving.

  Mussina doubts that many pitchers will last as long as he did, because there’s less incentive to innovate. Pitchers throw harder, but they’re not trained or expected to work deep into games. If they were, he believes, they’d have to develop more pitches to keep the same hitters guessing. Then, as their best stuff fades with age, they’d have other pitches to use.

  If a starting pitcher does his job, Mussina believes, he should win half his starts. That was his logic long before he finished with 270 victories in 536 starts. But there’s a catch: the quality of a pitcher’s stuff will vary from game to game. In a few starts it will be crisp; in a few others it will be flat. Most of the time, he’ll have just enough to compete.

  What made Mussina great, his peers believed, is that he always had so many options, so many different pitches to grind his way through a start when he wasn’t at his best. This is how he described his thought process:

  “Boy, there’s so many variables involved in the equation that you can’t even discuss it, almost,” he said, then does so at length. “It’s not like there’s nobody on base every time—there’s guys in scoring position, nobody out, crowd’s going crazy. You think, ‘OK, I screwed up, we can’t go with A. What’s B, what’s C, what’s D?’

  “Who’s hitting? Is he hot or cold? Where are the base runners? What’s the situation? Where are we in the game? Are we on the road? Are we at home? Is it
nighttime? Is it daytime? What has he done the other two at-bats? Let’s say it’s the seventh inning. Where he’s at in the box? How’d he look taking that pitch, or how’d he look fouling that pitch off?

  “There’s all these things going on in your head. And then you take in all this outside input and you say to yourself, ‘Yeah—but I don’t feel good with that pitch.’ Because your brain tells you, ‘Look, you should throw this,’ but I haven’t thrown one of those for a strike in four innings. Eventually you just have to have enough balls to say, ‘Screw it, I’ve got to do it the way I should do it, and whatever happens, happens.’ I can’t just throw fastballs because he knows I don’t have a good enough changeup today, or he knows I don’t feel good with my slider today. He doesn’t really know that. All he knows is that I have these five pitches I can throw. He doesn’t really know that I don’t feel good about this one. He may know that I don’t look like I have great command because I have three walks already and I usually don’t walk anybody, but he doesn’t know that I don’t feel good with my changeup—so let’s throw it anyway.

  “That’s the kind of stuff you think about, and it’s not planned. It’s just experience. You just have to do it. But there’s so many variables. We could talk for months about variables when you’re trying to figure out what to throw.”

  * * *

  ————

  Those variables consumed me for three years. Wherever I went, in my travels as the national baseball writer for The New York Times, I sought people who could help me tell the story of every pitch. How did the great ones learn? How did their pitches move? When and why did they use them? What made them work?

  I settled on 10: the slider, the fastball, the curveball, the knuckleball, the splitter, the screwball, the sinker, the changeup, the spitball, and the cutter. Mussina, who taught me more about pitching than anyone else I covered in 12 years as a beat writer, isn’t sure there are only 10.

  “There might be 10 defined, different things,” he says. “But every guy that throws it is different. My sinker and Kevin Brown’s sinker aren’t the same. Not the same pitch. When it’s going through the strike zone and the hitter’s trying to hit it, my sinker and his sinker are not doing the same sinking. My curveball and somebody else’s curveball? They’re not the same. They may be technically the same, but when it’s going through the hitting zone and somebody’s trying to hit it—to the guy in the box, it’s not the same. Mo’s cutter and my cutter aren’t the same thing. I call it that and he calls it that, but it doesn’t do the same thing. So is there really a limit, a number, to how many pitches there are? Like I said, I was out there trying to invent stuff.”

  There is, indeed, no limit to the kinds of options available to a pitcher, or how he can use them. Lance McCullers Jr., who called Mussina one of his favorite pitchers to watch, threw 24 curveballs in a row to close out the American League Championship Series for Houston in 2017. He knows the spin rates of all his pitches, and studies their movement on an X-Y axis after every start. But by reading his stuff in the moment, he pumped curve after curve with a pennant on the line. There was no rule against it, only convention.

  “No one would be like, ‘Oh my gosh, he threw 24 fastballs in a row,’ ” McCullers told me later, clutching a champagne bottle in the clubhouse. “No one would say that. But this game continues to evolve. A couple of years from now, it may not be so crazy to think about.”

  The pitches are the DNA of baseball, the fundamental coding of the game. Joe Maddon, the Cubs’ manager, says the sport could easily be called “pitching,” because the pitcher controls everything. He is the most influential player on the field, by far, but he can’t play every day. That factor, more than any other, makes baseball so interesting.

  A major league pitcher is part boxer and part magician; if he’s not punching you in the face, he’s swiping a quarter from behind your ear. If you ever square him up, you’d better savor it. Even in batting practice, the world’s best hitters tap harmless grounders and punch lazy fly balls. In the heat of competition, every hit is an exquisite anomaly.

  * * *

  ————

  Playing baseball—as a pitcher or a hitter—eventually just got too hard for me. I played through high school, but by then I was well into this career. In seventh grade, I started jotting down my thoughts and opinions about the game, copying the pages and stapling them into a magazine. From early 1988 through early 1995, I published 11 issues a year, every month except January, so I could study for exams. I conducted my first interview—with Pat Combs, a Phillies pitcher—the day after my fifteenth birthday.

  The press box was the ultimate learning lab. Instead of asking pitchers how I should grip a slider, I asked writers how they crafted their stories, how they asked the right questions, how they found their ideas. Sometimes, they reported on me. One winter day in 1990, the ABC affiliate in town, WPVI, sent its human-interest correspondent to meet me at school and drive me home for a feature story. His name was Tug McGraw.

  “Is that Joe in front of us?” he asked on our drive.

  “Joe?”

  “Joe Mama!”

  Tug was a scamp, an affable rascal who named his pitches and wrote a children’s book, Lumpy, from the perspective of a baseball. In second grade, when the teacher told us to write a letter to a famous person, I wrote to Tug and invited him to my birthday party. He didn’t come, alas, but he did send back an autographed photo with the inscription, “Best of luck in school and sports, pal.” He also returned the letter and signed that, too. Always with a smiley face.

  Digging through files at the Hall of Fame library in Cooperstown, New York, I found a column on McGraw from 1977 by Bill Lyon, an elegant writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer who inspired and mentored me. He spoke with McGraw about the art of pitching, and McGraw held a baseball as they talked. His passion all but singed the yellowed newsprint.

  “You know, if somebody called me at four in the morning and said, ‘Hey, let’s go out and play some catch,’ I’d do it,” McGraw said. “I love this little thing.”

  If there’s anything in life more endearing than enthusiasm, I’ve never found it. I’ve seen a lot in baseball, and I’m proud to say I’m not jaded. Neither are the hundreds of folks who gave me their time and insights for this book. We all love this little thing, this miracle: baseball.

  Tyler Kepner

  Wilton, Connecticut

  THE SLIDER

  A Little Bitty Dot

  I can pinpoint the single happiest moment of my childhood. On October 8, 1983, when I was eight years old, the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the National League pennant at Veterans Stadium. Everyone in the stands chanted “Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!” On our way home, my dad let me honk the horn of his Chevette, like the other revelers on Broad Street. It was the best traffic jam ever.

  Steve Carlton won the game, just as he had won the World Series clincher three years earlier, when I was too young to notice. In between he claimed his fourth Cy Young Award, a record at the time, leading the majors in wins and strikeouts and mesmerizing me completely. When I had tickets on his day to pitch, I would scramble to the front row near the first base dugout to watch him get loose, staring up in awe. He would bring his hands together, dip them down by his belt, and then raise them up near his head. He’d drop them lower as he turned, hiking his right knee up around his chest. For a moment, he’d curl the ball in his left hand, down behind his left thigh, before whipping it up and around for the pitch. Power and grace, personified.

  I would imitate this windup at home, in the mirror, where I could be left-handed, too. I pitched like Carlton in Little League, right down to his facial twitches. I collected every baseball card that ever featured him, scoring his rookie card for $75 from a cash-strapped friend who had just gotten his driver’s license. Thirty-two has always been my favorite number. I named the family dog Lefty.
<
br />   I met Carlton in 1989, his first year of retirement, at a charity signing at the Vet. I had just finished my middle school baseball career, and he signed my jersey, right above the 32 on the back. I didn’t tell him that I wanted to be a sportswriter.

  For most of his career, Carlton didn’t talk to the media at all. To a young fan, that only added to his mystique. He loosened up later in his career, but not much. When I started this project, I wanted to talk to Carlton more than anyone else. We connected by phone, and this is the first thing he said: “So you’re writing a book. Don’t you know people don’t read anymore?”

  If that was a brushback pitch, I ducked.

  “Well,” I replied, “my first goal in life was to be you, and that didn’t work out. So I’m going with my strengths.”

  He laughed and then talked for a while about the slider, the pitch he threw better than anyone else.

  “I always had a little bitty dot on the ball,” Carlton said. “If it was big as a quarter or half a dollar, that was a ring, or a circle, and hitters could see that. When I threw it, I wanted the spin real tight on it, so the ball is blurry like a fastball and you can’t see the dot. The intent is to fool the hitter as long as you can, so he has to commit to a fastball, so he has to come out and try to get it, because he can’t sit back on a fastball and hit it. You have to commit to the fastball—and that’s where you want him.”

  * * *

  ————

  The slider is faster than the curveball and easier to control, with a tighter break, shaped not like a loop but like a slash, moving down and away toward the pitcher’s glove side. The trick, as Carlton said, is in the disguise, making a hitter swing over a pitch he thinks is a fastball. A dot—formed by the side-spinning rotation of the seams—would seem to telegraph the pitch. But some hitters call it a myth.