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  “I never saw it,” says Matt Williams, who had 7,000 at-bats in the major leagues. “Guys have said, ‘Well, all you have to do is look for the red dot and you’ll know that it’s a slider.’ You’ve got a fifth of a second, right? I couldn’t do it.”

  He is hardly alone. Batters hit just .233 in at-bats ending with sliders in 2017, their worst average against any pitch. The Pirates’ Chris Archer, who has one of baseball’s best sliders, gave a simple reason why: “Of all the true breaking balls—slurve, curve, slider—it looks the most like a fastball for the longest.”

  The origins of the slider, as we know it now, are murky. In 1987, hundreds of former players responded to surveys for a book called Players’ Choice. They answered many questions, including the best slider of their day. Pete Donohue, a three-time 20-game winner for the Reds in the 1920s, could not give a name: “We didn’t have one when I pitched,” he replied.

  Hmm—but what is this pitch, if not a slider? “It was a narrow curve that broke away from the batter and went in just like a fastball,” said the great Cy Young, describing a pitch he threw in a career that ended in 1911.

  Contemporaries of Young, like Chief Bender, an ace of the early Philadelphia A’s, probably threw it, too. Bender’s name virtually demanded he not throw straight, and he was, you might say, the chief bender of pitches in his era. Listing his repertoire for Baseball Magazine in 1911, Bender first mentioned his “fast curves,” which would seem pretty close to what we now call a slider. George Blaeholder and George Uhle, whose careers ended in 1936, were early pioneers. Blaeholder, who pitched mostly for the Browns, had sweeping action on his fastball that was said to baffle Jimmie Foxx. Uhle, a 200-game winner, developed the slider late in his career, after his prime with the 1920s Indians. It startled Harry Heilmann, a Detroit teammate who was hitting off Uhle in batting practice.

  “What kind of curve is that?” Heilmann asked.

  “Hey, that’s not a curve,” Uhle replied. “That ball was sliding.”

  Waite Hoyt, an admiring teammate and the ace of the fabled 1927 Yankees, compared its action to a car skidding on ice. He added the pitch himself and credited Uhle for inventing it. Uhle told author Walter Langford that, as far as he knew, he threw it first.

  “At least I happened to come up with it while I was in Detroit,” he said. “And I gave it its name because it just slides across. It’s just a fastball you turn loose in a different way. When I first started throwing it, the batters thought I was putting some kind of stuff on the ball to make it act that way.”

  Red Ruffing used a slider in his Hall of Fame career, which included four 20-win seasons in a row for the Yankees from 1936 through 1939. In that final season, the National League MVP was the Reds’ Bucky Walters, a former third baseman who had learned a slider a few years earlier from Bender, a fellow Philadelphian. Walters led his league in all the major categories in 1939, and the next year lifted the Reds to their only World Series title between the Black Sox and the Big Red Machine—a span of 55 seasons.

  In 1943, another MVP threw the slider: the Yankees’ Spud Chandler, who shut out the Cardinals to clinch that fall’s World Series. Chandler had learned the pitch from Ruffing, whose influence Rob Neyer and Bill James cited as a reason the slider soon made a breakthrough. The other factors, they said, were Walters’s success and the fact that the pitch now had a name; it was not just another breaking ball. After three years at war, Ted Williams noticed the trend:

  We began to see sliders in the league around 1946 or 1947, and by 1948 all the good pitchers had one. Before that there were pitchers whose curves acted like sliders. Hank Borowy threw his curve hard and it sank and didn’t break too much, so it acted like a slider. Johnny Allen’s was the same way. Claude Passeau’s fastball acted like a slider.

  Williams called the slider “the greatest pitch in baseball,” easy for a pitcher to learn and control. He worried about grounding the slider into the infield shift, reasoning that the only way he could put it in the air was by looking for it. Most hitters are late on the fastball if they sit on the slider, but Williams was not like most hitters. He batted .419 off the Browns’ Ned Garver and .377 off the Tigers’ Jim Bunning, who otherwise thrived with sliders.

  “The big thing the slider did was give the pitcher a third pitch right away,” Williams wrote in his book, My Turn at Bat. “With two pitches you might guess right half the time. With three, your guessing goes down proportionately.”

  Williams believed the popularity of the slider helped drive averages down. Bob Feller, the best pitcher Williams said he ever saw, had fiddled with the slider in 1941, and perfected it by the time he returned from the war. Mixing a slider with his devastating fastball and curve in 1946, Feller struck out 348—then considered an American League record. He described the pitch like this:

  It can be especially effective for a fast ball pitcher because it comes up to the plate looking like a fast ball. It has less speed, but not enough for the hitter to detect the slightly reduced speed early in the pitch.

  The slider darts sharply just before it reaches the plate, away from a right-handed hitter when thrown by a right-handed pitcher. It doesn’t break much—four to six inches—but because it breaks so late, the hitter has trouble catching up to it.

  I didn’t invent the slider—I merely popularized it. The pitch has been around since Christy Mathewson’s time.

  The slider’s transformative power showed up in Feller’s statistics, and in his clubhouse. Phil Rizzuto said that in his rookie season, 1941, the only pitcher he faced who threw sliders regularly was Al Milnar of the Indians. Feller was on that team, and so was Mel Harder, who taught the slider a few years later to Bob Lemon, who went on to the Hall of Fame. The logic behind the pitch was so easy to understand, and the pitch itself so simple to learn—generally, but not always: off-center grip, pressure applied to the middle finger, and possibly a late, subtle wrist snap—yet there remained an odd kind of backlash against it into the 1950s.

  Pitchers threw fastballs and curveballs, sometimes a trick pitch like a knuckleball, and a spitball if they could conceal it. The conventional wisdom was that learning a slider would harm a pitcher’s curveball. A curveball demands a different arm action—wrapping the wrist and pulling hard, straight down, to generate furious topspin. Throw too many sliders and you might lose the feel for staying on top of the curve.

  “If you have a good curve, it’s foolish to add the slider,” said Sal Maglie, a curveball master who was turned away from using a slider by Uhle for that reason. “But all the young pitchers today are lazy. They all look for the easy way out, and the slider gives ’em that pitch.”

  Maglie said this in 1962, in an Esquire article that included his assertion that Roger Maris had feasted off sliders while blasting 61 homers the year before. To Maglie, expansion and “all the second-line pitchers in the league throwing sliders” had added at least 10 homers to Maris’s total. The pitch was widely derided as a “nickel curve”—a breaking ball, yes, but a cheap knockoff of the real thing. That term is long gone, but “cement mixer,” which describes a lazy and obvious slider, persists today.

  The critics of the slider were blind to its impact. In his book Head Game, Roger Kahn asserted that the slider “saved major league baseball from becoming extended batting practice” after the offensive boom of the 1930s. That era had its masters—Lefty Grove, Dizzy Dean, Carl Hubbell—but few others were much better than ordinary. The slider gave pitchers a weapon they could learn and control with relative ease, a pitch that looked like a fastball much longer than the curveball did.

  “I could always tell a curveball from a fastball in the first 30 feet of flight,” Stan Musial told Kahn. “I picked up the speed of the ball and I knew who was pitching and I put the two of them together and I’d know just what the ball was going to do. Break or hop. The slider was tougher. I got my share of hits off sliders. But during the ye
ars I played for the Cardinals, the slider changed the game.”

  Musial played from 1941 through 1963. By then, a contemporary from his playing days, Johnny Sain, was an avid teacher of the pitch, winning pennants and building 20-game winners with startling regularity.

  * * *

  ————

  Sain did not invent the slider in his long career as a pitcher and a coach, or use it very much as a pitcher. But he probably studied and imparted the principles of spin better than any coach ever has. Forever curious, Sain was the leading pitching mind of his era. He had seen the slider’s rise, understood its impact, and spread its gospel like nobody before him.

  “He was a genius in his field,” says Roland Hemond, who hired Sain to instruct his White Sox pitchers in the 1970s. “Johnny Sain was a master.”

  Sain is remembered best for a rhyme—Spahn and Sain and pray for rain, a shorthand version of a poem by Gerry Hern, the sports editor of The Boston Post in 1948. Sain and Warren Spahn were the aces of the Braves’ staff and carried the team to the pennant, the culmination of a three-year run in which Sain completed 62 of his 65 victories. He began the 1948 World Series by shutting out Feller and the Indians, the highlight of an unlikely 11-year playing career.

  “I spent four years in the lowest minor leagues, the D leagues, and I never had overpowering speed,” Sain told The New York Times in 1968. “So I kept practicing my breaking stuff, big curves and short ones. I started in 1936, and by the time I came up to the big leagues with Boston in 1942, I was throwing sliders.”

  Sain pitched mostly in relief that season, without distinction. He left for three years as a Navy pilot in World War II, spending the downtime building up his arm and experimenting with angles and pitches. He came back throwing breaking balls almost exclusively—90 percent of the time, he once guessed—and his creativity served him well when he moved into coaching, a fitting profession for the son of an auto mechanic. An open mind and skilled hands compelled Sain to innovate.

  As a Yankees coach in 1961, he created a spinning device, first by impaling an apple with a television antenna. Sain could hold the antenna in one hand and twirl the apple with the other, tilting it this way or that to see the spin from various angles. He liked the idea so much that he transferred it to a baseball, drilling a wooden handle into the center and calling it The Spinner. Sain spent thousands of dollars developing his invention and sent it to the United States Patent Office. A Yankees pitcher, Luis Arroyo, called it the best tool he had ever seen.

  “I’m most concerned about movement on the ball,” Sain once said. “What makes it fool the hitter? Why does it do what it does?”

  The Spinner showed pitchers how. Just by flicking their fingers on the ball as they held and moved the handle, they could see the way it spun. The more they toyed with it, the more knowledge they gained of their craft. Aspiring pitchers could purchase a Spinner by writing to Sain at PO Box 487 in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas. His pupils on major league teams could use them whenever they pleased, and if a pitcher got released, Sain often gave him a Spinner to take with him. Chances are Sain would soon follow him out the door.

  As a coach, he bounced from the Yankees to the Twins to the Tigers to the White Sox, succeeding everywhere but doing so with independence that irritated the established order. He traveled with dozens of books and motivational audiotapes for his pitchers. He was their advocate, not the manager’s friend, upending the logic of the day by emphasizing throwing—and experimenting with spin, even at moderate effort levels—over the rote running exercises that most pitchers hated.

  “His big deal was turn and pull,” says Jim Kaat, who thrived under Sain in Minnesota and Chicago. “So we would practice from 45 feet, straight backspin. Then he’d say ‘turn and pull, turn and pull,’ and it’d be like Mariano Rivera’s cutter, and then we’d turn it a little more. He’d show us with the device. Every day we would throw.

  “We’d play games—‘OK, throw this as slow as you can and make it break as big as you can,’ almost like Steve Hamilton’s ‘Folly Floater’ [a version of Rip Sewell’s Eephus pitch from the 1940s]. Then he’d say, ‘OK, now let’s put a little more velocity to it, let’s see how short we can make it break and how hard we can throw it, without trying to muscle it.’ He taught us how to make the ball do things. Velocity was never an issue.”

  The weapon most pitchers learned from Sain was not shaped like the arcing curveball, and certainly thrown much harder than the blooper Hamilton used for the Yankees in the 1960s. It had a two-plane break—over and down—which distinguished it from the cutter Rivera would perfect, which veered more than it broke. Yet it was not thrown as hard as the vicious sliders that Bob Gibson and Carlton were beginning to unleash on the majors.

  Call it a short curve, or maybe a slurve, but basically it acted like a slider, and Sain’s pupils used it to dominate the 1960s and early 1970s. All of these pitchers won 20 games under his guidance: Kaat, Whitey Ford, Mudcat Grant, Denny McLain, Jim Bouton, Al Downing, Jim Perry, Wilbur Wood, Stan Bahnsen. Later, as a minor league instructor with the Braves, Sain would mentor Leo Mazzone, who coached the celebrated Atlanta staffs of the 1990s. Tom Glavine always remembered Sain’s advice on breaking balls: impart spin but think fastball, to protect your elbow through the delivery.

  Too often, pitchers try to generate break with their elbows and forearms. The safer, more effective way is to do it with the wrist and hand. The former pitcher Jerry Dipoto, who would go on to be a general manager, remembers a daily drill that emphasized this. For 15 minutes every day, he and his Cleveland teammates had to throw all their pitches with a four-seam fastball grip. They would shape their pitches and create different breaks with their wrist, hand, and finger pressure.

  “Creating break and spin is just about creating a fast hand,” Dipoto says. “If you have a fast hand, you’re gonna create movement. And the easiest way to work on training a fast hand is just by using it.”

  When the pitchers finally applied their grips, they would amaze themselves with the action they could impart. They would also know why they did it—and when a pitcher understands the way his pitch spins, Dipoto says, it’s on. The pitchers had a name for this daily exercise in the art of the spinning baseball. They called it the Johnny Sain Game.

  * * *

  ————

  Bob Gibson decided to become a professional athlete at age 11, in 1947, the year Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Gibson had lost his father before he was born, and his brother, Josh, who was 15 years older, helped raise him. Josh built a pitching mound at Bob’s elementary school, and while he knew sports, he did not know a slider. Bob, therefore, did not know it either. He just threw it better than anyone ever had.

  “I thought it was a curveball, because I didn’t really understand the dynamics of all those pitches,” Gibson says. “Since day one, I had always thrown a slider, and as I got bigger and stronger, I threw it harder. But I always threw it the same way.”

  His Triple-A manager for the Cardinals, Johnny Keane, told Gibson that the pitch he called a curveball was actually a slider. To be a curveball, he would have to start with his hand on top of the ball, and deliver it with a rolling wrist. Gibson could do that, but, he says, “it was slow and just kind of a flopper.”

  That was not his pitch. His pitch was a sharp, darting missile at 92 miles an hour, held with his index and middle fingers together between the seams, at their narrowest point, and his thumb on the seam below.

  “It didn’t really break that big, it was just really hard,” Gibson says. “And I thought the harder I threw it the better it’d be, and that was true.”

  In popular lore, Gibson’s heat and competitiveness are often mistaken for head-hunting. Yet he played 17 years and never led the league in hit batters. His slider was a big reason for the 102 he did hit, and the many close calls.

  “Guys used to laugh at me all the time when
I said they hit themselves,” Gibson says. “They go, ‘Yeah, right.’ But no, they would. Because when you go guessing for a ball outside and you go out there to get it, especially with that slider out there a lot to right-handers, they would start out there to get that ball. Well, if I threw a fastball inside, especially a two-seamer, it’s gonna hit them. And I wouldn’t acknowledge, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I would never acknowledge that. I just said, ‘Gimme another ball, let’s go,’ so they thought I was throwing at everybody. And that was OK.”

  The Hall of Famer Billy Williams, who hit left-handed, handled Gibson fairly well. He liked the ball down and explained that Gibson’s slider would sometimes drop squarely into his bat path. If he could extend his arms, Williams had a chance. That’s how he hit 10 homers off Gibson, the most by any opposing hitter.

  “But here,” Williams adds, placing his hand a few inches from his belt, “you’ve got to get out in front. He’d throw a fastball to get you out in front, and you’re way out here.”

  That pitch, the one that tied up lefties, was Gibson’s stiff-wrist slider, which acted like a cutter and shattered many bats. He would break his wrist for a more sweeping slash away from righties, holding them to a .204 average, with a .287 slugging percentage, across 17 seasons.

  Gibson’s masterpiece was 1968, when he resolved to use the slider more, especially to left-handers, with catcher Tim McCarver’s encouragement. Gibson authored one of the greatest seasons a pitcher has ever had, going 22–9 with a 1.12 earned run average, the lowest ever. He completed 28 of his 34 starts and was never removed from a game in the middle of an inning. He set a World Series strikeout record in Game 1 against Detroit, with 17, and overall went 7–2 with a 1.89 ERA in the World Series, twice winning MVP.