A good post. Burning a bullpen isn’t just the innings vactually pitched, it’s getting people up and throwing and then sitting them, then maybe getting them hot again. I think it’s much better than it used to be, generally. They still burn out after a while, especially the non-dedicated spot guys, who get up and down more.
Mariano used to throw a weighted ball for part of his warm up, if I recall.
The first ‘dedicated’ relief pitcher in the Hall was Hoyt Wilhelm. Ted Williams always swore that he had the best knuckler he ever saw. And that’s the feeliest of the feel pitches, it’s just on when it’s on and off when it’s off. And he didn’t have any time to get the feel of it, as he was mostly relieving.
“Wilhelm spent seven seasons in the minors before getting to the majors with the New York Giants in 1952. He’d been a starter throughout his minor league career, but Giants manager Leo Durocher moved him to the bullpen. All Wilhelm did was lead the National League in ERA and appearances as a rookie.
A few years later, Orioles manager Paul Richards gave Wilhelm the chance to be starter again after he came over from the Indians in August 1958. In just his third start for Baltimore, Wilhelm threw a no-hitter against the Yankees on Sept. 20, striking out eight. He remained in the Orioles rotation in 1959 and won the AL’s ERA title, though he moved back to the bullpen again the following season. Richards helped make this success possible by devising a larger catcher’s mitt that was 41 inches in diameter—later reduced to 38 by rule—for Wilhelm’s receivers to use, cutting down the passed balls that plagued him and so many other knuckleballers.
Wilhelm settled in as the premier relief pitcher in an era dominated by pitching. He posted ERAs under 2.00 in five consecutive seasons from 1964-68 with the White Sox, doing all of it after his 40th birthday. While some marveled at Wilhelm’s longevity—he was the majors’ oldest player from 1966 through the end of his career in 1972—he himself was quite pragmatic about it. He took care of himself, and he recognized that the knuckleball wasn’t as taxing on his arm as conventional pitches would be.
Wilhelm also believed that the knuckleball wasn’t a pitch that could be taught. A pitcher either had a knack for it or he didn’t. Wilhelm certainly did, perhaps better than anyone ever has.
“He had the best knuckleball you’d ever want to see,” said Brooks Robinson. “He knew where it was going when he threw it, but when he got two strikes on you, he’d break out one that even he didn’t know where it was going.”
He also got the purple heart at the battle of the bulge. Pitched in 1,070 games with a career ERA of 2.52.
FReegards
Hoyt Wilhelm was in his own class, of course, but I've always noticed that knuckleball pitchers at once fascinate and unnerve baseball people. Matter of fact, the year R.A. Dickey was gunning for and won the Cy Young Award---he was the first knuckleballer to win it---I did a little run-down (for my blog Throneberry Fields Forever) on how pitchers who were either pure knuckleballers or featured the pitch as a regular part of their repertoire did in Cy Young voting. I listed and discussed these pitchers in the order in which their careers began:
Wilhelm---Never factored in Cy Young voting. Though he did once inspire Leo Durocher (who managed him on the Giants) to regret making a relief pitcher of him, when Wilhelm opened 1959 as a starter and with a 9-0 record astride an ERA below 1.00: "If I'd ever had any idea he could go the distance like that I’d have used him as a starter when I had him on the Giants. Maybe I made a big mistake."
Al Worthington: Like Wilhelm, Worthington put in time as a starter before being moved permanently to relief while with the Giants. He never factored in any Cy Young voting, and he used the knuckleball in hand with an array of other off-speed pitches—he didn’t go to the pitch as more of his money pitch until 1966. Once he settled in in Minnesota (he was sold to the Twins by the Reds in 1964) he personified the better-with-age adage. He was one of the American League’s best relief pitchers from there until his retirement after the 1969 season, a year after he led the American League with 18 saves.
Worthington made a reputation as a man of integrity even when it cost him Show time; he once opted to stay in the minors rather than look the other way when the White Sox (to whom he belonged in 1960) were known to be stealing signs rapaciously enough. (He didn’t return to the majors until 1964.) When he was 38, Worthington came into a game against the Senators and pitched eight and two thirds innings of two-hit relief.
Bob Purkey: The knuckleballers didn’t even show up in the top four or five in Cy voting until 1962, when Purkey finished third in the vote (Hall of Famer Don Drysdale won the award) after going 23-5 and leading the National League with an .815 winning percentage. Bear in mind: from 1956 through 1966 (when Sandy Koufax won his staggering second consecutive and third overall), the Cy Young Award was given to one pitcher across the board.
Think about that: In 1962, Cy Young Award voters thought Bob Purkey—whose preponderant pitch was a pitch many still think either a gimmick or an illegitimate pitch—was the third-best pitcher in baseball, and some future sabermetricians (Bill James among them) would come to argue that Purkey might have been slightly more worthy of the 1962 Cy than Drysdale actually was. (It kind of makes you wonder, too, what might have been if Wilhelm, arguably a better pitcher than Purkey, hadn’t been sent back to the bullpen after 1959.)
A lot of the possible factor: Drysdale’s team went to the wire for the pennant, tying the Giants at season’s end—they lost in a three-game playoff to the Giants—while Purkey’s Reds finished third, six games out, and Cy Young voters in those years were usually inclined to think about pennant winners in hand with individual performances. The actual or perceived prejudice against the knuckleball may even have been the reason why, following his 1952-53 military service, it took Purkey four seasons to establish himself as a useful regular pitcher.
He was a very late bloomer, as it turned out. The Pirates signed him in 1948 (Purkey was a hometown signing), keeping him in the minors until he was drafted for military service (in the same seasons in which the Army kept Willie Mays), then used him mostly in relief from 1954-57, before trading him to the Reds after the 1957 season (for a no-name, Don Gross). In Cincinnati, Purkey became a rotation mainstay and a three-time All-Star, and was one of the keys to the Reds’ 1961 pennant. He hadn’t made the majors until he was 27 (two years younger than Wilhelm on arrival), he wasn’t thought of as a regular pitcher until he was 28, and his 1962 would be his career year and his last good year.
Purkey retired in 1966, after he had a quiet swan song with his first club, the Pirates. (The Reds traded him to the Cardinals after the 1964 season; he pitched usefully if unspectacularly for the Cardinals until they sold him to the Pirates coming out of spring training 1966.) He became a television sportscaster for a time in Pittsburgh, then launched a successful insurance business, before dying of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at 78 in 2008.
Phil Niekro: Knucksie actually finished second to fellow Hall of Famer Tom Seaver in the 1969 National League Cy Young voting. In 1978-79, after about a decade of earning no such votes, Niekro finished sixth in the league’s Cy voting each season, even as he posted a 21-20 record in 1979. In 1982, he led the National League in winning percentage and finished fifth in the Cy Young voting, the last time Niekro would finish in the award’s top ten vote.
Niekro would pitch 20 seasons for the Braves before they released him to be signed by the Yankees, where he made his final All-Star team; he’d win his 300th game during his Yankee days, not to mention setting the record Jamie Moyer would break in due course—the oldest man in baseball to throw a shutout. He spent time in Cleveland and Toronto before having a farewell tour of sorts with the Braves, retiring to manage an all-women’s baseball team and serve as sports advisor to a toy and game manufacturer.
Classic Niekro story: In his Yankee days, Lou Piniella was his manager. One night, Piniella and a couple of reporters were schmoozing in the Yankee hotel bar when Niekro walked through the lobby, well past the team curfew. When one of the reporters asked Piniella after that, he cracked, “Hell, I can’t tell Knucksie to go to bed—he’s older than I am!”
Wilbur Wood: Already a ten-year veteran as a relief pitcher, Wood was converted to starting by the White Sox in 1971. He finished third that year’s American League Cy Young voting (he went 22-13 with an astonishing 1.91 ERA), second in the following season’s vote, and fifth in 1973 . . . when he turned the unusual feat of winning 24 (leading the league for the second straight season) and losing 20. Wood would go from there to hang up a fourth straight 20+-win season before hanging up a second 20-game losing season.
For four years following his conversion to starting Wood was one of the best pitchers in the American League. His career was all but ended when Detroit’s Ron LeFlore smashed his kneecap with a low line drive in 1976. Wood underwent surgery and returned in due course, but he was never the same pitcher again and retired in 1978. Among his unusual feats are included a 1973 accomplishment in which he started the carryover of a suspended 21-inning game and won with five innings’ work, then started the regularly-scheduled game (against the Indians) and pitched a shutout.
Joe Niekro: Knucksie’s brother was one reason why the Hall of Famer finished sixth in the National League’s 1979 Cy voting: brother Joe finished second. (Bruce Sutter, another Hall of Famer and a relief pitcher in the bargain, won the award.) The following season, the younger Niekro finished fourth. He would never again see a top-ten Cy Young vote finish for himself. He wasn’t even close to big brother as a Hall of Fame candidate, but Joe Niekro did forge a very long and distinguished career.
Brother Joe, alas, is probably remembered most for a hilarious incident in 1987, when he toiled for the Twins. (He’d eventually make his only World Series appearance on that team.) During one 1987 game, umpire Steve Palermo caught Niekro with an emery board in his pocket. Niekro reached into his pockets and yanked them out with the board flying out to the ground, making blooper highlight reels for years to come and getting suspended ten games after then-American League president Dr. Bobby Brown refused to buy his story that he filed his nails between innings in the dugout.
Niekro retired when the Twins released him in 1988. He died of a brain aneurysm in 2006.
Classic anecdote: When fabled broadcaster Bob Uecker was elected to the Hall of Fame as a Frick Award winner, Uecker's hilarious induction speech (Willie Mays was in tears throughout from laughter) included a memory of catching Phil Niekro the day he faced brother Joe for the first time as the game's starting pitchers. Referring to the erratic knuckleball travel, Uecker cracked: "Their parents were sitting behind the plate. I saw more of their parents during that game than they saw of them that weekend."
Phil Niekro busted his gut laughing at that one.
Charlie Hough: Never finished in the top ten Cy Young Award voting; only ever made one All-Star team. He’s probably remembered best as being one of the three pitchers Reggie Jackson abused while hitting three straight home runs, on three straight pitches, in Game Six of the 1977 World Series. (Perhaps speaking of a good nature, Hough has been known to autograph photos showing Jackson hitting that bomb.) Like most knuckleballers, Hough was durable; he retired in 1994 as the last active major league player to have been born in the 1940s.
He’s since made his way as a pitching coach, including brief stints in that job for the Dodgers and the Mets.
Tom Candiotti: Like Hough, Candiotti never finished in the top ten Cy Young voting. He had a respectable career, though. And he did, however, get to portray a Hall of Fame knuckleballer on film after he retired from baseball.
Candiotti portrayed Hoyt Wilhelm in 61*, Billy Crystal’s loving if occasionally factually-challenged revisitation of the Roger Maris-Mickey Mantle home run chase of 1961. The scene in question: Baltimore manager Paul Richards brought Wilhelm in late to face Maris, in a game the Yankees had sewn up to clinch the American League pennant but in which Maris had already hit number 59 . . . and might yet have another in him, since he’d hit several long fouls and a to-the-wall fly out otherwise. (Maris was trying to hit number 60 at least, under commissioner Ford Frick’s arbitrary—and disingenuous—deadline of 154 games.)
Playing Wilhelm, Candiotti cocked his head to one side, with a look of sober determination on his face, as Richards threatened to fine him $5,000 if he threw Maris anything but knuckleballs. Maris (played by Barry Pepper, an actor whose physical resemblance to the real Roger Maris was stupefying) grounded out feebly back to the box, Wilhelm (Candiotti) picking it up toward the first base line and—with an unmistakeably somber look on his face—tagging Maris out gently on the chest.
Tim Wakefield: Got to finish third in the Cy Young voting in his third full major league season; never got anywhere near the top ten in Cy Young voting for the rest of his career. He had a long and somewhat distinguished career as an innings-eater, though, and he was one of the most popular Red Sox, yet he only ever got one World Series assignment in the two to which he went.
He's remembered most, unfortunately, for the gallant relief duel he mounted against Mariano Rivera in Game Seven of the 2003 American League Championship Series, a duel that ended when Aaron Boone parked Wakefield's first pitch of the bottom of the eleventh in the left field seats for game, set, pennant, and one last Boston heartbreak before the 2004 surreality . . .
A forgotten factoid: Wakefield was actually moved to the Boston bullpen in mid-1999, when Tom Gordon was injured; Wakefield nailed fifteen saves before Derek Lowe became the new Boston closer and Wakefield returned to the starting rotation.
His best game, perhaps: 15 April 2009. Knowing the Boston bullpen had gone eleven innings of relief the previous day, Wakefield convinced manager Terry Francona to leave him in for the distance: I understand the circumstances and I just wanted you to know: Whatever happens, don't take me out; let me keep going.. He took a no-hitter into the eighth inning and ended up going the distance for the win, making him the oldest Red Sox pitcher to pitch a complete game.