Pitching In A Pinch? Dial 1-800-GAYLORD

Lots of people look upon baseball's last several seasons and are not amused. Not everyone enjoys a ball game turned into a batting practise scrimmage. It's not that baseball doesn't have other problems to fix - like salary inflation, revenue sharing, and a division alignment that's all but cut the legs out from under the pennant races. But you could solve all those problems this minute and still have a game distorted by the idea that no one cares about anything but relentless offence. Real baseball fans - those who savour the noble game, not those who can't stand the quiet or the subtleties between home runs - either have or hold with one or another theory as to why, other than the owners' insane ideas about televisibility and cash fattening.

It's the rabbit ball. (Dubious.) It's Frankenhitters turning into tantrum throwers if a pitcher dares to come inside and move them back off the plate. It's wimpy pitchers afraid to come inside, lest a mortified hitter charge the mound or a judicial tyrant behind the plate run them at the first bar of chin music, maestro. (Six of one, half a dozen of the other.) It's pitchers leery of the risk because they know too many of their mates won't back them up if the other guys charge. (Guess how Mo Vaughn made himself persona non grata in the Anaheim Angels' clubhouse, folks. Mets be forewarned.) It's the hitter friendliness of the new yards, a lot of them. (Ironically, over the past few seasons, the park which started the otherwise salutary retopark trend - Camden Yards - would be a pitcher's park as configured now, if only the Baltimore Orioles had some pitching.) It's Roger Clemens, getting away with trying to shish kebab Mike Piazza during the 2000 World Series, because the Mets would have been spanked if even one Yankee uniform was sent on his tail in retribution. Blah-blah, woof-woof.

OK, maybe half or slightly more of the above are true, except maybe the rabbit ball theory. What is true is that the hitters rule the roost, and too many people whose love of the game goes no deeper than a Bob Uecker long ball are bent as best they can on keeping the hitters in power. Now, I love a long bomb into McCovey Cove as much as anyone. But baseball and war have this much in common: Too many bombs wreck too much unnecessarily. And a slap and slugfest a day can be even more sensorily numbing than a pitching duel. With a pitching duel you're seeing more continuous craftsmanship; with a slap and slugfest, you're seeing assault and battery, not workmanship.

These day's a team's batting practise machine has more fortitude than its pitching staff. It also has a better earned run average than the Texas Rangers' pitching staff. Should any of those pitchers have any sense of their own team history, they will pick up the phone and dial 1-800-GAYLORD. It wouldn't hurt a lot of other pitching staffs, either. Balanced baseball may have little hope other than a few stouthearted pitchers greasing some palms - also, some fingertips, sleeves, caps, and anyplace else from which they can get more on the ball than invitations to hit them across the International Date Line.

Maybe it wouldn't matter what you throw Barry Bonds, or even Ichiro Suzuki. Maybe they'll go yard 73 times or pile on 273 hits even if you throw them a shot put. But who passed any law saying you have to let baseball's lawmakers make it easier for them?

Let the nannygoat contingency bleat their heads off about undermining moral revival. Then let's quit pretending and admit it: Baseball fans love outlaws on the field. Especially on the mound. We love few things more than watching hitters cringe and opposing managers snivel when they think a pitcher has more on the ball than his thumb and forefingers. And we love it when we see a pitcher going through whatever fidgety motions he goes through when he wants the big ogre at the plate to think he's about to oil it up and go. If you think I'm spitting in the wind, you don't remember how even Mets fans, if not always the Mets themselves, held a sneaking admiration for Mike Scott's reported scufflaw performances. The only thing bothering us was why Scott didn't have the brains to learn his tricks while he was a Met.

Today's pitchers, most of them, are a bunch of pink squirrels. They're also not Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, or Pedro Martinez, either. They need to know the sacrifices of their elders. Players love talking frozen ropes about those who came before them but that stops when the subject moves beyond salaries that equal Delaware's state budget. Time to tell these pink squirrels on the mound of those who came before them and taught the world about grease under pressure: Hugh Casey, Harry Brecheen, Preacher Roe, Eddie Lopat, Lew Burdette, Whitey Ford (Whitey Ford?), Art Fowler, Bob Purkey, Bo Belinsky, Joe Hoerner, Gaylord Perry, Tommy John, George Frazier ("I don't put any foreign substance on any ball I pitch - everything I use is made in the good old U.S. of A."), Don Sutton, Rick Honeycutt, Rick Rhoden, Mike Scott, Joe (Mr. Sandman) Niekro, Mike Flanagan, and others. Said pink squirrel pitcher now would probably think you're talking about the guys who landed in prehistoric times on a place called Iwo Jima.

Well, there's your opening. The pitcher's mound today is Iwo Jima, and it's begging to be re-taken by enterprising Yanks. Or Mets. Not to mention Rangers, Orioles, and Angels, among others. Even the sainted Atlanta Braves. What the hell is Don Sutton doing up in the broadcast booth instead of down around the mounds? Greg Maddux isn't getting any younger. John Smoltz couldn't hurt from a different kind of Tommy John surgery.

Where have you gone, Gaylord Perry-o? The eyes of Texas ought to be upon you. Last I checked, even Lew Burdette was still alive and well in Florida someplace. Surely he could use the extra income.

On the other hand, the political correctness police would probably lock Burdette up and throw away the key. Burdette's M.O. involved his chewing tobacco - the big Milwaukee Braves righthander of yore would spit into a certain spot on the mound until he had his own little cesspool. (Jay Johnstone, the famous flake who began his career with the Angels as Burdette was winding down his career on the same club, swears by it - and once swore at it, like many other hitters afore him). Burdette could scoop up a load of this toxic waste whenever he bent down to adjust his shoelaces - as he did frequently. "I swear," Johnstone has said, "that when he pitched you could see that sh@t flying all over the place. You'd walk back to the dugout needing a clean shirt. The problem, though, was that you were walking back to the dugout."

If Whitey Ford were healthy (he is said to be battling cancer), maybe he could teach his own version of Lord of the Ring. Ford's favourite trick, after he was nailed throwing a mud ball, was a rasp in his wedding ring. After that one was exposed ("Whitey," Jim Bouton has recorded an umpire telling him, "go on back to the clubhouse. Your jock strap needs fixing. And when you come back, it better be without that ring!"), Whitey went to the buckle ball - his own, or catcher Elston Howard (Howard would catch a low pitch and scrape the ball on the shin guard buckle before throwing it back to Ford). Young pitchers of today, learn something of chutzpah: Whitey Ford's free lance carpentry became such a habit that by his own admission, when he got fed up being rapped around in Old-Timer's Games, he began cutting balls in those games, too.

Or, maybe, some enterprising pitching coach could take a clue from former Oriole pitching coach Ray Miller, who was once confronted by an outraged pitcher after Miller let it slip that this pitcher had a pretty good spitter if he wanted to use it. Miller told him, approximately, that it almost didn't matter if he didn't have it - just letting the word get out that you have it takes a point off your ERA. (Thomas Boswell calls it "hitter hydrophobia" - spitter on the brain, says he.) Meanwhile, wouldn't it be a magnificent discipline test for today's Frankenhitters if, facing a pitcher whose nickname could be Greased Lightning, they had to just bring up the patience to cash in big - as in, what they used to call hitting it on the dry side? (Translation, according to Boswell: wait for the one that doesn't break.)

This could make baseball gobs of fun all over again. Unfortunately, baseball has a pretty skewed sense of job creation. When you've got (presumably) Lew Burdette, Whitey Ford, Gaylord Perry, Bob Purkey, and Tommy John out of work and with knowledge and wisdom to pass on to a generation of ballplayers who think wisdom is the tooth you got knocked out on a play at the plate, you know baseball isn't looking at the big picture. The hitters aren't getting any smaller. Neither are team ERAs. The time for baseball's salivation is now.

I've gotta give you credit. You managed to defend the undefendable. I'm old enough to remember the emery board falling out of a Perry brothers' (I think) back pocket and I still remember how I thought he should be hanging from someone's foul pole. But then again, I've always been a Law & Order type, so maybe I'm not representative of the fans as a whole. George Brett's pine tar incident seemed to make a deeper impression, even though I was much younger at the time. Maybe it was the way he expressed his innocence...

Think of what George Bamberger once called the Staten Island sinkerball as baseball's version of the War On Drugs. Time was when what are now illegal drugs were perfectly legal. Time also was when the wetball was perfectly legal. Time also was that, just like those narsty drugs*, a panicky paranoia prodded baseball to outlaw the spitter for all time, once the incumbent practitioners of the dark art had finished their careers. (To my knowledge, the last known pitcher for whom this "grandfathering" applied was the legendary Burleigh Grimes.)

In the case of the spitter, the catalyst was the Ray Chapman incident - Chapman having been, of course, the Cleveland Indians shortstop who was killed by a high hard one thrown by Yankee pitcher Carl Mays. Because Mays a) had a less-than-nice-guy rep, and b) was known to load one every so often, there seems to have been a presumption that c) the pitch that killed Ray Chapman was a spitter. This gained added credence, from what I can gather, from the fact that the ball Mays threw was not a fresh, clean ball. From there, because of the horror of Chapman's death, it became only too simple, from what I could tell from the readings I've done, to stretch a game-worn ball into a loaded ball, especially since Mays was known as a not-so-nice guy anyway and was known to throw the wet one once in awhile.

And yet the question baseball was never able to reconcile, particularly in light of its grandfathering clause to the spitball codicil (pitchers who were already throwing the pitch were allowed to continue but the ban began immediately on pitchers fresh in the leagues; the last known "legal" spitballer was probably Burleigh Grimes), was how it was that the pitch never injured anyone else even half as severely if and when a batter was hit by it. Still, the spitball ban goes on. A number of pitchers since - Preacher Roe in particular - have admitted to one or another idea of trying to get it legalised again. When Preacher Roe retired, he wrote an article for Life magazine called, "The Outlaw Pitch Was My Money Pitch." He told The Boys of Summer author Roger Kahn that the real idea behind the piece was to get the pitch legalised, since Roe had thrown it without incident for his entire career. (Preacher Roe, by the way, was one of the more underrated members of the Boys of Summer - he comes up short enough of a Hall of Famer, but he was a magnificent competitor who twice led the National League in winning percentage, including a 22-3 season in 1951.) Roe, incidentally, never did it with any tricks. The umps and opposing managers were already so accustomed to looking for the tricks and guile that they never thought to look for a pitcher doing it the old fashioned way: spitting right into his glove. According to Carl Furillo, the Dodgers could tell when the wet one was coming by how Roe tapped his cap before setting for the pitch. "If he went with two fingers," Furillo said, "that was the signal - we knew it was coming. If he went with one finger, we knew he was faking." Roe also told a cute story about getting with Roy Campanella on the pitch, and asking Campy as a rookie if he thought he could handle the wet one. "Nah, no problem," Campanella told Roe. "I caught 'em for years in the coloured leagues."

I don't know Blues, something has been rotten in the state of baseball for a while now. I'm sure many would say that it has been so from before my tender years of viewing strted. The yards and the inside of the plate are just symptoms of a much bigger problem, one that I don't know where to begin to solve. Money, expansion and the longball are interrelated in an unsavory way.

I thought expansion was a dumb idea in the 1990s, particularly since baseball had chosen the new markets without bothering to check as to whether there were viable baseball markets there. But one of the real problems is, baseball somewhere became insane enough to think it had to do it the way football, basketball, and hockey does to promote itself in terms of broadcasting and all. Baseball somewhere lost its singular sense of its own vision, its own uniqueness, when it came to promoting itself, something I dare say might not have happened had A. Bartlett Giamatti lived. And one of its real dumb moves was the insane playoff system and three-division alignment. It has cut the legs out from the pennant races, as I enunciated above, and ruined the singularity of the World Series with the gimmicks like the "division series" and regular-season interleague play. Baseball wasn't broken until the Lords of Baseball tried to fix it.

But I'd posit that it all began not long after the sainted Dodgers left Brooklyn!

The situation involving the Dodgers is actually irrelevant. The real cause of the Dodgers and Giants leaving New York had to do with New York's usually gamesmanship-addicted politicians being unable to stand on their hindlegs against a notoriously smarmy master builder whose grand design for rebuilding New York didn't include baseball teams playing in anything other than city-owned facilities. Robert Moses did everything in his power to obstruct Walter O'Malley's move to buy a portion of parcels on which he could build the Dodgers a new and very badly needed ballpark (Ebbets Field, for better or worse, became obsolete before her time and could no longer be expanded or refurbished - the most successful franchise in the National League couldn't even sell games out in the heat of a pennant race, that's how bad the park itself was becoming), and also to jam down O'Malley's throat the city-owned site on which Shea Stadium in due course was built. Say what you will about O'Malley, but he wasn't looking for the city or state to build a park and just give it to him. Robert Moses's allergy to private enterprise, and his insistence that no new ballpark would go up under his jurisdiction without the city getting the major piece of the action (the nerve of those Dodgers thinking they should be allowed to build themselves a ballpark and reap the benefits and profits for themselves, those capitalist pigs!), is what pushed the Dodgers out of town. (Interesting mystery: why Moses never thought of offering the Flushing Meadows site to the New York Giants, who didn't have the borough-specific identity the Dodgers had in Brooklyn and couldn't afford then to build a new park which they, too, needed very badly.) You can get the full story in Mr. Neil J. Sullivan's The Dodgers Move West.

Maybe instead of the famous Red Sox "curse of the bambino", we should start looking at other factors leading towards the decline of baseball. Brooklyn's continuing sense of loss, while other unworthy cities like Tampa Bay and Montreal were rewarded, may be a starting point for what went wrong.

Tampa Bay was stupid enough to build the cart before it had the horse, not to mention thinking it had a market for baseball when none, really, existed. (They originally built that abominable stewpot of a stadium hoping to attract an established team, particularly the Chicago White Sox or the San Francisco Giants, both of whom thought they might have to move during the 1980s.) Montreal's mistake was Olympic Stadium. In fact, one of baseball's biggest mistakes was the cookie-cutter parks that began showing up in the 1960s (Veteran's Stadium, Riverfront, Three Rivers, et. al.), all of which were built municipally for multipurposes (Wags in Washington: "The Redskins loved the Senators' new ballpark," then known as D.C. Stadium.) and none of which allowed for any legitimate baseball ambience. That was one of the critical reasons why baseball had such topsy-turvy times of public support in the decades before Camden Yards appeared. Baseball had to learn the hard way that the ballparks and their ambiences matter. As for Brooklyn's sense of loss, it was very real and soul deep - but the blame belongs with the New York politicians who fiddled while Robert Moses burned Walter O'Malley's bridges.

No, I'm not kidding! MLB threw mud in the faces of a strong area of support while continuing to find reasons too expand in areas that are not willing or able to bear the burden.

MLB didn't throw mud in any Brooklyn face - the politicians in New York did that. MLB did, however, throw mud in Washington's face when they approved Bob Short's purchase of the Washington Senators in 1968. Short was fool enough to think he could run a baseball team the way he ran his trucking enterprises. The result: he screwed the Senators' pooch just when the team began to look like a contender, alienated their fan base, then took the team out of town blaming the fans for his own shortsights. And baseball - then under the rule of the hardly competent Bowie Kuhn - let him get away with it.

"And one of its real dumb moves was the insane playoff system and three-division alignment. It has cut the legs out from the pennant races, as I enunciated above, and ruined the singularity of the World Series with the gimmicks like the "division series" and regular-season interleague play"

You are totally correct. The races aren't races anymore. Everyone thinks they can just lay off and go for the wild card. I can do without interleague play as well.

"MLB didn't throw mud in any Brooklyn face - the politicians in New York did that."

If you're talking about the Dodgers' exodus, I tend to agree with you after the evidence you have presented. "O'Malley as villain" is still the basic story passed on around here, and i guess I just accepted it from childhood without really delving into it. But MLB has never tried to make up for what happened, even though it would be in their interest to do so. The perfect example for me is how the NFL handled the situation of the Cleveland Browns. Eventually they got their colors and their team back.

Brooklyn, taken apart from the rest of NYC, is still larger than most cities in the USA and more baseball-crazy. After the success of the Cyclones last year, I have no doubt we could support three teams around here should MLB have the guts to overrule any objections from the Mets and yanks. Yes, the three teams would split the fan base, but this would help bring the yanks closer to the rest of MLB in power and wealth. You might find this amusing- A few weeks ago i walked over with my girlfriend to Bartels-Pritchard square next to Prospect Park to watch the local St. Pats parade. As it was forming up to begin, our new borough president (Marty Markowitz)walks bye glad handling the crowd and waving to people he knew and this is what took place.

Borough president: Hi, nice to see you all...blah blah blah

Anonymous guy: HEY! MARTY! WHAT ABOUT THE DODGERS?!

Borough president: ummmm... (keeps shaking hands)

Anonymous guy #2: YEAH! THE DODGERS MARTY! WHAT ABOUT THE DODGERS!

Borough president: (scurries away)

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