K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches (Random House Large Print) - Softcover

Kepner, Tyler

 
9781984883292: K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches (Random House Large Print)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1984883291 ISBN 13: 9781984883292
Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From The New York Times baseball columnist, an enchanting, enthralling history of the national pastime as told through the craft of pitching, based on years of archival research and interviews with more than three hundred people from Hall of Famers to the stars of today.

The baseball is an amazing plaything. We can grip it and hold it so many different ways, and even the slightest calibration can turn an ordinary pitch into a weapon to thwart the greatest hitters in the world. Each pitch has its own history, evolving through the decades as the masters pass it down to the next generation. From the earliest days of the game, when Candy Cummings dreamed up the curveball while flinging clamshells on a Brooklyn beach, pitchers have never stopped innovating.

In K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, Tyler Kepner traces the colorful stories and fascinating folklore behind the ten major pitches. Each chapter highlights a different pitch, from the blazing fastball to the fluttering knuckleball to the slippery spitball. Infusing every page with infectious passion for the game, Kepner brings readers inside the minds of combatants sixty feet, six inches apart.

Filled with priceless insights from many of the best pitchers in baseball history--from Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, and Nolan Ryan to Greg Maddux, Mariano Rivera, and Clayton Kershaw--K will be the definitive book on pitching and join such works as The Glory of Their Times and Moneyball as a classic of the genre.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

TYLER KEPNER started covering baseball as a teenager, interviewing players for a homemade magazine that was featured in The New York Times in 1989. He attended Vanderbilt University on the Grantland Rice/Fred Russell sportswriting scholarship, then covered the Angels for the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise and the Mariners for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He joined The New York Times in 2000, covering the Mets for two seasons, the Yankees for eight and serving as the national baseball writer since 2010.

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THE SLIDER

A Little Itty 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, of course. He had won the World Series clincher three years earlier, when I was too young to notice, and led the majors in wins and strikeouts in 1982 for his fourth Cy Young Award. 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. A few years ago, I named my dog Lefty.

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 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.
           
“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. Chris Archer, the Tampa Bay All-Star with 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 M.V.P. 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 M.V.P. 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’ 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...

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Verlag
Random House Large Print
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1984883291
ISBN 13 
9781984883292
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
512
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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