K A history of baseball in ten pitches

Tyler Kepner

Book - 2019

"From the New York Times baseball columnist, a ... 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"--Dust jacket flap.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Doubleday [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Tyler Kepner (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xiv, 302 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [283]-285) and index.
ISBN
9780385541015
9781101970850
  • The slider : a little itty 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.
Review by New York Times Review

TYLER KEPNER STARTED his own baseball magazine in 1988 as a kid in suburban Pennsylvania. In 2010, he was named national baseball writer for The New York Times. In "K," his delightfully nerdy first book - a study of the history, psychology and physics of 10 pitches, from the fastball and curveball to the spitter and splitter - he brings both a child's giddy enthusiasm and a beat reporter's diligence to questions of pitch velocity, the legend of the rising fastball, and which pitches cause injury. He interviewed more than 300 people to get into the heads of players armed with nothing but "those precious pitches, loaded with cork, yarn and possibility." If pitchers and hitters constitute a twoparty system, Kepner is no independent. "The pitcher is the planner, the initiator of action," he writes. "The hitter can only react. If the pitcher, any pitcher, finds a way to disrupt that reaction, he can win." Kepner compares changeup throwers to artists and knuckleballers to Jedi knights. "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." Kepner believes the best pitch in baseball is "a well-located fastball," but he offers vivid descriptions, telling anecdotes and shrewd historical context for all the pitches he discusses. Throwing a changeup is like bringing "a feather duster" to a cage match. A slider's action, according to one pitcher, is like "a car skidding on ice." Knuckleballers, Kepner reports, are typically the nicest players, and brave enough "to bring Silly String to a battlefield." The chapter on the spitball - a pitch out of fashion, Jason Giambi tells Kepner, because TV cameras make it harder to cheat - is especially charming. Woebegone Rick Honeycutt saw a thumbtack on the way to the bullpen and decided to use it to mark up a ball. He immediately gave up two hits, was caught scuffing and earned a 10-game suspension - talk about a "cheaters never prosper" poster child. Of his reputation for throwing at batters, Bob Gibson tells Kepner: "I wasn't really throwing at them, but I didn't care whether I hit them or not." He adds that it drove him crazy when umpires accused him of trying to hit a batter: "I'm not throwing at him. If I threw at him, I would hit him." Not every quote is that good. Some players ramble unedited; others offer banal reflections. Take King Félix on the changeup: "I tried to throw it because I wanted to take it to the next level. I wanted to be the best I can be." Such boilerplate humble-brags veer a little too close to the "I'm just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ball club" clichés parodied in "Bull Durham." Kepner displays some hokeyness himself. The slider pitcher Chief Bender "was, you might say, the chief bender of pitches in his era." In old age, Jim Bouton "can still grip a baseball, and baseball still grips him." After quoting Al Leiter using a common epithet to describe how aggressive the bat-breaking cutter can be, Kepner says, sounding rather square, Letter's "enthusiasm for his craft is so endearing that you look right past the language." I would say the same about Kepner. His love of baseball is so genuine and his work ethic so intense that I ignored the occasional ball in the dirt. The book's appeal to superfans is indisputable. The stats-heavier sections will prove as satisfying to those readers as flipping through a stack of baseball cards. But " K" may be an even bigger gift to more casual fans like me. Like Kepner, I was a tween baseball geek in the mid-80s - captivated by charismatic Mets like Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson and Keith Hernandez. In ensuing decades of game-on-in-the-background, New York Post-headline-glancing and occasional spring-training attendance, I haven't paid much attention to pitching styles. Sure, I picked up on the obvious - Mariano Rivera's cutters, Fernando Valenzuela's screwballs, Chad Bradford's submarine delivery. But, lacking behind-the-plate seats at Shea and now Citi Field, and watching on a less-thanhigh-def TV at home, I registered little more of pitching technique beyond knowing that you have to do the bunny-ears thing with your index and middle fingers to throw a knuckleball. Thanks to "K," when the Mets game was on the other night I knew Edwin Diaz had given up a home run on a hanging slider even before I heard it from Keith Hernandez, now one of the Mets announcers. I have also picked up terms like "slurvy," "pronating," "Mr. Splitty" (Roger Clemens's name for his split-finger fastball) and "whippy" (for the arm action the onetime Expo Steve Rogers says is necessary for successfully throwing a sinker). Kepner has enhanced my enjoyment of the game and made me realize how much I was missing before. It does seem like a big unforced error, though, that the book offers no handgrip graphics or ball-path diagrams for these pitches. I supplemented with YouTtibe videos and charts I tracked down online, as I suspect many readers will. "K" is best read while holding a baseball. It's useful for trying out the grips and as a reminder that the game's century-plus of drama revolves around something that weighs only about five ounces. It's so small and so simple, and yet so loaded with meaning and potential. As Kepner quotes Tilg McGraw: "You know, if somebody called me at 4 in the morning and said, 'Hey, let's go out and play some catch,' I'd do it. I love this little thing." ADA CALHOUN is the author of "St. Marks Is Dead," "Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give" and "Why We Can't Sleep," coming in January.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Joe Maddon, manager of the Chicago Cubs, once suggested that his game might better be called not baseball but pitching because the pitcher controls everything. In this spirited romp through the history, folklore, and science of America's pastime, Kepner, the New York Times' national baseball writer since 2010, celebrates the 10 major pitches that hurlers have used to dominate the game. Readers learn exactly what skills a pitcher must master to unloose a blazing fastball, a nasty splitter, a maddening knuckleball, or a tumbling sinker. Kepner even initiates readers into the devious craft of those throwing the notorious spitball. Relived episodes capture the excitement of superb pitching: Sandy Koufax whiffing all-stars with his electric curve; Pedro Martinez frustrating sluggers with his deceptive changeup; Fernando Valenzuela baffling batters with his mystifying screwball. But readers also experience pitchers' humiliation when their pitches fail them as Dennis Eckersley's backdoor slider does when Kirk Gibson launches it into baseball history in the 1988 World Series. And when a misguided pitch strikes a batter, the result can be the dark tragedy witnessed in 1920 when a Carl Mays fastball killed Cleveland batter Ray Chapman. From triumph to tragedy, readers trace the astonishingly diverse trajectories of the baseballs pitchers throw. Appreciative fans will keep this book zipping off library shelves.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Detailing the history of baseball's 10 most common pitches, Kepner chronicles the national pastime's evolution from its 19th-century beginnings, when pitchers could throw "nearly 700" innings in a season, to today's modern game that focuses on spin rates and sees most Tommy John elbow ligament surgeries performed on teenagers. Kepner focuses on pitching because "pitches are the DNA of baseball" and "the pitcher controls everything." As the national baseball writer for the New York Times, he's had the opportunity to talk about the slider with his childhood idol Steve Carlton, the fastball with Nolan Ryan, and the changeup with Pedro Martinez-all to uncover the mindset of players he says are "part boxer and part magician." Using interviews and extensive research, Kepner not only discovers the origins and evolutions of these and other pitches, like the curveball (discovered in 1867, "when [W.A.] Cummings was the amateur ace of the Brooklyn Stars"), knuckleball, and spitball, but he also shines a microscope on how pitches captured championships or ended lives, as with the fastball that killed Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman in 1920. Kepner puts a new spin on baseball's history that will have even the most avid fans entertained as they learn something new in each chapter. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Is baseball boring? Iconic announcer Red Barber famously stated, "Baseball is dull only to dull minds." It may not have the breakneck pace of basketball or big-play tension of football, but baseball has a lot of action beneath its measured surface. Pitching is one of those areas. New York Times sportswriter Kepner (The Phillies Experience) takes a deep look into this element of the game, dissecting the art of the pitch: slider, curve, sinker, fastball, and so on. He recounts the history and evolution of throws by pitcher, generation to generation. Laced through the narrative are interviews with famous pitchers and pitching coaches as well as enjoyable stories of pitchers who turn their careers completely around by simply learning one new pitch. A running theme is the tension between science and experience; players hope to see pitches accomplish things that are nearly impossible. This overlap of science and experience is a fascinating conversation to observe. VERDICT Baseball enthusiasts will devour this well-paced, journalistic read, it may even inspire them to go outside for a little catch.-Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A gripping tour through the most elemental component of baseball.Baseball is unique in the sense that the defense starts with the ball and provides the conditions under which the offense operates. The pitcher is at the center of at it, arguably the single most central figure in all of team sports. At one time, the pitcher simply served as a person providing offerings for batters to be able to hit. But as the game shifted to become the sport we know today, the goal of the pitcher became not to provide hittable balls but to try to ensure that batters could not hit the ball. In so doing, they created an arsenal of pitches based on speed and location, movement and trickery. In this top-notch sports book, Kepner, the national baseball writer for the New York Times, takes a tour of the history of baseball through 10 pitches: slider, fastball, curveball, knuckleball, splitter, screwball, sinker, changeup, spitball, and cutter. He conducted more than 300 interviews with pitchers, coaches, and the batters tasked with trying to hit these offerings; among countless others, these include a long list of legends, including Bob Gibson, Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Nolan Ryan, and Randy Johnson. He traces the development of each pitch, often as far back as the 19th century, and describes how pitchers take different approaches to the same fundamental pitch, creating myriad variations of each. Discussions of grips and arm angles become compelling aspects of a larger drama, and his interviewees provide useful insight into the psyche of players and the mindset that it takes to traverse the 60 feet, 6 inches between the pitcher's mound and home plate. Although less a "history of baseball" than "a history of pitching," with this book, Kepner has worked magic.This engaging exploration of the art and craft of pitching belongs in the first ranks of books on America's most written-about sport. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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 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, of course, was not like most hitters. He hit .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 '41, 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. "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' 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 years 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. Excerpted from K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches by Tyler Kepner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.