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  “It was an amazing catch, a catch that sent a charge through all the fans at Shea,” Ryan later said. “I felt like applauding, too. Agee had gotten me off the hook, and I [had] gotten away with a bad pitch.”

  After that bit of luck, Ryan pitched into the ninth inning, when he loaded the bases with two out. Even though the Mets still led 5–0, Hodges nearly took Ryan out. Knowing he was on a short leash, Ryan threw two fastballs by Blair again and then struck out the Orioles’ outfielder with an unexpected curveball. Ryan got the save and the Mets went on to upset Baltimore for the title.

  “This will be an important spring for Nolan,” Hodges told reporters in spring training. “He’s now on the threshold of becoming not only a good pitcher but a great one.”

  Yet the Mets weren’t as patient as their manager. In 1970, Ryan was as frustratingly inconsistent as ever. He went 7–11 that year and 10–14 the following one as he was also required to travel to four different military bases to satisfy his U.S. Army Reserve obligations. In fact, Ryan was becoming so disillusioned with baseball in general that he again talked seriously with Ruth about quitting the game, returning to Alvin, and going into a new line of work.

  After the 1971 season, Ryan returned home to Alvin. His first child, Reid, had just been born. In his autobiography, Ryan remembered that he was heading out the door to class at Alvin Junior College when the phone rang. It was the Mets with news that he had been traded to the California Angels in the American League along with outfielder Leroy Stanton and prospects Don Rose and Francisco Estrada for infielder Jim Fregosi. Fregosi had batted .233, with five home runs and 33 RBI in 107 games the year before.

  In the subsequent newspapers stories, Hodges told the press he had approved the trade. His patience had run out as well. The Mets’ manager added that Ryan, among all the young pitchers on his team, was the one he would miss the least.

  The Stride

  Bob Feller

  Photo courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  I got brains. But you got talent. Your god damn left arm is worth a million dollars a year. All my limbs put together are worth seven cents a pound—and that’s for science and dog meat.

  —CRASH DAVIS, BULL DURHAM

  A top Hollywood producer once told me that the trick to making a memorable movie, a real blockbuster, is to have “two or three scenes people still remember days after they walk out of the theater.”

  “Give me those,” he said, “and I can do the rest. I’ll fill in the backstory and figure out the best places to shoot it, get a star or two on board. But if I don’t have those two or three big scenes, it’s tough to really make it work.”

  Maybe that’s why there are so many lousy movies out there these days. Too often the so-called big scenes are ginned up with digital effects and Dolby surround-sound and offer little in terms of character or story. When we stumble upon a movie that offers a healthy slice of both, it often sticks with us far longer than anybody expected.

  That’s what runs through my mind as I enter the front lobby of the new Durham Bulls ballpark. I’m in town to catch up with left-hander David Price, who was sent down to Triple-A after spring training to work on his slider and changeup. What was repeated by everyone in the Tampa Bay Rays’ organization was that Price possessed one of the top fastballs in the game but needed to work on his overall consistency.

  Down on the field, the Bulls are caught up in team photo day and Price is posing with his minor-league teammates. Even though the imposing left-hander is expected to rejoin the parent club sometime this season, action photos of him adorn the cover of the Bulls’ 2009 media guide. With some time to kill, I head for the team gift store. If in doubt, squander the time by buying trinkets, right? It’s there I’m greeted by a poster of Kevin Costner, aka Crash Davis himself.

  Costner has starred in his share of baseball movies: For Love of the Game and Field of Dreams. But the one flick that fans and players both agree Hollywood got right, that had more than its share of boffo scenes that would make any producer sleep like a baby at night, was Bull Durham. Filmed at the old Durham ballpark in 1987, its memorable moments include the scene where the team gathers on the mound to talk wedding gifts rather than game strategy. Or the quick tutorial about sports clichés aboard the team bus. Or when the wild fireballer beans the Bulls mascot on purpose.

  The film’s big moments often revolve around how the game is a curse to some and a gift to only a select—dare we say, undeserving—few. In Bull Durham, Crash Davis portrays baseball’s version of Shakespeare’s everyman. The guy who knows as much about baseball as anybody under the sun but will never make the majors for longer than a cup of coffee. His foil is the hard-throwing pitcher Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh. Played by Tim Robbins, the young fireballer doesn’t have a clue about the game or life in general. Yet he has an arm capable of throwing lightning bolts. To heighten the plot line, both ballplayers are determined to win the affections of the lovely Susan Sarandon.

  The movie poster in the Bulls’ souvenir shop details Crash’s philosophy of life: “I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe that there outta be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the ‘sweet spot,’ voting every election, soft core pornography, chocolate chip cookies, opening your presents on Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in low, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last for seven days.” Perhaps more than any one scene, it’s Crash, himself, that’s so memorable. But I think the reason why so many love the movie, and identify with Crash, has more to do with an acknowledgment that life, at some basic level, isn’t fair. If it were, the more deserving Crash would be the one bestowed with the stupendous fastball instead of the often clueless Nuke.

  Bull Durham was written and directed by Ron Shelton. He drove to minor-league ballparks throughout the South, determining where to film. He kept coming back to the old stadium in Durham, which still stands on the north side of town.

  “I loved that it was located among abandoned tobacco warehouses and on the edge of an abandoned downtown and in the middle of a residential neighborhood where people could walk,” he once told the Associated Press. “In the ’80s, minor-league baseball wasn’t happening. Now, of course, it’s huge business. I thought that it had a feel of the kind of baseball I loved—small-town, intimate, the players could talk to the fans and back and forth.”

  Shelton had spent several seasons playing in the Baltimore Orioles’ minor-league system, beginning to play professional ball about the time Steve Dalkowski was falling out of the game. During that time Shelton heard the stories about a real-life Nuke, the unfortunate pitcher who never found a catcher like Crash Davis to steer him straight.

  “It was a groundskeeper in Stockton who first told me about Steve Dalkowski, the fastest pitcher of all time,” Shelton wrote years later in the Los Angeles Times. “‘Dalko once threw the ball through the wood boards of the right field fence,’ he said. The groundskeeper studied the broken boards, maintained like a shrine, and the Dalkowski stories started flowing. In minor-league ballparks all over the country, they still talk about the hardest thrower of them all.”

  Those tall tales included Dalkowski being so wild one night that his pitch hit the announcer’s booth. Dalkowski scholar John-William Greenbaum tells me that this story “is patently false.” But that didn’t keep Shelton from including it in his movie. An incident where a Dalkowski pitch hit a poor fan standing in line for a hotdog became Nuke plunking the Durham Bulls mascot at Crash’s urging. Perhaps the ultimate tribute by Shelton to Dalkowski was Nuke’s statistical line: 170 innings pitched, 262 strikeouts and 262 walks. In real life, Dalkowski did just that for the Stockton Ports in 1960.

  As the 2009 season got under way, many in the baseball world had heard of David Price. Most wondered why he was in Triple-A Durham instead of Tampa Bay, pitching for the big-league ballclub. Such talk only grew louder when the Rays stumbled out of the gate, g
oing 8–14 in the first month of the new season. Still, the team stuck to its plan of building up Price’s innings in the minors. The powers that be had deemed he needed to work on his control and pitch repertoire.

  “Just because things aren’t going the way we thought they would right now, doesn’t mean you blow everything up and start all over,” Rays manager Joe Maddon says. “We tend to not do that.”

  Indeed, the Rays stayed amazingly even-keel even though they play in the American League East, arguably the toughest division in baseball. One in which the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox were off to good starts in 2009 and the New York Yankees reveled in the hubbub of moving into their new majestic $1.5-billion ballpark. Down in Durham, Price did his best to focus on the challenge at hand.

  “I know what I need to do,” he says. “I cannot control when I get called up. So, you make the best of it, you know. You tell yourself to just keep working, getting better.”

  As Price spoke, he gazed out on the field, watching the grounds crew water down the mound and drag the infield one last time. The PA system carried the local sports talk show until the topic turned to steroids and Alex Rodriguez’s return to the big leagues. Then somebody changed the station to classic rock. The gates were due to open soon, with a crowd of 6,000-plus expected. That’s a decent attendance figure for a weekday night in the minors. But, of course, it’s a far cry from the big leagues.

  During the games, when he’s not pitching, Price says that his mind can wander. He’ll sneak trips into the clubhouse, where the MLB Network, the new 24-hour channel broadcasting all things baseball, is often on. Tonight the Rays are in Fenway Park, playing the Red Sox. Price knows as well as anybody that several members of Tampa Bay’s rotation—Andrew Sonnanstine, James Shields, and Jeff Niemann—have struggled at times, and that if they continue to do so he could be just the guy to bolster the pitching staff. He surfs the Net daily. He knows what they’re saying in Tampa—how he could be the answer to a lot of problems with the big-league ballclub.

  Despite such technology constantly allowing him to be in the loop, always at the ready, on this evening in Durham the major leagues seem well over the horizon. Price agrees that perhaps he got a bit spoiled during his star turn with the Rays last fall. Of course, before that he burned through the minor leagues, going 12–1 at three levels in the Rays’ minor-league system. He got used to doing things fast, being a young man in a hurry. The concept of slowing down, refining his changeup and slider, well, it can get a little old at times.

  “In the majors, you never have to get up for a game,” Price says. “It’s always just there, whether you’re pitching or not. When you come to the park up in the majors, it’s so much different. Hours before the game, there are already 20,000 fans there, the place is filling up. Being down here is just different. It’s just different. That’s about the only way I can explain it. I cannot wait to get back up [to Tampa].”

  Any time Price takes the mound, a dozen or more scouts from rival teams monitor his every move. It’s a kind of joke, really. The Rays aren’t looking to trade their young phenom. But the curiosity about how good this kid could be extends well beyond the Tampa organization. So, the scouts have been there to witness when he’s lost focus every now and then. They saw how his fastball rarely got out of the low 90s during a loss at Norfolk. How a left-handed hitter was somehow able to turn on one of the southpaw’s offerings and drove it out of the ballpark. After a month at Durham, Price’s record was a rather pedestrian 1–3, with a 3.92 ERA. Although the left-hander was averaging a strikeout an inning, at least one scout wasn’t all that impressed. “The kid’s got to toughen up,” he says. “That’s what this level of baseball is all about. It all comes down to how much you want it.”

  Of course, that’s what Crash is trying to get across to Nuke. Shelton later acknowledged that when he wrote about LaLoosh he was channeling the real-life Steve Dalkowski. Trying to wrap his mind around the question of whether the gift of such an arm “was an act of grace or just a cruel trick.”

  Dalkowski’s fastball rose markedly from the time it left his hand until the moment it crossed home plate. So much so that the more savvy catchers who caught him, beginning in high school and on throughout his roller-coaster ride in the Orioles’ farm system, often told him to aim below the batter’s knees, or even at home plate itself. It was the only way to keep the heat from riding too high in the strike zone.

  “Even then I often had to jump to catch it,” says Len Pare, one of Dalkowski’s high school catchers. “That fastball? I’ve never seen another one like it. He’d let it go and it would just rise and rise.”

  What made the pitch even more amazing was that Dalkowski didn’t have anything close to a classic windup. No high leg kick like Bob Feller or Satchel Paige, for example. Instead Dalkowski almost short-armed the ball with an abbreviated delivery, which only kept opposing batters all the more off-balance and shocked at what was too soon coming at them.

  “His right leg rises a few inches off the ground. His left arm pulls back then flicks out from the side of his body like an attacking cobra,” Pat Jordan wrote in The Suitors of Spring. “There’s a sharp crack as his wrist snaps the ball toward the plate. Then silence. The ball does not rip through the air like most fastballs, but seems to just reappear silently in the catcher’s glove as if it had somehow decomposed and then recomposed itself without anyone having followed its progress.”

  For a pitch that seemed to disappear and then reappear, Dalkowski’s fastball was as light as a feather to snare. This comes from the guys who caught him. Cal Ripken Sr. claimed he could catch Dalkowski bare-handed, at least when he was sure what was coming. Getting the pitch near the plate, though, was often another story. For a fastball that could often be easily corralled by a catcher’s mitt, it caused mayhem when it sailed out of control.

  “Ripken always said, ‘If the ball left his hand belt high, you just turn and run for the screen.’ It was going to sail, in other words,” Steve Barber told John Eisenberg of the Baltimore Sun. “And if it left his hand looking like it was going to hit the ground, it was going to come in as a strike. But all his balls were so light, that was the amazing thing.”

  Boog Powell added, “They’d get him to hold the ball across the seams, you know, to keep the ball down. If you throw a cross-seamer with the seams, it’ll sink. They had him doing that and everything else, but it was still taking off. It was something to see.”

  In 1958, Dalkowski began the season in the minors, at Knoxville, Tennessee. Soon he had the fans there ducking for cover, too, when three of his fastballs tore through the wire-mesh screen behind home plate.

  “[The last one] went through the screen and hit a hotdog vendor in the butt and knocked him down,” Dalkowski says. “Boy, was he mad.”

  One Knoxville dad told the fireballer he was no longer going to bring his young son to games Dalkowski started. He felt the left-hander set a poor example about how baseball was supposed to be played.

  Of course, a lot of coaches at the minor-league level had bright ideas about how to harness Dalkowski’s heater. One afternoon, before a night game, manager George Staller set up a square wooden target over the bullpen plate near right field and gave Dalkowski a bucket of balls. He was told to keep throwing until all the balls were inside the target.

  “I shattered the bastard,” Dalkowski says. “Broke it in half. And it wasn’t just plywood, either. They had a boy there who was supposed to bring the balls back and he ran away.”

  When Dalkowski returned to the ballpark for that night’s game, a crowd of ballplayers was gathered around a heap of splinters and chunks of wood—what was left of Staller’s target.

  Dalkowski played for three teams in the Orioles’ system that season—Knoxville, Wilson (North Carolina), and Aberdeen (South Dakota). Each step was a demotion, and he didn’t have a winning record at any of them. His ERA ranged from 7.93 to 12.21 to 6.39. In addition, at every stop his walk totals surpassed his strike out totals.<
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  Early on, Billy DeMars, a former big-league shortstop who often managed the phenom, noticed that Dalkowski’s plant foot often stayed on the pitching rubber well after he had released. Could this be the key to the phenom’s wild streak? DeMars sincerely thought so. He believed he had found the Rosetta Stone. “Essentially he had no follow-through,” DeMars later told the (New York) Daily News. “It was unbelievable when you think about it. This kid was throwing 100 miles per hour with his arm alone.

  “I told him, ‘Stevie, I’m gonna yell from the bench to let it go every time you don’t follow through.’ We would work on it and in the next start he walked only five batters and struck out 20. They took our pictures together in the local paper and I got quoted as saying he was the fastest pitcher I’d ever seen. I think that’s how ‘the fastest ever’ legend got started.”

  Indeed, as the 1959 season got under way, Dalkowski showed promise of coming around. He pitched a no-hit, no-run game for Aberdeen, in which he tied a Northern League record with 21 strikeouts. But as soon as Dalkowski began to show signs of harnessing the gift, things fell apart. In the next game after the no-hitter, he walked the first eight batters he faced. His wild streak lasted for the next four games.

  During those early years, he constantly crossed up the poor souls who had to catch him. One time it was Cal Ripken Sr., father of the Ironman. Ripken was definitely looking for something else when Dalkowski’s rising fastball took off. The ball flew past Ripken’s glove and hit the umpire flush in the face mask. The protective headgear shattered and the poor ump was carted off to the hospital.

  “I’ve umpired for Koufax, Gibson, Drysdale, Maloney, Seaver, Marichal, and Gooden, and they could all bring it, but nobody could bring it like he could,” umpire Doug Harvey once said of Dalkowski. “In one season, he broke my bar mask, split my shin guards, split the plastic trim on my chest protector and knocked me back 18 feet.”