High Heat Page 13
Such was the case with injured catcher Cliff Blankenship. In the spring of 1907, he was sent west by Washington Senators manager Joe Cantillon. Even though Blankenship was reluctant to make such a long trip, Cantillon was insistent. He had been receiving letters extolling a young right-hander playing semipro ball in Weiser, Idaho. “This boy throws so fast you can’t see ’em,” read one missive, “and he knows where he is throwing the ball because if he didn’t there would be dead bodies strewn all over Idaho.”
Blankenship’s road trip began in Wichita, where he signed a promising outfielder, Clyde Milan, for $1,250. The Senators’ manager had seen Milan play the spring before on a barnstorming tour, and Blankenship confirmed that the kid had talent. (In fact, Milan would go on to be one of the best outfielders in Senators history.) After signing Milan, Blankenship was eager to return home. But Cantillon told him to first check out the young pitcher in Idaho.
Blankenship wrote a friend, as later detailed in Hank Thomas’s biography, that he had “to look over some palooka who they say is striking out everybody. Probably isn’t worth a dime, and I’m on a wildgoose chase for Cantillon.”
When Blankenship saw Walter Johnson for the first time, however, he immediately knew that the 19-year-old was the real deal. Of course, he made his determination well before the days of the radar gun. Johnson lost the game that day, 1–0 in 12 innings, as his infielders booted a pair of grounders for the lone run. Afterward, Blankenship flashed a $100 bill, telling Johnson it was an immediate signing bonus and promising a contract that would pay the prospect $350 a month.
At first glance, Johnson had hick written all over him. He was 6-foot-1, 200 pounds, with dangling arms and, as Shirley Povich later noted, “a behind-the-plow gait.” Yet when it came to negotiations, Johnson proved as adept as he was on the pitching mound. He told Blankenship that he wanted expenses to travel to Washington. Blankenship agreed. But the scout was taken aback when the kid insisted that the Senators also guarantee his train ticket home, in case things didn’t work out in the nation’s capital.
What Blankenship didn’t know was that several other major-league clubs had been scouting Johnson as well. The Pittsburgh Pirates missed out when they wouldn’t pony up for the $9 train ticket that would have brought Johnson to the team’s training site in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
After some dickering, Blankenship agreed to the travel round-trip expenses and Johnson was soon en route to Washington. “Fastest pitcher since Amos Rusie,” Blankenship wired Cantillon.
Anxious to take the heat off his struggling ballclub, Cantillon told the press. The story the next day in the Washington Star, June 29, 1907, reported that the Senators’ manager “has added a great baseball phenom to his pitching staff. The young man’s name is Walter Johnson.”
The story went on to say that “Blankenship is very enthusiastic, but fails to state whether the great phenom is right- or left-handed.”
Since the Big Train’s heyday, every method imaginable has been tried to measure the sheer speed of a pitched baseball. Even Johnson, the gold standard back in his era, was roped into demonstrating how hard he could throw.
In the closing days of the 1912 season, with the New York Giants and Boston Red Sox facing off in the World Series, Baseball Magazine convinced Johnson and Brooklyn’s Nap Rucker, who was said to be the fastest pitcher in the National League, to travel to Bridgeport, Connecticut. There, at the Remington Arms Company’s bullet-testing range, “a pitched ball was accurately measured for the first time in history,” the magazine proclaimed.
The range comprised a tunnel that was shoulder height and used to calculate the speed of bullets fired from a standing position. The speed was calculated by how fast a projectile—in this case a regulation Spalding National League baseball—broke one of the myriad of copper wires at the front of the chute and then smacked into a steel plate at the rear of the shooting gallery.
“The distance from the muzzle to the plate is accurately measured,” the magazine explained, “and a comparison of the time elapsing between the breaking of the copper wire and the strike of the bullet against the plate readily gives the velocity of the bullet in number of feet per second.”
“It may have made sense on paper,” Hank Thomas, Walter Johnson’s grandson, reminds me. “But they forgot that Walter didn’t throw over the top. He threw sidearm and had difficulty getting the ball to go straight through that plate with the copper wires.”
Baseball Magazine reported that “after some effort and with a consequent loss of speed” Johnson was finally able to muster a reading. His best throw was clocked at 127 feet per second (86.6 miles per hour). The best Rucker could do was 113 feet per second or about 76 miles per hour.
As Thomas outlines in his biography of his grandfather, such numbers require some perspective. The best we can do is to compare them to another series of tests done two decades later. In June 1933, Lefty Gomez of the New York Yankees and Van Lingle Mungo of the Brooklyn Dodgers headed up to West Point and were tested with similar equipment. The top pitches were less than impressive, as Mungo hit 77.4 miles per hour and Gomez 75.7 miles per hour.
In 1946, Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith borrowed a cumbersome photoelectric cell from the U.S. Army post in Aberdeen in order to test the speed of the fastest pitcher of that day—the Cleveland Indians’ Bob Feller. The device was used in the military to determine the speed of projectiles. “The military used that thing to test everything from bullets to shells,” Feller tells me. “It was a helluva lot more accurate than what you see used in some ballparks today.”
Well, maybe. In any event, Griffith heavily advertised the event and reportedly had a walk-up gate of 20,000. Unfortunately, he forgot to run the scheme by Feller.
“He never contacted me at all,” Feller wrote in his autobiography. “I was on the rubbing table in the clubhouse, getting ready to warm up. Our trainer was stretching my pitching arm and legs when Mr. Griffith came in. He told me it was about time to get out there and start throwing smoke. I told him as soon as he paid me for it I would.”
The Indians’ ace didn’t agree to the stunt until Griffith agreed to pay him $700. (“I mean I had to get something out of the deal, too,” Feller recalls.) At that point, there wasn’t a faster or better pitcher in the game. The wildness that had hampered Feller earlier in his career was gone and he was on his way to winning 26 games and striking out 348.
The photoelectric cell, a cumbersome cratelike framework that the ball had to be delivered through, was set up atop home plate. Before the game, Feller warmed up for about 10 minutes and then threw about five pitches through the contraption to a catcher, who squatted on the other side of the device. More than 30,000 fans sat in near silence that evening, awaiting the announcements of the specific speed levels. Feller claims that the device was able to calculate the highest average speed, as well as the velocity of the ball as it reached the framework over home plate. He says his best average speed was 107.9 miles per hour and the highest clocking at home plate topped out at 98.6 miles per hour. “That was also my body temperature when I calmed down after my showdown with Mr. Griffith,” Feller says.
Steve Dalkowski was another pitcher tested by the Aberdeen equipment. He was told to throw the ball through a metal box, roughly the width of home plate, in which a laser was being beamed. Sounds simple enough, right? But as with most things surrounding the career of the unpredictable left-hander, things didn’t go according to plan. Even though the mechanism and physics were similar to those in Feller’s test, Dalkowski had to throw off a flat surface. At least Feller had been able to throw off a mound at Griffith Stadium. In addition, Dalkowski had pitched the night before his Aberdeen test, which some claim took 5 to 10 miles per hour off his best heat. Despite it all, Dalkowski was game to try. The season was 1958, when Dalkowski fanned 17 and walked 16, throwing 283 pitches, in a single game. At Aberdeen, it took him 40 minutes to throw anything close enough to the sensors to even get a reading. The device clocked
him at 93.5 miles per hour at the target, 5 miles per hour slower than Feller. At that point, everybody decided to call it a day. “That was a crazy, crazy time,” Dalkowski recalls. “It made no sense. Like so many things that happened, it seemed like things were stacked against me.”
In 1960, Sandy Koufax was one of a half dozen pitchers to be timed by a high-speed camera in a test by This Week magazine. Koufax was joined by his hard-throwing Dodgers teammate Don Drysdale, as well as Herb Score of the Cleveland Indians, Steve Barber of the Baltimore Orioles, and Bob Turley and Ryne Duren of the New York Yankees. Unfortunately, the test took place in spring training and was the only time Koufax was clocked.
“You would have thought they would have waited a couple of months until we were in peak condition,” Drysdale told Street & Smith’s Baseball magazine. “We were told there was going to be a test of some sort but it was not big deal. We didn’t ever set up for it and it was actually done without us knowing when.”
Barber led the pack with an offering of 95.5 miles hour, followed by Drysdale (95.3), Koufax (93.2), Duren (91.1), Score (91.0), and Turley (90.7).
In 1974, the California Angels tried to be more precise by using the best scientific equipment of the time to test their fireballer, Nolan Ryan. Four Rockwell International scientists rigged up an infrared radar device from the press box. Fans were invited to guess to the nearest one-tenth of a mile per hour how fast Ryan could throw. Entries were sent care of Ryan Express at the Angels, with the grand prize being a trip for two to the American League Championship Series that season.
The event was hyped on CBS Sports, and by the time the day came around—a September 7 game versus the Chicago White Sox—Ryan had had enough of the hoopla. “I didn’t like it,” he said afterward. “It takes too much away from your concentration.”
The infrared device only tracked strikes, and Ryan voiced his concern that “a lot of balls outside the strike zone have more velocity.” A pitched ball needed to pass through an infrared beam 17 inches wide and 2 inches high to record a reading.
Tom Egan, Ryan’s catcher that day, added that he had seen the Express in better form. “He didn’t have his real stuff,” Egan told the Associated Press. “All that activity took away his concentration. I don’t know why there is all that fuss anyhow. Everybody knows he’s the fastest that ever lived.”
For the record, Ryan’s best clocking by infrared was 100.9 miles per hour. His teammates and members of the Angels press corps later claimed that he could easily throw 5 miles per hour faster on a better day. In fact, he may have done just that.
Rockwell International acknowledged that Ryan was actually clocked approximately 45 feet after the ball left his hand, rather than at home plate. The rule of thumb tends to be that a pitched ball loses up to 10 miles per hour by the time it reaches the plate. So, in this case, “that means that on a modern gun, Ryan was at best throwing 105.9 miles per hour,” says John-William Greenbaum, who besides knowing a lot about Steve Dalkowski is an expert on testing devices, too. “On the bright side, it makes Ryan the fastest right-hander of all time, since his pitch was still probably traveling faster than Joel Zumaya’s best offering.”
Of course, almost every ballpark in the game, from the minors to the major leagues, clocks pitches today. The results are regularly flashed on the scoreboard. You would think that advances in technology would have made clocking speed more definitive by now, but some argue radar guns have only made things more confusing.
“They help you get the answer,” Pat Gillick once told Baseball America. “But they’re not the answer themselves.”
“I don’t put much faith in what they’re using to guess speed today,” adds Andy Etchebarren, a former catcher with the Baltimore Orioles and a coach with the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs during the 2008 season. “Take a guy like Steve Dalkowski. He would have hit 107–108 [miles per hour] on the radar guns they used today. I have no doubt about that. You see guys hitting 94, 95 on the gun now that wouldn’t have been considered fast at all back in my day. Us old-timers joke about it.”
If anything, heightened technology—namely, the radar gun—has made it possible for everyone to be an expert. Fans can play big-league scout by jotting down the timings via the scoreboard. Such pitch-by-pitch tabulation led The Bill James Handbook to credit Seattle’s Felix Hernandez with the fastest average fastball in the American League in 2008 (94.6 miles per hour) and Colorado’s Ubaldo Jimenez in the National League (94.9 miles per hour), with San Francisco’s Tim Lincecum right behind them.
“You know what the radar gun is for? The fans,” says Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon. “I personally don’t even think we should have them in the ballpark because it’s a tool that benefits only the hitter, not a pitcher at all.”
Such sentiment didn’t stop the tabulators from adding another category—pitches 100-plus in velocity. Before he was hurt, Detroit’s Zumaya accomplished that feat 30 times in one season; the New York Mets’ Billy Wagner 18 times.
“And in the end, all those numbers leave you nowhere,” says Phil Pote. “It’s too much information. Plus, you cannot compare it with Walter Johnson or Bob Feller or Lefty Grove. Once we didn’t have enough scientific readings, now we have too many.”
Midway through the 2009 season, Zumaya had the fans at Comerica Park in Detroit cheering after the stadium radar clocked his fastball at 102–104 miles per hour. In comparison, his changeup was 85 miles per hour that day, and to everyone’s amazement Zumaya opted for this “third best pitch” with the game against the visiting Cubs on the line.
“I mean, that’s what I’ve been working on,” the Tigers’ reliever explained after Chicago’s Micah Hoffpauir hit the changeup for a two-run homer.
Detroit manager Jim Leyland said the selection was “not a good choice.” He wondered if the buzz from the crowd caused Zumaya to commit one of baseball’s cardinal sins: thinking too much.
“It might be exciting for the guy in section 129, seat 6,” Leyland said of the public radar reports, “but it’s not worth a hoot to me.”
Pote, another old-school guy, couldn’t agree more. “I started my scouting career without a radar gun and I’ll end without one,” he says. “I guess I’m a curmudgeon because I still trust my eyes. Is the fastball good enough that batters cannot catch up with it? If so, I’m a believer no matter what some gun may say.”
Howie Haak, a legendary scout pivotal in bringing Tony Pena, Manny Sanguillen, Jose DeLeon, and Roberto Clemente to the Pittsburgh Pirates, used his eyes and a trick of the trade to gauge how hard a player could throw. While sitting down, Haak would raise his forearm to shoulder level as a prospect was about to throw. Haak’s arm would be bent at the elbow, the joint often on the arm rest. When the player let fly, Haak would allow his forearm to drop toward his lap. The closer the forearm was to Haak’s legs when the ball hit the catcher’s mitt, the faster the prospect could really bring it.
Nobody ever became as famous for wielding a radar gun as Mike Brito. For years he was a fixture, standing 20 feet or so behind home plate (usually the optimal place to get the best reading) at Dodger Stadium. He got to be such an omnipresent figure that people watching at home on TV wondered who he was.
What many don’t realize is that Brito was the one who convinced the Dodgers to sign left-hander Fernando Valenzuela, who arguably had the best screwball since Christy Mathewson. In fact, when Valenzuela struggled to stay focused during his banner rookie year, he moved in with Brito and his family.
When I attend ball games, no matter what level, I hang with the scouts. Most press boxes are too sterile and removed from the hubbub down on the field. Kind of like watching a ball game in a multiplex movie theater. Plus, I enjoy how upbeat most scouts can be. They realize that every game is a chance to be surprised by, to even stand in awe of, what somebody they maybe never even heard of can do.
“Every time I’m at a game and seeing a good player, if it’s tomorrow or last week, it always fires me up,” the Nationals’
Mike Rizzo once told the Washington Post. “It’s in my blood.”
Being a scout allows one to be passionate about the game. Pote has even penned poems about the profession and the search for the fastest pitcher of all time:Everyone’s dream, a second chance, is our story
Will he at long last get but a touch of fame and glory
And will we catch a glimpse of his greatness to be, back then
Being left to wonder at all that mighta been.
That’s the closing stanza to one entitled “The Ultimate Fastball and What Might Have Been.”
Being a scout also means sticking by one’s assessment of talent, even when everybody else disagrees with you. Perhaps Nolan Ryan doesn’t get signed without somebody like Red Murff in his corner. Before Tommy Lasorda managed the Los Angeles Dodgers, he toiled for that organization as a scout. He was the one sent to Fresno in 1965 to evaluate a 20-year-old Tom Seaver.
“This boy showed a good fastball with good life,” Lasorda wrote in the report he filed with the team. “[He] has good command . . . plenty of desire to pitch and wants to beat you.”
In all likelihood, a talent like Seaver would have reached the majors without Lasorda’s glowing review. When Lasorda was a scout, though, the position was still considered a step toward managerial stardom—a way to make your mark. Today scouting is regarded by some organizations as a dead-end position. Despite the brief recognition of a half dozen scouts in the late 1990s (Haak, Joe Cambria, Cy Slapnicka, Wish Eagan, and Bobby Mattick), scouts aren’t eligible for induction into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Through it all, the best scouts still refuse to back down when they believe a player has ability. Such was the case with Don Welke and Jim Abbott.