High Heat Read online

  A few days later, back at the Dodgers’ complex in Vero Beach, it was apparent to anybody watching how far the fireballer had come. Koufax threw to Sherry in what the players called “the string area.” This was a series of mounds with string set up near the plates to represent the strike zones. In the past, Koufax had struggled to consistently put the ball inside the strings. But on this day, he was having no difficulty. In fact, he soon told Sherry to cover the plate with dirt. Then he told him to draw a line where the outside of the plate was and another for the inside part.

  “After that I just sat on the corners and he hit my glove all day. It was unbelievable how much he changed,” Sherry says. “The previous years he hadn’t come close to that. Heck, the previous week he couldn’t have done it.”

  In 1961, Koufax broke through, going 18–13, leading the league with 269 strikeouts in 255 ⅔ innings. But that was just a hint of what was to come. He pitched the first of his four no-hitters the following season and led the league in victories and strikeouts in 1963, 1965, and 1966. He was inducted into Cooperstown at the age of 36, the youngest player ever to enter the Hall of Fame.

  “With any of these great pitchers, the questions become, ‘Can they harness their stuff? Can they pull together what’s been given to them sufficiently to become great?’” says Jeff Torborg, who caught Koufax’s perfect game in September 1965. “That’s not an easy thing to do. Not easy to do on any field, at any time. But these guys show that it can be done.”

  Sherry agrees that “throwing fast is a God-given talent. That’s for sure. But it’s not like it’s a present with all the bows.

  “Sandy’s a good example. He was a very determined guy. He was somehow going to make this work and it took a while, but he did. I believe you have to have that: that belief in yourself that it’s going to work out somehow.”

  The old ballpark of Bull Durham fame still stands. Unlike such parks in Brooklyn, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, it has been spared the wrecking ball, perhaps because somebody thought enough of it to film a baseball classic there.

  On my way out of town, I decided to drive by and pay my respects. Instead of an aging dinosaur, I find Durham Athletic Park to be thriving. On this morning, workmen are painting the front facade and lining the base paths. As part of a $5-million renovation, the DAP now hosts summer collegiate ball, high school games, and professional women’s softball.

  “If you build it, he will come.” Of course, that’s the famous line from W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe, which became the movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner, who once played Crash Davis.

  Here in Durham, they still come to what should be a forgotten ballpark because of another famous motion picture and characters we almost consider family. Sitting in the stands at DAP, I cannot help thinking of the next Nuke LaLoosh, a kid who somehow possesses the ability to throw thunderbolts from above. No matter how many radar guns are pointed in his direction, no matter how many years fly by, the mystique—dare we say, the fantasy—surrounding a prospective fireballer remains a key element of the game. The next great hurler could be from anywhere, even here, pitching in Nuke LaLoosh’s shadow.

  By mid-May, David Price had seemed to right himself. After starting the season 1–4, he struck out five and walked none in 4 ⅔ innings, with Andrew Friedman, the Rays’ executive vice president for baseball operations, in attendance. His parents flew down from the Nashville area for his next start, against visiting Rochester on May 17. He didn’t disappoint, taking a no-hitter through five innings. Despite striking out nine, the Rays treated him like fine china, taking him out after 82 pitches. The no-hitter? It didn’t matter. Not at this level.

  “We’re just trying to be patient,” says Debbie Price, who listened to her son’s Durham Bulls games over the Internet. “[The Rays] are kind of in a dilemma because if they bring Dave up, who are they going to send back down or trade off? It’s the ugly part of the business really.”

  The Price family often don’t talk to one another after David’s starts. Perhaps a text message the next day, briefly connecting Durham and the family in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. But Debbie Price says that may be because the season so far hadn’t played out exactly as planned.

  “Most nights we have the Tampa game on TV,” she says. “That’s another reason we’re rooting hard for him to get back up with the Rays. We went ahead and bought this MLB package and he’s not there yet.”

  The Arm Acceleration

  David Price

  Photo courtesy of Tampa Bay Rays/Skip Milos

  Joe: He walked 18.

  Larry: New league record!

  Joe: Struck out 18.

  Larry: Another new league record! In addition he hit the sportswriter, the public address announcer, the bull mascot twice . . .

  Larry: Also new league records!

  —ANNOUNCERS, BULL DURHAM

  It’s a Friday evening at Fenway Park in Boston, with the breeze coming off the Charles River and the CITGO sign beyond the left field wall glowing bright orange and blue. At first glance, it seems to be a perfect night for baseball—until I notice that the teams on the field, the hometown Red Sox and the visiting Angels—are the same ballclubs that took the field during an infamous game decades ago. What happened then, despite advances in equipment, and changes in rules and attitude, could occur again. Once more, I’m reminded how the game can turn evil on any given pitch, especially one thrown by a bona fide fireballer.

  In this ballpark, on August 18, 1967, Red Sox slugger Tony Conigliaro was struck in the face by a pitch from the Angels’ Jack Hamilton. In an instant, what assuredly was a Hall of Fame career was derailed. Conigliaro suffered a fractured left cheekbone, dislocated jaw, scalp contusions, and a severely bruised eye. The injury caused a cyst to form on the macula, a portion of the retina, resulting in a blurry blind spot. The eye injury would play havoc with his depth perception for the rest of his career, to the point that he became a one-eyed batter. Even though Conigliaro did make several comebacks, he was never the same player.

  When I was growing up, Tony C. was one of my boyhood idols. When I signed up for Little League in Gasport, New York, a onestop-light village between Lockport and Middleport on Route 31, hard by the Erie Canal, I was assigned to the Red Sox. That’s how I became a Bosox fan. It was the whim of some adult who assigned me to that particular team as opposed to the Tigers or the Athletics or the Yankees. Of course, this was well before cable, satellite television, or the Internet provided us with highlights and updates 24/7. To root for a team meant tuning in on a transistor radio, often late at night under the bedroom covers so the parents couldn’t hear, and studying box scores in the next day’s newspaper like they were the Dead Sea scrolls, imagining game sequences from what little information was squeezed into those narrow columns.

  That’s why that night in 1967 remained part mystery, part nightmare for such a long time to me. I saw the photograph of Tony C. in the morning paper—his left eye socket blackened and bruised almost beyond recognition. But the question of exactly what had happened or, more importantly, how a game I loved and also played for a time could turn so dangerous so easily is what stayed with me through the years. As Rick Wolff, son of broadcaster Bob Wolff and once a sports psychology coach for the Cleveland Indians, told me as my search for the fastest pitcher of all time was just beginning, “You’re going to need to discuss the dark side of all this. What happens when a fastball flies out of control.”

  Long before Ken Griffey Jr., Derek Jeter, or Cal Ripken, there was Tony C. With a smile on his face and with his cocky manner, he was the modern slugger who was ahead of his time both in plate performance and flamboyant lifestyle. He was one of the youngest players to reach 100 career home runs—only 22 when he gained that plateau. Until that night in 1967, it seemed only a matter of time until he hit 400, 500, even 600 dingers.

  “He might have been the guy to break [Babe] Ruth’s and [Hank] Aaron’s record,” Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer says. “With that swing, in th
at ballpark, there’s no telling how many he would have hit.”

  How quickly such promise was taken away—gone in a single pitch. Nearly everyone I spoke with in attendance that evening remains haunted by it.

  “The sound is what I’ll always remember,” Bill Rigney, who was managing the Angels that night in 1967, once told me. “The ball hitting him—it was like a broom smacking the side of a pumpkin. The sound seemed to carry everywhere in that ballpark.

  “Of all the things I’ve experienced in baseball, that’s what I can’t get out of my head. That’s the sound that still wakes me up at night.”

  An inch or so higher, and Jack Hamilton’s pitch would have killed Conigliaro. The tragedy left Red Sox fans wondering what might have been. If Conigliaro had been in the lineup for the 1967 World Series, would Cardinals ace Bob Gibson have had such an easy time sitting down the Boston order? Could the ballclub have had the championship nearly 40 years earlier with its local slugger healthy and still swinging for the fences?

  Before dismissing that night at Fenway as another case study from the “Curse of the Bambino,” or another example of Red Sox paranoia, consider how memory and time work, how the ripples from a single tragedy can impact lives years and years later. For a moment or two, let’s chase the ghost of Tony C. and consider how a baseball thrown with some malice in mind can forever alter one’s opinion of high heat.

  “He was baseball’s JFK,” says Dick Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England. “That’s why you’re still interested in him. That’s why there will always be this fascination with him that goes beyond him and the Red Sox. In Tony C., people see their greatest hopes and biggest fears realized in one player, one pitch.”

  There was something about the way Conigliaro carried himself that immediately won over Johnny Pesky. Pesky was the Red Sox manager in 1964 when Conigliaro arrived at spring training camp fresh from being named rookie of the year in the New York-Penn League. After seeing how the kid could hit the ball, Pesky lobbied hard to have Conigliaro on the major-league roster when camp broke.

  “I put my neck out for him,” Pesky says. “I knew he was the real thing.”

  At the plate, Conigliaro exhibited quick hands and a fluid stroke. He appeared taller than his 6-foot-3, 180 pounds when he stepped into the batter’s box—a similarity that Pesky remembers Conigliaro sharing with Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

  In his initial at bat at Fenway, on the first pitch, Conigliaro proved Pesky a prophet, homering off Chicago’s Joel Horlen. Years later, that highlight was included in the video Red Sox Home Run Heroes, with Curt Gowdy doing the play-by-play.

  “What a thrill that must be for a 19-year-old boy, who a year ago was playing high school baseball,” Gowdy says as Conigliaro rounds the bases on the old video. “Look at that smile on his face. Ah, look at that smile.”

  From the beginning, Conigliaro realized that the way to succeed at Fenway Park was to hang in against inside deliveries and pull everything he could toward left field, toward the Green Monster, only 310 feet, if that, down the line. “He had the perfect swing for Fenway,” says Red Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg. “But that swing made him vulnerable to getting hit. It was the price he decided to pay.”

  Before the tragic beaning in 1967, Conigliaro had already suffered a broken finger, thumb, wrist, hand, and shoulder blade—all from getting hit by a baseball.

  “He was a matador,” Johnson says. “Nobody had more courage than him. He’d get hit and stick his head right back in there the next time out.”

  Despite missing six weeks because of injuries, he homered 24 times in 1964, an amazing total for a teenager. Mike Sowell, who wrote The Pitch That Killed, the story of Ray Chapman’s fatal beaning in 1920, says it “is easy to forget how rough a game baseball can be. You don’t see guys getting hit like you do in football. Most of the time, there’s a civility to baseball.”

  Or at least that’s what we like to think. But when such rules of engagement are ignored or misunderstood, the consequences can be tragic. Conigliaro wore a helmet, but it didn’t have the kind of side flap that players use today. When Sowell hears the sound of a ball ricocheting off a modern helmet, it almost sounds like music to him. “Chapman and Conigliaro didn’t hear that,” he says. “Maybe that’s why I like the sound. Some of the incidents you see today, a guy is hit and in a few minutes is right back up.”

  Despite such safety measures, beanings have prematurely ended several modern-day careers. The Astros’ Dickie Thon was hit in the face with a pitch thrown by the Mets’ Mike Torrez in 1984. He missed the rest of the season and half of the next with blurred vision, and he never matched his 1983 numbers of 20 home runs and 79 RBI. The Twins’ Kirby Puckett had his jaw broken by the Indians’ Dennis Martinez in 1995. He retired the next spring because of vision problems unrelated to the beaning.

  Of course, the list of injuries was much longer before helmets and the ear flap (introduced after the Cubs’ Ron Santo broke his cheekbone in 1966) became everyday equipment. The notables include Mickey Cochrane (fractured skull in 1937) and Don Zimmer (broken cheekbone in 1956). Orestes “Minnie” Minoso, the first darkskinned athlete to play in Chicago, the “Latino Jackie Robinson,” led the league in getting hit 10 of the 11 years between 1951 and 1961. The lone exception was 1955, when a pitch earlier in the season fractured his skull.

  “I tried to take everything as it comes,” Minoso says. “I never let the world hurt me. The world didn’t break me.”

  Since the game’s origins, pitchers, especially those who throw really, really hard, have used intimidation to win many a battle at home plate.

  “My first two times up, he struck me out on six pitches—low and away fastballs,” Phil Garner said once about facing Nolan Ryan. “My third time up, the first two pitches again were low and away fastballs for strikes. I decided not to get caught again with a low and away fastball. I leaned out over the plate, hoping to just peck the ball.

  “In a flash, in that thousandth of a second, I saw his fastball thrown as hard as he could throw it coming right at my ear. My whole life passed before me. I tried to dig a hole beneath the batter’s box ’cause I was scared to death. As he was winding up to throw his next pitch, I was already walking to the dugout. It was strike three for me, and I was just happy to be out of there.”

  Dick Williams claimed that Ryan rarely threw at anybody, “but he was conveniently wild. His ball just took off.”

  As later detailed in Ryan’s autobiography, Williams remembered slugger Reggie Jackson hitting a line drive off Ryan, which was barely tracked down in the outfield. After Jackson made the turn at first base, heading back across the infield to the dugout, he gave Ryan a playful smack on the butt. The next half dozen games they faced each other, Ryan was “conveniently wild.”

  Perhaps that’s what prompted Jackson years later to say that Ryan was “the only guy who put the fear in me. Not because he could get me out but because he could kill me. Every hitter likes fastballs like everybody likes ice cream. But you don’t like it when somebody’s stuffing it into you by the gallon. That’s how you felt when Nolan was throwing fastballs by you. You just hoped to mix in a walk so you could have a good night.”

  Dave Duncan, who went on to be a respected pitching coach, says what separated Ryan from most pitchers was that he didn’t “just get you out. He embarrassed you. There are times when you’ve won some sort of victory just hitting the ball.”

  Brooks Robinson adds that when Ryan was in his prime there was definitely a fear of him. “There’s an old baseball saying,” the Hall of Fame third baseman said. ‘“Your heart might be in the batter’s box, but your ass ain’t.’”

  Such sentiment once forced Dodgers shortstop Bill Russell to return to the dugout before his at bat was over. The reason? A fastball delivered by the Astros’ J. R. Richard that sailed over Russell’s head and splintered a piece of wood attached to the backstop. The wood was a good 30 feet beyond home plate, and Richard’s heater was later reported
to be 103 miles per hour.

  Russell stepped out of the batter’s box, thought things over, and then refused to step back in. Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda tried to console him, but Russell had seen enough. So, Lasorda motioned for Pepe Frias to pinch-hit, which prompted the famous response, “Why do I have to bat?”

  Before the start of the 1969 season, the St. Louis Cardinals traded slugger Orlando Cepeda to Atlanta. Cepeda still remembers his first at bat against his old friend and teammate Bob Gibson, and how the rules of engagement changed overnight. “The first time I went to the plate, he knocked me back,” he says. “It was mandatory, you know what I mean? In fact, Bob came to my house for dinner after the game, and my son said, ‘How come you threw at my dad?’ And Bob said, ‘It’s a game. Baseball.’”

  From Ryne Duren to Rob Dibble, pitchers have always employed intimidation. Duren was famous for uncorking his last warm-up pitch to the backstop behind home plate. “I didn’t do it as much as people think I did,” Duren once said. “But the evil that men do lives after them. Somebody said that once.”

  Dibble, who along with hard throwers Randy Myers and Norm Charlton was part of the Cincinnati Reds’ “Nasty Boys” relief corps, buzzed a hitter or two, especially early in his career. “I’ve pitched like that my entire career,” Dibble told the Associated Press after a 1991 altercation in which he brush-backed the Houston Astros’ Eric Yelding, who then came after him and threw his batting helmet at the pitcher. “I didn’t hit him. He hit me.”

  Sometimes even the best intentions can turn heads. When Andy Baylock, who caught Steve Dalkowski in high school, complained about a sore receiving hand, a few adults advised him to get a slab of beef from the local butcher. They told him to cut it thin enough to slide inside the palm of the catcher’s mitt to provide another layer of cushion. It seemed like a good idea at the time. What nobody envisioned was that the meat would ooze so much blood and juice that by the middle innings hitters stepping to the plate against Dalkowski would see red stuff dripping down the catcher’s forearm. “It got a bit out of control,” says Bill Huber, Dalkowski’s high school coach. “I had to put an end to that practice, no matter how well intentioned.”