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  Helmets and new rules were a long way off for the Cleveland ballclub as it tried to move ahead without Chapman. But after the team strung together a few victories, many of the players believed that their fallen comrade was looking down on them. Perhaps that’s so. How else to explain the Indians’ rallying down the stretch to take the pennant by two games over the White Sox and three over the Yankees? One of the key players for Cleveland was in fact rookie shortstop Joe Sewell, who replaced Chapman in the everyday lineup. The Indians went on to defeat the Brooklyn Robins in the World Series for their first championship.

  As for Mays, he became an outcast, a persona non grata. In the weeks after the incident, several teams, including the Red Sox and Tigers, spoke openly about boycotting games in which the hard-throwing submariner participated. Yet like many such grandstanding gestures, the campaign soon lost momentum. Mays went on to pitch another nine years in the majors, finishing his career with a respectable 207–126 record and 2.92 ERA. In fact, his numbers stack up favorably with those of several hurlers in the Hall of Fame. But Mays would never reach a place of forgiveness and redemption after he retired, let alone a plaque in Cooperstown. To his dying day, he insisted he hadn’t hit Chapman on purpose.

  “The death of Ray Chapman is a thing I do not like to discuss,” Mays later told Baseball Magazine. “It is an episode that I shall always regret more than anything else that ever happened to me. And yet, I can look into my own conscience and feel absolved from all sense of guilt. The most amazing thing about it was the fact that some people seemed to believe I did this thing deliberately. . . .

  “Suppose a pitcher was moral monster enough to want to kill a batter with whom he can have no possible quarrel. How could he do this terrible thing? Christy Mathewson in the days of his most perfect control couldn’t have hit a batter in the temple once in a thousand tries.”

  Almost 20 years after his book about the Chapman tragedy was published, I ask Sowell how he feels about Mays now. Was he the monster that everybody made him out to be? Or was he simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, throwing the wrong pitch?

  “When it first came out, the question I got most of the time was, ‘Did you think Carl Mays threw at Ray Chapman on purpose?’” Sowell says. “I don’t think so. That opinion hasn’t changed much.

  “What has changed for me is that I think I have more respect for him. That’s what has grown over time. Carl Mays may have not been the friendliest guy in the world. He sure didn’t have many friends. But he was loyal to the ones he had and he played the game hard. A lot of players, including Johnny Pesky, admired him, how he went about his business.

  “Over time, I’ve become more convinced that he belongs in the Hall of Fame. His numbers are as good as or better than many pitchers from his era. But there’s this one pitch, this one awful mistake. For that he’ll probably never be forgiven.”

  Most fireballers intimidate opposing batters. A select few, such as Robert Moses “Lefty” Grove, who played in the majors from 1925 to 1941 for the Philadelphia Athletics and then the Boston Red Sox, terrified their teammates as well. Growing up in the Allegheny Mountains of western Maryland, Grove pretty much taught himself how to pitch. He, like Amos Rusie before him, gained a reputation for throwing rocks “at anything, moving or stationary.” According to the Baltimore Sun, sometimes the targets were squirrels and birds, but mostly they consisted of the glass insulators on the telegraph poles. If it hadn’t been for baseball, Grove likely would have followed in his family’s footsteps and been a coal miner. But he detested going below ground, having to eke out a living that way.

  When he was 15, Grove worked with his father in the mines for two weeks. He remembered it being dark when he went down and dark when he came back up. “If it hadn’t been for Sundays,” he said, “I’d never know if there was any sunshine. After two weeks, I said,

  ‘Paw, that ain’t my kind of work and I’m going to get some other job.’ . . . I didn’t put that coal there and I’m not going to dig it out.”

  So, Grove went to work at a local glassworks. When it burned down, he found employment at $7 a day at another glassworks and the Klotz Silk Mill. Yet his options were proving to be limited at best. So, in the spring of 1919 legend has it that Grove put on his “store clothes” and pedaled his bike down out of the hills to Martinsburg, West Virginia. The town had a team in the Blue Ridge League and Grove wanted to try out.

  After some cajoling, Bill Louden, the manager, gave him a chance. While the kid from the mountains sure could throw hard, too often he had no idea where the ball was going. Still, he made the team.

  “[They] offered me $130 a month to play ball over at Martinsburg, more than 50 miles way,” Grove later told the Boston Globe. “Would I take it? I jumped at that $130 a month just for pitching. My folks told me, ‘You’ll get homesick,’ and I told them, ‘I’ll not be homesick and I’m never going to be.’ I couldn’t get away fast enough. And I wasn’t homesick, neither.”

  On or off the mound, Walter “The Big Train” Johnson was an imposing presence.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Few had a more violent pitching motion than fireballer Smoky Joe Wood.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Bob Feller’s fastball was clocked at 98.6 miles per hour during this pre-game test in Washington, D.C., in 1946.

  Getty Images

  Bob Feller and Satchel Paige talk during their barnstorming days. Paige would later join Feller in Cleveland as a member of the major-league Indians.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians died tragically after being hit in the head by a pitch thrown by Carl Mays in August 1920.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Before he was beaned in 1967, nobody had a more promising career than Tony Conigliaro of the Boston Red Sox. Here he swings a bat in the on-deck circle of a spring training game during his comeback bid in 1969.

  Jim Hansen, photographer, LOOK Magazine Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

  After six years in the majors Sandy Koufax had a 36–40 record, but over his last six years on the mound he won 129 of 176 decisions, and he would later reach the Hall of Fame.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Randy Johnson was another fireballer who took a while to find his way. But he went on to reach the 300-victory plateau, an accomplishment that usually lands a pitcher in the Hall of Fame.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Tommy John shows off his famous arm. Ligament replacement surgery not only saved his own major-league career but the fortunes of many other injured pitchers who followed in his footsteps.

  Getty Images

  Nobody intimidated opposing batters more than Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals. He struck out a league-leading 268 hitters and had 13 shutouts in 1968, the so-called “Year of the Pitcher.”

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  In 1973, Nolan Ryan posted a single-season record for strikeouts (383). In addition, he pitched 26 complete games, four shutouts, and two no-hitters that season.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Ryan celebrates his fourth no-hitter, which he pitched in 1975 as a member of the California Angels.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Ryan shows some emotion in the midst of his sixth no-hitter on June 11, 1990, in Oakland. He would record his record seventh no-no the following season against Toronto.

  Jose Luis Villegas

  Billy Wagner proves that size doesn’t matter when it comes to throwing a quality fastball.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  Off the field Tim Lincecum could pass for a skateboarder, but between the lines he’s one of the hardest throwers
in the game and a Cy Young winner.

  Jose Luis Villegas

  The top pick in the 2009 amateur draft, Stephen Strasburg signed at the 11th hour with the Washington Nationals.

  Ernie Anderson

  Steve Dalkowski, shown here in 1959, was a legendary fireballer but never reached the major leagues.

  Associated Press

  Who says you can’t go home again? Steve Dalkowski, center, with several of his boyhood friends at the 2009 spring sports banquet in New Britain, Connecticut.

  Tim Wendel

  Grove soon gained such a reputation in the Blue Ridge League that Jack Dunn, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, sent his son to Martinsburg for a firsthand look. The younger Dunn was impressed, and one of the most curious deals in baseball was soon completed. One story has it that a recent storm had leveled the outfield fence in Martinsburg. Dunn agreed to pay for a new one—$3,000—in exchange for the rights to Grove.

  At that time, the Orioles were playing in the International League, and nobody was better. Under Dunn, the ballclub won seven consecutive pennants, and during his four-plus seasons in town Grove went 108–36. Usually winning makes everybody happy. But several of Grove’s teammates in Baltimore appeared to resent his success.

  “They used to say that I was mean in those days, but I had a reason,” Grove said. “Everybody was mean to me. It was rough on a kid trying to make it in baseball in those days.”

  So began the often dysfunctional relationship between Grove and his teammates—an uneasy truce that would continue throughout his playing days.

  In October 1924, the Orioles sold Grove’s rights to Connie Mack and the Philadelphia Athletics for a then-record $100,600. By that point, there were three constants when it came to Grove: (1) His stuff was as fast as anything ever seen in baseball; (2) it was just as wild; and (3) his teammates couldn’t stand him. “Hitting off him was like asking to be blindfolded and then trying to swing an ax handle to hit a lump of coal in the darkness of midnight,” the Baltimore Sun noted.

  Under Mack’s tutelage, Grove gained better control of his fastball. In his second spring training with the As he got up early every day and started pitching before his teammates showed up.

  “I threw for 20 minutes,” he later recalled. “I put nothing on any pitch. I merely concentrated on hitting different spots of the plate and I finally got so I could throw strikes blindfolded. After that, it was easy sailing.”

  So much so that Grove put together one of the most incredible runs in baseball history. From 1929 through 1933, he won 128 games and lost just 33. Yet it was never easy sailing between Grove and his teammates.

  “I often was in the need of a helping hand when I came up to the As from Baltimore,” he said of his early years with the As, “but I was never offered one. My victories were greeted by silence. My defeats, all due to wildness, brought no advice as to how I might acquire control.”

  In 1931, Grove was on the cusp of breaking the American League’s consecutive-wins record. He had tied Walter Johnson and Smoky Joe Wood by winning 16 straight. The record 17th appeared to be a sure thing as he took the mound in St. Louis against the lowly Browns and their journeyman pitcher Dick Coffman. Before the game, Mack had said that Grove was better than his other heralded left-handers, Eddie Plank and Rube Waddell. The stage was set for a coronation. Instead, Grove was greeted with a debacle.

  Besides flattering his superstar pitcher, Mack had allowed Al Simmons, the team’s All Star left fielder, to take a few days off. Starting in Simmons’s place was backup Jimmy Moore. In the third inning, Moore misjudged a fly ball that gave the Browns a 1–0 lead. Remarkably, the tainted run stood up and Grove lost the game, 1–0.

  Afterward, he tore apart the visitors’ clubhouse at Sportsman’s Park. After that he ripped off his uniform, threw it on the floor, and jumped up and down on it.

  “If Simmons had been here and in left field,” Grove fumed, “he would have caught that ball in his back pocket.”

  Grove didn’t speak to Mack or his teammates for several days. He never did forgive Simmons for taking the day off and spoiling his potential record breaker.

  To help him concentrate and throw more strikes, Mack urged his fiery left-hander to take more time between pitches, to not rush things. The legendary manager told Grove to count to 10, sometimes 15, between deliveries. Opposing crowds soon caught on and chanted the count along with Grove. Despite being prickly with his teammates, Grove didn’t let the distraction bother him. In fact, his walk totals steadily decreased throughout his 17-year career.

  Such improvement wasn’t enough to keep him in Philadelphia, though. Mack was going broke and began to sell off his stars one by one. Before the 1934 season, after he led the league in victories (24), Grove was sent to the Red Sox. He struggled early on and battled a sore arm, especially during the 1938 season. Yet Grove won 105 games in eight seasons with Boston and finished his major-league career with a 300–141 record. (After he retired, Grove would claim that he could have won 400 if he hadn’t spent five seasons in the International League with Baltimore.)

  Throughout it all, success went hand in hand with his temper tantrums. After player-manager Joe Cronin’s error cost Grove a ballgame late in his career, the left-hander followed Cronin into the Boston clubhouse. Cronin hurried into his office and closed the door behind him. But Grove was never put off so easily. Finding a stool, he climbed atop it, so he could reach the wire screen above Cronin’s office. From this vantage point, he sneered down at his manager, shouting obscenities about Cronin’s inability to field like a major leaguer.

  Then Grove wondered why Cronin and Ted Williams, another teammate he traded insults with, didn’t attend a party he threw to celebrate winning his 300th game. Talk about a diva.

  “That’s the kind of bird Mose is,” former Red Sox general manager Eddie Collins said at the time. “He may never reach the heights of popularity that Babe Ruth has, but it isn’t because he isn’t a good fellow. He’s naturally shy, like most of those fellows from the mountains, and has a natural distrust of strangers.”

  Luke Sewell, who batted against Grove for 15 years and later coached in Cleveland, said Grove was faster than the next legend to come down the pike, Bob Feller. “I mean that Grove’s fast one actually was past the batter and into the catcher’s mitt quicker than Bobby’s,” Sewell told the Associated Press. “Feller’s fast one, though, had more life to it, and, of course, he had a wonderful curve, whereas Lefty had none until after he began to lose speed.”

  “Lefty Grove was the hardest thrower of his era,” Maury Allen wrote in 1981. “[His] fastball would have registered more than 100 miles per hour if the currently used radar gun had been in existence.”

  Lefty Gomez was once asked who was faster, Feller or Sandy Koufax. His answer was simply, “Grove.”

  “There was probably no better left-hander who ever pitched,” Bill Veeck told the Washington Star in 1975. “It’s tough to compare different eras and so it is tough to say whether he or Sandy Koufax is better. Certainly no left-hander was better than Grove. His control was his biggest asset. When you throw as hard as he could with his accuracy, you didn’t have to do much else.”

  Perhaps it was Mickey Cochrane, Grove’s catcher in Philadelphia, who figured him out better than anybody. When the southpaw got into trouble, Cochrane would forget about reminding Grove to count to 10 or trying to settle him down. Instead, Cochrane would fire the ball back to Grove and shout out an accompanying insult or two for good measure. Grove hated that, the Christian Science Monitor reported, and the pitcher “would try to throw the ball right through Cochrane. Meanwhile, the hitters were suffering.”

  Let’s leave it to Red Smith to sum up Grove. “On the mound [Grove] was poetry,” Smith wrote in a New York Times column in 1975. “He would rock back until the knuckles of his left-hand almost brushed the earth behind him, then come up and over with a perfect follow-through. He was the only 300-game winner between Grover Alexander and Warren Spahn, a
span of 37 years.

  “He had the lowest earned run average in the league nine different years, and nobody else ever did that more than five times. If the old records can be trusted, Alexander, Christy Mathewson, [Walter] Johnson and Sandy Koufax each won five ERA titles. Some men would say these were the best pitchers that ever lived. Are the records trying to tell us Old Man Mose was twice as good as any of them?”

  Two decades after he beaned Tony C. at Fenway Park, Jack Hamilton opened a restaurant in Branson, Missouri. Back then the town of 3,700 was nothing more than a wrinkle in the Ozarks. These days Branson draws more than 6 million visitors annually. They come from far and wide to see what has been nicknamed the “Hillbilly Las Vegas.” With 30 music theaters—named for stars from Roy Clark to Japanese-born fiddler Shoji Tabuchi—a 27-acre factory outlet center, and hotels, the traffic is bumper to bumper on Highway 76 through town. And nobody is busier than Hamilton.

  “It’s nice to know things work out for the best sometimes,” says Hamilton, who can be found most days at his restaurant, Pzazz. “We’re just down the street from Mel Tillis’s and Boxcar Willie’s. We work hard, putting in long hours. But in the restaurant business, that’s the way you like it.”

  Most days, after troubleshooting his way through the kitchen, making sure there’s plenty of prime rib (Pzazz’s specialty), Hamilton can be found out front, greeting customers. Every couple weeks or so, somebody will walk in from Boston or somewhere else in New England. And even though Hamilton wishes he was better known for the one-hitter he pitched or the grand slam he walloped while a New York Met, invariably somebody will ask, “Aren’t you the guy who hit Tony Conigliaro?” And with a resigned look on his face, Hamilton will nod and talk about that pitch one more time.