High Heat Page 18

  Throughout the 1967 season, it was rumored that Hamilton was throwing a spitball, which had been declared illegal soon after Chapman’s death. In fact, early in the game in which Conigliaro was beaned, Red Sox manager Dick Williams complained to the umpires that Hamilton’s pitches were behaving strangely. Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr, the Red Sox first-base coach in 1967, noted in his diary for that day that Williams protested Hamilton’s offerings in the second inning. Back at the bench, Williams told Doerr that he “was afraid someone would get hurt.”

  But the Angels’ battery denies that Hamilton was throwing a spitter. Catcher Buck Rodgers, who would later manage the Angels, remembers the pitch as “a fastball that sailed.”

  Hamilton also recalls Conigliaro crowding the plate so much that his head was hanging over it. “No, I wasn’t throwing a spitter,” Hamilton says. “I had two outs in the inning. It was tied. Why would I want to hit anybody in that situation? I was just wild. I was so wild that I couldn’t have hit him if I wanted to.”

  After Conigliaro went down, Hamilton stood on the mound with his arms folded, while many in the Fenway crowd of 31,027 booed. Hamilton started to walk toward home plate, but Rodgers, who had seen the condition Conigliaro was in, blocked his path. After the game, Hamilton tried to visit Conigliaro at Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Red Sox slugger had been rushed. But Hamilton wasn’t allowed in.

  “I never did talk with him,” Hamilton says. “That’s what really bothers me. I didn’t get a chance to tell him that it was an accident.”

  And that’s what Hamilton will tell anybody who asks him about the beaning today. It was an accident. “I know that in my heart, I didn’t mean to do it,” he says. “So, it really doesn’t matter what people may say. They don’t know. They weren’t there. When the anniversaries come around, I know it’s going to come up. What are you going to do?”

  “I think it’s malicious to hit anyone because of your own inadequacies,” Jim Palmer says, and Walter Johnson would have undoubtedly agreed.

  Legend has it that the Big Train threw at a batter only once in his 21-year career. That declaration comes from several sources, most notably the sportswriter Shirley Povich. Such a reluctance to throw the beanball is attributed to Johnson’s outstanding fastball and his easygoing disposition.

  That lone beanball incident involving the Big Train occurred against the Philadelphia As in 1912, and if Povich and others are to be believed it wasn’t even Johnson’s idea. Throughout his career, Johnson told teammates that he was afraid that he would kill a batter one day, and after close calls he often ran toward home plate from the mound out of concern.

  The best hitters noticed Johnson’s apprehension about coming inside, especially with the hard stuff. The Tigers’ Ty Cobb, who would undoubtedly look for an edge against his own grandmother, saw how Johnson winced when he fired the ball too close to the batter’s head and shoulder. That’s when the Georgia Peach began to crowd the plate, confident that Johnson wouldn’t dare bust him too far inside.

  “I’d crowd that plate so far that I was actually sticking my toes on it when I was facing Johnson,” Cobb later told Povich. “I knew he was timid about hitting a batter, and when he saw me crowding the plate, he’d steer his pitches a little bit wide. Then, with two balls and no strikes, he’d ease up a bit to get it over. That’s the Johnson pitch I hit. I was depending on him to be scared of hitting me.”

  Perhaps that’s a major reason why Cobb was the all-time hits leader for so long. He could use such reverse psychology against even the best in the game. Other hitters didn’t think things through to such a degree or, if they did, didn’t have enough confidence in their conclusion to actually try it out against Johnson. But occasionally some did have success.

  One of them was the Athletics’ Frank “Home Run” Baker. He hit so consistently off the Big Train that the Senators’ trainer, Mike Martin, finally confronted Johnson.

  “That Baker has been ruining us all season,” Martin told Johnson. “If you don’t knock him down, I’ll always think you’ve got no guts.”

  Why the Big Train bothered listening to the team trainer is anybody’s guess. But for whatever reason the criticism hit home. When Baker next came to bat, Johnson vowed he would intentionally throw at his head.

  With Baker in the batter’s box, Johnson went into his windup with malice on his mind. The pitch, as Povich later recalled, was “a high, hard one, inside, that barely missed Baker’s skull and sent him foundering and pale into the dirt. Johnson, white with terror, was the first to reach him. He was a happy man when Baker stirred, glowered, and told him, ‘Get back there and pitch!’”

  Years later, Johnson told Povich, “The moment I threw the pitch, I wished I had it back.”

  In the twilight of his career, Johnson did an extended interview with Baseball Magazine. In the piece, he left little doubt on where he stood on the subject of the beanball, calling it “the meanest thing in baseball.”

  He explained that the “bean ball is one of the meanest things on earth and no decent fellow would use it. I shall not attempt to judge anyone, but there are pitchers, I am convinced, who do resort to the bean ball intentionally.

  “Such a ball to be effective must be pitched fast. The bean ball pitcher is a potential murderer. If I was a batter and thought the pitcher really tried to bean me, I would be inclined to wait for him outside the park with a baseball bat, or I wouldn’t be averse to spiking him as I slid into first base when he was covering the bag. I don’t think any treatment of such actions is too severe.”

  For a moment, the Big Train sounds an awful lot like his old adversary Ty Cobb.

  When so much is on the line, the thought process of pitcher and batter becomes very intriguing. Before Cobb rationalized correctly that Johnson would never throw at him on purpose, he went to great lengths to not only convince himself to step up to the plate but to do his utmost against a fireball pitcher like Johnson.

  “I reasoned with myself. I said, ‘I am up here to make a success and must overcome this foolish fear,’” Cobb later explained to Baseball Magazine. “‘The worst that can happen to me is that Walter Johnson will hit me. If he does hit me that it is all part of the risk I assume playing ball, a risk that is peculiar to my profession. . . . ’

  “So I ignored my fears. I not only refused to back away from the plate, but I crowded the plate. I was determined to conquer Johnson’s fastball. And that season I batted nearly .700 against him, a higher average, I believe, than anyone else ever made at his expense.”

  In essence, Conigliaro and nearly every successful batter from Cobb’s era to the present day have made the same pact with themselves.

  Four days after Tony Conigliaro came home from the hospital, the Red Sox signed outfielder Ken “Hawk” Harrelson. The Hawk replaced Tony C. in right field, collecting a league-high 109 RBIs the following season. In 1970, Conigliaro was traded to the Angels, Hamilton’s former team, where his eyesight continued to diminish. Midway through the 1971 season, Tony C. retired at the age of 26. In 1975, he attempted one more comeback with his Red Sox. But it ended after just 21 games.

  After taking broadcasting jobs on the West Coast, Conigliaro came home for the final time. In 1982, after he had auditioned for a broadcasting spot with the Red Sox, he suffered a heart attack. Although his heart recovered, his brain went too long without oxygen. He lived out the rest of his days with his family and at a chronic-care hospital outside of Boston, where he required 24-hour care. Bumper stickers throughout New England read, “I PRAY FOR TONY C.” He died in 1990 at the age of 45.

  “I don’t know how my mother and father did it,” Billy Conigliaro says. “Each day was a struggle and you just took it a day at a time. I know that’s what killed my father. Seeing his son suffer like that.”

  Really nothing else in baseball can be as sudden or as shocking as a pitch that can kill. Even though nobody at the major-league level has died directly from a beaning since Chapman, base
ball can still be deadly. Researchers Bob Gorman and David Weeks calculate that 9 minor leaguers and 111 amateur baseball players, some as young as eight years old, have died as a result of beanings since 1887. And despite the best in equipment, from lighting to helmets to a fresh baseball put in play at almost every turn, the game still has its dark side.

  Consider another Friday night, April 17, 2009, at Fenway Park. The Red Sox are hosting the Baltimore Orioles when seemingly out of nowhere Danys Baez’s 93-mile-per-hour fastball to Boston’s Kevin Youkilis gets away from him. The high heat tails inside, head high, with such ferocity that all Youkilis can do is turn his head ever so slightly away. An instant later, the ball smacks off his helmet and Youkilis falls to the ground. On the mound, both of Baez’s hands reach for his head, as if he cannot believe what he’s done. For a long moment or two, the Fenway faithful hold their breath.

  Thankfully, Youkilis is soon on his feet, walking to first base as the cheers build throughout the ballpark. Baez nods his head in Youkilis’s direction, as if in apology.

  “Hitting somebody in the head is frightening,” says Jim Palmer, now a broadcaster for the Baltimore Orioles. “Not only for the guy who’s hit, but for the guy who threw the ball, too.”

  Legend has it that before a spring training game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Red Sox at the old Miami Stadium, Steve Dalkowski was throwing to a few hitters while a group of reporters and players watched. Among those in attendance was Ted Williams of the Red Sox, the last guy to ever hit better than .400 in a season, the guy renowned for his keen vision, the one who didn’t like to wear a batting helmet. After studying Dalkowski, Williams couldn’t help himself. He was tantalized by this epic fastball, so he picked up a bat, ready to take a few hacks against the young left-hander.

  According to lore, Williams took three practice swings, cocked his bat, and nodded for Dalkowski to give him his best shot. Dalkowski went into that abbreviated motion of his. The next thing everybody knew the ball was in the catcher’s glove, only a few inches below Williams’s chin. “The Splendid Splinter” looked from the glove, back out to Dalkowski, and then walked out of the batting cage. He told reporters that he never would bat against that kid again. It was too dangerous—the way the ball seemed to disappear and then reappear only when it was already past him.

  Of course, Teddy Ballgame could have just asked some of the kids who faced Dalkowski back in New Britain, Connecticut, to know how terrifying the experience could be. “If he’d hit someone in the head, he might have killed them,” Len Pare, Dalkowski’s high school catcher, once told the Baltimore Sun. “Fortunately, he never did. But once a game, he’d throw a ball behind the batter. That put the fear of God in everyone. Then the next three pitches would be way outside because he was afraid of hitting the guy.

  “He didn’t have to worry about brushing people back. They never dug in. They just wanted out of there. They’d swing at anything. Steve struck out tons of guys without throwing the ball over the plate.”

  In the closing chapters of his professional career, Dalkowski came as close as he ever would to becoming a complete pitcher. In a remarkable piece of luck, he had hooked up with Earl Weaver, a manager who could actually help him. The two of them came together for the 1962 season in Elmira, New York, and for the first time, Dalkowski began to throw strikes. During one stretch, over 53 innings, he struck out 111 hitters and walked only 11.

  Many considered it only a matter of time until Weaver was the head man at the parent club in Baltimore, which did happen in 1968. Under his direction, the Orioles won the American League pennant four times and the World Series once. Weaver wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and was known for his rants against umpires as well as his own players. And deep down, Weaver had a profound respect for what a power arm could mean to a team, how a quality fastball could even turn a season around. Growing up, Weaver had seen Bob Feller pitch. He remembered being in awe of how fast the ball traveled to the plate. Later in his managing career, Weaver witnessed firsthand what Nolan Ryan could do. And when he first laid eyes on Dalkowski, he saw that in terms of pure speed, the unassuming left-hander was easily one of the best.

  That season in Elmira, Weaver attacked with the tools of a social scientist the riddle of why Dalkowski couldn’t throw strikes. Weaver learned that Dalkowski was the son of a blue-collar background. He listened to his young phenom tell the story about hitting that batter in Kingsport in his rookie season, how Dalkowski had visited the kid in the hospital and how that incident still depressed him. From others in the organization, Weaver learned about Dalkowski’s adventures with the “Lost Boys”—Bo Belinsky and Steve Barber.

  “By the time he got to me, Steve was in bad shape,” Weaver says. “He was well on his way to being an alcoholic. He’d lost track of who really could help him and who was just along for the ride.”

  Tough love was heading Dalkowski’s way and he sure didn’t like it—at least at first. “He’s one guy that I never really got along with,” Dalkowski says. “In fact, for a long time, I hated Earl.”

  Weaver soon discovered that liquor and lousy friends weren’t Dalkowski’s only problems. That season in Elmira Weaver gave all his players the Stanford-Binet Intelligence tests. When the results came back, Dalkowski’s score was the lowest on the team—an IQ of about 65.

  “That meant we were going about it all wrong with him,” Weaver says. “We were telling him to hold the runners close, teaching him a changeup, how to throw out of the stretch. The problem was he couldn’t process all that information. We were overloading him. Those tests showed that if you had something to teach 100 people, Steve would be the last to learn.”

  In an effort to save the prospect’s career, Weaver took his training in the opposite direction. He told Dalkowski to throw only two pitches—his fastball and slider—and simply concentrate on throwing the ball over the plate. Dalkowski went on to have his best year ever. In his final 57 innings of the 1962 season, the left-hander gave up one earned run, struck out 110 batters, and walked only 21.

  “Maybe it was the slider,” Dalkowski later told Pat Jordan, a pitch that reaches the plate five to eight miles per hour slower than the fastball and usually breaks laterally and downward. “I began throwing a lot of sliders that year. I threw it as hard as my fastball and I could throw it for strikes. I’d just hit the black part of the plate with it when I was right. I struck out Ken Harrelson five times in one game and he said to me, ‘I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!’”

  As the final piece of the puzzle, Weaver worked up another technique to help with Dalkowski’s control. The left-hander was under strict orders to take some heat off the fastball, and go with the slider some, until he got two strikes on the batter. Then Weaver would whistle from the dugout. That was Dalkowski’s go-ahead that he could throw as hard as he wanted. Weaver remembers that Dalkowski loved to hear that whistle.

  Despite the newfound success between the lines, Dalkowski’s antics off the field continued to escalate. Once Andy Etchebarren, Dalkowski’s catcher in Elmira, began riding him, telling Dalkowski that his fastball was overrated. Etchebarren motioned at the wooden outfield fence and said that if Dalkowski’s fastball was so good, why didn’t he just throw it right through that fence? Dalkowski already owed his catcher $20, so for that amount and a few extra dollars the bet was made on the spot.

  Etchebarren handed Dalkowski a ball. The fireballer stepped back and proceeded to throw it right through the wooden fence. It was a feat that harked back to the glory days of Amos Rusie.

  Convinced that the ball must have hit a knot or that the fence wasn’t very strong in the first place, Etchebarren tried to duplicate the feat. But his attempt only bounced off the wall, directly back at the two of them.

  “But that’s not my favorite one,” Etchebarren says, shaking his head, recalling another Dalkowski story. “No, that has to be about [Dalkowski] and the cop car. Poor Dalko—he tried to drink everything in sight.”

  The t
ale involves Ray Youngdahl, another Orioles farmhand led astray, and another evening spent howling at the moon. Youngdahl joined Dalkowski at a bar one evening, eager to drown his sorrows after striking out four times with men on base. Youngdahl had a few drinks and then went outside and fell asleep in the backseat of his Cadillac. Come closing time, Dalkowski was once again three sheets to the wind. Somehow he was in possession of the car keys, so he stumbled outside, started the vehicle up, and began to drive home—with Youngdahl still asleep in the back.

  Soon Dalkowski was sighted driving down the middle of the road by a policeman, and the cop pulled him over. Dalkowski didn’t have a driver’s license, so the cop told him to follow him back into town. By then Youngdahl was wide awake, even though he probably wished he wasn’t. Because that’s when Dalkowski put the car into reverse and bashed into the police cruiser.

  Pat Gillick, who would later lead three teams to World Series championships (Toronto in 1992 and 1993, and Philadelphia in 2008), was a young pitcher in the Orioles’ organization when Dalkowski came along.

  “I first met him in spring training in 1960,” Gillick says. “The minors were already filled with stories about him. How he knocked somebody’s ear off and how he could throw a ball through just about anything. He had a great arm but unfortunately he was never able to harness that great fastball of his.

  “His fastball was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It really rose as it left his hand. If you told him to aim the ball at home plate, that ball would cross the plate at the batter’s shoulders. That was because of the tremendous backspin he could put on the ball.”

  In Elmira, Weaver had Dalkowski bunked in a private home with several other Orioles pitching prospects, including Gillick. The fiery manager told the others to do what they could to keep Dalkowski in line. But that proved far more difficult than anybody, including Weaver, expected.