High Heat Read online

  At 8:50 a.m., I’m ushered by a member of the Indians’ public relations staff into a conference room at Jacobs Field. The room overlooks the emerald-green field several stories below. Feller is already there, waiting for me. He has a videotape of the motorcycle test and as we watch it for the first of several times, a small crowd of ballclub employees gathers to view the show.

  “I guess it’s our fascination with speed,” Feller says, again cuing up the two-minute clip. “Who was the fastest pitcher of all time? The world will never know, may never agree, but it sure is fun to talk about, isn’t it?”

  That sunny day in Chicago was a generation before radar guns and such modern-day timing devices. So, Lew Fonseca, a player for 12 years in the major leagues, the American League batting champion in 1929, devised what will forever be remembered as the motorcycle test to clock Feller’s legendary fastball. At the time Fonseca produced instructional baseball films. If he could capture Feller’s speed on film, he believed he could precisely track and calibrate how fast the baseball was traveling. But to do so, Feller seemingly had to do the impossible: hit his bull’s-eye target, about the size of a cantaloupe, from 60 feet, 6 inches away, just after the motorcycle roared past him.

  The Harley motorcycle had a 10-foot head start on Feller’s fastball and was doing 86 miles per hour when it flew by, just a few feet to the right of the Indians’ ace. At that moment in U.S. history, Feller was just about the most famous ballplayer, certainly the most famous pitcher, in the land. Soon after he began pitching for Cleveland, at the age of 18, he was on the cover of Time magazine. Three seasons later, on this summer day in Chicago, Feller was arguably the best pitcher, the fastest fireballer, in the game. He was on the verge of leading the American League in victories for the second time in three consecutive seasons and being the strikeout leader for the third time in four seasons. But in Europe and on the far rim of the Pacific, World War II was building, and too soon Feller, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Greenberg, Ted Williams, and the other stars of this era would leave the national pastime to enlist. Perhaps that’s what makes the motorcycle test even more incongruous and precious when seen in the rearview mirror of today. Here’s a window to a world before the Best Generation was tested by Pearl Harbor and Hitler. Feller’s boyish face could be from any era. He smiles sheepishly as the cameras begin to roll. He knows he has the world on a string and has arrived at that station in life when participating in such a jerry-rigged experiment, the morning of a game in Chicago, somehow made complete sense.

  “It was kind of a cute idea,” Feller says. “I suppose I wanted to know as badly as everybody else how hard I could throw a baseball. Since I’d been a little guy, I’d heard people talking about how I was the next Lefty Grove or Walter Johnson.

  “You look back at it now and ask yourself, ‘What the heck were you doing?’ But I knew I could throw the ball with the best of them. Deep down if somebody asks you to try and prove it, you step right up and give it a shot. No questions asked—you know what I mean?”

  Seconds after the motorcycle flew past, Feller flung the regulationsize hardball. The ball quickly outraced man and machine, ahead by a good three feet when it split the paper bull’s-eye target that was held upright by a wooden frame. Alongside Feller’s target was another 10-foot-high target that the motorcycle sped toward. More importantly for the matters of science, Feller’s speed ball hit the 12-inch-diameter dark bull’s-eye in the center of the heavy paper.

  “To this day I still don’t know how I hit that target on the first try,” Feller tells the growing audience at Jacobs Field. “It was the luckiest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “As lucky as pitching a no-hitter on Opening Day?” somebody sings out.

  “Hey, don’t be getting silly on me,” Feller snaps back. “But afterward I told those guys doing this test, ‘Give me another fifty chances and there’s no way I can duplicate that.’ I don’t know if they believed me or thought I was just blowing smoke.”

  Seconds after Feller’s offering broke the paper target, the motorcycle obliterated its target and Fonseca had satisfied enough variables to calculate the speed of the pitch. Soon afterward, MLB announced that Feller’s fastball had been clocked going 104.5 miles per hour. Feller’s throw gained 13 feet on the motorcycle over the 60 feet, 6 inches. So, with the motorcycle traveling at 86 milers per hour the calculation goes as follows: 86 divided by 60.5 equals 1.42. Now, add in the 13 feet plus 60.5. That equals 73.5. Multiply it by the previously calculated 1.42 and you have nearly 104.5 miles per hour.

  That sounds pretty definitive and it certainly ranks Feller among the fastest pitchers ever in the game. But does that really make him the fastest of all time? Even Feller, a guy who isn’t afraid to speak his mind or polish his accolades, isn’t so sure. “I know it puts me in the ballpark,” he says. “I know there’s no arguing with that. But I’m also not foolish enough to think that’s the end of the story.”

  Indeed, we’re just getting started.

  Two weeks before Christmas in 2008, I’m driving from Washington, D.C., just ahead of the worst ice storm to hit the Northeast in years. Climbing into the mountains north of Harrisburg, through the freeway roller-coaster ride leading into Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, the weather changes from freezing rain to sleet mixed with snow. The early-morning forecast back home in Washington called for a few inches of snow, which I’m somewhat prepared for. A shovel lies in the rear cargo compartment. But a wintry mix, of course, can be an entirely different story.

  Exiting Interstate 88, between Binghamton and Albany, I drive as fast as I dare along Route 28 toward the Village of Cooperstown. The new world economy hasn’t treated upstate New York very well. The Victorian homes of Oneonta and Milford could use a new coat of paint, and the once-proud region has too many traces of decay and downright poverty. At Hartwick Seminary, though, just south of town, the Cooperstown Dreams Park rises up from an old cow pasture. This is where kids’ teams from across the country come during the summer months to play tournament ball. The complex is surrounded by ice cream stands, fast-food outlets, and miniature golf establishments. Of course, most are closed for the season, and on this afternoon all of them are being enveloped in a white glaze.

  Entering Cooperstown proper, I turn right onto Main Street. My wipers are so coated with ice that they resemble giant popsicles being pulled across the streaky windshield. When I spy the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, I turn left and slip-slide away downhill to the Lake Front Motel.

  “You just made it,” the desk clerk says as the door closes behind me. It’s 2:45 in the afternoon. In the background, a TV hums with the latest weather update.

  “What’s the forecast?”

  “Sleet and freezing rain until midnight,” she says. “Then changing over to snow through the morning.”

  I check into my room but don’t linger long. After changing into wool socks and more appropriate footwear, I’m outside, retracing my route on foot back up to Main Street and the Hall of Fame.

  One reason I think so many books are written about baseball is that the reference staff at the Hall of Fame has no equal. Make the strangest request about the national pastime (Did Fred Lynn win the batting title his rookie year? The answer is no, but he did win the MVP), and they will try their best to accommodate you. The only catch is that best material usually requires a visit to Cooperstown.

  Inside the main door, I hurry through the Hall of Fame Plaque Gallery. The room is T-shaped with the original five players inducted into the Hall in 1932—Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson—holding a place of honor on the far wall. After a nod in their direction, I turn up the ramp that leads to the Hall’s theater and a bookstore. A door to the left of the bookstore’s register opens into a room with a long wooden table and six chairs on either side. This is the main reference room for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Sitting at one end of the table, awaiting my arrival, stands a plastic tub of files and books about many of th
e fastest pitchers who had ever hurled a baseball. After signing the proper release forms and donning the mandatory white gloves (all Hall materials must be handled with white gloves), I open the first file, one of three thick ones about Walter Johnson, aka “the Big Train.”

  Despite my good fortune in reaching Cooperstown ahead of the ice storm, my luck doesn’t hold. A little after three in the afternoon, Tim Wiles, research director at the Hall, announces that the museum will be closing early due to the inclement December weather.

  I reluctantly close the Walter Johnson file and return it to the plastic tub with the mounds of other material I haven’t cracked yet. I’ve been at it less than a half hour.

  “We’ll reopen tomorrow morning at nine,” Wiles says. “We’ll make sure somebody is here to let you in.”

  Back outside, the sky has grown even darker, with the sleet indeed turning to snow. From the hotel parking lot, I gaze upon Otsego Lake, the Glimmerglass of James Fenimore Cooper’s imagination. The far end remains shrouded in mist. Cooperstown has been called remote in terms of time and place. A perfect locale to really begin a séance with the game’s past.

  Long ago, the town embraced baseball and, as a result, Cooperstown has done better than most hamlets between Albany and Buffalo. The village latched onto baseball even if that meant putting up with droves of Little Leaguers and their parents from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Overall, it’s been quite a gambit for Cooperstown, especially when one considers that its connection to baseball’s roots remains tenuous at best. Myth has it that Abner Doubleday invented the national pastime here in 1839. Such theories proved to be as imaginative as Cooper’s tales about Hawkeye and Chingachgook. But no matter. The village has found a way to ride out the worst financial blizzard since the Great Depression. It has baseball.

  Cooperstown’s small downtown area extends for a few blocks, from Fair Street to Chestnut. The redbrick Hall of Fame stands as a sentinel at one end, with easily half of the storefronts that roll out from there devoted to posters, T-shirts, jerseys, baseball bats, and books and photographs about the national pastime. Even the restaurants, the Triple Play Cafe and Short Stop Restaurant, have hitched their fortunes to baseball and the tourists that fill these sidewalks during the warmer months.

  Winter, of course, remains another matter. Today the only ones out and about are the locals, shoveling away at crusty ice now topped with several inches of snow. I grew up in Lockport, New York, a place much like this one, a good 200 miles to the west. There I learned the proper etiquette of snow removal: When the white stuff flies, a person has a responsibility to soon clear the stretch of sidewalk in front of his or her home. That’s part of being a good neighbor, dare we say a good citizen. It disgusts me when folks in warmer climes simply leave the snow and ice alone. As a neighbor in northern Virginia once told me, “Why bother? It’ll melt soon enough.”

  Why bother? I could never wrap my mind around such a philosophy.

  That evening, at Lake Front Motel, I fall asleep to the scrape of shovels and plows methodically clearing Cooperstown’s small web of sidewalks and streets. The next morning, I find my car buried under four inches of ice, topped with several more inches of snow. I’m scheduled to leave late that afternoon, heading to Syracuse to pick up my daughter from college, and for a moment I begin the laborious task of digging out my Subaru station wagon. But when I can’t pry open any of the doors after five minutes of trying, I adopt the approach of my neighbor back home in Virginia. It’ll have to keep. I need to be back at the Hall of Fame.

  True to Wiles’s word, the baseball museum has opened its doors at nine o’clock sharp, even though Hall of Fame employees are about the only ones there. Back at the reference library, the plastic tub of files and books still awaits me. I pick up reading where I left off, trying to move through the vast amount of material as methodically as possible. Outside, more snow starts to fall.

  The thick files are jammed with all kinds of stuff—newspaper clippings, letters, interviews, even old scouting reports. The trick seems to be to stay alert, always mindful of the next piece of paper. Crucial pages can be duplicated at one of the two copy machines in the reference room. But at 25 cents a page, I can’t copy everything in sight.

  As I slowly read through the files, starting with Walter Johnson and continuing on to Satchel Paige, I search for any kind of pattern or overarching narrative. A link between such talent and the beginnings of a story. After a few hours, no common thread found, I take a break and stroll throughout the lower floor of the museum. Of course, any good museum or exhibition hall takes history’s abstractions and vagaries and transforms them into tales with bona fide heroes, even villains.

  At the far end of the bronze-bust gallery stands the Hall of Fame’s gift shop. There postcards of the enshrined players—actual photos of their busts—go for 50 cents apiece. Looking at the assortment in alphabetical order, I begin to pull down the fireballers, the fastest of the fast—Johnson, Paige, Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Don Drysdale, and Nolan Ryan. A proverbial Mount Rushmore of the pitchers who threw hard. But there are other, less-known names enshrined here at Cooperstown, too. Guys like Amos Rusie, Jim “Pud” Galvin, and Wilber “Bullet” Rogan.

  Of course, there are others who were given the gift of high heat who never reached Cooperstown. “Sudden” Sam McDowell, Ryne Duran, Virgil “Fire” Trucks, Don Newcombe, Rex Barney, Herb Score, “Smoky” Joe Wood, and Steve Dalkowski are among the fireballers without a Hall of Fame postcard fashioned in their likeness.

  As I take my short stack of postcards over to the cashier, I realize that whether or not they end up in Cooperstown, these pitchers belong to a select brotherhood. One that remains equal parts distinction and stigma. As soon as a kid begins to throw hard, he invariably hears the stories about whose footsteps he could follow in. More is expected of him, even though all he has to offer the world at the outset is speed, with little or no command. Throwing a baseball hard—really, really hard—remains a God-given gift. In the end, though, whether this gift will be remembered as a blessing or a curse depends upon the individual player and what luck, judgment, and good friends he finds along the way.

  The Dalkowski file, for example, is plenty thick. That fact borders upon the remarkable when you realize that he never reached the majors and only went 46–80 in the minors. But many claim he was the fastest of all time. Only misfortune and the inability to throw his high heat for strikes kept him out of Cooperstown. Such is the allure, even the stubbornness, of baseball’s most basic, yet important, pitch.

  Perhaps we are enthralled with the fastball because after all these years, we’re still struggling to truly comprehend it. Even though baseball has been around since the mid-1800s, few other things remain as constant and as mind-boggling as a little high heat. A quality fastball travels at least at 132 feet per second. How fast is that? How long does it take for such a quality pitch to travel from the pitching mound to home plate? According to the Sporting News, that’s about as much time as it takes somebody to jerk his head from one side to another. Barely enough time to take a quick bite of a ballpark hot dog.

  A few weeks later, I’m in New York City, on a commuter bus from Washington pulling into Penn Station. There to greet me is my friend Greg Downs, and we’re soon aboard the B train, bound for Brooklyn and Green-Wood Cemetery. It seems that anybody who was anybody in New York has been laid to rest at Green-Wood through the ages. The ranks of the rich and famous include stainedglass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, toymaker F. A. O. Schwarz, the influential newspaper owner and “Go West, Young Man” orator Horace Greeley, painter George Catlin, corrupt politician Boss Tweed, and composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.

  Green-Wood was one of the first “rural” cemeteries in this county, a concept imported from Europe. With its rolling hills and commanding vistas of the Manhattan skyline, it became a tourist attraction during the 19th century, drawing half a million visitors annually. “Green-Wood is as permanently associated with
the fame of our city as the Fifth Avenue or the Central Park,” the New York Times proclaimed in 1866.

  Besides the Tiffanys and Tweeds of the world, the cemetery became the final resting place for many of baseball’s early pioneers. They often played upon the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey, on the other side of Manhattan.

  “Green-Wood, the most prominent of all historic American cemeteries, was a well-preserved baseball time capsule,” Peter Nash wrote in Baseball Legends of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. “Arlington National Cemetery is home to our country’s fallen military heroes, but nearly all of the important baseball heroes of the 19th century found their final rest amongst the half million or so men and women who now inhabit Green-Wood.”

  This group includes pioneer baseball scribe Henry Chadwick, Brooklyn Dodgers owner Charles Ebbets, and James Whyte Davis, who was buried, as requested, in his Knickerbocker uniform. According to Nash, the early memorials at Green-Wood served as models for later tributes to such Hall of Famers as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle at the old Yankee Stadium.

  On this chilly morning in January, Greg and I are on foot, searching for the final resting place of James Creighton, the game’s first true fireballer. Armed with a printout map from the computer kiosk at the cemetery’s main entrance, we begin walking in a northeasterly direction between the headstones.

  Back in the early days, baseball more resembled fast-pitch softball than what we witness today. Pitchers stood closer to home plate, and the ball was delivered underhand, like a bowler’s delivery. In addition, the arm and wrist were kept stiff, a technique handed down from the game’s early cousin, cricket. Creighton was the first hurler to push past such pedestrian guidelines, combining speed with control, and in doing so, he became the game’s first superstar.