High Heat Page 6

  More prophetic words were never spoken.

  Somehow the Senators battled back to take Game Six, 2–1, behind Tom Zachary’s complete game. That set up the epic Game Seven. The starting pitchers were Curly Ogden for Washington and Virgil Barnes for New York. But Senators manager Bucky Harris said he was ready to employ all available arms, in large part to keep Giants rookie Bill Terry off the base paths. After Harris went over his strategy with Griffith, the Senators’ owner called Johnson at home. The Big Train was told to be ready for late-inning relief work. At first, Johnson’s wife, Hazel, was ecstatic about the news. Then she realized that her husband could be a three-time loser in the World Series.

  On a beautiful day in mid-October, the stands were filled to overflowing in the nation’s capital. Posing for photographs before the opening pitch, President Coolidge told the opposing managers, “May the better team win.”

  Besides Johnson’s inability to win with the nation watching, the 1924 World Series was also known for acrobatic catches or at least the attempts at such grabs. The Giants’ Hack Wilson, perhaps trying to copy Goslin’s Superman effort in Game One, soared toward the stands after Bucky Harris’s home-run blast. But instead of clearing the fence, “Wilson’s ample girth made full contact with the top of it,” Thomas wrote.

  To Grantland Rice, the collision sounded “like a barrel of crockery being pushed down the cellar stairs.” You don’t find sportswriting like that these days.

  In the bottom of the eighth inning, the Senators scored two runs to tie the game at 3–3. Moments after the Washington rally, the sellout crowd began to chant Johnson’s name. The hometown crowd was ready to see what magic the Big Train had left. But those up in the press box, especially the guest columnists, didn’t like his chances. The belief was he was too exhausted, too old to do much good. Still, there was little doubt that he was coming into the ball game.

  “[Harris] had at his disposal not merely the best pitcher on the team, or even the best in the league—he had The Greatest Pitcher in the History of Baseball to call upon,” Thomas wrote in the biography of his grandfather. The capital letters are his.

  Visibly nervous, Johnson walked out to pitch the top of the ninth inning. Even though some later remembered that his face was ashen, his warm-up throws were soon cracking Herold “Muddy” Ruel’s catcher’s mitt. As the warm-up continued, a buzz began to spread through the stands—the Big Train’s fastball was back.

  Or was it?

  After Johnson got one out, Frankie Frisch scorched his offering into right-center field. Only a great throw by Earl McNeely held him to three bases. After a conference at the mound, the Senators decided to walk Ross Youngs, a left-handed hitter, bringing up RBI champion Kelly. Washington was playing the averages here, as the right-handed Kelly was only two for nine against Johnson. The gambit worked as Kelly went down on three fastballs. That made two outs, with Emil “Irish” Meusel coming up. Johnson got out of the inning when Meusel hit a grounder to third and 5-foot-8 Joe Judge stretched to snag the throw at first base.

  Back and forth the teams went in extra innings, with the hometown crowd cheering wildly when the Senators were at bat and becoming quietly apprehensive when Johnson was on the mound. Through it all, Johnson pitched four innings of scoreless ball. “I’d settled down to believe, by then, that maybe this was my day,” Johnson later said.

  In the bottom of the 12th inning, Washington’s glorious ending began innocently enough. With one out, Ruel, who was having a miserable series, appeared to pop up in foul territory. Giants catcher Hank Gowdy drifted back to make the catch, tossed off his mask, only to trip over it a few steps later. Given a second chance, Ruel doubled to left. That brought up Johnson. He hit the first pitch hard and when it was bobbled, he was safe at first.

  Next up was Earl McNeely, and with men at first and second base he hit what appeared to be a tailor-made double play ball directly at third baseman Freddy Lindstrom. That would have been enough to end the inning.

  For a moment, the ball appeared headed for Lindstrom’s glove. On the last bounce, though, it seemed to hit a pebble or was levitated by the baseball gods themselves, perhaps a nod to Johnson. Whatever the reason, it bounded over Lindstrom’s head and rolled into left field. Ruel rounded third and chugged for home, and the Senators and their longtime fireballer had at last won the championship.

  As the fans poured onto the field, Johnson stood at second base, tears in his eyes.

  Up in the press box, Christy Mathewson watched in disbelief. His body ravaged from being gassed during World War I, it would be the last World Series Mathewson would ever witness. “It was the greatest World Series game ever played, I’m sure,” Mathewson said. “I’m inclined to think, indeed, that it was the most exciting game ever played under any circumstances.”

  Today, a monument of bronze and granite stands in tribute to the Big Train at Walter Johnson High School, located around the corner from Shirley Povich Field, where Bruce Adams’s ballclub plays. The impressive slab, which shows Johnson pitching along with a list of accomplishments—games won (414), shutouts (113), strikeouts (3,497), and scoreless consecutive innings (56)—was unveiled at Griffith Stadium in 1947, less than a year after his death. President Truman presided at the event, where he called Johnson “the greatest ballplayer who ever lived.”

  Every year the student body celebrates Johnson’s birthday (November 6, 1887) with sheet cake. When the high school team competes on the television show It’s Academic, the squad often brings along a baseball talisman for good luck.

  The Washington Nationals, the new professional team in town, were interested in moving Johnson’s monument permanently to the new ballpark in southeast Washington. But the high school eventually turned down the request. Instead, the Nationals commissioned a statue of Johnson, along with ones of Frank Howard and Josh Gibson, which were unveiled outside before Opening Day 2009.

  By retaining the monument, Principal Christopher Garran hopes that the memory of the Big Train will inspire future classes at Walter Johnson High. That they will even touch the slab for luck on the way to their games.

  “We could have given it to the Nats, for the new ballpark,” Garran says, “but it just didn’t seem right in a way. After all, Walter Johnson is the person our school is named after. Once you learn a little about him, you realize what a hero the Big Train was.”

  Being able to throw a baseball at speeds of 100 miles per hour or greater is certainly a gift. But during the careers of almost every fireballer—Johnson, Feller, Nolan Ryan, Steve Dalkowki—there comes a time when this gift will ultimately be remembered as a blessing or a curse. For Johnson, the moment was likely the 1924 World Series. For Feller, it came 14 years later, on the last day of the 1938 season.

  The Indians hosted the Detroit Tigers in a doubleheader on October 2, a sunny day that held a hint of the long winter to follow. Hank Greenberg, the Tigers’ All-Star first baseman, came into the game two home runs shy of Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs in one season. At that point in history, it was baseball’s most recognizable mark.

  Many of the Indians vowed that Greenberg wouldn’t break the Babe’s record on their watch. Several of the veteran ballplayers, especially Hal Trosky, fondly remembered Ruth. Out of loyalty to the Babe, they didn’t want to see Greenberg break the 60-home-run mark.

  But there was also an undercurrent of prejudice, even religious zeal, that day in Cleveland. Greenberg was the first Jewish superstar in the national pastime. Across the Atlantic, Hitler was making religion a device for division and quickly gaining political power in Germany. Into this cauldron of escalating allegiances and pursuits of all-time individual records stepped Feller. He had been named to be the starting pitcher in the first game of the doubleheader. More than 27,000 fans attended the game to bid the Indians adieu for another season and to see if Greenberg could catch the Babe. Instead they were treated to a different record performance.

  The Indians decided they would pitch to Greenberg. No intentional wa
lks, even with men in scoring position. Going against Feller, the great Tigers first baseman, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame 18 years later, went 1-for-4. His lone hit in the first game was a double. He had better success in the second game with three hits, but they were all singles. He finished the day still with 58 home runs. The Babe’s record would be safe until Roger Maris broke it in 1961.

  In that first game, Greenberg was one of the few Tigers to have any success against Feller. The Indians’ hurler would finish the 1938 season with 240 strikeouts and a modern major-league record 208 walks. But on this day, the elements of his game came together, becoming a template that would guide him to 20-plus victory seasons in the next three years, before World War II sent him overseas.

  At the time, the major-league record for strikeouts in a nine-inning game was 17, set by another fireballer, Dizzy Dean. But early on against the Tigers, many in the crowd sensed that Feller’s stuff, especially his fastball, had never been better.

  “It was one of those days when everything feels perfect,” Feller says, “your arm, your coordination, your concentration, everything. There was drama in the air because of Greenberg’s attempt to break Ruth’s record, and the excitement became even greater when my strikeouts started to add up.”

  After striking out rookie second baseman Ben McCoy in the first inning, Feller struck out the side in the second, third, and fourth innings. He picked up two more Ks in the fifth, two more in the sixth, and one each in the seventh and eighth, so by the time the ninth inning rolled around the crowd was on its feet, realizing that Feller was on a record pace.

  That’s when this 19-year-old phenom got Pete Fox for his 17th strikeout of the game. Feller’s walk of Detroit catcher Birdie Tebbetts then brought up Chet Laabs. The odds were definitely working against Feller now. He had already struck out Laabs four times in the game. The next season Laabs would be traded to the St. Louis Browns, where he would lead the league in pinch hits. Just the type of batter the baseball gods will often befriend. The kind of future journeyman perfectly capable of derailing history.

  But Feller quickly ran two fastballs past Laabs. When he first entered the big leagues, Feller was criticized for going away from his best pitch—that is, his fastball—with the game on the line. Early in his career, he had given up a game-winning home run to Joe DiMaggio when he went with a breaking pitch instead of his high heat. Afterward his father told him to stay with the fastball the next time he was in a tight situation.

  So, on this day, with the hometown crowd behind him, Feller didn’t make the same mistake again. He went with another fastball low at Laabs’s knees. Home plate umpire Cal Hubbard decided it caught enough of the inside corner of the plate and called Laabs out on strikes. Feller had his 18-strikeout game and a career destined to one day land him in the Hall of Fame.

  “I was lucky, too, because I threw in the American League,” Feller tells the crowd in the conference room at Jacobs Field. “I really believe that because the ball in the American League had blue seams. That’s why I only use a pen with blue ink to this day. But I believe the American League model, with those blue stitches, was aerodynamically better for speed, for guys like me. Some of you may scoff at that, but I always believed it.”

  Whether it was the blue seams or his farm upbringing that so closely paralleled Johnson’s, Feller retained his high-octane fastball. He returned from four years in the U.S. Navy in World War II, the longest tenure of any big-league superstar, to strike out 348 in 1946, one away from Rube Waddell’s modern record. Yet the following season, his left leg came down awkwardly during that high leg kick of his at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, ironically on Friday the 13th. He injured a muscle in his back, and he claims his fastball was never the same. That didn’t stop Feller from being a winner at the major-league level, though. From 1948 to 1956, he won 108 games and helped lead the Cleveland Indians to their last World Series championship in 1948.

  “Three days before he pitched I would start thinking about Robert Feller, Bob Feller,” Ted Williams once said. “I’d sit in my room thinking about him all the time. God, I loved it . . . Allie Reynolds of the Yankees was tough, and I might think about him for 24 hours before a game, but Robert Feller; I’d think about him for three days.”

  The only way the motorcycle test worked was by Feller hitting the cantaloupe-sized target with his first and only pitch. “I did it on the first try and you know something?” he tells the assembled crowd in Cleveland. “I’m as proud of that as anything I ever did in my career.”

  That includes three no-hitters and a dozen one-hitters.

  At one level, the motorcycle test was inconsequential. There is no mention of it alongside his records in the Hall of Fame or The Baseball Encyclopedia. By now we’ve watched footage of the motorcycle test many times through, the room falling silent every time. Even though Bob DiBiasio, the ballclub’s vice president for public relations, has seen the film many times before, he cannot resist watching it again.

  “Now that’s old school,” he says. “You don’t see a ball thrown like that anymore. It’s remarkable.”

  Feller smiles and lets the film play through for a final time. Previously, he has stopped the tape here and rewound it, but now he lets it continue to roll. The motorcycle footage ends, sharp and ragged like the conclusion of a silent movie, to be suddenly replaced by the old comedy team of Abbott and Costello doing their famous routine “Who’s on First?”

  As the room breaks into laughter, Feller leans over and tells me that he often puts the two segments together. For decades, from the Little League annual dinners to his speaking engagements aboard cruise ships, he’s rolled the two out as a twin bill, his own doubleheader.

  “It makes sense, in an odd way,” he says. “Me throwing against a motorcycle and then these two funnymen. I don’t know which one I get a bigger chuckle out of these days.”

  The Pivot

  Nolan Ryan

  Photo courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

  We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

  —PAUL BOESE

  The 2009 spring training season was the strangest in some time. Steroids were back in the news as the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, arguably the best player in the game, admitted to performance-enhancing drugs after being outed in a Sports Illustrated cover story. In Florida and Arizona, where enthusiastic crowds gathered to watch their favorite major-league ballclubs get into shape, nobody was quite sure where the top players were. After a week or so with their regular-season teams, many of the best-known stars headed elsewhere to train with squads of their fellow countrymen in preparation for the second World Baseball Classic.

  During the labor wars of the mid-1990s, an Olympic-style international tournament had been one of the few things that the owners and the players’ union were able to agree upon. One could even argue that this infatuation to see the game’s superstars competing under their nations’ flags had played a major role in eventually leading baseball back from the abyss. What better way for a sport to get back on track than by producing another “must-see TV” sporting event?

  Despite smiles all around, the WBC had plenty of problems. It was a far different animal than what I’d heard Paul Beeston, then representing the owners, and union boss Donald Fehr praise 15 years before. First off, the timing was all wrong. Crucial games, with national pride on the line were contested when the players weren’t yet in midseason form. And to help prevent injury, pitchers were often limited to how many pitches they could throw—a rule that led to some curious pitching changes and perhaps helped foster such surprising outcomes as Italy defeating Canada (a squad that included Justin Morneau, Russell Martin, and Jason Bay), the Netherlands downing the Dominican Republic not once but twice, and Team Japan repeating as overall champs.

  Through it all, Tampa Bay’s David Price, a bona fide fireballer and one of the most promising young pitchers in the game, put in his
work at the Rays’ spring training complex in Port Charlotte, Florida. On potential alone, Price should have had a starting spot in the Rays’ rotation locked up. After all, his fastball sometimes neared 100 miles per hour, and it wasn’t unreasonable to expect him to gain even more velocity as he grew stronger and accustomed to the professional game. Only two years out of Vanderbilt University, where he had won college baseball’s top honor, the Dick Howser Award, Price had sped through the Rays’ farm system. In mid-August 2007, he signed a six-year deal with Tampa Bay, which included a $5.6-million signing bonus, reportedly the second largest in draft history to that point. (Justin Upton of the Arizona Diamondbacks received $6.1 million in 2005.) He had then gone 11–0 on the lower rungs of the Rays’ farm system, turning heads every step of the way.

  “He’s amazing,” three-time Cy Young winner Pedro Martinez, who ended up squaring off against Price during a rehab assignment in the minors, told the Associated Press. “That kid is very mature for his time in [the professional ranks], and very talented.

  “At that age, I don’t think I was like that. He seems far superior. . . . God bless him and keep him healthy.”

  In 2008, the Rays were one of the top stories in baseball. Rising from the cellar in the American League East, they reached the World Series, with Price a major reason for their postseason success. He came out of the bullpen to win Game Two of the American League Championship Series against the Boston Red Sox and then came on in relief again in Game Seven to record his first career save, eliminating the defending champions. With that Price reached the World Series faster than any other top overall June draft selection, surpassing Atlanta’s Chipper Jones and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Tim Belcher, who was drafted by the New York Yankees in 1984. In addition, he was only the third rookie pitcher to record a victory and a save in the same postseason series, joining Adam Wainwright (St. Louis, 2006) and Rawly Eastwick (Cincinnati, 1975).