Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (10 page)

Heard any good fastballs lately? Not likely. Pitchers such as Brown, 24-game winner John Smoltz of the Braves, 265
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/
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-inning workhorse Pat Hentgen of the Blue Jays and Randy Johnson of the Mariners, who has gone 55–16 since 1993, are anachronisms. They are pitchers who have the heat to dominate games consistently. They matter in a sport in which the owners, in their quest to grab the attention and disposable income of the casual, give-me-action fan, have turned the pitcher into a prop.

“What it takes to succeed as a pitcher now is so much more refined than it was 10 years ago,” says Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan. That explains why young pitchers, in particular, are getting their lunches handed to them. Only one pitcher younger than 27 won more than 15 games last year: Andy Pettitte of the Yankees. Only three younger than 27 kept their ERAs below 3.50: Pedro Astacio and Ismael Valdes of the Dodgers and Steve Trachsel of the Cubs.

These days baseball belongs to the biggest, strongest men ever to have played the game, swinging extremely light bats at baseballs that seem harder and livelier while the dimensions of ballparks and the strike zone grow smaller. Owners have ignored recent suggestions that the pitching mound be raised or that umpires be compelled to expand the strike zone to the dimensions that are called for in the rule book. Instead, the owners have ensured the further escalation of offense by adding two expansion teams—meaning that about 40 more pitchers who don’t belong in the big leagues will be on major league rosters—and by planning another wave of retro ballparks designed to minimize foul territory and maximize home runs.

Today’s state-of-the-art hitter crowds the plate with such impunity that he needs to wear a protective plastic guard over his lead forearm while his hands hang in the strike zone. He virtually ignores the inside pitch, knowing the umpire is not likely to call one a strike and the pitcher doesn’t want to risk inciting a brawl or give up a home run by throwing one. So the batter dives into the pitch—he doesn’t simply stride toward the pitcher as in the old days—and is just as likely to pull an outside pitch out of the park as he is to hit it out to the opposite field. Then, as Gary Sheffield of the Marlins did after crushing 42 dingers last year, he goes home to lift weights with a former Mr. Olympia to get bigger and stronger.

The 1990s hitter has a batting cage in his basement and a library of videotapes in his den. Batters, especially designated hitters, watch pitchers on the clubhouse television during games. It’s not unusual for a batter to run to the clubhouse VCR after one of his at bats.

The home run, the quickest way to a fat paycheck, is so driving baseball that striking out is no longer taboo for batters, who last year whiffed at a higher rate than ever. The grip-it-and-rip-it school of hitting does not encourage cutting down on one’s swing even with two strikes. Mo Vaughn of the Red Sox was the American League MVP in 1995 while striking out 150 times, the most by an MVP in either league. Sixty-one players belted at least 25 home runs last year, but only seven of them didn’t strike out at least 80 times (Barry Larkin, Sheffield, Bobby Higginson, Frank Thomas, Bernie Williams, Barry Bonds and Cal Ripken).

Home runs now occur more frequently than double plays, and nearly half the regular players hit at least 20 dingers (43% of the players with 400 at bats did so last year). For a pitcher to come away from this climate with the level of success achieved by Brown, Smoltz, Hentgen and Johnson is as difficult as coming away from a
Jenny Jones
show appearance with your dignity. Never mind the spotted owl. Who’ll save the starting pitcher?

“The best thing you can do is intimidate hitters with your stuff,” Smoltz says. “If you don’t have really good stuff, I honestly don’t know what you do. I believe so much in my stuff that I can dictate the game. I still believe if you make good pitches, it wouldn’t matter if they were swinging aluminum bats. But hitters today are so good and so strong that if you don’t have good stuff, they’ll make you look real bad real quick.”

Says Brown, “I don’t buy the dilution-of-pitching theory. The offensive explosion has been dictated more by the size of the strike zone and the hitters. They’ve become stronger, and they have a smaller area to focus on as far as the strike zone is concerned. People say pitchers don’t pitch a lot of innings anymore. That’s because they have to put more into every pitch. That takes more out of you.”

Hitters have raised the standard of what is considered quality pitching. In the mid-1980s, for instance, Dwight Gooden of the Mets dominated the National League with just two pitches: a fastball, which he usually threw high in the strike zone, and an overhand curveball with a big break. Davey Johnson, his manager then, thinks more hitters would catch up to pitches of that quality today. “They have more bat speed now,” Johnson says. “It was unheard of then to have a centerfielder who lifted heavy weights. I’ve noticed a big difference in the past 10 to 12 years. It’s like golf—it’s all about clubhead speed now.”

Gooden, too, has had to adjust, adding a changeup and slider to his repertoire. In one game last year against the Indians, Gooden, who now pitches for the Yankees, threw nine straight sliders. “There are some lineups where every guy can take you deep,” he says.

The strike zone used to be shaped like a refrigerator, with classic hard throwers such as Jim Palmer and Sandy Koufax going top-shelf to get strikes. Now it has become flatter and wider, and it is not only shaped like a shoe box but also is barely bigger than one. Pitches about the width of a baseball outside the plate generally are called strikes, and ones that hit the inside corner are often called balls. Pitches at or above the belt are usually called balls.

Pitchers like to blame umpires for the shrinking strike zone—umpires say that the zone they call has not changed, despite films of games as recently as the early 1980s that prove the contrary—but the pitchers are the ones most responsible. Because it has become harder to throw the ball past hitters and because mistakes on the inside half of the plate often become home runs, not just singles and doubles, pitchers nibble maddeningly off the lower and outside boundaries of the strike zone. The rare pitch high or inside suddenly looks
too
high or
too
inside after an umpire sees a continual barrage of pitches down and away.

What, then, do the best pitchers do to thrive in the powerball era?

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Establish the fastball.
The five toughest pitchers to hit last season in each league (according to opponents’ batting average) were all power guys: Al Leiter, Smoltz, Hideo Nomo, Brown and Curt Schilling in the National League and Juan Guzman, Roger Clemens, Hentgen, Kevin Appier and Alex Fernandez in the American League. Johnson, with his 97-mph fastball, is annually among that group when he isn’t ailing.

Even finesse pitchers such as Maddux and teammate Tom Glavine work primarily off their fastballs. “If I throw 100 pitches in a game, I’ll probably throw as many as 70 fastballs, unless it’s a night when I have a great changeup,” Glavine says. “Too many guys pitch backward. They throw their breaking ball so much that it’s almost like their fastball is their off-speed pitch. What you have to realize is that a breaking ball is tougher to throw for strikes. That means you have more pitchers pitching behind in the count, and that’s when you get hit.”

Young pitchers in particular tend to stray from the fastball, a habit formed in high school and college where hitters whip 28-ounce aluminum bats. “You can’t throw the ball hard enough to get it past someone swinging those bats,” Duncan says. “And if you do jam somebody, he can still hit it out. I have two sons whose coaches want them to be pitchers because they have good arms. But they want to hit. I don’t blame them.”

Pitchers need to be retrained to develop the arm strength to throw with greater velocity. In 1991 the Dodgers drafted a high school pitcher named Rick Gorecki in the 19th round. Gorecki had an outstanding curveball, but his fastball maxed out at only 82 mph. The Dodgers ordered him to throw fastballs 80% of the time at rookie league Great Falls. Gorecki didn’t win a game that first season, but his fastball eventually reached 90 mph. Now, at 23, he’s one of L.A.’s better prospects. “We did the same thing with a couple of pitchers at [Class A] Bakersfield a number of years ago,” says Dodgers pitching coach Dave Wallace. “That team lost 102 games, but we had a couple of young pitchers named Ramon Martinez and John Wetteland.”

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Be aggressive.
“Nowadays too many pitchers go into a self-defense mode,” says Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone. “It’s as if they’re afraid to throw the ball over the plate.”

Pitchers have become so intimidated that hitters see the fear on their faces. Los Angeles catcher Mike Piazza says, “I notice that you don’t see young pitchers being aggressive. I don’t know if you’d call it cockiness, but you hardly see anyone with a presence on the mound. That’s why someone like Pedro Martinez stands out.”

Martinez, a 25-year-old Expos righthander, has a natural sailing motion on his fastball that carries the ball toward the hands of righthanded hitters. It’s the type of pitch that prompts offended batters to charge the mound. “Hitters disregard the inside corner so much that you can throw a pitch in the strike zone and they’ll jackknife out of the way,” says one American League All-Star pitcher. “Frank Thomas is the worst one for that, and umpires won’t call inside strikes on him.”

Pettitte, a lefty, features a cut fastball that bores in on righties. A cutter acts like a hard slider with a smaller, sharper break. Leiter, also a lefthander, held righthanded hitters to a major-league-low .194 average last year employing his cutter.

“The way hitters stand on top of the plate now and dive into the ball, you have to pitch inside to keep them off the plate,” Seattle’s Johnson says. “You have to come inside so that they don’t feel comfortable.” In a spring training game Johnson fractured the lower left orbital bone of Giants first baseman J.T. Snow with one of his don’t-get-too-comfortable heaters.

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Emphasize location.
That’s what Hentgen did last season on his way to a 20–10 record. “I always knew it was important,” Hentgen says, “but last year I really made location my Number 1 priority. That could be the key element in pitching today.”

Atlanta’s staff is a case in point. Smaller strike zone? Somehow the Braves’ pitchers have
expanded
it, especially Maddux. Whereas Jim Palmer once worked “up the ladder”—pitching incrementally higher in the strike zone, an extinct art because of the shrinking zone—Maddux has turned the ladder on its side. With laserlike precision, he pecks away at the outside corner with such regularity that he gets more pitches farther off the plate called strikes than anyone else. It’s not unlike Michael Jordan escaping traveling violations that apply to other NBA players. “Maddux pitches to a bigger strike zone than anyone,” Duncan says. “If you watch Maddux, the games in which he gets hit are the ones in which he’s not getting those pitches called and he has to come in to where the strike zone is for everybody else.”

In last year’s World Series the Yankees were amazed at how often Atlanta pitchers worked off the outer edge of the plate. The Braves’ outfielders shifted to the opposite field on every Yankees hitter because of that pitching style. “My objective with the strike zone is to see how much I can get away with,” Glavine says. “I know I get pitches off the plate. You’ve got to see how far you can go. You start out at a certain spot and see how much more you can get on the outside corner. Every umpire is different and every game is different, so you have to find out.”

•
Be creative.
“Varying the speeds of your pitches to throw off the timing of the hitter is much more important than it used to be,” Yankees righthander David Cone says. “Teams have charts now that show what pitches you throw and in what location on a 3-and-2 count. So you’ve got to have at least three pitches, sometimes four.”

Says 22-year veteran Dennis Eckersley, the Cardinals’ closer, “It’s getting to the point where you have to have a trick pitch. You always have to think, What can I do differently? That’s one reason Nomo is so effective. It’s that twisting delivery. Nobody else pitches like that.”

For at least 10 years the trendiest trick pitch has been the split-finger fastball. The splitter looks like a low fastball before it breaks down with a late tumbling action. It rarely results in a called strike because it usually sinks out of the strike zone. Good splitters result in missed swings and ground balls. Smoltz, whose fastball and slider long have been nightmarish for righthanders, reached an elite level last season after he added a splitter to neutralize lefthanders. The pitch, however, has become so common that it has lost some of its effectiveness. “When a few guys first threw it—guys like Bruce Sutter and Mike Scott—they were unhittable,” Yankees pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre says. “But it’s not a novelty anymore. You can play a three-game series against somebody, and every one of their starters throws a splitter.”

Adds Maddux, “The slider was the pitch of the ’70s and the splitter was the pitch of the ’80s. I think the changeup has become the pitch of the ’90s. You’ve got to have something to mess up a hitter’s timing.”

Maddux has so much confidence in his changeup that he has been known to intentionally miss the strike zone with a 2–2 pitch so he can shock a hitter with a full-count changeup. Says Johnson, “As hard as I throw, I know everyone sits on my fastball and tries to time it. If I throw 125 pitches, maybe only five to eight are changeups, but it’s enough to throw them off, especially when I mix in my breaking ball.”

The changeup, however, can be fickle, especially for young pitchers, because it requires “feel” that can be elusive—like putting in golf as opposed to whaling away with the driver. Pettitte won 12 games as a rookie in 1995 using a changeup as his out pitch. “Last year I hardly threw it,” he says. “I didn’t have the feel for it. I mostly went with the cutter, fastball and curveball. Maybe the hitters kept waiting for the changeup.”