Sport: The Whole Story of Pitching

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Moved one day by intimations of mortality, that bibulous philosopher, W. C. Fields, looked back on his arid boyhood home and chose his modest alternative to death: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

The 20th century's beneficiaries of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" in "Virtue, Liberty and Independence" might even share this sentiment. A sip of their chlorine-loaded tap water and they understand why Fields shunned the liquid all his life; a trip downtown and they know why he hated the city's narrow, crosshatched streets. A baseball park should be a place to get away from all this, but these days even a trip to Connie Mack Stadium is seldom a pleasure. The Philadelphia Phillies, now the only major-league team in town, are stumbling through their 1956 schedule with all the grace of corporation lawyers cutting up at a church picnic.

Yet Philadelphia's tiny army of baseball fans can still look the world in the eye. The Phillies may not add up to much of a team, but for the moment it is more than enough that they boast the best pitcher in baseball. This season, as for many a long summer, Philadelphia's oft-punctured pride rides high on the strong right arm of a visiting Middle Westerner named Robin Evan Roberts.

The muscular (6 ft. 1 in., 190 Ibs.), 29-year-old fugitive from the chores on an Illinois farm is almost too good to be true. Ever since he came up to the Phillies in 1948 after two brief months in the bush leagues, he has plodded out to take his pitching turn with every-fourth-day regularity. Dedicated to the old-fashioned notion that he is getting paid for throwing the ball over the plate, and not for demonstrating some trick delivery or practicing some offbeat vaudeville act for the TV cameras, Roberts has performed his job with an efficiency deadly to 1) opponents and 2) baseball records. In his third major-league season he won 20 games—a record no other Philly had even flirted with since the hard-drinking days of the late great Grover Cleveland Alexander. Now, six years later, he has yet to fall back below the 20-game mark.* No major-leaguer has done so well since the days (1925-33) of the Philadelphia Athletics' Lefty Grove.†

Aside from 1950, when he pitched the Phillies to the National League pennant, Roberts has been playing for a club that has never wound up better than third. But over the years he has started, finished and won more games than any other active major-league pitcher. And always, even losing, he has found the plate with such grim routine that in an astonishing total of 2,272 innings of big-league ball, he has been charged with only 500 walks (less than two a game), has made only 19 wild pitches, hit only 28 batters. He has thrown 1,179 strikeouts.