Sport: The Whole Story of Pitching

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Time was when pitchers got a better break. Before Babe Ruth taught club owners that home runs and high-hitting games mean cash customers, the game was played with a dead ball. Often when a home team took the field for the first time, they used a "refrigerator" ball, carefully chilled in the clubhouse icebox to make it even deader. There was no rule against spitballs, so with a cud of chewing tobacco or a wad of slippery elm, a clever man could keep the ball hopping all afternoon. After roughing up one side of the ball, pitchers used to shine the other side on a part of their uniform heavily dosed with paraffin. Thus treated, the ball would really dance.

Unlike modern games, where dozens of new balls are used in nine innings, the games of the memorable days of Cy Young and Rube Waddell, Rube Marquard and Jeff Tesreau and Ed Cicotte used the same ball inning after inning. Batters pounded it until it was brown and hard to see, pitchers doctored its horsehide; everything was stacked against the hitter (everything, that is, except for the occasional inspirations of such oldtimers as the pre-World War I Phillies' Otto Knabe and Mike Doolan, who once broke up a game with the Giants by swabbing the ball with capsicum salve, an irritant that sent Spitballer Jeff Tesreau to the showers with painfully swollen lips after only three innings).

Play It Mean. Today occasional pitchers may still get away with an occasional outlawed spitter, but that dangerous pitch has all but vanished. Just about the only survival from baseball's rowdy youth is the "accidental" beanball, the close pitch that keeps a batter honest by forcing him back from the plate, that keeps him from taking a toehold and getting set to powder the ball. If the Phillies' Coach Whitlow Wyatt, who learned his baseball manners as one of Leo Durocher's Dodgers, had his way, Philly pitchers would put the brush-back pitch to constant use. "I think you ought to play it mean," says Whit, "like Durocher did. They ought to hate you on the field." Pitcher Roberts does not fill Coach Wyatt's prescription. "He won't knock down a batter," complains the coach. "Says it don't do him any good, doesn't help him any. Well, it sure helped me. Hell, if it was my own brother, I'd knock him down as soon as I would anyone else. It's my meat and bread he's trying to take away."

In his stubborn refusal to toss beanballs, Roberts resembles the late great Walter Johnson of the lackluster Washington Senators. The "Big Train" was a self-confident competitor who occasionally went so far as to serve up fat ones to hitters suffering from nerve-racking slumps. But throwing at a batter was unthinkable. Johnson never even waited for umpires to discard scuffed balls; as soon as he saw one he tossed it aside, for fear it might force him to throw his fast one wild and injure the man at the plate.