Sport: The Whole Story of Pitching

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But at the time young Robin's goldbricking held less appeal to a man who had come up the hard way from the back-breaking labor and pocket-pinching strikes of a Lancashire coal mine. Father Roberts recalls his barely controlled anger the day Robin deliberately broke a hoe to avoid work. The outraged father took a fly swatter to his son's well-padded bottom ("It don't hurt your hand and it don't mark the kid"). But Robin went right on playing. When he couldn't talk one of his three brothers into playing catch, he would prop an old mattress against the garage door and fire away for hours at a hole in the middle. All the while, the braying porch radio kept him up to date on Chicago Cubs ball games. "If people knew what I thought about pitching," says Roberts now, "they'd think I was nuts. They make it so complicated. They're always saying I studied control from the time I was a little kid. That's silly. It's just that it's tough to play catch when nobody's around. I threw to that mattress for fun. I never thought about control at all. It just never entered my mind that the purpose of pitching wasn't to get the ball over the plate."

Impartially athletic, Robin switched to basketball with the season. When his mother would try to get him to do some work around the place, he would put her off: "Naw, Mom. I'm a ballplayer. You just wait till I get into the major leagues. Then I'll build you a house." Even Tom Roberts came to respect his son's determination. "You just had to go along," he says today. "He wouldn't do nuthin' else."

Will to Win. On the way to bigger things, Robin stopped off at Springfield and Lanphier High Schools, where he pitched and played third, was a competent end on the football team and a promising shotputter. When he went to Michigan State in the fall of 1944, he was good enough to earn a basketball scholarship the next year. (He majored in physical education, graduated in 1948 with a B.S. degree.)

When Roberts tried out for the State baseball team, his hitting was too weak for an infielder, so he asked Coach John Kobs for a chance to pitch. "I liked his motion," says Kobs. "He threw it someplace around where the catcher held his glove, and that made sense."

An unspectacular success as a college pitcher, Roberts got his big break when the University of Michigan's baseball coach Ray Fisher took him to New England in the summer of 1946 to play in the old Northern League. Roberts balked often out of sheer awkwardness, fell down fielding bunts, was so eager he threw before he got the catcher's sign. But Fisher saw things worth working on—a tireless arm, an indomitable will to win. An ex-major-leaguer (with the New York Yankees and Cincinnati), Fisher put the finishing touches on the boy.