Sport: The Whole Story of Pitching

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Fisher did so well that by the end of his second season in New England, Roberts had excited the scouts of half a dozen big-league clubs. The St. Louis Browns offered him $225 a month to play Class B ball. A few days later the Phillies offered him $10,000. Roberts hesitated and the Phillies raised the ante to $15,000, then to $25,000. Roberts signed. "I would've signed for $2,500," he admits now, "only they didn't know it. When they got up to $25,000, I knew I was going to be able to buy a pretty good house for Mom, so I said yes. She really got a belt out of that house."

"They Won't Tell Me Anything." Now, nine successful years away from those awkward summers in Vermont, Robin Roberts still turns for help to the man who polished him up for the Phillies. Last fall Roberts surprised his old coach by stopping off in Ann Arbor and asking permission to work out with the Michigan pitchers. Puzzled, Fisher said, "Sure." He watched Roberts throw a few. Fisher saw right away that the familiar three-quarters motion had been replaced by a sidearm delivery; Roberts was unconsciously favoring a sore arm. Fisher walked over. "Robby," he said, "you've changed your delivery, haven't you?" Roberts smiled with relief. "That's what I wanted to know," he said. "You know, in Philadelphia I'm Robin Roberts, and they won't tell me anything."

Roberts' first season with the Phillies earned him an unexciting record (seven won, nine lost), but it also earned him the confidence of his manager and teammates. And it convinced him that he had been right all along: baseball was all he wanted out of life. The small kid who had cried over lost basketball games took naturally to the habits of grown men who sat around and brooded, morose and silent, after a defeat on the diamond. Like all baseballers before and since Ring Lardner's busher, he learned the tired routine for killing time on the road, "the one bad thing about baseball," says he. He went to every movie in town ("I don't care what's playing; I like 'em all"), slept for long hours, read the sports pages, stared blankly out of bus and train windows, sat slack-jawed in hotel lobbies.

Something Besides Baseball. By the time he got home that fall, Robin had begun to suspect that there might be something else besides playing ball. He asked his sister Nora if she knew any girls he might ask for a date. Nora fixed him up with a young grade-school teacher fresh from the University of Wisconsin, a pretty brunette named Mary Ann Kalnes. Mary had never seen a big-league game; Robin could talk only about baseball. So the happy couple went to the movies, where conversation is sometimes helpful but not compulsory. "We evidently got along," says Robin. Little more than a year later they were married.