A comprehensive look at “the unchanging game,” in several parts
Bill Felber wrote this dazzling essay for Total Baseball back nearly thirty years ago, and Gary Gillette updated it for a later edition of that estimable encyclopedia, now gathering dust on my shelf beside my high-school slide rule. This part, on spring training and then pitching, continues from https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-changing-game-part-3-9a7c129150a4.
The precise origin of spring training, that marvelously contrived ritual that today amounts to a six-week paid vacation in the sun for athletes, media, and club officials, is unknown. With few exceptions, early-day ballplayers trained privately at home. It is known that in 1870 the Chicago White Stockings organized a trip to New Orleans, but that may have been mere barnstorming rather than preparation for the coming season. The generally accepted beginning of spring training is 1886, when the White Stockings and Philadelphia Phillies traveled to Little Rock and Charleston, respectively.
The standard regimen of spring training has varied greatly from decade to decade. Today, for instance, little actual training is done in the spring, since players are expected to report in shape. Instead, the emphasis is on narrowing a roster of 40 players (plus many other spring training invitees) to the requisite 25 by Opening Day. Modern spring training amounts to an extended advertisement for the season to come, with a bit of tryout camp thrown in for effect.
That was not always the case. Players in the 19th and early 20th century commonly received salaries of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, supplementing their salaries with off-season jobs, many of questionable value to their athletic careers. These players literally required a period of a month or so to work back into shape before the start of the season. In the early 1900s the New York Giants trained in the little Texas town of Marlin, and their training was, by the strictest definition, training.
Each day began and ended with what amounted to a two-mile forced march along the railroad tracks from the hotel to the park. The routine consisted of batting and fielding practice, along with drills on the fundamentals of play. If there was a scrimmage, it usually was an intrasquad effort, or perhaps a game against a local team or minor league club. In 1906 the 16 major league teams trained in 10 different states as far north as Illinois. The notion of grouping in Florida and Arizona to make exhibition games between them more convenient would not gain full currency for the better part of another decade. In 1911 the Yankees set up their spring camp in Bermuda.
At most early camps, players oversaw their own conditioning since, as a rule, teams employed only a manager and a single coach — if that. Teams now have coaches they employ just for spring training and will occasionally even attach a coach to a player who is making a position change. Complexes are usually used to house minor league teams when spring training is over; the municipalities, which see spring training as a major source of tourism dollars, often pay for construction of these complexes.
Pitching
How prized is the pitcher? Consider that of the nine positions, candidates for eight are winnowed principally by their skill with the bat. Middle infielders can progress through the professional ranks on the strength of superior range, outfielders may prosper by dint of speed, or catchers thanks to a God-given arm. Fundamentally, however, not even an Ozzie Smith or an Ivan Rodriguez can become a regular professional player until they establish at least a minimal offensive ability. The only exception is the pitcher.
Pitchers always have been the exception, even before the designated hitter rule legislated many of them out of that terra incognita known as the batter’s box. In any analysis of Ty Cobb’s value as a player, the first thing that comes up is his lifetime .366 batting average, yet no one would think of discussing Sandy Koufax’s value to the Dodgers in terms of his .097 batting average.
In fact, the pitcher is the one and only player whose defensive contribution is so vital that the ability to hit is considered irrelevant — as is his fielding skill. Red Ruffing, the fine righthander for the New York Yankees of the 1930s and 1940s, compiled one of the best batting records of any pitcher in the past three quarters of a century, including a .268 career average. But when he was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1967, it was on the strength of a 273–225 record, 3.80 earned run average, and on his status as the leading moundsman for seven pennant winners.
Pitching has been the staple of most successful big league franchises since batters lost the right to call for the type of pitch they liked. Connie Mack is variously quoted as having called it anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of the game. The precise figure is not important: What is important is that Mr. Mack’s axiom remains generally accepted today, though logical analysis of baseball shows that pitching and fielding together comprise 50 percent of the game.
Yet, despite the constancy of the importance placed on quality pitching, both pitching styles and the rules governing pitching have undergone more major changes than any other aspect of on-field play. This change has been so great that the best pitchers of today have virtually nothing in common with the best pitchers of a century ago. Furthermore, pitchers today bear strikingly little resemblance to their predecessors of as little as three decades earlier.
Much of this evolution took place during the game’s formative years, and came via efforts by the rule makers to settle on the proper balance of batting to pitching. In the early years of professional ball in the 1860s and 1870s, pitching bore more similarity to the style employed today in fast-pitch softball than in baseball. The ball was delivered underhand and without a wrist snap from a box set at a distance of 45 feet from the plate, although pitchers fudged so much that, by 1872, wrist movement was legalized. Legalization of the wrist snap quickly spawned the development of various “trick” pitches, notably the curveball, commonly credited to William “Candy” Cummings, a much-traveled moundsman of that era who compiled a 124–72 record in the only six seasons he played as a top-level professional. Whether Cummings or any of several other pitchers of his era first perfected the art of making a ball curve, Candy generally got the credit (being elected to the Hall of Fame in 1939 for that accomplishment).
Nineteenth-century pitchers worked under virtually ever-changing conditions. For instance, the pitcher’s “box” was moved back to 50 feet from home plate after 1880, then eliminated in 1893 in favor of a “rubber” placed at 60 feet, 6 inches. The underhand delivery requirement gradually was modified to allow what in effect was a sidearm pitch in 1883, and a full overhand delivery the following year. Rules governing the ball-and-strike count — at one time nine balls were required to give the batter a walk — changed frequently until they were stabilized at four and three, respectively, in 1889. At various times, pitchers were required to deliver a high or low pitch, as requested by the batter; windups were banned, then permitted again; the size of the “box” was altered almost routinely before being consigned to extinction.
It would be difficult to generalize as to whether all of those changes helped or hurt pitchers. Certainly, batting averages tended to improve as the distance between the mound and plate increased. Yet the underhand pitching style, physically much easier on the arm, enabled most teams to play an entire schedule with only one or two pitchers. And the best of them attained results that would be unthinkable today.
By way of illustration, compare the statistics of Providence’s Old Hoss Radbourn compiled in 1884 with the record of the last pitcher to win 30 or more games, Detroit’s Denny McLain, in 1968, and of the pitcher with the best statistics in 2000, Boston’s Pedro Martinez.
Radbourn’s numbers seem even more impressive when it is noted that his Providence team played only a 112-game schedule. Of course, the comparisons are fair only as illustration of how greatly the pitching environment — the rules, conditions, and strategies — changed between 1884, 1968, and the present.
At least as dynamic a force as the rulebook in the evolution of the modern pitcher has been the development of pitching strategy, notably new pitches. For while the broad regulations under which pitchers work today are not vastly different from 1893, the arsenal of pitches that have come into vogue — and occasionally passed from it — has ranged widely and sometimes wildly.
Cummings’s introduction of the curveball marked the first major deviation toward finesse from what had fundamentally been a power pitcher’s game to up that time. Other innovators included Phonney Martin, who threw a drop or slowball, and Al Spalding and Tim Keefe, masters of the change-of-pace. However, such bolder experimentation was limited to a handful of hurlers.
While pitchers of the latter part of the 19th century occasionally dabbled in “outshoots” or “rises,” the best built their reputations with speed. “Cyclone” Young in Cleveland and Amos Rusie, New York’s “Hoosier Thunderbolt,” were the best — and in all likelihood — the fastest of them. Young won 27 games for Cleveland in 1891, his first full season, and then accumulated 511 victories over a remarkable 22-year career. The magnificence of Cy Young’s record is best illustrated by the fact that the alltime runner-up, Washington’s Walter Johnson, trails by almost a hundred wins. Young’s 2,799 strikeouts — a record when he retired — further testify to his velocity. As for Rusie, he won 36 games in 1894 and led the league in strikeouts five times between 1890 and 1895. He also led five times in walks, initiating the popular linkage between hard throwers and control trouble.
By the mid-1890s, earned run averages rose as a reaction to the shift of the mound back to 60 feet, 6 inches. The legendary Baltimore Orioles of Wee Willie Keeler had batted .343 as a team in 1894, yet did not even lead the league — Philadelphia did, at .350! In response, pitchers began to experiment more readily with changes of speed as well as with the ball itself. Chicago’s Clark Griffith scraped the ball against his spikes and discovered that the scuffs added to the break of his curve, making him a 20-game winner for six consecutive seasons. Philadelphia’s Al Orth, a “one-pitch wonder,” mastered the art of changing speeds and won 203 games in 15 years.
Equally as significant as changes in the approach to pitching was the increase in the numbers of pitchers needed. In 1876 Chicago’s Albert Spalding had been able to pitch in all but five of his team’s 66 games. By the early 1880s, the top teams were using two pitchers. Within another decade — as the increased pitching distance, longer playing schedules, and more tiresome overhand motion became accepted — staffs of fewer than four to five were uncommon. The Detroit team of the 1884 National League utilized perhaps the first pitching “staff” per se, with four hurlers (Frank Meinke, Stump Weidman, Charley Getzien, and Dupee Shaw) each working between 147 and 289 innings. Detroit’s strategy did not count for much as the club finished last but, within a decade, Baltimore rode what amounted to a four-to-six-pitcher rotation to the league championship. That staff’s ace, Sadie McMahon, pitched only about one-quarter of the total number of innings worked by the sextet. In 1876, the eight National League teams basically employed a total of 13 pitchers; by 1886, that number was 24; by 1896, for 12 teams, it was 51.
By the turn of the century, the popularization of two theretofore lightly used pitches helped reestablish the pitcher as the game’s dominant player. Christy Mathewson, a fresh-faced college graduate from Bucknell, brought to the New York Giants a pitch he called the “fadeaway,” actually a reworked version of something known in the 1880s as an “outshoot.” Today, Matty’s legendary fadeaway would be called a screwball, though the popularity of that pitch has declined in recent years.
The pitch acts like a reverse curve: when thrown by a righthanded pitcher, it breaks toward a righthanded batter. Mathewson might very well have become a great pitcher even without the fadeaway, but with it he won 373 games, four times winning 30 or more, and five times helping the Giants to pennants. So difficult was the pitch to throw and control that no other major league pitcher of the era could master it.
The other dominant pitch of the first part of the 20th century was the spitball, advocated principally by two men, Jack Chesbro and Ed Walsh.
Chesbro came to the major leagues with Pittsburgh in 1899 and, by 1901, had incorporated the spitball into his routine. He became a 20-game winner throwing the wet one; it would not be illegal to doctor a baseball with a foreign substance for two more decades. Chesbro won 28 games with the pennant-winning Pirates in 1902, so greatly increasing his value that he became one of a cadre of “free agents” who were recruited to the fledgling American League during the three-year interleague war. With the New York Highlanders of the young league in 1904, Chesbro’s spitball took him to a 20th-century record 41 victories, although it also set up one of the most ironic finishes to any pennant race. Because of its wild break, the spitball was one of the least predictable of pitches, yet Chesbro had walked only 88 batters that season, fewer than two every nine innings. His control of the devious delivery was impeccable.
On the final weekend of that season, Boston and New York — virtually tied for first — engaged in a five-game series, with the winner of that series becoming the champion. Chesbro’s 41st victory came in the series opener, but Boston claimed the ensuing two. In the climactic fourth game, the opening contest of a last-day doubleheader, Chesbro held a 2–2 tie entering the ninth. An infield hit, a sacrifice and a groundout moved Boston’s pennant winning run to third base. The great pitcher had been masterful to that point, walking just one and striking out five. However, in that most pivotal of situations, a Chesbro spitball bounced in the dirt and skipped toward the backstop, a wild pitch that cost New York a pennant.
Walsh, like Chesbro, perfected control of the elusive spitter and parlayed that to remarkable feats. A moundsman of modest ability prior to employing the pitch in 1906, he won 17 games that season, 24 the next, and an astonishing 40 the year after that. Irony played a central role in Walsh’s career as well, for perhaps his best performance in that 40-win season of 1908 came in defeat. At the climax of a three-team race involving Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, Walsh’s White Sox came to Cleveland needing a victory to remain in contention. Walsh pitched a four-hitter and struck out 15 batters, but Cleveland’s Addie Joss achieved a rare perfect game and won 1–0. The only run scored on a passed ball.
Other so-called “freak” pitches came into vogue during that era as well. Pitchers altered balls not only with spit or spikes, but also with emery paper, paraffin, mud, slippery elm, and who knows what else. But the ranks of pitchers who relied on tampering for their success still constituted a minority. Most, like Washington’s Walter Johnson, continued to rely on the basic fastball. Of course, most pitchers did not have a fastball the caliber of Walter Johnson’s to rely on.
And on that basis, pitchers and batters lived in happy coexistence for about a decade, pausing only to occasionally admire the ascendancy of a new star like Philadelphia’s Grover Cleveland Alexander. Master both of the fastball and curve, Alexander emerged in 1911 as a rookie 28-game winner and, by 1915, he was leading the Phillies to the National League pennant on the strength of a 31-victory season. With Philadelphia and later with the Chicago Cubs, he led the league in victories six times between 1911 and 1920, becoming generally acknowledged as the pre-eminent pitcher of the latter half of what is commonly called baseball’s Dead Ball Era.
Alexander, along with Walter Johnson, continued to pitch in form beyond 1920, but that was not true of major league pitchers as a whole. A series of factors, some mechanical, some societal, reshaped the game again following World War I and, in most instances, it was pitchers who suffered in the reshaping.
The catalyst for much of that reshaping, ironically, was a former pitcher — and a very good one. As a 20-year-old rookie in 1915, Babe Ruth won 18 games to help the Boston Red Sox to the world championship. By the following season, Ruth, a 23-game winner who added another victory in the World Series, was coming to be recognized as Boston’s ace. He led the American League in earned run average (1.75), starts (41), and shutouts (9), and paced it in complete games (35) the following season as well.
By 1918, however, Ruth the pitcher was recognized as less of a hero than Ruth the slugger. He pitched in 20 games that season, winning 13 of them, but started nearly three times as often in the outfield, a response both to his hitting and to the box-office value of the fans’ clamoring to see him hit. Although by no means an everyday player, the Babe tied for the league lead in home runs that season with a modest 11. More significantly, he drew crowds, both at Fenway Park and on the road. So in 1919, Boston manager Ed Barrow converted him almost exclusively to the outfield. Ruth’s response was to break the all-time record for home runs — with 29 — and to lead the league in runs, runs batted in, and slugging as well. Traded to New York in 1920, Ruth almost immediately became the most celebrated player in the game’s history. He slugged a then-unthinkable 54 home runs, breaking existing records for runs, RBIs, bases on balls, and slugging percentage. To the public, Ruth was “the Sultan of Swat,” “the Bazoo of Bang,” “the Infant Swatigy,” and “the Colossus of Clout.”
Batting averages and home run production rose league-wide as other players strove to imitate him. American League batters, who hit .248 with 136 home runs in 1917, raised those figures to .292 and 477 by 1921. In the National League, the increases for the same period were from .249 and 202 to .289 and 460. Part of that 150 to 200 percent increase in the home run count could be attributed to the banning — enforced gradually as of 1920 — of the spitball and other so-called “doctored” pitches, part to improved craftsmanship on the part of the baseball makers, and part to the directive by league officials to replace soiled, scuffed balls with cleaner, whiter ones. But in large measure, the change was simply a strategic one: batters swung harder and tried to drive the ball farther than ever before. Once a poke-and-run contest, baseball had become — thanks in good measure to Ruth — a slugger’s game. There is no question that the fans loved it: American League attendance soared from 1.7 million in 1918 (albeit in a season shortened by the owners because of World War I) to more than 5 million in 1920.
Unfortunately for pitchers, they proved less than capable of adapting to the new and more thrilling style. The rule change barring use of the spitball, emery ball, shine ball, and other similar pitches removed a potential weapon from all arsenals, save those of 17 men who were exempted from the ban. These 17 were permitted to continue throwing the pitch, which did not actually die out until the last of them, Burleigh Grimes, retired in 1934. Effective new pitches were not developed to fill the void, though a few toyed with a knuckleball. In the late 1920s George Blaeholder, a nondescript pitcher the St. Louis Browns, devised a pitch that eventually came to be known as the slider, but for years was derided by many as just a “nickel curve.” For the most part, though, pitchers relied on the fastball, curve, and a very occasional changeup. With pitchers as with batters, raw power replaced guile and cunning as their chief weapon.
The result was predictable: for the better part of two decades, batting averages, home runs, and earned run averages soared. National League ERA skyrocketed from 3.13 in 1920 to 4.97 in 1930; in the American League, ERA increased from 3.79 in 1920 to 4.65 in 1930. National League home runs more than tripled, but strikeouts increased by only 6 percent. The differences in the American League were less dramatic, but still quite large. Pitchers reasserted their competitiveness somewhat in the 1930s, though by then bat-happy baseball society had been conditioned to view a 4.00 ERA as good.
The period between 1920 and 1960 produced some exceptional pitchers, but few changes in pitching style. In the mid-1930s, a rookie righthander in Detroit named Eldon Auker bothered batters with an underhanded delivery reminiscent of the style of the 1870s. Auker’s so-called submarine pitch was necessitated by an arm injury that made it difficult for him to throw overhand. He won 130 games in a 10-year career, pitching on two pennant winners and one world champion. His style would be resurrected in the modern era by relievers like Ted Abernathy, Kent Tekulve, Dan Quisenberry, and Gene Garber. In the National League, the New York Giants’ Carl Hubbell also reached back in time for a cudgel. Hubbell resurrected Mathewson’s fadeaway, renaming it the screwball, and mystified opponents sufficiently to record five straight 20-win seasons between 1933 and 1937, leading the Giants to three pennants.
A more conventional, and more overpowering, form belonged to Lefty Grove, who pitched for 17 years for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Boston Red Sox. Grove’s trademarks were a fastball that many have called the swiftest ever and a surly disposition. Four times a league leader in victories and nine times the ERA king, Grove was the only pitcher to win 300 games in the hot-hitting 1920s and 1930s, an achievement often cited by those who point to him as the best pitcher ever. His career ERA of 3.06 is more than one full run lower than the league average for the years (1925–1941) that he pitched.
Pitching rules, which had remained virtually untouched since 1920, underwent several adjustments between 1950 and 1969. The strike zone was tightened in 1950: the new upper limit being the armpit instead of the top of the shoulder (with the lower limit at bottom of the knees staying the same). After a decade of unprecedented home run hitting in the 1950s, both home runs and scoring increased in 1961–62, so the old strike zone was brought back in an attempt to help the beleaguered moundsmen. The result was in the intended direction, but of a magnitude unforeseen and undesired by everyone except pitchers: scoring plunged dramatically from 1963 through 1968. American League pitchers posted a post1920 low ERA of 2.98 in 1968 as Denny McLain won 31 games and only one AL batter (Carl Yastrzemski, at .301) could top .300. In the National League, two hard-throwing righthanders who gave enemy hitters no quarter entranced fans: Bob Gibson posted an unbelievable 1.12 ERA while Don Drysdale set a then all-time record with 58 consecutive scoreless innings. Fully 21 percent of 1968 games resulted in shutouts. Rule makers quickly responded to that offensive nadir by lowering the mound several inches and restoring the strike zone to its 1950–1962 dimensions. Scoring and home runs climbed, aided further in the American League in 1973 when the designated hitter was introduced.
It would be overly simple and wrong to merely to point to the rule book as the fulcrum for all variations in pitching performance in the past five decades. Certainly, another very significant factor in the second half of the 20th century was the development of relief pitching. Beyond that, pitchers perfected pitches they had only toyed with before. The knuckleball was not new — it had been thrown since the early part of the century and, in the 1940s, the Washington Senators employed a foursome of flutterballing starters. No pitcher employed the erratic butterfly pitch as effectively, however, as the trio of Hoyt Wilhelm, Phil Niekro — both of whom rode the knuckler to the Hall of Fame — and Phil’s younger brother, Joe Niekro. Wilhelm pitched in a then-unprecedented 1,070 games over 21 years and established what at the time was the all-time record for saves, 227. Phil Niekro won 318 games and, in tandem with Joe (who won 221), in 1987 set the record for most victories by members of one family.
A sort of variation on the knuckleball, also developed years before but resurrected recently, was the forkball or “split-fingered fastball.” Credit for its development generally is given to 1940s New York Yankees pitcher Ernie Bonham, but the first famous exponent was Elroy Face, a relief pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959 Face compiled a sensational 18–1 record with 10 saves by the simple expedient of jamming the ball between his index and middle fingers before releasing it. This unusual grip caused the ball to have very little spin and gave it an unexpected dip as it crossed home plate; it also made it a devastating change-of-pace pitch. Face, who saved 20 games in 1958 and 24 in the Pirates’ world championship year of 1960, is generally credited with ushering in the era of the modern relief ace or closer.
In the late 1970s another star reliever, Bruce Sutter of the Chicago Cubs, reinvented the same pitch with the help of his minor league pitching coach Fred Martin, though Sutter called it his “split-fingered fastball.” Sutter saved 37 games for the fifth-place Cubs in 1979, and earned the Cy Young Award. In Sutter’s wake, entire pitching staffs began learning what was quickly dubbed the “splitter.” Roger Craig became a one-man traveling demonstration of the newly popular pitch’s success. As Detroit pitching coach, he taught it to the Tigers staff in the early 1980s, and they responded by winning the world championship in 1984. Then Craig taught it to journeyman Houston righthander Mike Scott, and he blossomed into an 18-game winner capable of recording over 300 strikeouts while leading the Astros to a divisional flag in 1986. Craig returned to managing in San Francisco, where his staff of split-finger throwers helped the Giants win the NL West title in 1987.
The most widely used new pitch, however, was the one invented by Blaeholder 50 years before — the slider. Acting much like a fastball but with a sharp, late break, the slider supplemented and frequently supplanted the slower and bigger-breaking curveball in the repertoire of most big-league hurlers. Perhaps the pitch’s most famous practitioner was Steve Carlton, who used it to become the second winningest lefthander of all time, behind only Warren Spahn. So disarming was Carlton’s nasty slider that he became the first pitcher to win four Cy Young Awards; he also staged a dramatic contest in the mid-1980s with fastballer Nolan Ryan to see who would become the first pitcher in history to record 4,000 strikeouts.
If the evolution of pitching suggests anything, however, it is that no one style, no single delivery, no trick pitch, and no simple rules change can remain perpetually dominant. In the 1960s no two pitchers could have been more stylistically different than Juan Marichal, the highkicking ace of the San Francisco Giants, and Sandy Koufax, the stylish lefthander of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Marichal employed seemingly every move, every trick, every pitch ever devised by professional pitchers. He threw the fastball, the curveball, the slider, the changeup, and the screwball; he delivered them overhanded, three-quartered, or sidearmed whenever he chose, to the great consternation of most opposing hitters. Koufax relied on a fastball, a stunning curve, and (during his peak years after 1960) exemplary control. Yet in 1963, for instance, each won 25 games, each appeared among the league leaders in winning percentage, earned run average, strikeouts, complete games, and innings pitched. Between 1963 and 1966, Marichal averaged better than 23 victories; Koufax, 24.
One of the most frequently debated questions in baseball is whether modern pitchers throw harder than their predecessors. It is, of course, very difficult to answer that question. To the degree that today’s pitchers are bigger and stronger than ever, to the degree that improved training and conditioning programs encourage greater speed, it is logical to assume that the fastest modern hurlers must be swifter than Cy Young or Walter Johnson or Lefty Grove. Consensus picks as to the hardest-throwing starting pitchers of the past two decades would probably be Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson. Ryan’s fastball was clocked in his prime on radar guns at about 100 miles per hour; Johnson has been routinely clocked at 100 or even higher in the late 1990s. (It is true that several relief pitchers — Rob Dibble, Roberto Hernandez, Mark Wohlers, Robb Nen, Troy Percival, and Billy Wagner — to name some of the more prominent — have been clocked as regularly throwing in the high 90s or around 100 miles per hour in recent years. However, it is like comparing apples and mangoes to talk about peak velocity for a pitcher that routinely pitches only one inning as contrasted with a starting pitcher.)
One of the biggest problems in discussing pitch velocity is changing standards. Prior to the advent of sports radar guns in the 1970s, various measures were used in an attempt to accurately time pitches. Some of the early radar guns used in the 1970s and 1980s sampled the speed of the pitch only a few times between the pitcher’s release and when the ball crossed the plate. Because the pitch slows down more the farther it travels from the pitcher’s hand — it can be traveling be as much as 10 m.p.h. slower at the plate than when released by the pitcher — the point at which the radar gun actually “clocked” the pitch could easily make a difference of multiple miles per hour. Therefore, earlier radar guns were best used to average the velocity of many pitches, not to give a definitive reading on one pitch. Newer, digital-technology radar guns can sample the speed of a pitch hundreds of times in the split-second it takes to travel from the mound to home plate, making individual pitch readings much more accurate. There is a four-mile-per-hour difference between some of the old radar guns (which showed average big-league fastballs at 85–86 m.p.h.) and the current guns (which show average velocity at 89–90 m.p.h.). The effect of this difference is that a pitcher clocked at 100 miles per hour in the late 1990s would probably have been measured as throwing in the mid-to-high 90s with some of the old guns. The best that can be said is that changing measurement standards and changing technology over the decades, plus the lack of controlled tests and systematic records, make all of these discussions about peak velocity exercises in approximation, not precision.
Old-timers, of course, did not have the advantage, or disadvantage, of pitching to radar guns, so assessments of their speed are necessarily cruder. “Rapid Robert” Feller’s fastball, for instance, once was clocked against a speeding motorcycle. The finding? About 100 miles per hour. The eyewitness testimony of old-timers varies. Many picked Walter Johnson, but Johnson himself picked Smoky Joe Wood. Billy Herman selected Van Lingle Mungo. Contemporaries like Wes Ferrell said Lefty Grove was faster than Feller, but numerous sportswriters sided with Feller as the fastest ever. Connie Mack, who played and managed across six decades, opted for Amos Rusie, the old-time “Hoosier Thunderbolt.” Mack’s opinion, however, could easily have been influenced by nostalgia: he batted against Rusie. Nolan Ryan was generally considered the fastest pitcher in the 1980s but, for a time, it was not universally presumed that he was the fastest on the Houston Astros! Until his crippling stroke, J.R. Richard was conceded that title by at least some that saw both.
Part 5 — Strategy to 1920 and Night Ball — tomorrow
The Changing Game, Part 4 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.