As long as "The Greatest Third Base Man of All Time" is currently being discussed (there’s a "Hey, Bill" on that topic, concerning Pie Traynor and how and when he got, and lost, that title), I was reminded of this piece which I wrote decades ago, so long ago that I got it off a computer that is wholly incompatible with current technology, The narrow margins make it look like verse, but no, it’s meant to be prose—I just can’t do anything about the margins, or about anything else for that matter. This is exactly how I wrote it, and how I left it in my "unpublished" file, for a good reason. It wasn’t quite finished, and it quickly became outdated.
I wrote this essay, disguised as a short story, a long time ago, probably the late 1980s, early 1990s. Internal evidence suggests strongly that it dates from Don Mattingly’s peak, around 1985 or 1986, because I completely wrongheadedly decided Mattingly was going to become the consensus All-Time Great at first base, eclipsing Gehrig, which he could have if only he’d had a dozen more 1985s. In any case, it was well before Mariano Rivera broke into the major leagues, and well before he claimed the title of World’s All-time Undisputed Dominant Reliever-- since its subject is a sort of pre-Mariano, narrated in the form of an after-dinner talk.
The speaker was meant to be someone like Bill James, as you can see from the opening lines, and the form was supposed to some vague sort of encomium at the end of a very successful career. I don’t like it much, as a story or as an essay—not enough character and plot for a story, and totally outdated as an argumentative essay. (It is interesting, though, as a document noting the changes in the game since the 1980s: I allude at one point to the "third-string catchers" on every big league club, just as teams were beginning to adopt a two-catcher maximum.) I was fascinated by the idea that no one as of the mid-1980s had put together a long and dominant career as a relief pitcher, and how late it was in baseball history that we still had even one position, reliever, that hadn’t had a truly dominating world-class star. As I go on (and on) to explain, every other position had had several players who dominated MLB at their position when they were young, and again in their peak years, and then again when they were older players. Third base had been the last position, in my view, to feature a player who excelled over a long period of time in Eddie Mathews, and then added to that in Mike Schmidt and George Brett, but there still wasn’t a reliever who fulfilled my simple if difficult terms, of excellence coupled with longevity, so I decided to point out that oddity in this story, by creating a dynamic young reliever who got better and better as his career progressed.
It was odd, I thought, that MLB hadn’t promoted guys to the role of closer earlier in their careers than it sometimes did at other positions. I still find it a little odd, just because for other positions you need to master a lot of different skills at the very highest level of competition, but a closer can do okay with only two skills: throwing very fast and throwing with excellent control. Not that these two skills are available at your local supermarket, mind you, just that there are only two of them, and with those two, a teenaged hot-shot should be capable of pitching one inning very effectively. He needn’t master the pick-off move, the change-up, the fielding, the breaking ball—of course they’re desirable, just not absolutely necessary, given fabulous control and a great fastball.
Obviously, there’s something screwy with my reasoning, because teenaged closers still don’t exist, but that was my reasoning, and so I wrote this piece about a teenaged closer who just added to his repertoire, one tool per year, and kept on getting better and better and better. There. You’ve now read the piece, but please continue if you’d like to read the literary version:
THE SOMEDAY KNUCKLEBALL
Some men rank beers for a living. That's all right with me, but I
can never figure where these guys get off to criticize me, who
ranks ballplayers for a living. My standards, I figure, are a
little clearer than "This makes me belch a lot" or "Went straight
to my bladder." My standards are dominance, longevity, consistency.
A first rate ballplayer‑‑take Yogi Berra‑‑was the best
player at his position( that’s one), for a long time (two), without ever
really having a bad season (three). I'm prejudiced against guys
like Mantle who, great as they were, carry with them the baggage
of shoulda‑coulda‑woulda. You know: "Mantle woulda been the
greatest ever if he didn't have osteo‑whatchamacallit." So we
lose Mantle off my list. Gone, forget it, goodbye. The best, by
my standards, were Berra‑Mathewson‑Mattingly‑Collins‑Schmidt‑
Arino‑Musial‑Speaker‑Ruth. Practically any season, for any of
these guys, is a terrific year. When I was growing up, and I came
up with this list I had Honus Wagner at shortstop, and Brooks
Robinson at third, and Lou Gehrig at first base, and those three
are first‑rank too. But I never had a relief pitcher. Until the
last couple of years. Which is why I'm here tonight.
Simply, there never was a really first‑rank relief pitcher. There
have been years that the best player in the game was a
reliever‑‑1963 with Dick Radatz, maybe, 1950 with Konstanty‑‑ and
maybe even whole periods when that was true, like the long
stretch in which you could have seriously argued that no one
dominated the game like Sutter or Fingers. This isn't to put
relievers down. To play first‑rank ball, by my standards, you
have to figure into the MVP voting from practically your rookie
year until you get into at least your late thirties. Wonderful
players like Dizzy Dean and Williams and Koufax and Jackie
Robinson, who all either started late or finished early or missed
seasons for good reasons and bad, wind up getting discussed in
terms of what they would have done in some ideal life. Players
like Aaron and Cobb and Rose and Berra and Mathewson all get
talked about in terms of what they did and, by my lights, that
makes their careers first‑rate.
That's what made Newton remarkable. He pitched his first World
Series in his teens, and his last in his forties, and he finished
second in the MVP voting both times; and in between he had seven
better World Series. He dominated the game for twenty‑three
years, and who's done that? No other reliever, I'll tell you.
Even before he came up, he was known. Like I said, he was
nineteen when he pitched in a Series, but it seems that he was in
the minors forever when they called him up. He'd pitched in the
Olympics the year he graduated high school, and he dominated the
Double‑A league that the Phillies sent him to at age 18, and the
next year, when the Phillies insisted on sending him to Triple A,
there was practically a riot in the City of Brotherly Love lasting from April
until mid‑June when he got called up. He was just a kid, but Phillie fans
carried on so much you would have thought he'd won a hundred
games in the minors and saved hundreds more. I looked it up. His
minor league record was 11‑3 with fifteen saves, in parts of two
seasons.
He was a funny‑looking kid, and never got much better looking. He
had this huge adam's apple, which got hairier the older he got, until
it got so hard to shave he took to letting his chest hair grow
halfway up his neck. And sloping shoulders, so he looked more
like an antelope than an athlete. Coupled with long skinny arms,
those shoulders and his hunched-over posture made him look like
some weird forest creature grazing on all fours.
Even though he had a major‑league curve from the moment the Phils
signed him, and a major‑league fastball in the womb, probably,
the Phillies wouldn't have brought him up if he didn't also have
the best control in their whole system,. And even then, they
wouldn't have called him up if they didn't need a reliever in
the worst way. They'd been in third place all season, sometimes
a close third, sometimes a very distant third, and their bullpen was
destroying them.
The Philly pen was worse than inept. If it had just been inept, they could
have traded for somebody. The bullpen was ept, all right, but only for a
game or two at a time. Their veteran relievers would have one or two bad
outings, then come in and blow the other side away for a couple of innings,
and then come right back with a few more awful outings. By mid-May,
they had an ERA in their bullpen of better than a run an inning, with a few
hitless appearances mixed in. Management had decided that the terrible
appearances were just bad luck, a whole season’s worth of bad relief jobs
squeezed in together at the beginning of the year.
Then it got to be the middle of the year. The bullpen ERA was still
in the high sevens, and‑‑worse‑‑the management had lost several
chances to pick up ace relievers (at suitably ace prices) until
now there was no one available anymore. So they called Frankie
Newton up.
He had a terrific fastball, and a good curve and control, from
git‑go, and they just needed him to pitch a couple of innings a
couple of times a week, and they needed it bad. Most of all,
the kid to his credit was relaxed, especially in the big games. He
couldn't fail, the way he saw it, because he was only a kid. If
he screwed up, the Phils would get the blame, for rushing him
up too fast. And if he pitched well, he'd get all the credit, so
he pitched wonderfully. It took a lot of maturity to see how he
could use his youth to his advantage.
After the Phils won that year’s Series, with Newton pitching seven
scoreless innings against the Tigers, Newton improved a little
every year, although if you'd have asked Jack Pokey, the team's
owner, if Newton could bear improvement, he'd have thought even
the question reeked of ingratitude. But the next spring, he
sharpened his curve, and the spring after, he put on a little
weight, which went straight to his fastball, and the next year,
he got to fielding fairly spectacularly, which up to then he'd
never really noticed as a part of his game, and then the next
year, he got his pickoff motion down almost perfect, and then the
next year, he started monkeying with a better grip on his change‑up,
and the year after that, he learned how to hit a little bit‑‑not
much, maybe .190 or .210, like that, but a big improvement on his
previous contribution, which stood at .165. I'm skipping over a
lot of crises here‑‑like the time Haunches Frye, his manager,
tried making a starter out of him, or the time he was suspended
for his pickoff throw of Tim Whitted, which broke Whitted's
ankle, and ruined his career. Never understood how the
Commissioner could have felt, let alone ruled, Newton was
aiming for a fast man's moving ankle. Somewhere in here, though,
Newton must have developed his mythical knuckleball.
No one knows where it started, this knuckleball of his. Ed Worth,
his catcher starting for three years when he was twenty five,
swears he couldn't have even thrown one before Johnny Yyke, the
knuckleballer, came to the Phillies. But Yyke's widow makes the
point that her husband hated young pitchers, and would have died
in boiled oil before he ever taught a young pitcher his money
pitch. Other players point out, besides, Newton was throwing it
in the bullpen years before Yyke came to the team. And some
players claim there was never any knuckler at all‑‑the whole
story of his knuckleball was an elaborate hoax, maybe the biggest
hoax in all of baseball history.
The story was spread by the biggest flakes in the game: bullpen
catchers. Players to this day sometimes say bullpen catchers,
though they're on the official rosters, aren't even major‑
leaguers. The first-string catcher's in the game, the second
stringer's on the bench, and the third stringer's in the
bullpen, risking his fingers two or three times a game, warming
up relievers on a second's notice, usually without warming up or
putting on a mask or shinguards or a chest protector. Three years
in the majors is about the longest they last. After that, they
either get out of the bullpen, which most of them can't play well
enough to do, or they're too crippled to play any more. Starting
catchers in the minors outlast major‑league third‑stringers, and
when the big‑league third‑string job opens up, most minor‑league
catchers would rather wait in some triple‑A or Double‑A league
for a better opening to come along. Most teams go through a
different third stringer every year, and some more often
than that.
These guys, pathetic as it may seem, train real hard over
the winters; the lucky ones, the ones whose open sores heal,
whose busted hands function after a long winter of rehabilitation
fool their bodies and fool some new team into believing that they
can catch in the bullpen another year. Most of these cases look like
some poor kid who's gotten whacked out night and day by his parents
and his new teammates believe his crazy stories about as often as
people believe some whacked‑out kid. One of these abused
catchers, his chest solid welts after the winter, made a new team,
and warned his new teammates about Newton's knuckler. "His
knuckler?" they'd laugh, "he ain't got one." And the new kid
would say he caught it all last summer, don't tell him! That's
how Newton warmed up. After a half‑dozen knuckleballs, Newton
would be loose, and with no strain on his arm.
The first few times recycled catchers spread such stories, most
players figured they'd caught a few too many fastballs with their
foreheads. They'd think the new kid couldn't tell a knuckler from
Newton's fastball‑‑which for a short while became the expression
players used for "he can't tell his ass from a dry well." But
then the Phillies got rid of a couple more bullpen catchers, and
then some veterans who'd been on the Reds, where one ex‑Phillie
bullpen catcher spread knuckler stories, got traded to the White
Sox, where another ex‑Phillies catcher was now the bullpen coach,
and their stories matched. One Red, the old batting champion Leo
Chin, spread the story, and from Chin's lips, it was believed. By
the next summer, Newton's knuckler was the Unicorn of baseball,
and everyone wanted to see the strange and terrible creature.
Newton himself had put in ten years in the big leagues around
this time, and he'd just answer knuckler questions with an inane
laugh and a "Nah." When reporters persisted, listing ex‑catchers
who claimed to have caught Newton's knucklers, he'd just spit.
Now people would try to see Newton throwing knucklers, in his
natural habitat, so to speak. In likely Newton situations, the
fans would all gather around the bullpen, making the old ball
park look like it was going to get tipped over at one end, maybe
fifteen thousand of them, jostling for position in the seats near
the Philles pen, waiting to see him soft‑toss. "There it is,"
one would scream, "that was it! There, that one knuckled! And
that one."
A knuckler, as most of you know, rides the air currents, moving
slowly but at random, buffeted an inch up, now a half inch down
on the diagonal. No one, least of all the pitcher, knows where
it's going, and no one, least of all the batter, can pick up a
pattern in the motion of a good knuckler from fifty-five feet away.
Now these fans, or these fools, were a good two hundred feet
away, and practically straight up above Newton as he warmed up,
so how they could see a pitch moving centimeters at a time, is
beyond me.
But at least the fools had ignorance to claim as a defense.
Broadcasters, who should have known better, were
claiming, "You can see old Newton warming up with that knuckler
in the bullpen," from maybe four hundred feet away. "Looks like
it's really moving today, Vin." "Oh, yeah, Joe, that knuckler's
just dancing the night away."
Well, maybe Vin and Joe would claim senility as their defense, I
sure don't know. I'm an old man, I get called to talk at these
things about players from my time, and them two geezers are still
doing the game of the week. Last time they made any sense at all
must have been 1995. Joe's been wandering around No‑man's land
for decades, and Vin's been at least a buck short for that long.
Hell, everybody in those days was gabbing about Newton’s
knuckler. And when he'd come into a game, the first few years,
people wondered when he would throw it in a game for the first
time.
Batters, especially. The first year word got out about the
knuckler, they'd be looking it for it in a tight spot. Newton'd
come with men on, tie game, he'd throw two fast strikes over the
plate, and the batter would start wondering if this was the time
he'd choose to throw the pitch. Only it never was.
Even in World Series games, batters would concentrate extra on
the ball's spin, hoping to pick up the first Newton knuckler, and
Vin and Joe would be yakking away, speculating on what he was
saving it for. But it was always boom‑boom‑boom, fastballs on the
corners, with an occasional curve or change to keep the batters
straight, even in the seventh game of the series.
Most people figured that Newton was perfecting the pitch until
his fastball left him, but as the years went on, and he lost a few
miles‑per‑ on the fast one, he just threw his curve a little
more, and got by on smarts. I figured that by this time, it had
become a psychological weapon more than anything else. If a
batter was thinking "Where is that knuckleball?" with only 1% of
his brain, and if he'd never seen the pitch just knew it was the
best one ever, that was maybe more valuable than the pitch
itself.
Young writers would ask him about the pitch from time to time,
and Newton wouldn't even acknowledge the question, except to say
"I don't throw one, man. What the hell are you talking about?"
The last few years, when he'd lost his fastball except as a
surprise, and pretty much lost his stamina, pitching maybe
thirty, forty times year, the word was that he was a valuable
pitcher for his sixty‑odd innings. I think his knuckleball might
have helped him hang on an extra year or three. He always
stayed a great pitcher, like I said, but some managers can't
afford to keep a reliever who can only work twice a week, no
matter how good he is. But with Newton, those managers had to
think that once Newton felt sufficiently humbled by the
experience of not pitching three or four times a week, he'd
finally cough up his knuckleball. He never did, of course, but I
wonder. Maybe Newton will listen to all these speeches tonight,
go home, and five years later when he's elected to the Hall of
Fame, I think he'll make a return as a knuckleballer. Maybe he'll
be the first man to get elected to the Hall of Fame twice.
And you know, there's one other thing I'd like to say, kind of an
afterthought., If he doesn't do something like that, he'll still
be the greatest reliever of all time, to my mind, but I'm not
sure any more that he's really first rank. I was just thinking
what I said before that the truly great ballplayers are truly
great because there's no shoulda‑woulda‑coulda about them. Well,
I'm just thinking, if he'd a mixed a few knucklers in there,
maybe he would have gotten a few more key outs, maybe he would
have picked up some key saves he didn't get, maybe he would even
have appeared in and won a couple of more series. Thinking now,
Newton does cause me to wonder what he would have done and I
suppose I'm always going to keep an open mind about Newton until
I see that knuckleball someday. Thank you. And Newton, thank
you, too. This's been an interesting evening.