Rick Ankiel pitches to Eddie Gaedel...

Most of this story was written in on Christmas Eve of 2007, when I had been trading emails with my friend David.  We'd been writing about MLB pitchers who had just lost it – lost almost every shred of their ability to throw strikes after having at least some degree of success in their careers. David brought up Steve Stone.  I think he was confusing him with another pitcher. Stone had won the 1980 Cy Young Award for the Baltimore Orioles, and the following year went right down the tubes, but it was all injury related, and after 1981, he was done as a player at the age of 31. Not guys like that.

The most famous guy I could recall who suddenly couldn't find the plate was Steve Blass (photo - right), from the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had been a pitching hero in the 1971 World Series. He followed it up with a superb season in 1972, but in 1973 he couldn't find the plate at all. He pitched one game in 1974 (5-innings, 2-K's, 5-hits, 7 walks, 9.00 ERA) and was done. It was like he couldn’t hit the ocean from the beach. One of the many great Roger Angell pieces on baseball (in one of his many outstanding anthologies) is titled "Gone for Good." It chronicles how things went from so great to so horrible for Blass, seemingly without any rational explanation.

Other pitchers have experienced this -- certainly the St. Louis Cardinals (now Washington National outfielder) Rick Ankiel (photo - right) is the most recent and well-known case. A young pitcher who had been quite successful who then implodes in a playoff game, firing one incredibly wild pitch after another on national TV. There was also Mark Wohlers, who had been a pretty good relief pitcher for the ATL when he just lost it. Blass may have been the best in history to have suddenly and inexplicably experienced a complete loss of a skill he’d possessed and honed for years and years

Any situation like this reminds me of a very funny story from my own  experience playing baseball, a million years ago in my hometown of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.  I was set to play in a Babe Ruth League game when I was about 14, but our team didn't have enough players to field a line up for the game, so we forfeited. We then decided to play a “practice” or scrimmage game.



Charlie, Sr. -- top left

 Our opponents were the Graham School (also located in Hastings), which had become a sort of huge foster home for poor (99% black) kids back then. It was always interesting to play at their field, because decades earlier my dad had played on the same field, and when he played there, it was a home game. He and his older brother lived at the Graham School while my grandmother worked there. This all happened after my grandfather was killed in a railroad accident when my dad was 5 years old in 1918. (It was no doubt 99% lily-white back then) My dad went on to become a pretty good high school and semi-pro pitcher in the 1930’s. He also had one helluva knuckleball. It was an amazing pitch, usually very hard to control, but not for him when he threw it to me when we played catch.

Anyway, the game was a scrimmage and didn't count at all, so for “fun,” I asked my coach if I could move in to pitch, from shortstop, and he said go for it. I had pitched in Little League, and actually was the winning pitcher in my final season's championship game. I think I only pitched about 8 innings all season, but only gave up two hits (and I can recall both of them, precisely as they happened), and zero walks, while striking out quite a few. Just like my dad, I had impeccable control of all my pitches, and never walked anyone.

Don't look back, something might be gaining

Being 12-years old and facing more than a few 9 and 10 year olds gave me an enormous psychological advantage when pitching to little kids. I had a devastating change-up, which was generally my adaptation of Satchel Paige's famous 'hesitation pitch.' The way I threw it would always be a balk if runners were on base, so I couldn't use it then. I would actually come out of my wind up, make a big stride with my left foot and then stop! Then, after what must have felt like a lifetime to the batter but what was only a moment later, I’d finish by throwing the ball. I think I made some younger and smaller kids cry with frustration because they looked so stupid?  They were basically swinging at a ball that hadn't even left my hand, and I drove one coach crazy with this, all the change ups.  He searched the rulebook for something that would point to it being illegal. When he couldn't find anything, he would yell at his players to "just wait on the pitch," but I guess that was easier said than done when you’re only 9 years old, with tears in your eyes, and your deep sobbing gulps of air are drowning out your coach’s plea?

I also used to throw a Ted Abernathy (or Chad Bradford, for you tykes) submarine-ball, getting so low on my follow-through that I'd come close to scraping the ground with my knuckles on delivering the pitch. I would also go straight side arm to right-handed batters, but always from as far to the right side of the rubber as possible -- then stretching it out to the right even more. The effect must have seemed like the ball was coming straight down the third base line at a right-handed batter’s left ear.

Can you imagine some 9 or 10-year old kid at bat with this stuff being fired at him?

I'd waste a conventional type of pitch for a ball -- like a fastball to the backstop ala Ryne Duren, the apparently blind (and often blind-drunk) flame-thrower for the Yankees back in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Duren (whose career ended early in part due to his raging alcoholism) would purposefully fire a warm up pitch or two into the screen behind home plate, just to shake up batters on the opposing team.

Then, I’d fire a submarine pitch on the up and inside corner for a strike – the kid bailing out all the way.

I'd follow that with a "hesitation pitch" floated down the middle for strike two. By now, some of the younger kids would be stifling a sniffling tear or two.

"The Whip"

Lastly, a screaming freight train of a Ewell "The Whip" Blackwell (a lightning- fast pitcher for Cincinnati from the 1940’s) side-arm fastball coming down the third baseline for a strike on the inside corner for strike three, and the kid would get razzed back to the bench.

The thing was that my stuff wasn't nearly effective enough to get anyone good out consistently, as in time, any good hitter would adjust, but as little as I was used (and I didn't want to pitch anyway) I was very effective, and had pin-point control.

I used to pitch endless batting practice for my teams, because I had the ability to throw the ball over the plate, pitch after pitch after pitch -- it was almost machine like. This seemingly rare ability carried over for me to Babe Ruth ball and the regulation playing field.

Okay, back to that day at the Graham School.

As we’d decided to play a game anyway, we used the two 15-year old guys who'd shown up to umpire the game as players for our team. The Graham School had somewhere between 25 and 250 kids ready to play, and it seemed like they had thousands more in the stands.

I started at short as I always did, batting clean up, which in retrospect is really scary. I was never a good hitter, and as small as I was I had zip for power too. How we ended up being a better than .500 team is beyond me, though we did have one good pitcher named Bobby Reilly, and our defense was great.

Where long flies went to die.

Graham School had this big kid named Alan Fisher, a lefty all the way. I had played against him in Little League. He was big and strong and had some talent. One game against his team in Little League I was facing Jake Reilly, Bobby's older brother, who was the best pitcher in the league. In one game, I managed to hit a long foul pop down the right field line that Fisher (playing first base) snagged ala Willie Mays off of Vic Wertz in October of 1954 – a fabulous, over-the-shoulder basket catch. While Fisher celebrated like he'd just won a lottery, my teammate on first base tagged and went to third, and later scored the only run of the game. I remember ragging on Alan a bit that evening, as his bit of over exuberant bone-headedness might have cost his team the game? I also didn't like being shown up like that.

Well, after getting the okay from my coach that I would pitch the next inning, I really pushed the envelope by asking him if I could hit lefty in my next at bat, prior to taking the mound. Even though I always hit righty, I had dreams of batting from both sides of the plate, and my coach said sure, though he thought I was stupid for doing so.

Why?

Alan Fisher was pitching, and he threw really hard, was he was very wild, and was left-handed, as pointed out. A switch-hitter would bat righty against Fisher, plus, batting lefty, his fastball would seem like a 100-MPH freight train coming down the first base line at my right ear, just like a left-handed Ewell Blackwell. It’s also important to point out that Alan Fisher also clearly remembered me from a couple of years ago.

Yeah, stupid.

It was nasty for me, but at least my fiasco was only 3 pitches long. I think Alan may have been salivating, and I don't blame him, as in retrospect what I was doing was trying to show him up. In this ever more PC world is it all right to say that I looked like a little girl up there, chasing pretty butterflies with my 30-ounce wooden club?

But, my horror show wasn't complete.

To the mound!

The first two batters I faced were regular starting players, and they both went down on called third strikes, never lifting their bats from their shoulders.

Veeck, as in "wreck."

 At that point the Graham School's coach started to run up a series of pinch hitters, and as this was a meaningless game, he found kids that all looked to be about 3-feet tall. He sent them up to bat in exaggerated crouches that made me think of Bill Veeck (photo-left), the St. Louis Browns owner and General Manager, and his use of Eddie Gaedel as a pinch hitter in a game back in 1951. Hey, Eddie was a midget, but at least he was 3' 7" tall. The opposing pitcher for Detroit, Bob Cain, was laughing so hard he couldn’t do anything except walk Gaedel on 4 pitches. Right after Veeck pulled that fabulous strategic and promotional stunt, the commissioner banned Gaedel from ever appearing in another major league game under the "making a travesty of the game" rule. Eddie became a bitter guy after that, which is another story, but regardless, from a strategic and a promotional perspective, Veeck's move was pure genius.

So, I strike out the first two batters, but now I have a kid so small and crouched down that his strike zone appears to be about the size of an inch-wide band running horizontally across the plate. I may have managed to get one called strike before walking the kid, but I had also noticed at this point that none of the first 3 batters had swung the bat yet.

Eddie, draws the walk.

Now, from the stretch, I walk the next kid on 4 wildly-meandering pitches. Each pitch seemed to be wandering farther and farther from the plate, and as they did, the huge crowd of little black kids screamed, danced, and chanted in pure delight!

It was actually getting hard to see if a strike zone even existed with some of these kids. I mean, their shoulders appeared to be touching their knees for cryin’ out loud! I felt like a slice of white bread getting lowered into a toaster, right after all the bread crumbs had been cleaned out of it, and the dial set all the way to the right. It wasn’t warm yet, but it would be soon crispy.

I walked the next kid on 4 straight pitches and my friend Charlie Papelian wandered in from short to ask me "what the hell’s goin’ on Halstead?" I could barely hear him standing right next to me, my ears ringing with catcalls and yelps from the stands. Plus, my neck was getting a little warm and sweaty for some reason, and the sweat was trickling down my back and making it itch.



Bob Cain walked Eddie.



“Come on, come on, come on, wild thing!”

As the bases are now loaded, my coach yells from the sidelines to "just throw it over the plate and make them swing!"

I think I looked at him like he was the world's biggest imbecile. I mean, what the hell did he think I was doing out there? I must have looked a bit shell-shocked, having a goofy grin on my face, because he came out to the mound to tell me I could go back to the full wind up, though why he thought that would work I couldn’t begin to say? It’s probably good he didn’t give me the old baseball slap on the butt, or I might have had an accident, and perhaps discovered another use for the resin bag?

A part of me felt as though I was making a major mockery of the game – hell, it may have been a Colonel Mockery, it was so bad. I don’t know if our league had a Commissioner, but if we did have one, we really could have used him at that point.

Okay, next batter – a full bore screeching cacophony of jeers and a full bore wind up.

Manute was 7'7" tall

4 straight balls...none of them seriously near what Manute Bol's’s strike zone would be, let alone some minuscule squatting ball of a jeering-kid that looked like he was defecating in the batter's box.

I have now walked in a run, after four consecutive bases on balls.

Now, walking purposefully to the plate is (drum roll) Alan Fisher.

We are now at a key point in this story. It’s like DEFCON 5, and General Mockery has taken command.

It sounds as if there are 50,000 little kids in the crowd, all of them still screaming at me, still laughing at me, and still hooting at me each time another fastball would sail high and away, or over the batter's head.

I wish I could tell you that something really dramatic happened, like I struck Alan Fisher out on 3 pitches, or he hit a grand slam, but this isn't some bastardization of "The Natural," and I am not going to offer up exploding light towers. No, this was just my descent into an area of baseball hell in which the brain can completely screw up physical performance, ala Steve Blass, Mark Wohlers, Rick Ankiel, and any number of others.

Alan took one mighty swing at a pitch no where near the plate, and then after a verbal lambasting from his coach, took 4 straight wild ones for the walk and the RBI.

I yelled over the cosmic and comic din to my coach to bring in a reliever. I was forever done as a pitcher. My ERA for the game was a nifty 67.50. If you don’t know what ERA means, suffice my telling you that if I pitched a complete game with that ERA, my team would need to score at least 69 runs to win the game, but only if they made certain that I didn’t throw another pitch.

In (much) later years I did get back on the mound, but only to throw batting practice to the Little League teams I coached. The pin-point and machine-like accuracy returned, and periodically I would dust off the old hesitation pitch, just to see the look on a kid's face, or drop down to side-arm or under-handed, to show 'em all that the magic was still there.

I have to say that even at the time the whole episode happened that day at the Graham School, it was hilarious, and I do vividly recall laughing as it all happened. If it hadn’t been fun, I wouldn’t have been doing it, and after all, it was only practice.

Perhaps in another life we may all get to witness "Rick Ankiel pitches to Eddie Gaedel," and there could be more hooting, laughing, and razzing. Then, Manager Charlie would send up 8 more hitters, and all of them would be tiny crouching kids from the Graham School, and my team would go up 900-0 in the 1st inning.

Then, I’d be tempted to pitch again, but the Commissioner would surely show up and not let me make a mockery of the game. Not even my own private mockery.

Commissioners have no sense of humor.

Happy New Year.