High Heat (18 page)

For the record, Ryan's best clocking by infrared was 100.9 miles per hour. His teammates and members of the Angels press corps later claimed that he could easily throw 5 miles per hour faster on a better day. In fact, he may have done just that.

Rockwell International acknowledged that Ryan was actually clocked approximately 45 feet after the ball left his hand, rather than at home plate. The rule of thumb tends to be that a pitched ball loses up to 10 miles per hour by the time it reaches the plate. So, in this case, “that means that on a modern gun, Ryan was at best throwing 105.9 miles per hour,” says John-William Greenbaum, who besides knowing a lot about Steve Dalkowski is an expert on testing devices, too. “On the bright side, it makes Ryan the fastest right-hander of all time, since his pitch was still probably traveling faster than Joel Zumaya's best offering.”

Of course, almost every ballpark in the game, from the minors to the major leagues, clocks pitches today. The results are regularly flashed on the scoreboard. You would think that advances in technology would
have made clocking speed more definitive by now, but some argue radar guns have only made things more confusing.

“They help you get the answer,” Pat Gillick once told
Baseball America
. “But they're not the answer themselves.”

“I don't put much faith in what they're using to guess speed today,” adds Andy Etchebarren, a former catcher with the Baltimore Orioles and a coach with the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs during the 2008 season. “Take a guy like Steve Dalkowski. He would have hit 107–108 [miles per hour] on the radar guns they used today. I have no doubt about that. You see guys hitting 94, 95 on the gun now that wouldn't have been considered fast at all back in my day. Us old-timers joke about it.”

If anything, heightened technology—namely, the radar gun—has made it possible for everyone to be an expert. Fans can play big-league scout by jotting down the timings via the scoreboard. Such pitch-by-pitch tabulation led
The Bill James Handbook
to credit Seattle's Felix Hernandez with the fastest
average
fastball in the American League in 2008 (94.6 miles per hour) and Colorado's Ubaldo Jimenez in the National League (94.9 miles per hour), with San Francisco's Tim Lincecum right behind them.

“You know what the radar gun is for? The fans,” says Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon. “I personally don't even think we should have them in the ballpark because it's a tool that benefits only the hitter, not a pitcher at all.”

Such sentiment didn't stop the tabulators from adding another category—pitches 100-plus in velocity. Before he was hurt, Detroit's Zumaya accomplished that feat 30 times in one season; the New York Mets' Billy Wagner 18 times.

“And in the end, all those numbers leave you nowhere,” says Phil Pote. “It's too much information. Plus, you cannot compare it with Walter Johnson or Bob Feller or Lefty Grove. Once we didn't have enough scientific readings, now we have too many.”

Midway through the 2009 season, Zumaya had the fans at Comerica Park in Detroit cheering after the stadium radar clocked his fastball at 102–104 miles per hour. In comparison, his changeup was 85
miles per hour that day, and to everyone's amazement Zumaya opted for this “third best pitch” with the game against the visiting Cubs on the line.

“I mean, that's what I've been working on,” the Tigers' reliever explained after Chicago's Micah Hoffpauir hit the changeup for a two-run homer.

Detroit manager Jim Leyland said the selection was “not a good choice.” He wondered if the buzz from the crowd caused Zumaya to commit one of baseball's cardinal sins: thinking too much.

“It might be exciting for the guy in section 129, seat 6,” Leyland said of the public radar reports, “but it's not worth a hoot to me.”

Pote, another old-school guy, couldn't agree more. “I started my scouting career without a radar gun and I'll end without one,” he says. “I guess I'm a curmudgeon because I still trust my eyes. Is the fastball good enough that batters cannot catch up with it? If so, I'm a believer no matter what some gun may say.”

Howie Haak, a legendary scout pivotal in bringing Tony Pena, Manny Sanguillen, Jose DeLeon, and Roberto Clemente to the Pittsburgh Pirates, used his eyes and a trick of the trade to gauge how hard a player could throw. While sitting down, Haak would raise his forearm to shoulder level as a prospect was about to throw. Haak's arm would be bent at the elbow, the joint often on the arm rest. When the player let fly, Haak would allow his forearm to drop toward his lap. The closer the forearm was to Haak's legs when the ball hit the catcher's mitt, the faster the prospect could really bring it.

Nobody ever became as famous for wielding a radar gun as Mike Brito. For years he was a fixture, standing 20 feet or so behind home plate (usually the optimal place to get the best reading) at Dodger Stadium. He got to be such an omnipresent figure that people watching at home on TV wondered who he was.

What many don't realize is that Brito was the one who convinced the Dodgers to sign left-hander Fernando Valenzuela, who arguably had the best screwball since Christy Mathewson. In fact, when Valenzuela struggled to stay focused during his banner rookie year, he moved in with Brito and his family.

When I attend ball games, no matter what level, I hang with the scouts. Most press boxes are too sterile and removed from the hubbub down on the field. Kind of like watching a ball game in a multiplex movie theater. Plus, I enjoy how upbeat most scouts can be. They realize that every game is a chance to be surprised by, to even stand in awe of, what somebody they maybe never even heard of can do.

“Every time I'm at a game and seeing a good player, if it's tomorrow or last week, it always fires me up,” the Nationals' Mike Rizzo once told the
Washington Post
. “It's in my blood.”

Being a scout allows one to be passionate about the game. Pote has even penned poems about the profession and the search for the fastest pitcher of all time:

That's the closing stanza to one entitled “The Ultimate Fastball and What Might Have Been.”

 

 

B
eing a scout also means sticking by one's assessment of talent, even when everybody else disagrees with you. Perhaps Nolan Ryan doesn't get signed without somebody like Red Murff in his corner. Before Tommy Lasorda managed the Los Angeles Dodgers, he toiled for that organization as a scout. He was the one sent to Fresno in 1965 to evaluate a 20-year-old Tom Seaver.

“This boy showed a good fastball with good life,” Lasorda wrote in the report he filed with the team. “[He] has good command . . . plenty of desire to pitch and wants to beat you.”

In all likelihood, a talent like Seaver would have reached the majors without Lasorda's glowing review. When Lasorda was a scout, though, the position was still considered a step toward managerial stardom—a way to make your mark. Today scouting is regarded by
some organizations as a dead-end position. Despite the brief recognition of a half dozen scouts in the late 1990s (Haak, Joe Cambria, Cy Slapnicka, Wish Eagan, and Bobby Mattick), scouts aren't eligible for induction into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Through it all, the best scouts still refuse to back down when they believe a player has ability. Such was the case with Don Welke and Jim Abbott.

Born without a right hand, the left-hander became an inspiration to millions. His father, Mike, dreamed up the deft way Abbott transferred the baseball glove from his right wrist to his left throwing hand to catch the ball. He began the technique during solitary games of catch when he was four years old, throwing a rubberized ball against the brick wall of his family's townhouse. From such beginnings, Abbott went on to pitch around the world and recorded a no-hitter for the New York Yankees in 1993. His deeds included an Olympic gold medal, and the Sullivan and Tony Conigliaro awards, as well as being the first American pitcher to win in Cuba in 25 years. He threw in the mid-90s, and his cut fastball—a cross between a fastball and a slider—sawed off many bats and induced tons of ground balls. Before such stardom, though, somebody had to believe.

Welke, who was in charge of the Midwest for the Toronto Blue Jays' organization, first saw Abbott pitching during his senior year at Flint (Michigan) Central High School. The veteran scout can still rattle off the date like it was a loved one's birthday—May 5, 1985.

In Abbott, Welke saw a tremendous competitor. The last ballplayer that he had scouted that belonged in Abbott's class was Kirk Gibson. After that first game, Welke wrote a glowing scouting report: “six-foot-four . . . mammoth heart . . . projected to have well above average fastball.” The only part he hurried through was the report's last four words: “has no right hand.”

Welke's enthusiasm, on the page and in team meetings, wasn't enough for Toronto to take a real chance on Abbott. The Blue Jays didn't draft him until the 36th round of the 1985 draft and Abbott refused to sign with them. Yet such interest made other teams take notice. Abbott eventually signed with the California Angels after the 1988 Olympics and became only the 15th player since the amateur
draft began in 1965 to make his professional debut in the majors. Throughout it all, Welke and Abbott have remained the best of friends. Welke was in Abbott's wedding party. “Don's the first one outside of my family and the ones in Flint,” Abbott says, “who really believed in me.”

 

 

S
couts refer to the difference between a quality fastball and breaking stuff (a slider, curveball, or changeup) as range. If the gap between a fastball and the slower deliveries is big enough, then the pitcher has a much better chance for success.

“[Batters] can dial up on that heater,” Billy Ripken says. “But Ryan had that nasty hook to go along with the fastball. Randy Johnson has that nasty slider. If a pitcher can throw in the mid to upper 90s and have another pitch that comes in at 80 to 82 [miles per hour], one that he can throw for strikes, you get that kind of package and a guy is pretty much unhittable.”

As the 2009 season unfolded, one of the best feel-good stories was Zack Greinke of the Kansas City Royals. After having taken time off due to a social anxiety disorder, the right-hander was back, and one of the things opposing hitters and scouts noticed was how much harder his fastball was. Instead of being clocked in the high 80s, the heater had climbed to 98. When coupled with a curveball timed in the 50s, the combination made the opposition look silly. “That's too big a range even for a major-league hitter,” says ESPN analyst Chris Singleton.

After six weeks of the 2009 season, Greinke was 7–1, with a 0.60 ERA. Fernando Valenzuela was the last to have an ERA that low eight games into the season, as he went 8–0, with a 0.50 ERA, to start 1981.

To better ascertain range, let's take a look at the opening lines of Joan Didion's story “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”:

If a scout were recording that sequence, he would mark the first sentence as a quality fastball, maybe a two-seamer in the mid 90s, certainly good enough for that crucial first-pitch strike. The second sentence, the one beginning with “The San Bernardino lies,” is as long and loopy as any slow stuff: a curveball, changeup, or even a knuckler well off the outside corner. That sets up another fastball (“October is the bad month”) for strike two. Then Didion goes with another short sentence, a fastball perhaps just a few inches off the plate. With the count 2–2, Didion has set up the batter—I mean, reader—for a quick punch-out. And here comes the heat (“Every voice seems a scream”). It may be by us in a rush, but we won't soon forget it.

By alternating between fast and slow, long and short sentences—in other words, exhibiting great range—Didion holds our attention, and that last line is one of her best remembered.

Great range in pitching almost always begins with a quality fastball. From there the other stuff—a curveball, slider, change—can be taught. In essence, that's what David Price went through at Triple-A Durham. Without an epic fastball, though, great range can never really be achieved. No matter how sharp the break on the curve, the difference in speed isn't enough to get decent batters out.

Quality range between the hard and soft stuff is what made Stephen Strasburg, a hard-throwing right-hander out of San Diego State, the number-one pick in the 2009 amateur draft. A fastball that regularly tripped the scouts' radar guns at 100 miles per hour first spread the word. Add a quality curveball to that repertoire and some
scouts were saying Strasburg, like Abbott, could make the jump from college ball to the pro ranks.

“He's the best I've seen in quite a while,” Ducey says. “With a guy like him, you open the pocketbook and pray everything goes according to plan.”