Review — On the mound

(This review first appeared on Purebaseball.com in 2002)

Depending on whom you listen to, pitching is anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of the game — even more for the math-challenged.

Christy Mathewson is credited with authoring one of the first treatises on that position with Pitching in a Pinch, first released in 1912. Of late, several titles extol the highest levels of pitching, including 300-game winners; no-hitters and their sub-classification, the even more elusive perfect game; and those special match-ups that pit one team’s ace against another.
With five-man rotations and the concomitant lack of opportunity, 300-game winners are an endangered species. The only two pitchers are within striking distance of that magical number: Roger Clemens, age 40, who finished the 2002 season with 293 victories, and Greg Maddux, age 36, with 273. No doubt they will be included in the next edition of 300 Game Winners.

As it is, Rich Westcott has highlighted the 20 pitchers who are already members of this exclusive club. More recent stars, like the incomporable Nolan Ryan, are within easy memory. Others, like those who played in the formative years of the game, need re-introduction.

Ninteenth-century moundsmen Pud Galvin, Tim Keefe, Mickey Welch, Hoss Radbourn and John Clarkson had the advantage of earning their stripes when the mound was only 54 feet from home plate. Some athletes could not make the transition when the rubber was moved to its present distance of the storied 60’6″ in 1893. Others were more successful, like Kid Nichols and Cy Young, whose 511 victories remains one of the unassailable records in sports.

Westcott, the author of several baseball titles, includes the record-reaching box score for each pitcher, all of whom are ensconced in Cooperstown.

More than 225 no-hitters have been tossed since they started keeping track of these things. That’s less that one percent of all the games played in the major leagues. Two books pay tribute to these rare occasions. No-Hitters offers a recap of each game, complete with box score. Westcott and Lewis conclude their comprehensive volume with appendices regarding combined “no-nos”; shortened games; and no-hitters prior to the relocation of the mound.

Rich Coberly goes somewhat farther in his No-Hitter Hall of Fame. He includes newspapers accounts of each contest for a nice historical context. He, too, tacks on an exhaustive appendix, full of trivia and statistics that make baseball so much fun.

Since no-hitters have been thrown in nearly the years since Westcott/Lewis was published, both books are in need of revision, but they are still the best sources for capturing the excitement and tension of each nail-biter.

Rarer still is the perfect game. Out of those 200-plus no-hitters, only sixteen have occurred with no opposing batter reaching base by any means.

Buckley does a fine job of recounting these prized few, from J. Lee Richmond’s in 1880, to David Cone’s in 1999. The Yankees have been on the winning side in three of those sixteen perfectos and there’s a great deal of karma involved in the two most recent. David Wells threw his against the Minnesota Twins in 1998. He attended the same California high school, as Don Larsen, who still has the only World Series no-hitter/perfect game on the books. Cone’s game occurred on a day saluting Yogi Berra. (It also happened to be Joe Torre’s birthday.) Who threw out the opening pitch for that one? None other than Larsen himself. Interestingly enough, Jim Bunning, with two no-hitters of his own (one of which was a perfect game against the Mets on Father’s Day in 1964), wrote the foreword for both the Westcott/Lewis and Buckley books.

The only thing keeping Perfect from living up to its title is the error of omitting the box scores.

Fans drool over match-ups which pit two teams’ aces against each other. For the most part, they can be assured of tight, well-pitched, low scoring affairs. That’s the sense that John Klima provides in Pitched Battles.

Klima recreates the excitement of these special rivalries. Some put Hall of Famers against each other during the regular season (Warren Spahn vs. Juan Marichal, Steve Carlton vs. Phil Niekro), while others came in more dramatic circumstances (Dwight Gooden vs. Mike Scott in the 1986 National League Championship Series; Johnny Podres besting Tommy Byrne in 1955 to give Brooklyn its only World Series title; and Larsen’s Fall Classic perfect game the following year at the expense of Sal Maglie). Other Pitched Battles include Pedro Martinez’s 2-0 victory over Roger Clemens in another classic Red Sox-Yankees face-off; Sandy Koufax’s perfect game over the Cubs in 1965 in which his opponent, Bob Hendley, allowed only one hit of his own; and Jack Morris’s leading the Twins to the 1991 World Championship with his 10-inning complete game 1-0 shutout over John Smoltz and the Braves; and Harvey Haddix’s lost extra-inning perfecto against Lew Burdette.

The stories are told in riveting detail; again, the only thing lacking are box scores to statistically document the mound gems.

Finally, for a “bizarro” spin on things, take a look at The Worst Baseball Pitchers of All Time, by the father and son team of James C. and Allan S. Kaufman. Let’s face it, a sadistic part of human nature takes a small measure of satisfaction in the failings of others. The Kaufmans divide their poor performers by timeframe: the “Skunk in a Box” epoch, pre-1893; the dead ball and long ball years; the post-Jackie Robinson era; and the age of expansion, which just about every baseball commentators declares diluted the pitching pool.

There are all sorts of reasons (or alibis, if you prefer) as to why a pitcher might fare poorly: lousy defense, absent offense support, poor timing. Regardless, the authors document dozens of hapless hurlers, from Hugh “Losing Pitcher” Mulcahey to Anthony Young of the Mets, who lost 27 games in a row over two seasons and became something of a cult hero for futility.

As the saying goes, though, you have to be pretty good to have the opportunity to lose so many games, especially year after year.