“To hell with the hitters. To hell with all of them.”
Sal “The Barber” Maglie, so named because he would gladly shave you with a fastball buzzed under your chin, felt pretty strongly that hitters are the natural and mortal enemy of pitchers. And what pitcher would disagree? Really, aren't batters all just high-priced, over-hyped golden boys with barely enough intelligence to stand and admire the pitch they were lucky enough to barely hit over the wall? The Barber probably said what pitchers throughout history have thought at one time or another.
Maglie merits only a few mentions in The Head Game, Roger Kahn’s 2000 book about the glorious long-running battle between pitcher and batter, a story Kahn tells exclusively (and empathetically) from the mound. The vitriol felt by The Barber for the men at the plate represents the (admittedly) extreme end of what is still an inherently uncomfortable relationship. On few teams do the pitchers and batters hang out in the clubhouse and go out together after the game. The two groups are fundamentally at odds, their job descriptions explicitly antithetical to the other. They may wear the same uniform, and they’ll high-five after a win, but they’re on different teams and they always will be.
The on-field rivalry between hitters and hurlers is what Kahn set out to chronicle in this book. Kahn is of course best-known for his groundbreaking work The Boys of Summer, a deeply personal portrait of the members of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, both when he covered them as a twenty-something reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and in their post-baseball lives. The Boys of Summer is in the Top Five of every list of great baseball books. Kahn has published numerous works since then, and despite a few missteps along the way, has consistently delivered more good than bad.
The Head Game is unquestionably on the good side of Kahn’s ledger. The work of a professional baseball writer who has covered more than five decades of the game, the book is infused with anecdotes, insights and analyses that very few writers could match, and none could surpass.
Kahn’s thesis, based on a conversation with former Brooklyn pitcher and longtime friend Clem Labine, was to map out the battle-strewn territory between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. The Head Game refers to the constant mental wars waged virtually between every pitch – the adjustments, the second-guessing, and the primal contests of confidence, fear and mutual intimidation that lurk just beneath the surface every time a pitcher comes to the set position.
In this effort, Kahn has mostly succeeded; reading this book gives you an amazing degree of insight into how some of the best pitchers in history have sized up and mowed down the opposition. If the Head Game itself sometimes seems to receive short shrift, it’s because Kahn sometimes goes off course – but when he does so, it’s wholly to the book’s benefit.
Kahn has integrated into his tome a capsule history of the evolution of pitching (which he believes, rightly, is also a history of the evolution of the game), as well as a series of remarkable character sketches of the most influential moundsmen in baseball’s pantheon. Underlying all and infused throughout The Head Game, moreover, is Kahn’s trademark personal touch. Virtually no other writer can litter his stories with direct anecdotes about and interviews with 50 years’ worth of great players; “I asked Preacher Roe to show me his curveball grip” is not a phrase you read on ESPN.com very often. I’m not usually a fan of writers who work themselves into the story, but Kahn is one of the few who can do it legitimately, and make it work, too. The timeless quotations scattered throughout are worth the price of the book alone.
So just what’s in the book? Kahn has broken his survey of pitchers down into two periods: from the game’s murky 19th-century origins to the end of the dead-ball era, and from thence to the end of the 1990s. In each half, separate chapters profile selected pitchers of the time.
The first section is necessarily more historical than up-close-and-personal, but Kahn infuses enough realism into his biographies that the characters come to life. Hence, we learn about the hard-living ways of Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, who won 60 games in 1884 (thanks to an arm-destroying 678 innings pitched), but died of syphilis in his early 40s. We get a glimpse of the one and only Cy Young, pressed into service in the ticket booth in the 1903 World Series before shutting out Honus Wagner and the Pirates. And we learn about the brutal education given to college grad Christy Mathewson when he joined the New York Giants, at a time when the better hotels refused to book baseball teams because of their often-savage behaviour. Kahn, to his credit, does not romanticize the times when baseball was a rough game played by very rough men.
Following a brief interlude on baseball’s pre-WWII nadir, when pitching went south and few greats prevailed, Kahn picks up the thread with a series of increasingly fascinating profiles of the most remarkable pitchers of the last half of the 20th century.
A leading example is the section on Warren Spahn, which starts with this quotation: “Home plate is 17 inches wide. I pitch to the 2 ½ inches on each side.” Spahn, indisputably the greatest left-hander ever until Randy Johnson came along to dispute it, didn’t even start his career in earnest until he turned 25, thanks to the war and short-sighted managers. His gift – every pitcher profiled by Kahn has a particular gift – was an outstanding memory: he could recall and name every pitch he threw following a 125-pitch shutout. The pages on the career-long battles between Spahn and Stan Musial are simply wonderful. Another chapter is given over to Spahn’s teammate and rhyme-mate Johnny Sain, master of the breaking pitch and maybe the greatest pitching coach there ever was. A pilot during the War (along with Ted Williams), Sain developed a fluency with aerodynamics and raw courage, both of which he used to train pitchers as different as Jim Kaat and Denny McLain.
Perhaps the best chapter is devoted to Don Drysdale, because it focuses intently on the abiding element of fear in the pitcher-batter relationship. It’s not always the batter’s fear of injury – Paul Molitor tells Kahn that if he was afraid of the ball, he couldn’t play the game – but what Branch Rickey identified as the fear of losing and looking bad doing it. Kahn’s history of the knockdown pitch and his reflections on intimidation are fascinating: he tells a great story of how Maglie learned the hard way not to throw a pitch behind Jackie Robinson’s head. Drysdale was known – infamous, really – as a brutal competitor in the Maglie mold; only the ruthless Iron Joe McGinnity hit more batters per inning. But Drysdale insisted to Kahn that his knockdowns were nothing more than setup pitches, designed to mess with the hitter’s mind more than his body. “….I knock him down again. He looks at me. Am I crazy? Am I a killer? No, I’m just a competitor about to strike him out with a 95-mph fastball on the outside corner at the knees.” Terrific stuff.
In tracing a history of the game, Kahn singles out three men whom he appears to credit as the most influential pitchers of all time. They are Candy Cummings, Whitlow Wyatt and Fred Martin, and probably you’ve never heard of any of them. But Cummings revolutionized the game in 1863 by inventing the curveball, a pitch he developed while flinging clam shells around with friends; his plaque hangs in Cooperstown as a result. Wyatt pitched during the hitter-happy 1930s and ‘40s, and is generally credited as the first master of the slider, the pitch that shifted the balance of power back to the mound for decades. And Martin was a journeyman pitcher who, 25 years after his last game, taught a struggling low-minor-leaguer named Bruce Sutter the split-fingered fastball. These three pitches, says Kahn, represented paradigm shifts in the game’s development – pitchers’ collective adjustment to the hitters and natural reclamation of the high ground.
There’s so much more to talk about – an interesting chapter on Sutter, profiles of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, and a testamentary piece about Leo Mazzone and Tom Glavine, plus amazingly consistent insights from pitchers decades apart on the secret to successful and long-lasting pitching careers. I could triple the length of this article and still only scratch the surface. Accordingly, I strongly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand pitching, the true heart of baseball, and who enjoys a masterful writer with a warehouse full of insights, in full command of his game. But I’ll wrap up this review with a couple of questions Kahn poses, and the answers that result.
First: who is the greatest pitcher of all time? Kahn first dismisses any attempt to answer it. He once posed that query to Pete Rose, who named three men: Koufax (the hardest thrower), Gibson (the toughest competitor) and Juan Marichal (the most complete pitcher). Kahn does relent by the end of the book, and provides his own highly subjective Top Ten. But it was already clear, from the two chapters devoted to him, that Kahn considers no pitcher greater than Christy Mathewson. His repertoire included almost a dozen pitches, and he could throw every one for strikes: fastball, screwball, hard curve, change-up, an “outdrop” (probably an early forkball) and variations on every one. Branch Rickey said Mathewson was the greatest adapter he’d ever seen: mid-season, mid-game, mid-inning, he would develop something new. Mathewson’s unbeatable adaptability, in a way, represents the ability of pitchers throughout the game’s history to adjust and triumph, and that is what has kept baseball alive and thriving all this time.
So if Mathewson is the greatest pitcher, what’s the greatest pitch? Whitlow Wyatt told Kahn, “The best pitch in baseball is a strike.” But Johnny Sain one-ups him with this even better line: “The best pitch in baseball is the one-pitch out.”
Sal “The Barber” Maglie, so named because he would gladly shave you with a fastball buzzed under your chin, felt pretty strongly that hitters are the natural and mortal enemy of pitchers. And what pitcher would disagree? Really, aren't batters all just high-priced, over-hyped golden boys with barely enough intelligence to stand and admire the pitch they were lucky enough to barely hit over the wall? The Barber probably said what pitchers throughout history have thought at one time or another.
Maglie merits only a few mentions in The Head Game, Roger Kahn’s 2000 book about the glorious long-running battle between pitcher and batter, a story Kahn tells exclusively (and empathetically) from the mound. The vitriol felt by The Barber for the men at the plate represents the (admittedly) extreme end of what is still an inherently uncomfortable relationship. On few teams do the pitchers and batters hang out in the clubhouse and go out together after the game. The two groups are fundamentally at odds, their job descriptions explicitly antithetical to the other. They may wear the same uniform, and they’ll high-five after a win, but they’re on different teams and they always will be.
The on-field rivalry between hitters and hurlers is what Kahn set out to chronicle in this book. Kahn is of course best-known for his groundbreaking work The Boys of Summer, a deeply personal portrait of the members of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, both when he covered them as a twenty-something reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and in their post-baseball lives. The Boys of Summer is in the Top Five of every list of great baseball books. Kahn has published numerous works since then, and despite a few missteps along the way, has consistently delivered more good than bad.
The Head Game is unquestionably on the good side of Kahn’s ledger. The work of a professional baseball writer who has covered more than five decades of the game, the book is infused with anecdotes, insights and analyses that very few writers could match, and none could surpass.
Kahn’s thesis, based on a conversation with former Brooklyn pitcher and longtime friend Clem Labine, was to map out the battle-strewn territory between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. The Head Game refers to the constant mental wars waged virtually between every pitch – the adjustments, the second-guessing, and the primal contests of confidence, fear and mutual intimidation that lurk just beneath the surface every time a pitcher comes to the set position.
In this effort, Kahn has mostly succeeded; reading this book gives you an amazing degree of insight into how some of the best pitchers in history have sized up and mowed down the opposition. If the Head Game itself sometimes seems to receive short shrift, it’s because Kahn sometimes goes off course – but when he does so, it’s wholly to the book’s benefit.
Kahn has integrated into his tome a capsule history of the evolution of pitching (which he believes, rightly, is also a history of the evolution of the game), as well as a series of remarkable character sketches of the most influential moundsmen in baseball’s pantheon. Underlying all and infused throughout The Head Game, moreover, is Kahn’s trademark personal touch. Virtually no other writer can litter his stories with direct anecdotes about and interviews with 50 years’ worth of great players; “I asked Preacher Roe to show me his curveball grip” is not a phrase you read on ESPN.com very often. I’m not usually a fan of writers who work themselves into the story, but Kahn is one of the few who can do it legitimately, and make it work, too. The timeless quotations scattered throughout are worth the price of the book alone.
So just what’s in the book? Kahn has broken his survey of pitchers down into two periods: from the game’s murky 19th-century origins to the end of the dead-ball era, and from thence to the end of the 1990s. In each half, separate chapters profile selected pitchers of the time.
The first section is necessarily more historical than up-close-and-personal, but Kahn infuses enough realism into his biographies that the characters come to life. Hence, we learn about the hard-living ways of Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, who won 60 games in 1884 (thanks to an arm-destroying 678 innings pitched), but died of syphilis in his early 40s. We get a glimpse of the one and only Cy Young, pressed into service in the ticket booth in the 1903 World Series before shutting out Honus Wagner and the Pirates. And we learn about the brutal education given to college grad Christy Mathewson when he joined the New York Giants, at a time when the better hotels refused to book baseball teams because of their often-savage behaviour. Kahn, to his credit, does not romanticize the times when baseball was a rough game played by very rough men.
Following a brief interlude on baseball’s pre-WWII nadir, when pitching went south and few greats prevailed, Kahn picks up the thread with a series of increasingly fascinating profiles of the most remarkable pitchers of the last half of the 20th century.
A leading example is the section on Warren Spahn, which starts with this quotation: “Home plate is 17 inches wide. I pitch to the 2 ½ inches on each side.” Spahn, indisputably the greatest left-hander ever until Randy Johnson came along to dispute it, didn’t even start his career in earnest until he turned 25, thanks to the war and short-sighted managers. His gift – every pitcher profiled by Kahn has a particular gift – was an outstanding memory: he could recall and name every pitch he threw following a 125-pitch shutout. The pages on the career-long battles between Spahn and Stan Musial are simply wonderful. Another chapter is given over to Spahn’s teammate and rhyme-mate Johnny Sain, master of the breaking pitch and maybe the greatest pitching coach there ever was. A pilot during the War (along with Ted Williams), Sain developed a fluency with aerodynamics and raw courage, both of which he used to train pitchers as different as Jim Kaat and Denny McLain.
Perhaps the best chapter is devoted to Don Drysdale, because it focuses intently on the abiding element of fear in the pitcher-batter relationship. It’s not always the batter’s fear of injury – Paul Molitor tells Kahn that if he was afraid of the ball, he couldn’t play the game – but what Branch Rickey identified as the fear of losing and looking bad doing it. Kahn’s history of the knockdown pitch and his reflections on intimidation are fascinating: he tells a great story of how Maglie learned the hard way not to throw a pitch behind Jackie Robinson’s head. Drysdale was known – infamous, really – as a brutal competitor in the Maglie mold; only the ruthless Iron Joe McGinnity hit more batters per inning. But Drysdale insisted to Kahn that his knockdowns were nothing more than setup pitches, designed to mess with the hitter’s mind more than his body. “….I knock him down again. He looks at me. Am I crazy? Am I a killer? No, I’m just a competitor about to strike him out with a 95-mph fastball on the outside corner at the knees.” Terrific stuff.
In tracing a history of the game, Kahn singles out three men whom he appears to credit as the most influential pitchers of all time. They are Candy Cummings, Whitlow Wyatt and Fred Martin, and probably you’ve never heard of any of them. But Cummings revolutionized the game in 1863 by inventing the curveball, a pitch he developed while flinging clam shells around with friends; his plaque hangs in Cooperstown as a result. Wyatt pitched during the hitter-happy 1930s and ‘40s, and is generally credited as the first master of the slider, the pitch that shifted the balance of power back to the mound for decades. And Martin was a journeyman pitcher who, 25 years after his last game, taught a struggling low-minor-leaguer named Bruce Sutter the split-fingered fastball. These three pitches, says Kahn, represented paradigm shifts in the game’s development – pitchers’ collective adjustment to the hitters and natural reclamation of the high ground.
There’s so much more to talk about – an interesting chapter on Sutter, profiles of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, and a testamentary piece about Leo Mazzone and Tom Glavine, plus amazingly consistent insights from pitchers decades apart on the secret to successful and long-lasting pitching careers. I could triple the length of this article and still only scratch the surface. Accordingly, I strongly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand pitching, the true heart of baseball, and who enjoys a masterful writer with a warehouse full of insights, in full command of his game. But I’ll wrap up this review with a couple of questions Kahn poses, and the answers that result.
First: who is the greatest pitcher of all time? Kahn first dismisses any attempt to answer it. He once posed that query to Pete Rose, who named three men: Koufax (the hardest thrower), Gibson (the toughest competitor) and Juan Marichal (the most complete pitcher). Kahn does relent by the end of the book, and provides his own highly subjective Top Ten. But it was already clear, from the two chapters devoted to him, that Kahn considers no pitcher greater than Christy Mathewson. His repertoire included almost a dozen pitches, and he could throw every one for strikes: fastball, screwball, hard curve, change-up, an “outdrop” (probably an early forkball) and variations on every one. Branch Rickey said Mathewson was the greatest adapter he’d ever seen: mid-season, mid-game, mid-inning, he would develop something new. Mathewson’s unbeatable adaptability, in a way, represents the ability of pitchers throughout the game’s history to adjust and triumph, and that is what has kept baseball alive and thriving all this time.
So if Mathewson is the greatest pitcher, what’s the greatest pitch? Whitlow Wyatt told Kahn, “The best pitch in baseball is a strike.” But Johnny Sain one-ups him with this even better line: “The best pitch in baseball is the one-pitch out.”
