The Whole Story of Pitching

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Moved one day by intimations of mortality, that bibulous philosopher, W. C. Fields, looked back on his arid boyhood home and chose his modest alternative to death: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

The 20th century's beneficiaries of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" in "Virtue, Liberty and Independence" might even share this sentiment. A sip of their chlorine-loaded tap water and they understand why Fields shunned the liquid all his life; a trip downtown and they know why he hated the city's narrow, crosshatched streets. A baseball park should be a place to get away from all this, but these days even a trip to Connie Mack Stadium is seldom a pleasure. The Philadelphia Phillies, now the only major-league team in town, are stumbling through their 1956 schedule with all the grace of corporation lawyers cutting up at a church picnic.

Yet Philadelphia's tiny army of baseball fans can still look the world in the eye. The Phillies may not add up to much of a team, but for the moment it is more than enough that they boast the best pitcher in baseball. This season, as for many a long summer, Philadelphia's oft-punctured pride rides high on the strong right arm of a visiting Middle Westerner named Robin Evan Roberts.

The muscular (6 ft. 1 in., 190 Ibs.), 29-year-old fugitive from the chores on an Illinois farm is almost too good to be true. Ever since he came up to the Phillies in 1948 after two brief months in the bush leagues, he has plodded out to take his pitching turn with every-fourth-day regularity. Dedicated to the old-fashioned notion that he is getting paid for throwing the ball over the plate, and not for demonstrating some trick delivery or practicing some offbeat vaudeville act for the TV cameras, Roberts has performed his job with an efficiency deadly to 1) opponents and 2) baseball records. In his third major-league season he won 20 games--a record no other Philly had even flirted with since the hard-drinking days of the late great Grover Cleveland Alexander. Now, six years later, he has yet to fall back below the 20-game mark.* No major-leaguer has done so well since the days (1925-33) of the Philadelphia Athletics' Lefty Grove./-

Aside from 1950, when he pitched the Phillies to the National League pennant, Roberts has been playing for a club that has never wound up better than third. But over the years he has started, finished and won more games than any other active major-league pitcher. And always, even losing, he has found the plate with such grim routine that in an astonishing total of 2,272 innings of big-league ball, he has been charged with only 500 walks (less than two a game), has made only 19 wild pitches, hit only 28 batters. He has thrown 1,179 strikeouts.

Dismal & Decent. For a while, such heady success seemed too rich for Philadelphia's blood. The monumental indifference that was ultimately to run Connie Mack's old Athletics all the way to Kansas City was far from dissolved by Roberts' effortless and somehow unexciting pitching. And if winning ball games was not enough, off the field the young man was about as colorful as the third fellow from the end in the class picture. The few real fans in town felt like Huck Finn trying to warm up to the Widow Douglas: "It was rough . . . considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways." Robin Roberts was an earnest young man interested only in giving the enemy its lumps, while the fans, as one of them explains it today, were looking for a player "who can give us lumps in the throat."

Unfortunately the rest of the team also cried out for color. There are men who still insist that Owner Bob Carpenter was desperately hoping to find some headline-catching shenanigans when he hired a private eye to shadow some of his players two years ago. At any rate Millionaire Sportsman Carpenter learned nothing that he has not known for years: all his money has yet to buy him a polished team.

Still, in the 1956 Phillies the nucleus is there. Behind the plate, crafty Veteran Andy Seminick makes up in pure baseball savvy what he lacks in hitting; Granny Hamner at shortstop is a real pro; Richie Ashburn and Del Ennis belong in any man's outfield. As for pitchers, though, unless Southpaw Curt Simmons gets back his "bonus baby" form and until the trade for the Cardinals' Harvey Haddix pays off, Robin Roberts is the Phillies' only reliable performer.

The Philadelphia fans have learned to appreciate him, and now they understand what his opponents mean when they call Righthander Roberts an old-fashioned pitcher. He never bothers with fancy stuff but makes do with what he has: a dinky curve, a sneaky but unspectacular fast ball, and a frustrating change of pace. He offers no single dramatic talent--he has no counterpart of Carl Hubbell's spectacular screwball, Walter Johnson's terrifying fast ball, Bobby Feller's strikeout touch. Pitch for pitch, many of his contemporaries have what the trade calls "more stuff," pitches that are harder, faster, or trickier. But better than any of them now on the mound, Robin Roberts can put the ball where he wants. There is one precious-diamond word for him--control.

Ball on Ice. In this era of short fences and hopped-up baseballs, Roberts' achievements are not easily come by. Managers flash their signals from the bench and teammates bawl their encouragement. But pitching is a loner's art. Once a man places his forefoot on the white rubber slab and takes aim at the plate 60 ft. 6 in. away, he is on his own. Only his craft and strength can whip the ball safely past the waiting batter.

Time was when pitchers got a better break. Before Babe Ruth taught club owners that home runs and high-hitting games mean cash customers, the game was played with a dead ball. Often when a home team took the field for the first time, they used a "refrigerator" ball, carefully chilled in the clubhouse icebox to make it even deader. There was no rule against spitballs, so with a cud of chewing tobacco or a wad of slippery elm, a clever man could keep the ball hopping all afternoon. After roughing up one side of the ball, pitchers used to shine the other side on a part of their uniform heavily dosed with paraffin. Thus treated, the ball would really dance.

Unlike modern games, where dozens of new balls are used in nine innings, the games of the memorable days of Cy Young and Rube Waddell, Rube Marquard and Jeff Tesreau and Ed Cicotte used the same ball inning after inning. Batters pounded it until it was brown and hard to see, pitchers doctored its horsehide; everything was stacked against the hitter (everything, that is, except for the occasional inspirations of such oldtimers as the pre-World War I Phillies' Otto Knabe and Mike Doolan, who once broke up a game with the Giants by swabbing the ball with capsicum salve, an irritant that sent Spitballer Jeff Tesreau to the showers with painfully swollen lips after only three innings).

Play It Mean. Today occasional pitchers may still get away with an occasional outlawed spitter, but that dangerous pitch has all but vanished. Just about the only survival from baseball's rowdy youth is the "accidental" beanball, the close pitch that keeps a batter honest by forcing him back from the plate, that keeps him from taking a toehold and getting set to powder the ball. If the Phillies' Coach Whitlow Wyatt, who learned his baseball manners as one of Leo Durocher's Dodgers, had his way, Philly pitchers would put the brush-back pitch to constant use. "I think you ought to play it mean," says Whit, "like Durocher did. They ought to hate you on the field." Pitcher Roberts does not fill Coach Wyatt's prescription. "He won't knock down a batter," complains the coach. "Says it don't do him any good, doesn't help him any. Well, it sure helped me. Hell, if it was my own brother, I'd knock him down as soon as I would anyone else. It's my meat and bread he's trying to take away."

In his stubborn refusal to toss beanballs, Roberts resembles the late great Walter Johnson of the lackluster Washington Senators. The "Big Train" was a self-confident competitor who occasionally went so far as to serve up fat ones to hitters suffering from nerve-racking slumps. But throwing at a batter was unthinkable. Johnson never even waited for umpires to discard scuffed balls; as soon as he saw one he tossed it aside, for fear it might force him to throw his fast one wild and injure the man at the plate.

Even an intentional walk is alien to Robin Roberts' kind of pitching. He plays the percentages, counts on his control to put the ball where the batter can hit it, but not safely. "Take a .333 hitter," says the Phillies' Coach Wally Moses. "Well, he's only going to get a hit once out of three times. Take Willie Mays: he comes up about 500 times a season, and he hits 50 homers. Hell, that's only one in ten. It'd be silly to walk him. Well, Roberts figures those are pretty good odds."

The odds would be even better if Roberts were willing to throw a few close ones to keep hitters loose. But his opponents know that he won't, so they occasionally scrounge off him. They step into the batter's box with complete confidence that he will put the ball near the plate ("The inclination is just to say 'Strike! Strike! Strike!" says Umpire Jocko Conlon. "He's so close you gotta watch him like an eagle.") If the hitters happen to be hot, they can dig in and hammer him unmercifully. This refusal to throw anywhere but over the plate has earned him at least one unenviable record: last year he allowed 41 home runs, a major-league mark.

Dainty Switch. A calm man, Roberts recovers quickly from even the most awesome shellfire. This season, after winning his first three games, he was beaten in the next three, knocked out of the box twice. Another pitcher might have wondered whether that inevitable slide down had begun. Not Roberts. One night last week, with his cool and easy motion on the mound and his reckless behavior on the base paths, he beat the league-leading Milwaukee Braves almost singlehanded, 2-1. He struck out ten men, allowed only eight hits, tore home from second on an eighth-inning infield single, slid head first into big Del Crandall at the plate, jarred the catcher loose from the ball and scored the run that tied up the game. When Roberts took his turn again, four days later, the red-hot sluggers of the Cincinnati Redlegs sighted in on his polite pitching and beat him handily, 5-1. There was never a sign of wildness; it was just one of the days when the percentages ran against him.

Such hell-bent base running--something of a rarity among pampered pitchers who figure that their only work waits for them on the mound--is typical of Roberts' attitude toward baseball. He loves every minute of the game. He is a better-than-average fielder, can knock down the line drives that whistle back from the batter's box, moves fast and surely to field bunts. Despite his dainty, mincing style at the plate, he is a competent (.250) switch-hitter. "I'm happy as can be out there," he says. "I enjoy all of it--fielding and swinging at bat and all that stuff. If you enjoy baseball and are out there playing when you're a kid, you can become all-round."

He Could've Done Worse. Robin Roberts began the rounding-off process early. By the time he was seven he was nourishing a well-developed dislike for his allotted chores on the Roberts farm near Springfield, Ill.; everything came second to learning how to play games--basketball, baseball, anything at all. "He never had a ball out of his hand," his mother Sarah Roberts remembers. "Ah well," says his proud Welsh father Tom. "He could've done a lot worse."

But at the time young Robin's goldbricking held less appeal to a man who had come up the hard way from the back-breaking labor and pocket-pinching strikes of a Lancashire coal mine. Father Roberts recalls his barely controlled anger the day Robin deliberately broke a hoe to avoid work. The outraged father took a fly swatter to his son's well-padded bottom ("It don't hurt your hand and it don't mark the kid"). But Robin went right on playing. When he couldn't talk one of his three brothers into playing catch, he would prop an old mattress against the garage door and fire away for hours at a hole in the middle. All the while, the braying porch radio kept him up to date on Chicago Cubs ball games. "If people knew what I thought about pitching," says Roberts now, "they'd think I was nuts. They make it so complicated. They're always saying I studied control from the time I was a little kid. That's silly. It's just that it's tough to play catch when nobody's around. I threw to that mattress for fun. I never thought about control at all. It just never entered my mind that the purpose of pitching wasn't to get the ball over the plate."

Impartially athletic, Robin switched to basketball with the season. When his mother would try to get him to do some work around the place, he would put her off: "Naw, Mom. I'm a ballplayer. You just wait till I get into the major leagues. Then I'll build you a house." Even Tom Roberts came to respect his son's determination. "You just had to go along," he says today. "He wouldn't do nuthin' else."

Will to Win. On the way to bigger things, Robin stopped off at Springfield and Lanphier High Schools, where he pitched and played third, was a competent end on the football team and a promising shotputter. When he went to Michigan State in the fall of 1944, he was good enough to earn a basketball scholarship the next year. (He majored in physical education, graduated in 1948 with a B.S. degree.)

When Roberts tried out for the State baseball team, his hitting was too weak for an infielder, so he asked Coach John Kobs for a chance to pitch. "I liked his motion," says Kobs. "He threw it someplace around where the catcher held his glove, and that made sense."

An unspectacular success as a college pitcher, Roberts got his big break when the University of Michigan's baseball coach Ray Fisher took him to New England in the summer of 1946 to play in the old Northern League. Roberts balked often out of sheer awkwardness, fell down fielding bunts, was so eager he threw before he got the catcher's sign. But Fisher saw things worth working on--a tireless arm, an indomitable will to win. An ex-major-leaguer (with the New York Yankees and Cincinnati), Fisher put the finishing touches on the boy.

Fisher did so well that by the end of his second season in New England, Roberts had excited the scouts of half a dozen big-league clubs. The St. Louis Browns offered him $225 a month to play Class B ball. A few days later the Phillies offered him $10,000. Roberts hesitated and the Phillies raised the ante to $15,000, then to $25,000. Roberts signed. "I would've signed for $2,500," he admits now, "only they didn't know it. When they got up to $25,000, I knew I was going to be able to buy a pretty good house for Mom, so I said yes. She really got a belt out of that house."

"They Won't Tell Me Anything." Now, nine successful years away from those awkward summers in Vermont, Robin Roberts still turns for help to the man who polished him up for the Phillies. Last fall Roberts surprised his old coach by stopping off in Ann Arbor and asking permission to work out with the Michigan pitchers. Puzzled, Fisher said, "Sure." He watched Roberts throw a few. Fisher saw right away that the familiar three-quarters motion had been replaced by a sidearm delivery; Roberts was unconsciously favoring a sore arm. Fisher walked over. "Robby," he said, "you've changed your delivery, haven't you?" Roberts smiled with relief. "That's what I wanted to know," he said. "You know, in Philadelphia I'm Robin Roberts, and they won't tell me anything."

Roberts' first season with the Phillies earned him an unexciting record (seven won, nine lost), but it also earned him the confidence of his manager and teammates. And it convinced him that he had been right all along: baseball was all he wanted out of life. The small kid who had cried over lost basketball games took naturally to the habits of grown men who sat around and brooded, morose and silent, after a defeat on the diamond. Like all baseballers before and since Ring Lardner's busher, he learned the tired routine for killing time on the road, "the one bad thing about baseball," says he. He went to every movie in town ("I don't care what's playing; I like 'em all"), slept for long hours, read the sports pages, stared blankly out of bus and train windows, sat slack-jawed in hotel lobbies.

Something Besides Baseball. By the time he got home that fall, Robin had begun to suspect that there might be something else besides playing ball. He asked his sister Nora if she knew any girls he might ask for a date. Nora fixed him up with a young grade-school teacher fresh from the University of Wisconsin, a pretty brunette named Mary Ann Kalnes. Mary had never seen a big-league game; Robin could talk only about baseball. So the happy couple went to the movies, where conversation is sometimes helpful but not compulsory. "We evidently got along," says Robin. Little more than a year later they were married.

Today the Robin Robertses live on Robin Hood Road in the Philadelphia suburb of Meadowbrook with their two children (Robin Jr., 5, and Danny, 2) and a 3 1/2-year-old Welsh corgi presented to Robin by an upstate New York fan. Mary Ann, who dutifully goes to Connie Mack Stadium when Robin is pitching a home game and turns on radio or TV when he performs on the road, still makes no pretense of being a baseball buff. She admits to knowing precious little about how the other players are doing, is sure only that so far, this season has been all slump for the Phillies. "I don't even bother to check the standings," says Mary Roberts.

A Tremendous Difference. Roberts professes to be unconcerned with the fact that he is using up his career pitching for a losing club. "Getting traded or staying isn't a deep ingrained thing with me," he says. "This club always could potentially win the pennant. Especially when I pitch, it isn't a fourth-place club. Usually they get the runs for me."

Last year, in fact, from the All-Star game to Labor Day, the Phillies were perhaps the best in the National League. Then Third Baseman Willie ("Puddin-head") Jones was hurt, First Baseman Stan Lopata was beaned, and the team faltered. "You look back on a season," says Roberts, "and you see two or three games, here and there, that if you'd won might have made the difference."

Mild-mannered Manager Mayo Smith agrees. "If we had another like Roberts," says Smith, "it would make a tremendous difference. I agree with Connie Mack that pitching is 70% of the game. If you have it, you're always in the game. Even if you haven't the power hitting, as we haven't, you can work things like the sacrifice, the stolen base and the hit-and-run."

Below the Belt. Smith and the Phillies' management are sure that in Roberts they own baseball's biggest bargain. Even in front of a losing team he wins so often that he more than earns his salary (about $60,000, including income from endorsements)--and incidentally disproves Indiana Humorist Kin Hubbard's snide crack: "Knowin' all about baseball is just about as profitable as bein' a good whittler."

To Roberts' slowly growing collection of hot fans, his own success seems adequate denial of his own most cherished belief: that pitching is essentially a simple art. "Anything is simple to an artist," snorts Umpire Larry Goetz. "For the rest of us," echoes Outfielder Ashburn, "there must be more, or everybody would bat .400 and win 20 games a year." But Robin Roberts insists that it is all much simpler than that: "I've been given credit for stuff I don't do. I don't even divide people into the tough and easy. It's never the same. With Willie Mays, for example, I don't put on anything special. I just try to mix up the pitches on him. I can't pinpoint what I pitch. I pitch the same to everybody--low and away, or high and tight.

"You don't have to make a fantastic proposition out of anybody. I live and pitch by a few basic rules. You don't have to make a big study of batters beforehand. When I have good stuff I throw four fast balls out of five pitches. You can basically confuse yourself by typing each hitter or worrying too much about righthanders and lefthanders. I don't have any special trouble with lefthanders."

If he has any trouble at all, says Roberts, it is his shallow curve. "I'm always hoping I can improve that curve. I must have changed that curve nine or ten times. I'll see Maglie throw and say, 'Gee, it'd be nice to have that curve.' But if I try to throw it that way, it hurts my arm. Mainly I try to count on a good fast ball that moves.

"Anyway, when you take up a hitter in a clubhouse meeting, no matter what his weakness is, it's going to end up low and away or high and tight, and the curve ball must be thrown below the belt. That's the whole story of pitching.

"It don't do me a bit of good to tell people this. I try to tell people and they just won't believe me. They want to believe you have everyone taped and baseball is like mathematics or something. But I'm telling the truth. It's like I say, keep your life and your pitching real simple and you'll get along."

*The total: 1948, won 7 and lost 9; 1949, 15 won and 15 lost; 1950, 20-11; 1951, 21-15; 1952, 28-7; 1953, 23-16; 1954, 23-15; 1955, 23-14.

/-Only a handful have ever won 20 or more games for more consecutive seasons: Christy Mathewson, 12; Walter Johnson, 10; Lefty Grove, 7; and (counting some 19th century seasons) Cy Young, 14.

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