Fun reminiscences, Steve. I remember Fernando vividly, as I was at prime teenage baseball fan status in 1981.
This is a great description:
"His elaborate windup, in which his eyes rolled back in his head like a Baroque martyr offering up a last prayer, was designed to put the maximum possible torque on his screwball."
Fernando would have been a batting practice pitcher without that screwball. He really didn't have much else in the arsenal that would get big league hitters out.
I think there are a couple of reasons the screwball has gone by the baseball wayside. Fernando's arm almost falling off at the end of his career is one of them. The other is that it seems now there is greater appreciation for pitchers who get what's often called 'armside run' on their fastballs, i.e. a right-handed pitcher can throw a fastball that drifts to the right on its path to the plate rather than going straight ahead.
I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly, but it seemed to me that when I started watching baseball on TV, the announcers would comment on this 'drift' almost as a flaw, i.e. they'd say things like 'that fastball drifted off the plate inside', or something like that. Now -- and rightly so -- 'armside run' is viewed as a pitcher's weapon, and is actively cultivated.
"Now -- and rightly so -- 'armside run' is viewed as a pitcher's weapon, and is actively cultivated"
Right, but at the same time, across the board in MLB, now starting pitchers arms are so fragile that they can't even pitch complete games. Nolan Ryan, I think that most will agree, was primarily a fastball pitcher (his pitches were among the first MLB pitchers to have been officially radar clocked, at around 100.8 mph). And yet he managed to pitch complete games from time to time. Steve Carlton, also had a major fastball (though primarily a slider pitcher) and he pitched complete games as well.
I suspect Ryan is a 2-3 standard deviation genetic anomaly; either he has extraordinarily tough tendons and muscles in his right arm and shoulder, and/or he has a high pain tolerance threshold. He was famous for his workout regimen to stay in the best condition. He landed in the profession that optimized his genetic gifts. I think he also had a higher than average mental discipline as well, which is also quite advantageous.
Perhaps so, but the point remains that most starting pitchers in MLB, if they were any good, pitched. complete. games. period. Consistently pitching complete games year after year wasn't an anomaly. It wasn't even considered to be controversial. It was what it was. You can't say that something can't be done, especially if it was consistently done decade after decade. And, considering that today's MLBers for the most part, have developed better training methods, work out regimes, etc. it should be even easier for many of them to pitch complete games year after year. But now they don't.
I'm no scientist but I wonder whether the human arm was meant to pitch 95 MPH fastballs and sliders and 85 MPH curves and breakers for 9 innings. Thinking outside the box, I wonder if some team developed a Jamie Moyer type pitching slop-balls and 90 MPH fastballs. Moyer pitched until he was 46.
Well, it was successfully and consistently done for decades. This type of pitchers can't pitch complete games, pitch counts, pitching a game by committee started post 1994 strike, and started to really gain traction in the 2000's.
For reference: The longest inning game in MLB history occurred in 1920 between the Braves and the Dodgers (known at the time as the Robins). It went 26 innings. BOTH pitchers went the distance. It was only called on account of darkness, although there was about 45 minutes left of daylight, but the shadows were starting to come in. BOTH pitchers pitched 26 innings. People can agree to disagree about the velocity of fastballs back then, etc etc. They pitched 26 INNINGS. BOTH of them did. At the very least, 26 innings has to be around 300 pitches for each pitcher (especially if Ryan ptiched 235 pitches in 13 innings, and allow for the fact that fewer batters struck out in 1920 compared to now). If so, 300 pitches in a single game is incredible.
"Nolan Ryan, I think that most will agree, was primarily a fastball pitcher (his pitches were among the first MLB pitchers to have been officially radar clocked, at around 100.8 mph). And yet he managed to pitch complete games from time to time."
In 1974 Ryan pitched 13 innings in a game against the BoSox. He struck out 19, walked 10 and threw 235 pitches. He K'd Cecil Cooper 6 times in the game. His opponent, the late Luis Tiant, went the distance, 14 and a 1/3 innings in the 4-3 BoSox loss. The past is a foreign country.
Luis Tiant again. In 1975 WS vs CIN, Tiant pitched 2 complete games for wins, and pitched into the 8th inning in the infamous game 6. In the highlight video, narrator Joe Garriagiola made mention that in his game 1 WS win, Tiant threw 163 pitches. As this gibes with Ryan throwing 235 over 13 innings a year earlier. I'm wondering IF the median pitches thrown back then needed to pitch 9 innings and thus throw a complete game was around 130-170 total pitches.
A pitcher I knew at Rice U., Alan Ramirez, led the NCAA in strikeouts as a freshman. The next year, Rice's biggest game was against #1 Texas with Keith Moreland. Texas was on a 34 game NCAA record winning streak. Ramirez pitched 13 innings, throwing something like 240 pitches, and Rice broke the Texas streak.
But Ramirez's arm was never the same after that game, even though he became a good enough junkballer to go 5 and 5, 3.97 in his one season in the majors.
That's sad. Many great pitchers went their whole careers without major arm problems. Matthewson. Johnson. Ford. Gibson. Seaver. Ryan. Carlton. But I bet a study could be done of the many pitchers who blew out their arms after a few fine seasons. Koufax retired early. He's in the Hall because he was so dominant for six years.
Grover Cleveland Alexander is another one. He pitched over 20 yrs in MLB won 373 games and is in HOF. Warren Spahn was a fast ball pitcher, pitched over twenty years in MLB. These and other examples of pitchers pitched lengthy careers and completed games. It wasn't considered a big deal. Pitchers took pride in pitching complete games because it meant that they were helping the team for a win. Also, their salaries depended on how they performed during the season, so the more innings pitched, the more games completed (and won, obviously) then the better chance for a raise, all things considered.
But on the whole, pitchers in MLB prior to 1990's had the same length of career as they do today. Arm problems weren't any more common than they are today. Perhaps today, they're more common. Though the pitch was and remains highly prioritized, pitchers for the most part, weren't trying to throw the ball as hard as they could on every single pitch.
Interesting. But for the most part, back in the day, pitchers took pride in completing games, they wanted to pitch more innings. Their livelihoods depended on it as well. Being an innings eater, or closer was considered an insult, because it meant that you weren't good enough to start. Same thing with being a platoon player--it meant you weren't good enough to play everyday.
Think about it today. Do platoon position players in MLB earn as much as starting position players? And that's the route that MLB is currently going with the whole pitch by committee type of thing. Better to pay 3-5 mediocre pitchers a basic rate (or fewer gazillions) who can eat up innings than to break the bank and pay for one strong calibre pitcher who can pitch 7-9 innings.
Was he a fastball pitcher? Was that his primary pitch? Leading the NCAA in strikeouts would seem to confirm this. Still not sure why such traditional fastball pitchers as Grove, Feller, Spahn, Randy, Ryan, and Carlton managed to have complete games as well as lengthy careers in MLB.
I'm not sure this is correct. I think 'sweepers' are just flat sliders, i.e. thrown to emphasize side-to-side break rather than the traditional downward 'bite' a slider is supposed to have in addition to a smaller break away from the arm side.
The classic curveball -- a la Sandy Koufax and Bert Blyleven, and like the one Clayton Kershaw still throws -- is effective because of its huge degree of vertical drop. A good curve may again have varying degrees of break away from the pitcher's arm side, depending on the arm slot the pitcher throws it from, but it's got to have the big downward drop, which the sweeper doesn't.
> Fernando's arm almost falling off at the end of his career is one of them
If you watch Steve's clip, Fernando tied Carl Hubbell's record for most consecutive strikeouts in an All-Star Game with 5. Hubbell, of course, was the most famous screwballer ever. If anyone is curious who the victims were...
Hubbell (1934): Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, Joe Cronin
Valenzuela (1986): Don Mattingly, Cal Ripken, Jesse Barfield, Lou Whitaker, Teddy Higuera
For those wondering, Foxx played third in that ASG, a position at which he started 13 times two years prior but hadn't played since.
Watching Valenzuela throw acrewball after screwball twisting his arm like that makes me wince. I remember how my arm would ache after a game and can only imagine what he went through.
I used to throw a reverse slider (broke arm side) when I was a kid. I thought it was a lot easier than a curveball, and it didn't require anything like the contortions Valenzuela went through.
Basically it's a 3/4 fastball where you flick your wrist counter-clockwise on release instead of following straight through. Not that hard.
Note the wrist turning counter-clockwise on release. I don't know why it's considered rare, except that maybe the wrist turn is strongly discouraged by coaches as a flaw in delivery.
That's interesting; I've never heard of this pitch. I suspect coaches at that age would discourage it because it does seem like an especially unnatural motion for a tender young arm.
I think now baseball coaches get way, way more involved in teaching kids how to try out different grips and spins than they did back in my day. My high school baseball coach would saunter over to observe while I was throwing to a catcher, ask me if my arm felt okay, and then, invariably, say, "Okay! Throw strikes.' And that would be it.
The coaching staff in "Ball Four" in 1969 are just a bunch of old players who got their jobs by being old teammates of the manager and general manager.
In contrast, my impression of the 2020s Dodgers is that you could build a profitable hedge fund using all the MIT grad analytical talent thinking 14 hours per day about how to optimize the team.
Unless it's something crazy like Valenzuela's screwball I don't think the breaking balls are what get the young pitchers so much as just throwing too hard for too many pitches with immature tendons.
I'd resort to throwing hard because I could, and it worked. I'd be pitching complete games as a teenager throwing hard for most pitches and I'm pretty sure that's why I have bursitis in my shoulder today. Fortunately that's all it is AFAIK (my elbow seems fine), but I'll probably need surgery at some point fairly soon to deal with it.
"I think there are a couple of reasons the screwball has gone by the baseball wayside. ..."
I think another reason is that the circle change has become a lot more common and can have similar movement to a screwball but without requiring the unnatural pronation of your forearm and wrist a screwball does.
“the third statue at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles after the current Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax bronzes, the franchise should hurry up and install a Fernando Valenzuela statue “
Wait, Fernando doesn’t have one already? I also assumed that Don Drysdale had one, and that at least a major plaque to honor Orel Hersheiser was at Dodger Stadium.
“ He started the 1981 season with eight straight complete game wins, five of them shutouts. (In contrast, the 2024 Dodger pitching staff altogether had a total of one shutout and one complete game.)”
Wow, that last part. ONE. As in…for the entire season. Here’s to not keeping it classy, LA.
“ Starting on short rest, Valenzuela allowed 16 baserunners but still somehow went all the way, throwing 147 pitches, to triumph 5-4 in the prototypical Fernando performance.”
From an historical standpoint, Fernando’s WS was par for the course in MLB, certainly up to that point anyway.
But here’s to a great LA player, who not only symbolized an often overlooked segment of SoCal, but backed it up on the field and on the biggest stage when it mattered most. Fernando, you will be missed.
Perhaps LA will honor his memory and wear an armband in their uniforms with his number; unlike Fernando, the Dodgers won’t be pitching any complete games. And that’s the tragedy of it all.
I’m sure that true blue LA fans are looking forward to this WS—this is the tiebreaker as NY has won 2 vs LA, and LA has won 2 vs NY. Whether it’s Judge, Ohtani, or someone under the radar, this WS should help make someone’s career quite memorable
And I've come to the conclusion that this is in no small part due to a conscious effort by MLB teams to deflate, or suppress starter's salaries across the board. Why have to pay a dominant starter who can throw 250-290 innings per season, win 20 games, with double digit complete games per season--why have to pay that pitcher 20-50 million per season when you can pay a journeyman middle innings eater about 8-13 million per season? The game gets completed no matter how many pitchers it takes to get the job done, and you save millions by not having to open the checkbook too deeply. This is somewhat akin to the NFL deemphasizing the role of RB's as it has become more and more of a passing league. Well, that makes the RB position less desirable and thus, they don't get the big money contracts that they used to.
As we were discussing on another thread, I think you're on to something here.
I suspect one simple data point has been behind this: that is, the systematic tracking of how well batters do against a pitcher in the first, second, third, etc. times they face that pitcher. This has been tracked on a game-by-game basis for quite a while, and recently I noticed they've starting tracking it across a series as well.
Once baseball management realized that batters would likely do worse, on average, facing even a mediocre reliever for the first time than they would do facing a medium-high-quality starter for the third -- or even the second -- time, the pitchers-go-round you've described becomes a logical choice. You can maybe buy two or three relievers for the price of that one 'name' starter, so why not?
The downside of this is that a team can burn out its entire pitching staff because its total number of pitchers on the roster is of course limited. So the truly excellent starters, i.e. the ones that can maintain effectiveness at least three times through their opponents' lineups, are still extremely valuable. But the 'mid-level' but still very expensive starter who, on average, starts running out of gas and getting bombed in the 5th or 6th inning, starts looking more like a liability than an asset.
Having many relief pitchers leads to fielders winding up at strange positions, like the Dodgers used to have Max Muncy, a classic beefy first baseman, play a bunch of games each year at second base, even though he's the opposite of a traditional wiry middle infielder. But some MIT grad had no doubt calculated which games Muncy would likely do the least harm defensively and how that kind of versatility could let the Dodgers carry one more relief pitcher.
Pitching by committee must eat up a bullpen. But that has led to the concept of players playing multiple positions which wasn't the method when I was growing up following baseball.
"I suspect one simple data point has been behind this: that is, the systematic tracking of how well batters do against a pitcher in the first, second, third, etc. times they face that pitcher. This has been tracked on a game-by-game basis for quite a while, and recently I noticed they've starting tracking it across a series as well."
This has been constant for well over a century, the theory that the more a batter faces a specific pitcher, the likelier that he'll have greater success vs that pitcher. However, STILL batters in MLB fail to safely hit the ball more than 70-75% of their total plate appearances (hence why hitting above .250, and hitting .300 is a high watermark for hitters).
You can maybe buy two or three relievers for the price of that one 'name' starter, so why not?"
Exactly. And this is a subtle form of collusion on management part to suppress starting pitchers salaries. Not sure what the Players Union could do in a case like this, but perhaps they can discuss it moving forward and decide on best course of action.
"You can maybe buy two or three relievers for the price of that one 'name' starter, so why not?"
But I have maintained that these valuable starters are not going to command the 20-50 million per season as they once did over the long term. After all, they're pitching fewer innings, not completing games, so their W-L record isn't going to be spectacular. If they haven't already figured it out, eventually a team will realize that they don't have to pay exorbitant salaries to pitchers; they can simply go get innings eaters for one-third the cost.
The mid-level starters will be converted to middle relief innings eaters. They'll be rebranded from being a starter to pitching from say, the 4th thru the 7th inning. In fact, this type of thing has already been going on. Example: NY HOF Mariano Rivera began his career as a starting pitcher. He took a shellacking and was sent back down to the minors. Then the following year he was converted over to a set up man, and from there the rest is history.
This type of situation isn't uncommon. Historically, most all of the closers/innings eaters were failed starters. It wasn't something to be proud of to be considered a reliever or innings eater. But it was better than being sent back down to the minors so pitchers made the best of it.
So I remain convinced that this promotion of middle relievers, innings eaters/mop up men, expansion of pitchers on the roster, etc is part of larger trend in MLB to suppress pitchers salaries. Why go out and get a Roger Clemens when you can get 3-4 pitchers to pitch by committee to complete the game, and can pay each of them a total of less than Roger Clemens would cost?
Verlander and Scherzer signed contracts in the $40 million range, but are often hurt, as is De Grom. (Kershaw only gets paid about half that because he seems embarrassed to ask for more and then wind up hurt.)
That's a lot of financial risk teams take on so sign old-time star starters. A portfolio of relief pitchers making an order of magnitude less seems smarter from a Wall Street point of view. What would Vanguard do? They'd hire a whole bunch of relief pitchers and see which ones turn out healthy.
I admire the historic ability of Max Scherzer but he's a mercenary willing to sell himself to the highest bidder and is no longer durable as he used to be. Only a stupid General Manager would sign him for more than a Major League Baseball pittance. But then the Tigers were stupid enough to sign Javy Baez for $25 million a year to strike out at a 30 % rate and hit .180 or so. Major League Baseball has its share of idiots with plenty of power.
It seems that USC (probably among others) figured out how to cut out the middleman and pocket the money affluent parents are willing to pay to get their children into highly selective universities. Of course, this steps all over the idea of merit in both academics and athletics.
The Varsity Blues scandal was about when coaches would take bribes to put some rich kid on the team even though he couldn't play. I believe USC admitted some kid because a football coach got paid off to list him as the backup placekicker on the Trojans. This could make a pretty funny teen comedy in which the real placekicker gets hurt and the ringer has to kick against Ohio State.
When USC as an institution takes not bribes but donations to let in rich kids, that's not a scandal.
Varsity Blues was about parents paying a middle man fixer who then paid coaches to tell university admissions committee that the children of the paying parents needed to be admitted using the lower athlete admission standard in order to be non-scholoarship athletes on non-revenue teams. The USC students admitted using the scheme claimed to be on their high school rowing team so that the fixer would pay off the rowing coach in order to get admitted using a lower standard. Varsity Blues scandal was never about playing on the team or ever pretending to be an athlete in college.
As an aside, when someone tells me that they were an athlete in college, my first two questions after learning which sport is whether they were on scholarship (usually a no for non-revenue sports) and did they play all four years. Usually the answer is a no. I talked to one college athlete who was a non-scholarship long snapper on a top 25 football team. When asked whether he played all four years, he said that he either could play football or pass Arabic. He decided his degree in middle eastern studies was more important.
I remember in Yankee game 154 in 1961 that the Orioles brought in Wilhelm to pitch to Roger Maris in the late innings to keep Maris from hitting a HR that would have tied home town hero Babe Ruth’s record of 60 HRs. The commissioner had decreed that the record book would have an asterisk next to any record that was set after game 154 due to the expanded 162 game schedule.
If I remember correctly (I was an 11 year old kid) Wilhelm induced a warning track fly ball out to right field.
> If I remember correctly (I was an 11 year old kid) Wilhelm induced a warning track fly ball out to right field
You were close; Maris flew out to right off of Dick Hall in the 7th; he grounded out to Wilhelm in the 9th.
This was dramatized in 61* (Crystal, 2001). In the movie Wilhelm was brought in specifically to face Maris but in reality he started the inning with Maris batting third. Of course he would have faced Maris either way. Also, in the movie Lum Harris threatened to fine Wilhelm if he threw Maris anything but knuckleballs, but this was apocryphal.
Frick did have the right idea to include asterisks vs an expanded season, that is the right to do. What was the wrong thing to do was to publicly announce it during the middle of the season, when it appeared as though either Mantle or Maris would surpass Ruth's record. Frick should've announced it during Spring Training, before the opening day of the new season. That and the fact that Maris benefitted from 2 additional teams that were expanded into the AL -- The Angels and the Senators (the original Senators moved to MIN and became the Twins).
> I have the terrible feeling that if Teddy dropped dead tomorrow, nobody would notice.
As a Yankee fan, I remember Teddy all too well, as he went 13-4 against us; the net 9 wins are the most he had against any opponent in his career. The AB against Fernando in the ASG was the only one of his career; if you noticed he batted righty so I thought he was a L/R pitcher like Sandy Koufax and Randy Johnson, but it turns out he is officially listed as a switch hitter.
> his World Series-saving win over the New York Yankees in 1981... starting on short rest
Because the NLCS went the full 5 days and was delayed by a day due to snow in Montreal, there was no rest between the NLCS and the World Series, so Fernando pitched on Monday in Montreal then Friday in Los Angeles for Game 3 of the WS.
Sadly Fernando was not the same pitcher in 1988, which so Tommy Lasorda left him off the postseason roster, denying him the opportunity to play for both World Series winners; only Mike Scioscia and Steve Sax did so.
My memories of Valenzuela are a bit indirect. My uncle was a keen sports fan and not having any kids of his own liked to pitch to me when I was a Little Leaguer, which often involved him mimicking players with unusual deliveries like sidearm or submarine, and also Fernando's signature delivery. So I learned a lot of pitchers names based on that as I semi-successfully dodged errant throws during batting practice.
I had the pleasure of sitting behind home plate at Candlestick to see Fernando pitch (wife worked for someone with season tickets and the Giants sucked then). After the first pitch I was "Oh, that's what a screwball is." Not sure that seeing it on TV does the pitch justice.
I was a little kid for that series, but still remember watching him pitch that game. When my baseball-lore hungry 13 year old son talks about pitchers, I always give him Valenzuela.
> his World Series-saving win over the New York Yankees in 1981 (despite all the complaints on Twitter about the big market teams buying their way into the World Series this year, the previous LA-NY World Series was 43 long years ago) was as melodramatic as any telenovela
I was there on Opening Day 1981 at Chavez Ravine when Fernando was the surprise starter for the Dodgers. I was a senior at UCLA, and that morning got a call from my buddy Matt ("Mad Dog"), a native Angeleno who told me he never missed a Dodger Opening Day. Of course he didn't have tickets, but said we could either hustle some up or he "knew a fence we could probably climb over". When we got to the stadium parking lot, we spotted a local radio station set up serving hot dogs, etc. before the game. We told them we were starving college students without tickets, and they invited us into their press box to enjoy the game - what a great memory! Years later in 1993 I was a retail executive in Baltimore, and I had just bought my first place - a penthouse condo on the water downtown, not far from Camden Yards. It turned out the Orioles had bought the unit just below mine to use for short-term player housing. One quiet evening on my patio I heard someone conversing in Spanish just below me, and found out it was Fernando, who played that year with the O's. When I ran into him later he enjoyed hearing that I had been there at that first game. He was a gentleman and great for the game...
The most dramatic baseball exploit I can remember is Reggie Jackson's three homer game in the1977 World Series. I missed it because I played high school football that night. But I saw it on the highlights.
He was with the Brewers, right? He was a fine pitcher. But once the Brewers declined after their World Series loss to the Cardinals, Milwaukee became the Siberia of baseball.
Fun reminiscences, Steve. I remember Fernando vividly, as I was at prime teenage baseball fan status in 1981.
This is a great description:
"His elaborate windup, in which his eyes rolled back in his head like a Baroque martyr offering up a last prayer, was designed to put the maximum possible torque on his screwball."
Fernando would have been a batting practice pitcher without that screwball. He really didn't have much else in the arsenal that would get big league hitters out.
I think there are a couple of reasons the screwball has gone by the baseball wayside. Fernando's arm almost falling off at the end of his career is one of them. The other is that it seems now there is greater appreciation for pitchers who get what's often called 'armside run' on their fastballs, i.e. a right-handed pitcher can throw a fastball that drifts to the right on its path to the plate rather than going straight ahead.
I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly, but it seemed to me that when I started watching baseball on TV, the announcers would comment on this 'drift' almost as a flaw, i.e. they'd say things like 'that fastball drifted off the plate inside', or something like that. Now -- and rightly so -- 'armside run' is viewed as a pitcher's weapon, and is actively cultivated.
"Now -- and rightly so -- 'armside run' is viewed as a pitcher's weapon, and is actively cultivated"
Right, but at the same time, across the board in MLB, now starting pitchers arms are so fragile that they can't even pitch complete games. Nolan Ryan, I think that most will agree, was primarily a fastball pitcher (his pitches were among the first MLB pitchers to have been officially radar clocked, at around 100.8 mph). And yet he managed to pitch complete games from time to time. Steve Carlton, also had a major fastball (though primarily a slider pitcher) and he pitched complete games as well.
I suspect Ryan is a 2-3 standard deviation genetic anomaly; either he has extraordinarily tough tendons and muscles in his right arm and shoulder, and/or he has a high pain tolerance threshold. He was famous for his workout regimen to stay in the best condition. He landed in the profession that optimized his genetic gifts. I think he also had a higher than average mental discipline as well, which is also quite advantageous.
Perhaps so, but the point remains that most starting pitchers in MLB, if they were any good, pitched. complete. games. period. Consistently pitching complete games year after year wasn't an anomaly. It wasn't even considered to be controversial. It was what it was. You can't say that something can't be done, especially if it was consistently done decade after decade. And, considering that today's MLBers for the most part, have developed better training methods, work out regimes, etc. it should be even easier for many of them to pitch complete games year after year. But now they don't.
I'm no scientist but I wonder whether the human arm was meant to pitch 95 MPH fastballs and sliders and 85 MPH curves and breakers for 9 innings. Thinking outside the box, I wonder if some team developed a Jamie Moyer type pitching slop-balls and 90 MPH fastballs. Moyer pitched until he was 46.
Well, it was successfully and consistently done for decades. This type of pitchers can't pitch complete games, pitch counts, pitching a game by committee started post 1994 strike, and started to really gain traction in the 2000's.
For reference: The longest inning game in MLB history occurred in 1920 between the Braves and the Dodgers (known at the time as the Robins). It went 26 innings. BOTH pitchers went the distance. It was only called on account of darkness, although there was about 45 minutes left of daylight, but the shadows were starting to come in. BOTH pitchers pitched 26 innings. People can agree to disagree about the velocity of fastballs back then, etc etc. They pitched 26 INNINGS. BOTH of them did. At the very least, 26 innings has to be around 300 pitches for each pitcher (especially if Ryan ptiched 235 pitches in 13 innings, and allow for the fact that fewer batters struck out in 1920 compared to now). If so, 300 pitches in a single game is incredible.
"Nolan Ryan, I think that most will agree, was primarily a fastball pitcher (his pitches were among the first MLB pitchers to have been officially radar clocked, at around 100.8 mph). And yet he managed to pitch complete games from time to time."
In 1974 Ryan pitched 13 innings in a game against the BoSox. He struck out 19, walked 10 and threw 235 pitches. He K'd Cecil Cooper 6 times in the game. His opponent, the late Luis Tiant, went the distance, 14 and a 1/3 innings in the 4-3 BoSox loss. The past is a foreign country.
Luis Tiant again. In 1975 WS vs CIN, Tiant pitched 2 complete games for wins, and pitched into the 8th inning in the infamous game 6. In the highlight video, narrator Joe Garriagiola made mention that in his game 1 WS win, Tiant threw 163 pitches. As this gibes with Ryan throwing 235 over 13 innings a year earlier. I'm wondering IF the median pitches thrown back then needed to pitch 9 innings and thus throw a complete game was around 130-170 total pitches.
A pitcher I knew at Rice U., Alan Ramirez, led the NCAA in strikeouts as a freshman. The next year, Rice's biggest game was against #1 Texas with Keith Moreland. Texas was on a 34 game NCAA record winning streak. Ramirez pitched 13 innings, throwing something like 240 pitches, and Rice broke the Texas streak.
But Ramirez's arm was never the same after that game, even though he became a good enough junkballer to go 5 and 5, 3.97 in his one season in the majors.
That's sad. Many great pitchers went their whole careers without major arm problems. Matthewson. Johnson. Ford. Gibson. Seaver. Ryan. Carlton. But I bet a study could be done of the many pitchers who blew out their arms after a few fine seasons. Koufax retired early. He's in the Hall because he was so dominant for six years.
Grover Cleveland Alexander is another one. He pitched over 20 yrs in MLB won 373 games and is in HOF. Warren Spahn was a fast ball pitcher, pitched over twenty years in MLB. These and other examples of pitchers pitched lengthy careers and completed games. It wasn't considered a big deal. Pitchers took pride in pitching complete games because it meant that they were helping the team for a win. Also, their salaries depended on how they performed during the season, so the more innings pitched, the more games completed (and won, obviously) then the better chance for a raise, all things considered.
But on the whole, pitchers in MLB prior to 1990's had the same length of career as they do today. Arm problems weren't any more common than they are today. Perhaps today, they're more common. Though the pitch was and remains highly prioritized, pitchers for the most part, weren't trying to throw the ball as hard as they could on every single pitch.
Interesting. But for the most part, back in the day, pitchers took pride in completing games, they wanted to pitch more innings. Their livelihoods depended on it as well. Being an innings eater, or closer was considered an insult, because it meant that you weren't good enough to start. Same thing with being a platoon player--it meant you weren't good enough to play everyday.
Think about it today. Do platoon position players in MLB earn as much as starting position players? And that's the route that MLB is currently going with the whole pitch by committee type of thing. Better to pay 3-5 mediocre pitchers a basic rate (or fewer gazillions) who can eat up innings than to break the bank and pay for one strong calibre pitcher who can pitch 7-9 innings.
Was he a fastball pitcher? Was that his primary pitch? Leading the NCAA in strikeouts would seem to confirm this. Still not sure why such traditional fastball pitchers as Grove, Feller, Spahn, Randy, Ryan, and Carlton managed to have complete games as well as lengthy careers in MLB.
I’m most annoyed at the addition of the “sweeper” to the baseball lexicon. It’s a curveball! A curveball!
I'm not sure this is correct. I think 'sweepers' are just flat sliders, i.e. thrown to emphasize side-to-side break rather than the traditional downward 'bite' a slider is supposed to have in addition to a smaller break away from the arm side.
The classic curveball -- a la Sandy Koufax and Bert Blyleven, and like the one Clayton Kershaw still throws -- is effective because of its huge degree of vertical drop. A good curve may again have varying degrees of break away from the pitcher's arm side, depending on the arm slot the pitcher throws it from, but it's got to have the big downward drop, which the sweeper doesn't.
So it’s a slider, that doesn’t break like a slider. It’s just an example of “there’s nothing new under the sun”.
> Fernando's arm almost falling off at the end of his career is one of them
If you watch Steve's clip, Fernando tied Carl Hubbell's record for most consecutive strikeouts in an All-Star Game with 5. Hubbell, of course, was the most famous screwballer ever. If anyone is curious who the victims were...
Hubbell (1934): Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, Joe Cronin
Valenzuela (1986): Don Mattingly, Cal Ripken, Jesse Barfield, Lou Whitaker, Teddy Higuera
For those wondering, Foxx played third in that ASG, a position at which he started 13 times two years prior but hadn't played since.
Watching Valenzuela throw acrewball after screwball twisting his arm like that makes me wince. I remember how my arm would ache after a game and can only imagine what he went through.
I used to throw a reverse slider (broke arm side) when I was a kid. I thought it was a lot easier than a curveball, and it didn't require anything like the contortions Valenzuela went through.
Basically it's a 3/4 fastball where you flick your wrist counter-clockwise on release instead of following straight through. Not that hard.
Here's an example:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP88Qf72N/
Note the wrist turning counter-clockwise on release. I don't know why it's considered rare, except that maybe the wrist turn is strongly discouraged by coaches as a flaw in delivery.
That's interesting; I've never heard of this pitch. I suspect coaches at that age would discourage it because it does seem like an especially unnatural motion for a tender young arm.
I think now baseball coaches get way, way more involved in teaching kids how to try out different grips and spins than they did back in my day. My high school baseball coach would saunter over to observe while I was throwing to a catcher, ask me if my arm felt okay, and then, invariably, say, "Okay! Throw strikes.' And that would be it.
The coaching staff in "Ball Four" in 1969 are just a bunch of old players who got their jobs by being old teammates of the manager and general manager.
In contrast, my impression of the 2020s Dodgers is that you could build a profitable hedge fund using all the MIT grad analytical talent thinking 14 hours per day about how to optimize the team.
Pro baseball uglified.
Unless it's something crazy like Valenzuela's screwball I don't think the breaking balls are what get the young pitchers so much as just throwing too hard for too many pitches with immature tendons.
I'd resort to throwing hard because I could, and it worked. I'd be pitching complete games as a teenager throwing hard for most pitches and I'm pretty sure that's why I have bursitis in my shoulder today. Fortunately that's all it is AFAIK (my elbow seems fine), but I'll probably need surgery at some point fairly soon to deal with it.
"I think there are a couple of reasons the screwball has gone by the baseball wayside. ..."
I think another reason is that the circle change has become a lot more common and can have similar movement to a screwball but without requiring the unnatural pronation of your forearm and wrist a screwball does.
“the third statue at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles after the current Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax bronzes, the franchise should hurry up and install a Fernando Valenzuela statue “
Wait, Fernando doesn’t have one already? I also assumed that Don Drysdale had one, and that at least a major plaque to honor Orel Hersheiser was at Dodger Stadium.
“ He started the 1981 season with eight straight complete game wins, five of them shutouts. (In contrast, the 2024 Dodger pitching staff altogether had a total of one shutout and one complete game.)”
Wow, that last part. ONE. As in…for the entire season. Here’s to not keeping it classy, LA.
“ Starting on short rest, Valenzuela allowed 16 baserunners but still somehow went all the way, throwing 147 pitches, to triumph 5-4 in the prototypical Fernando performance.”
From an historical standpoint, Fernando’s WS was par for the course in MLB, certainly up to that point anyway.
But here’s to a great LA player, who not only symbolized an often overlooked segment of SoCal, but backed it up on the field and on the biggest stage when it mattered most. Fernando, you will be missed.
Perhaps LA will honor his memory and wear an armband in their uniforms with his number; unlike Fernando, the Dodgers won’t be pitching any complete games. And that’s the tragedy of it all.
I’m sure that true blue LA fans are looking forward to this WS—this is the tiebreaker as NY has won 2 vs LA, and LA has won 2 vs NY. Whether it’s Judge, Ohtani, or someone under the radar, this WS should help make someone’s career quite memorable
If Kershaw were healthy, do you think he'd demand the ball and would want to go the full 9? I suspect so.
question is, with the way MLB is currently set up, do you think his manager would let him?
Nah, seems "starting pitcher" is devolving into pitching by committee.
And I've come to the conclusion that this is in no small part due to a conscious effort by MLB teams to deflate, or suppress starter's salaries across the board. Why have to pay a dominant starter who can throw 250-290 innings per season, win 20 games, with double digit complete games per season--why have to pay that pitcher 20-50 million per season when you can pay a journeyman middle innings eater about 8-13 million per season? The game gets completed no matter how many pitchers it takes to get the job done, and you save millions by not having to open the checkbook too deeply. This is somewhat akin to the NFL deemphasizing the role of RB's as it has become more and more of a passing league. Well, that makes the RB position less desirable and thus, they don't get the big money contracts that they used to.
As we were discussing on another thread, I think you're on to something here.
I suspect one simple data point has been behind this: that is, the systematic tracking of how well batters do against a pitcher in the first, second, third, etc. times they face that pitcher. This has been tracked on a game-by-game basis for quite a while, and recently I noticed they've starting tracking it across a series as well.
Once baseball management realized that batters would likely do worse, on average, facing even a mediocre reliever for the first time than they would do facing a medium-high-quality starter for the third -- or even the second -- time, the pitchers-go-round you've described becomes a logical choice. You can maybe buy two or three relievers for the price of that one 'name' starter, so why not?
The downside of this is that a team can burn out its entire pitching staff because its total number of pitchers on the roster is of course limited. So the truly excellent starters, i.e. the ones that can maintain effectiveness at least three times through their opponents' lineups, are still extremely valuable. But the 'mid-level' but still very expensive starter who, on average, starts running out of gas and getting bombed in the 5th or 6th inning, starts looking more like a liability than an asset.
Having many relief pitchers leads to fielders winding up at strange positions, like the Dodgers used to have Max Muncy, a classic beefy first baseman, play a bunch of games each year at second base, even though he's the opposite of a traditional wiry middle infielder. But some MIT grad had no doubt calculated which games Muncy would likely do the least harm defensively and how that kind of versatility could let the Dodgers carry one more relief pitcher.
Pitching by committee must eat up a bullpen. But that has led to the concept of players playing multiple positions which wasn't the method when I was growing up following baseball.
"I suspect one simple data point has been behind this: that is, the systematic tracking of how well batters do against a pitcher in the first, second, third, etc. times they face that pitcher. This has been tracked on a game-by-game basis for quite a while, and recently I noticed they've starting tracking it across a series as well."
This has been constant for well over a century, the theory that the more a batter faces a specific pitcher, the likelier that he'll have greater success vs that pitcher. However, STILL batters in MLB fail to safely hit the ball more than 70-75% of their total plate appearances (hence why hitting above .250, and hitting .300 is a high watermark for hitters).
You can maybe buy two or three relievers for the price of that one 'name' starter, so why not?"
Exactly. And this is a subtle form of collusion on management part to suppress starting pitchers salaries. Not sure what the Players Union could do in a case like this, but perhaps they can discuss it moving forward and decide on best course of action.
"You can maybe buy two or three relievers for the price of that one 'name' starter, so why not?"
But I have maintained that these valuable starters are not going to command the 20-50 million per season as they once did over the long term. After all, they're pitching fewer innings, not completing games, so their W-L record isn't going to be spectacular. If they haven't already figured it out, eventually a team will realize that they don't have to pay exorbitant salaries to pitchers; they can simply go get innings eaters for one-third the cost.
The mid-level starters will be converted to middle relief innings eaters. They'll be rebranded from being a starter to pitching from say, the 4th thru the 7th inning. In fact, this type of thing has already been going on. Example: NY HOF Mariano Rivera began his career as a starting pitcher. He took a shellacking and was sent back down to the minors. Then the following year he was converted over to a set up man, and from there the rest is history.
This type of situation isn't uncommon. Historically, most all of the closers/innings eaters were failed starters. It wasn't something to be proud of to be considered a reliever or innings eater. But it was better than being sent back down to the minors so pitchers made the best of it.
So I remain convinced that this promotion of middle relievers, innings eaters/mop up men, expansion of pitchers on the roster, etc is part of larger trend in MLB to suppress pitchers salaries. Why go out and get a Roger Clemens when you can get 3-4 pitchers to pitch by committee to complete the game, and can pay each of them a total of less than Roger Clemens would cost?
Verlander and Scherzer signed contracts in the $40 million range, but are often hurt, as is De Grom. (Kershaw only gets paid about half that because he seems embarrassed to ask for more and then wind up hurt.)
That's a lot of financial risk teams take on so sign old-time star starters. A portfolio of relief pitchers making an order of magnitude less seems smarter from a Wall Street point of view. What would Vanguard do? They'd hire a whole bunch of relief pitchers and see which ones turn out healthy.
I admire the historic ability of Max Scherzer but he's a mercenary willing to sell himself to the highest bidder and is no longer durable as he used to be. Only a stupid General Manager would sign him for more than a Major League Baseball pittance. But then the Tigers were stupid enough to sign Javy Baez for $25 million a year to strike out at a 30 % rate and hit .180 or so. Major League Baseball has its share of idiots with plenty of power.
Steve, in looking at the LA Times website to see if they listed the cause of death, this was the story right below all of the Valenzuela reporting.
"Beyond Varsity Blues: In pursuit of donations, USC admitted affluent kids as walk-on athletes"
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-22/usc-donor-kids-walk-on-athlete-admission-fundraising-scandal
It seems that USC (probably among others) figured out how to cut out the middleman and pocket the money affluent parents are willing to pay to get their children into highly selective universities. Of course, this steps all over the idea of merit in both academics and athletics.
The Varsity Blues scandal was about when coaches would take bribes to put some rich kid on the team even though he couldn't play. I believe USC admitted some kid because a football coach got paid off to list him as the backup placekicker on the Trojans. This could make a pretty funny teen comedy in which the real placekicker gets hurt and the ringer has to kick against Ohio State.
When USC as an institution takes not bribes but donations to let in rich kids, that's not a scandal.
Varsity Blues was about parents paying a middle man fixer who then paid coaches to tell university admissions committee that the children of the paying parents needed to be admitted using the lower athlete admission standard in order to be non-scholoarship athletes on non-revenue teams. The USC students admitted using the scheme claimed to be on their high school rowing team so that the fixer would pay off the rowing coach in order to get admitted using a lower standard. Varsity Blues scandal was never about playing on the team or ever pretending to be an athlete in college.
As an aside, when someone tells me that they were an athlete in college, my first two questions after learning which sport is whether they were on scholarship (usually a no for non-revenue sports) and did they play all four years. Usually the answer is a no. I talked to one college athlete who was a non-scholarship long snapper on a top 25 football team. When asked whether he played all four years, he said that he either could play football or pass Arabic. He decided his degree in middle eastern studies was more important.
I suppose I could look it up, but does anyone want to weigh in on the knuckleball?
Long ago I thought it brought a mystique to Hoyt Wilhelm that would be welcome today.
I remember in Yankee game 154 in 1961 that the Orioles brought in Wilhelm to pitch to Roger Maris in the late innings to keep Maris from hitting a HR that would have tied home town hero Babe Ruth’s record of 60 HRs. The commissioner had decreed that the record book would have an asterisk next to any record that was set after game 154 due to the expanded 162 game schedule.
If I remember correctly (I was an 11 year old kid) Wilhelm induced a warning track fly ball out to right field.
> If I remember correctly (I was an 11 year old kid) Wilhelm induced a warning track fly ball out to right field
You were close; Maris flew out to right off of Dick Hall in the 7th; he grounded out to Wilhelm in the 9th.
This was dramatized in 61* (Crystal, 2001). In the movie Wilhelm was brought in specifically to face Maris but in reality he started the inning with Maris batting third. Of course he would have faced Maris either way. Also, in the movie Lum Harris threatened to fine Wilhelm if he threw Maris anything but knuckleballs, but this was apocryphal.
Thanks for the correction. 63 years is a long time to remember details, no matter how historic at the time.
Think of it more as an elaboration than a correction 😊
Frick did have the right idea to include asterisks vs an expanded season, that is the right to do. What was the wrong thing to do was to publicly announce it during the middle of the season, when it appeared as though either Mantle or Maris would surpass Ruth's record. Frick should've announced it during Spring Training, before the opening day of the new season. That and the fact that Maris benefitted from 2 additional teams that were expanded into the AL -- The Angels and the Senators (the original Senators moved to MIN and became the Twins).
> I have the terrible feeling that if Teddy dropped dead tomorrow, nobody would notice.
As a Yankee fan, I remember Teddy all too well, as he went 13-4 against us; the net 9 wins are the most he had against any opponent in his career. The AB against Fernando in the ASG was the only one of his career; if you noticed he batted righty so I thought he was a L/R pitcher like Sandy Koufax and Randy Johnson, but it turns out he is officially listed as a switch hitter.
> his World Series-saving win over the New York Yankees in 1981... starting on short rest
Because the NLCS went the full 5 days and was delayed by a day due to snow in Montreal, there was no rest between the NLCS and the World Series, so Fernando pitched on Monday in Montreal then Friday in Los Angeles for Game 3 of the WS.
Sadly Fernando was not the same pitcher in 1988, which so Tommy Lasorda left him off the postseason roster, denying him the opportunity to play for both World Series winners; only Mike Scioscia and Steve Sax did so.
My memories of Valenzuela are a bit indirect. My uncle was a keen sports fan and not having any kids of his own liked to pitch to me when I was a Little Leaguer, which often involved him mimicking players with unusual deliveries like sidearm or submarine, and also Fernando's signature delivery. So I learned a lot of pitchers names based on that as I semi-successfully dodged errant throws during batting practice.
I had the pleasure of sitting behind home plate at Candlestick to see Fernando pitch (wife worked for someone with season tickets and the Giants sucked then). After the first pitch I was "Oh, that's what a screwball is." Not sure that seeing it on TV does the pitch justice.
I was a little kid for that series, but still remember watching him pitch that game. When my baseball-lore hungry 13 year old son talks about pitchers, I always give him Valenzuela.
The most knowledgeable set of comments I've ever read.
> his World Series-saving win over the New York Yankees in 1981 (despite all the complaints on Twitter about the big market teams buying their way into the World Series this year, the previous LA-NY World Series was 43 long years ago) was as melodramatic as any telenovela
Richard Roeper agrees with you
https://x.com/RichardERoeper/status/1848938660718105064
Who’s arm didn’t Tommy Lasorda blowout? Fernando, Hershiser, Belcher, Ramon Martinez….
I was there on Opening Day 1981 at Chavez Ravine when Fernando was the surprise starter for the Dodgers. I was a senior at UCLA, and that morning got a call from my buddy Matt ("Mad Dog"), a native Angeleno who told me he never missed a Dodger Opening Day. Of course he didn't have tickets, but said we could either hustle some up or he "knew a fence we could probably climb over". When we got to the stadium parking lot, we spotted a local radio station set up serving hot dogs, etc. before the game. We told them we were starving college students without tickets, and they invited us into their press box to enjoy the game - what a great memory! Years later in 1993 I was a retail executive in Baltimore, and I had just bought my first place - a penthouse condo on the water downtown, not far from Camden Yards. It turned out the Orioles had bought the unit just below mine to use for short-term player housing. One quiet evening on my patio I heard someone conversing in Spanish just below me, and found out it was Fernando, who played that year with the O's. When I ran into him later he enjoyed hearing that I had been there at that first game. He was a gentleman and great for the game...
Related: https://slyle.substack.com/p/the-legacy-of-el-toro?r=tax3g
The most dramatic baseball exploit I can remember is Reggie Jackson's three homer game in the1977 World Series. I missed it because I played high school football that night. But I saw it on the highlights.
Is it possible he really was older than his announced age, and thus he is dying in, more plausibly, his 70s?
Very good point -- you look at those 1981 photos of the '20-year-old' Fernando, and think hmmmmmm . . . .
Teddy Higuera, who got to the big leagues four years after Fernando, was officially three years older than Fernando.
He was with the Brewers, right? He was a fine pitcher. But once the Brewers declined after their World Series loss to the Cardinals, Milwaukee became the Siberia of baseball.