When I’m evaluating young players for the Yankees—young hitters—I see them roughly in two types. The first would be in the mold of a kid in our organization named Austin Jackson. He has very, very high motor skills—skills like Derek Jeter—and he’ll be a big-leaguer. Jackson had a full ride to Georgia Tech as a point guard, and he’s such a good athlete that he’s going to figure out how to get the bat on the baseball. With a guy as talented as that, you give him suggestions, counsel him, and then step back and let him adapt because he has the ability to figure it out on his own.
We also had a somewhat younger kid by the name of Jose Tabata, whom we signed when he was sixteen and traded to the Pirates when he was nineteen. To me, Tabata’s the other prototype, a classic behind-the-ball hitter in the mold of Roberto Clemente, Tony Perez, Albert Pujols, and Manny Ramirez. I’m talking about the kind of guy who is not looking to pull a pitch into the seats but is always behind the ball, putting it in play. I’d put Jeter in that company, because he stays behind the ball as well as anybody, but he’s a little different in that he’s not a power hitter in the mold of those other guys. In that sense, he could be a good model for Tabata. Derek simply refuses to get off his plan and try to pull the ball. That’s the reason he has been so successful. But it’s something he’s had to consciously stick with, and that takes a lot of mental effort. In 2002, after hitting well over .300 for four years in a row, Derek was struggling a bit and came to me asking for input. My advice was to quit trying to hit the inside fastball. All he was doing on those was grounding out to third and jerking foul balls down the line. Jeter’s game is hitting line drives the other way. Pulling the ball made his swing a little tighter and took away his real strength. He eventually got back to doing what he does best and had another great season.
For Derek, it’s all about being a “professional hitter.” His approach allows him to stay in the groove longer than most hitters because he does things right. Power hitters create more extension than Derek does, and he could hit for more power if he added extension, but there’s a trade-off involved with that. It makes you strike out a little more. Since Jeter doesn’t have the natural power that guys like Manny and Pujols have, and since he’s a smart hitter, he stays within his God-given gifts, which is hitting line drives—singles and doubles—with an occasional display of power. What he’s done better than the next guy is produce in the clutch. That’s mental makeup.
When Jose Tabata was sixteen, his first thoughts were to hit the ball to right center. So he’s very seldom out in front, he very seldom rolls over the ball and taps a ground ball to shortstop or second base. He just has a natural feel for the game, the innate ability to do things that other players have to be taught and may never pick up. Pitchers look at a guy like that and see a tough out, a tough guy to pitch to, because he’s not trying to pull every ball out of the park. He’s not creating weaknesses for himself. He does things that I view as gifts, things that tell me this guy has a real chance to be a hitter.
Of course, the great players are the ones who have both the athletic ability and the grasp of the game. Both of those things are gifts. That’s what you saw in Mays and Clemente and Aaron, and what you see today in hitters like Jeter, Pujols, Ramirez, and Alex Rodriguez. They combine physical talent with the ol’ noggin.
There aren’t many of those guys.
You could categorize pitchers the same way. The pure athletes would be the hard throwers, and then there are the guys who just have a touch, like Maddux or Tom Glavine or somebody like Jamie Moyer, who seems like he can pitch forever on brains and moxie.
People might argue that finesse pitchers get by without the natural ability of guys like Nolan Ryan or Roger Clemens or Randy Johnson. I’m not sure I’d go along with that. To some extent, control is a natural ability, too. Some pitchers naturally throw better curveballs than other pitchers, or better changeups. The feel for the game is a natural ability. Reggie described it as “innate,” and that’s a good way to put it. Some guys are athletes and others are just ballplayers. Put the two together and you’ve really got something.
You can teach somebody to be a better hitter, but you can’t teach the ability to hit to a guy who can’t. He’s just not going to hit. Now, a guy who’s a good ballplayer but can’t hit can end up as a pitcher. That’s a lot more common than somebody like Rick Ankiel converting from a pitcher to a hitter. That’s rare.
But certainly you need good hand-eye coordination to do either. Hand-eye coordination is perhaps the most critical thing for hitting.
Hand strength is very important.
All good hitters have big, thick hands.
Pretty much. Mays is not a big guy, but you ought to look at his hands. Big, thick hands.
Johnny Bench is another one.
The only real good hitter I can think of with small hands was Stan Musial. Little bitty hands. But you couldn’t find a better hitter.
So much of it is timing. Not all power hitters are built like Ryan Howard or Albert Pujols. Ken Griffey Jr. was thin when he was young and hitting home runs. Aaron wasn’t a big guy when he was young. A slender player can hit a ball a long way with coordination, good timing, and strength in his hands.
You see it better when you watch the golf swing of a skinny person who drives three hundred yards. Michelle Wie is a young, thin girl, but she’s six feet tall and has a long arc to her swing. And timing. Tiger Woods is a big person, but it’s obvious that with torque, timing, and strength in his hands he gets the maximum out of his body. If Tiger Woods or Michelle Wie were baseball players, they’d be power hitters, because of their timing.
A guy who hits for power just looks different when he swings the bat—different than a guy like Jeter, who has a good swing, an athletic swing, but one with an arc that is clearly not the arc of Manny Ramirez.
Studying the golf swing gives you a pretty good idea of how hard it is to hit a baseball. Hitting requires the same kind of timing and rhythm and hand-eye coordination, but then add to that the quick-twitch ability you need to hit a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball, and the reactions you need to handle the dramatic changes from pitcher to pitcher and even pitch to pitch, and the mental dexterity you need to process all the strategic considerations that pile up constantly.
Another difference is eyesight. Good vision is extremely important to hitting. Joe Torre’s eyes were so strong that he’d be talking about something going on out in center field—a light or a disturbance or whatever—and I’d have no idea what he was seeing out there.
I was a good hitter for a pitcher, and I even pinch-hit a few times, but I wasn’t a good hitter because I didn’t have the eyes to see the rotation on the ball. I’m not sure you have to see the rotation to be a good hitter, and I’m not sure all good hitters can—Torre could, and Ted Williams certainly could—but it helps. When the ball comes out of the pitcher’s hand, you see two dark lines coming at you, and if they’re straight up and down there’s a pretty good chance it’s a fastball. There’s a possibility it could be a breaking ball, but if you see the rotation going sideways you know it’s a breaking ball. I couldn’t pick that up.
I had no idea what my eyesight was, but I’ve been wearing glasses since I was nineteen. The problem was, I sweated so much when I pitched that I’d have to take a rag out of my pocket to wipe my glasses off, and then they’d smear and I couldn’t see at all. So I left them in the clubhouse.
People assume my eyesight was bad because I wore glasses when I played. Actually, it was twenty-twenty with my glasses off, twenty-ten with them on. I needed glasses to correct my astigmatism. I suppose I could have played without them, but I struck out enough with my glasses on.
As a hitter, eyesight is not something you can afford to shrug off. In my estimation, there’s no such thing as a good hitter who can’t read the spin on the ball. You’ve got to be able to read spin. You’ve got to read it right away, as soon as the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand.
There are so many things that go into hitting—eyesight, hands, hand-eye coordination, quickness, timing, strength, intelligence, instinct—that you can’t stereotype the guys who do it well. There’s no way to tell a hitter just by looking at him. There’s no prototype body for a baseball player.
What kind of body does a pitcher need to throw hard? Big, strong legs? Hell, mine look like bird legs. I had plenty of spring in my legs—I could easily dunk a basketball back in the day when the coach would take you out of the game for doing that—but it’s not something you could tell by looking at me. You’ve got skinny guys who can throw the ball ninety-five miles an hour and great big guys who throw ninety-five.
Arm speed makes a big difference. But I couldn’t tell you exactly what kind of athlete has it, or how to get it.
Arm speed is the thing that jumps out at you with a pitcher like Joba Chamberlain. He’s a big guy, thick and strong, but that’s not what makes him different. His arm speed is what makes him different.
To some extent, that’s a product of strength, which, to an extent, is a product of size. Pitchers like Carlos Zambrano and C. C. Sabathia produce a lot of power on the mound, and their big bodies have a lot to do with it. Tim Lincecum is just the opposite. But they all have arm speed. You look at Joba Chamberlain’s arm speed, especially when he wants to crank it up, and there’s just more of it than most guys have.
The characteristic that all these guys have in common, for certain, is that they’re good athletes.
Physically, there wasn’t any particular thing that gave me an advantage, although I do have one odd feature. My fingers are symmetrical. My forefinger and little finger are the same length and my two middle fingers are the same length. The only other person I know who has fingers like that is my son, Christopher. That’s how I knew he was mine.
My forefinger is a little shorter than normal, and maybe, because of that, the ball came out of my hand in a way that made it sail, like a cut fastball. I didn’t have to try to throw a cutter; it just acted that way. But if you went around cutting a quarter of an inch off everybody’s forefinger, I don’t think you’d create a class of Hall of Fame pitchers. It’s just something strange about me.
My distinction was that, physically, I was unusually muscular for a ballplayer. I watch myself on tape and I look stiff. I always thought I’d appear more fluid than I did. But my strength was a big part of who I was as a hitter. I never had to worry about pulling the ball to right field, because I knew that if I put the barrel on it and got it in the air, I could hit it out of any part of the park. Strength is also what helped me generate bat speed at the last instant and catch up with balls that seemed to be past me already—maybe even flick them over the fence. There were plenty of times when I surprised myself and wondered how I hit that pitch. The answer is strength—along with God-given talent.
Of course, this was before steroids and really before ballplayers did much weight training. In baseball, lifting weights had been frowned upon for a long time, because they thought it would make you too tight, that your muscles wouldn’t have the elasticity you needed to play the game. There were just a few who believed in it, and I was one.
I always worked out—it was a way of life for me, and still is—but I was also naturally thick through the chest, arms, and thighs. My biceps were seventeen inches, the same as Sonny Liston’s. My legs gave me a great power base—you generate power from the ground up—but they were so tight that they gave me a lot of hamstring trouble. Make sure you stretch.
I didn’t do any weight training, but I got plenty of work on my legs from pushing off the mound the way I did; and my right arm—especially my forearm—got hard and tight from throwing sliders. The inside of my forearm, right below my elbow, was always sore. One time it got so hard in there that I went to see the doctor. He tried to give me a shot to loosen it up and broke the needle.
He said, “That’s really hard in there.”
I said, “I know, Doc. That’s why I’m getting a shot.”
My power came from my motion, and for the most part my motion came from my legs. I’m sure the spring in my legs showed up in my fastball. You build up torque from the waist down. That’s probably why all the cartilage in my knees was torn up by the time I was through—and well before. It was all that twisting.
I had a violent delivery. I jumped at the hitter. If they would have let me, I’d have loved to back up and run up over the mound, like jai alai, like Happy Gilmore hitting a drive. I wanted everything to be moving that way when I let go of the ball. Everything. I wanted to be a gathering storm and blow that fastball in there with all the force and fury I could muster up.
Jim Bunning’s motion looked as much like mine as anybody I’ve seen. He used to fly around, too. But other than that, there was really no similarity in the way he threw and the way I threw. His arm angle was lower than mine. For me, dropping the arm angle was a bad habit I had to avoid. When I dropped lower than three-quarters, the ball would tend to shoot up in the strike zone because I didn’t get on top of it to drive it down. I liked throwing high fastballs, but those weren’t my best fastballs. Every once in a while, I’d raise my angle and come from over the top, but I’m not sure that I ever threw a strike that way. It was always high. So I stayed three-quarters.
There aren’t many Juan Marichals out there who can throw every pitch from every angle, thank goodness.
These days, there aren’t many pitchers who have a lot going on in their windups, either.
I have to wonder whether, if I pitched today, they’d try to simplify and quiet down my motion. I’m pretty sure they’d have gotten to me early in my career, when I didn’t have much idea of where the ball was going. I can just hear it: “Well, you know, it’s no surprise that you were a little wild out there. If you would find your balance point and slow everything down a little bit …”
They’d have also told me—and I heard this more than a few times—that I wasn’t in any position to field the ball after my delivery because I was falling off the mound and wheeling toward first base. Well, maybe I wasn’t, but I was a good fielder because I was quick and had body control; I was a basketball player. Somehow, I won nine straight Gold Gloves being out of position.
In order to end up in perfect position to field the ball, I would have had to take away from my velocity. I’d rather have the velocity and then have to recover afterwards. Getting the hitter out is more important to me than trying to snag a ball coming back up the middle.
Put it this way. As a hitter, I’d have liked it very much if Bob Gibson had slowed down or cut back on his delivery. And it’s not just the velocity he gained from it. It’s also the motion itself. A hitter tries to get in sync with a pitcher’s motion. When he’s rocking, I’m rocking. I’ll start getting into my swing before the ball is actually delivered.
If the motion is harder to time, that’s an advantage for the pitcher.
I like the idea of having a lot going on in your windup, and the hitters trying to figure out where the ball’s coming from and when it’s coming. Man, with a big windup the hitter sees all this stuff going on in front of him, knees and elbows, the hat flying off, all this crazy whirling motion, the ball’s moving from high to low, from side to side, the glove flashes out there, and then boom! Here it comes at ninety-five miles an hour.
For the first half of my career, I was doing all this off a fifteen-inch mound. It was a little different when they lowered it down to ten in 1969. The pitcher shrank by five inches. Now couple that with the fact that, gradually, big windups and motions have almost become a thing of the past, and you can see that a pitcher is not quite the formidable figure he used to be out there.
Dontrelle Willis is one of the few who still uses an elaborate windup, and he was devastating for a while, before he lost some of his stuff. I have a hard time understanding why so few pitchers do that anymore. Somebody started a trend and this is how it ended up.
Now everything’s all sedate. The gurus thought that pitchers could have better control if they minimized their motions, and everybody bought into it. Somebody told the pitchers they could throw just as hard without the windup. Maybe some guys can. I’m sure this is the best thing for a lot of guys, but I’m not buying that it’s best for practically everybody.
If I were pitching today, I’d still wind up and fly around. Personally, I’d rather have the batter look for the ball. If you start with a calm little windup, the hitter sees the ball all the way; or at least he sees the release point where it’s coming from.
And that’s not the entire issue. The most important thing, to me, is that I felt I threw harder when I wound up. It was more of an effort to throw that hard from the stretch, when you’re trying to generate power from a dead standstill. That’s got to take a little bit away. Does it take a lot? I don’t know. But I know that, if you’re trying to maintain velocity, it takes a lot more out of you, which can’t be good for your control. It’s a double-edged deal, because when you’re throwing from the stretch, or without much of a windup, you absolutely have to locate the ball better.
It really all depends on what kind of stuff the pitcher has. If you’re throwing ninety-five, the velocity is a little more important than the location. But if you’re throwing ninety, you’d better put that ball exactly where you want it. So I can see the value of restricting your motion, exchanging velocity for control, if you’re not that hard of a thrower. The difference between eighty-eight and ninety-one is not that significant. At that speed, I’d better damn sure have good control. Now, if the windup can increase your fastball from ninety-one to ninety-four or ninety-five, that’s a different thing. At ninety-five, my control doesn’t have to be quite as fine.
But if you don’t feel comfortable, don’t do it.
Some pitchers have clean, smooth windups that look really nice, but instead of all the extra business taking place on the mound and creating a distraction, the ball’s just coming out right there where the hitter can keep his eye on it.
Think about how they pitch in batting practice. The batting-practice pitcher wants the hitter to get a good look at the ball, so he’ll hold it up for the guy to see and just take one step and throw it from right out in front of the batter’s face. A lot of the pitchers today do it almost the same way.
Back in the day, Marichal had that big foot sticking in your face, and he’d change his angles and make you look so bad it just took the spirit right out of you. Luis Tiant had all that twisting and turning and looking this way and that—whatever he could come up with to throw you off. El Duque is a throwback with that big ol’ funny-looking leg kick of his. Those guys are all classic examples of how a pitcher’s motion can have a lot to do with his success.
Warren Spahn won 363 games with a big fancy windup that involved a lot of arm and leg action. With the Cardinals, we had a relief pitcher, Bob Humphreys, who might not have made it to the big leagues if he hadn’t had a gimmick in his windup, and he lasted nine years. He’d vary the number of times he pumped his arms before every pitch. We called him Double Pump. We could have called him Triple Pump.
Most pitching coaches today tell you that the more gyrations you go through on the mound, the greater your chance for error. I can’t argue with that. Sometimes when I leapt at the hitter, I’d leap a little too far and the ball would get away from me. You might kick your leg too high and lose balance. It is a matter of balance. Mostly, you’ve got to balance whether you want that extra control or that extra confusion and velocity.
And you know where I stand on that one. But that’s just me.
At least with Bob you could pretty much count on the ball coming from three-quarters. He wasn’t going to change much out there from pitch to pitch.
Once in a while, against right-handers, just to give a little different look, I’d drop down and throw a slurve—a slower slider or a faster curveball, whichever you wanted to call it. It was really too big to be a regular slider, and not as crisp. And I was careful about keeping it away. But that thing would flash down across the batters’ knees and you could almost hear them curse.
I wouldn’t do it for Willie Mays, because you have a better chance of making a mistake with a pitch like that. I’d throw it to somebody like Dick Stuart, where if I missed I’d have a better chance of getting away with it. You pick your spots.
When you’ve got a big-time power pitcher who suddenly throws in the kitchen sink like that, you do a double take and hope it’s out of the strike zone.
I also tinkered a bit with where I stood on the rubber. You’re always looking for an advantage, so you always tinker. I felt the most comfortable standing on the right corner of the rubber, where a right-handed hitter might have to look over his shoulder a little bit instead of straight-on. But once in a while I’d move to the other side if I was pitching to a left-hander. It’s not easy for a hitter to make adjustments every time he goes to the plate.
What I really liked, though, was when the other pitcher used the left side. That way, my foot wasn’t landing in the same hole where his foot was landing. It can throw you off, maybe buckle your ankle, if the other guy makes a hole that’s just a few inches from where yours is. That’s why you’ll occasionally see the grounds crew out there filling in a hole. You can also have that problem next to the rubber if the other pitcher sets up in the general vicinity of where you do and scrapes out a little hill that tilts your foot.
I started with my foot on the rubber, and then when I wound up I’d pick it up and turn it sideways against the rubber. If you happen to put your foot down a couple inches in front of the rubber, the umpire’s not going to see that. Nobody’s actually looking for it, but sometimes somebody in the other dugout will notice it and go “Hey! What’d he just do there?!” Spahn would do that. He’d get two strikes on somebody and want to get the ball up there just a little bit quicker, and he’d step several inches in front of that rubber. We’d holler, and while we’re hollering, whoosh, the ball would shoot in there for strike three. The umpire’s going to watch for it now, but Spahn wouldn’t do it again for a long time, when everybody had forgotten about it.
There’s a lot of stuff that goes into 363 wins.
There are also a lot of pitches, and a lot of innings, that go into that. Spahn had almost four hundred complete games. Gaylord Perry had more than three hundred. Gibson had 255. There’s no current player in the top hundred in that category. Greg Maddux has the most, with just over a hundred.
The emphasis on relief pitchers and pitch counts has quite a bit to do with that, obviously. But it’s interesting that all the pitchers who threw the most complete games and the most innings come from the age of bigger windups. Of the top ten all-time in innings pitched, six guys—Phil Niekro, Ryan, Perry, Don Sutton, Spahn, and Carlton—come from my day and Bob’s. They were all in the game by the time I got there in 1967; and Spahn was already out of it, thank goodness.
It’s not just windups. The whole delivery has been streamlined and homogenized. There’s a concerted emphasis these days on protecting the pitcher, and part of that involves fussing over his mechanics.
Mechanics are good. But people come up with all kinds of reasons why some pitchers last and others break down, and I don’t know that you’ll ever be able to pinpoint the reasons why. We’re all different. Our bodies are different, they can withstand different things, and in my opinion none of that stuff is worth a crap. If you try to teach one person to do something the way another person does it, you’re usually walking down the wrong road.
In the end, we’re all fundamentally similar, even if we arrive at our release points by different routes. It’s the same with hitting. One guy—remember Dick McAuliffe?—will set up with an open stance and Stan Musial will twist around so he has to peek over his shoulder; a hitter like Richie Hebner will hold his bat flat and down below his waist and Craig Counsell will swirl it up above his helmet, high as he can go; Pete Rose and Jeff Bagwell batted out of a crouch and Eric Davis stood straight up. But when the barrel addresses the ball, they all end up in roughly the same position. Likewise, if you took a picture of every major-league pitcher just as he’s letting go of the ball, you’d see that the arm angle might differ but there isn’t much variation in body position. There aren’t a lot of different ways to throw ninety-three miles an hour.
The fact is, some of us are going to break down and some aren’t, regardless of the mechanics. There’s not a recipe for it. Some guys appear to be straining their arms when they throw, and people today will watch and say, well, that’s no good, he’s going to hurt his arm for sure. Maybe. But let’s just see. Don’t try to head things off. We don’t know. Maybe he’s got an unorthodox way of throwing that will last forever. Maybe it would strain my arm to throw that way, but unless he’s having some problems, why mess with it?
If he starts to have arm trouble, maybe then we can break down his mechanics and suggest this or that to ease the problem. Is that going to cure it? We don’t know. But unless it’s broken, don’t try to fix it. You just can’t predict it.
We’re all different.
Keeping my front side closed is what made me a decent hitter. When I got to the plate I’d remind myself to stay closed in order to keep the right front hip in, in order to keep my shoulders square, in order to have proper plate coverage, in order to keep the barrel of the bat in the pay zone for a long time.
I was a good hitter if I could think to keep the ball to the left-field side of the diamond and concentrate on driving it over the shortstop’s head. And I could say one thing to myself—“keep your front side closed”—to make all those other things happen. Or I could say any of the countless variations on the same theme: “stay behind the ball” or “keep your nose behind the ball” or “cover the plate” or “stay square” or “wait for the ball to get on the barrel.”
It all works together. If you keep your front side closed, then your body stays behind your legs, your arms stay behind your body, your hands stay back, your bat stays behind your hands, and when you swing, all that momentum, all that torque, all that power, is brought to bear on the baseball. You could call it timing. It’s also called rotational force, which I generated a lot of.
Rotational force starts with the transfer of weight from back to front, or back foot to front foot. It’s the rhythm of hitting, and that part of it was natural for me. It was my natural coordination, my natural swing. Ted Williams—I wore his number nine when I was with Oakland—once said I was the most natural hitter he’d ever seen. I don’t know about that, but I did come into the game with power. To put that power into play, I had to execute the fundamentals. Stay behind the ball. Keep my front side closed.
Because I was strong, I could hit the ball out of the park without pulling it and also without lifting it. A lot of home-run hitters will uppercut at the ball, but the best hitters don’t do that. It was a lesson I learned from Dick Allen. We had long conversations about hitting. I wasn’t able to duplicate his style, though, because he could keep his hands low and get to the ball with power from that position. My method was to build up force with my rotation. So I held the bat higher. But I still dropped the bat head on the ball, essentially swinging down, like Allen did. Dick’s power was based on natural explosiveness. Mine was based on strength and natural mechanics, which combined to make me explosive.
We both generated it with the gifts we were given, and that’s what Bob Gibson did on the mound. He didn’t have to preoccupy himself with building up a big-time fastball; he had one, just like I had the strength to drive the ball out of the park, any park. But as a hitter, you can squander that power with poor fundamentals and an improper approach.
Some things are basic to baseball. The same way a hitter loses his power if he flies open too soon in his approach to the ball, a pitcher has to stay back on the rubber and not bring his weight forward prematurely. If a hitter flies open, there’s nothing left to hit the ball with. If a pitcher doesn’t keep his weight back as he gets into his motion, there’s nothing left to throw the ball with. Same thing.
Of course, that doesn’t make it easy to fix. If a pitcher has to think about mechanics in the heat of a game, he has a problem that particular day.
For a hitter, that’s why it’s important to simplify things. As I teach today with the Yankees, I try to show them the one thing—keeping the front side closed—that almost always will make everything else fall in line.
As you stand at home plate, clear your mind of everything except what you have to do next. I might tug on the shoulder of my shirt to remind me to keep the shoulder in. I might bang on my hip to remind me to keep the hip in. Find your own little ways to focus. Find one thought that will make four or five things happen.
He has time, sitting in the dugout and standing in the on-deck circle, to converse with himself about what he has to do in this next swing or two. A pitcher can’t sit back and do that every couple of pitches. We’re out there working. We have to get all that stuff straightened out ahead of time.
No matter how much talking to yourself you do, you still have to recognize the ball coming out of the pitcher’s hand. But again, if I’m staying back with my front side closed, it keeps my head in and my eyes locked on the baseball so that I’m able to read the spin on it. In other words, when I keep myself square it allows me to stay in a position to hit. It allows me to be able to respond whether the ball’s in, up, or down, whether it’s off-speed or whatever.
It’s a lot easier to fall into a rut, or a slump, if you’re constantly looking for a pitch on the inside part of the plate to pull. One of the things that used to mess me up was coming home to Yankee Stadium and wanting to get the ball around to those seats that looked so easy to reach in right field, the ones that Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle had so much fun with. That kind of temptation led to an eagerness that caused me to start pulling off the ball too early. It created a bad habit. That’s why, in batting practice, I’d pick out a sign in right center, draw myself a border that ran right through the second baseman, and make that my foul line. I tried to do the same thing during a game. I’d remind myself, keep your front side in, keep your front side in.
If you’re looking for a pitch away, as opposed to an inside pitch to pull, that makes you stay back on the ball longer, makes you more patient. It keeps your eye on the ball. Sometimes you can actually see the ball too well—so well that you think you can do anything with it. When that happens, you tend to try to hit it where you want it to go, rather than where it’s pitched.
By thinking “hard the other way,” you’re harnessing the movements of your body. Your swing becomes shorter. The eyes don’t travel as far. The bat doesn’t travel as far. With the shorter path, there’s less chance for error. The natural move, for a lefthander, is to start out with the idea of hitting a line drive in the direction of the shortstop and then let the speed of the pitch—and of course the location—move the ball around from there. Don’t let your own predetermination tell you which way to go with the pitch. Let the pitch itself dictate that.
Most of the big home runs I’ve seen Alex Rodriguez hit—and big ones in the context of the game—have been to center field and right center. He’s going to finish with 750 or 800 home runs, and he’d hit even more if he were more interested in staying behind the ball and driving it to right center, his opposite field. A good portion of the time, he does that. His game is hard to right center. But he doesn’t stay on his approach to right center the way Manny Ramirez and Albert Pujols do. For that reason, A-Rod is not quite as good a hitter as those guys. Don’t get me wrong: Nobody has more ability. He’s got great hand-eye coordination and he’s a great talent. He’s the first player in the history of the game to hit at least thirty-five homers in twelve seasons. Those are the facts. It’s also a fact that he gets off his game a little more than Ramirez or Pujols. Think “hard to right center” and let the rest take care of itself. If A-Rod did that more regularly, he’d consistently hit for a higher average and at the same time produce more home runs, the way he did in 2007.
Ryan Howard is another one who hasn’t quite learned to stay behind the ball, and consequently is not as good a hitter as Manny or Pujols. Don’t misunderstand: He’s one of the most productive hitters in the game, and he has the kind of power that can carry a team. All I’m saying is, he’s still young and learning. The talent, the power and the swing will take you a long way, but there’s more to it than that.
Guys who are high-skill-level hitters, like Hank Aaron and Manny Ramirez, are smart hitters. You have to know who’s on the mound, the situation, the score, the count, whether you need the ball in the air or on the ground or to the right side or to the left. Know what your team is trying to do every inning, every day. Learn to think like a manager.
And whatever the count is, or the score, or the situation, stay behind the ball. Keep your front side closed.
When I was a kid in Omaha, my older brother Josh worked with me a lot on my mechanics. Josh coached our baseball teams and basketball teams, and when we weren’t practicing as a team he had me out there by myself all the time, shooting, ballhandling, pitching, hitting, fielding ground balls, whatever. Practice, practice, practice. There was never an excuse to stop practicing.
One time, before a tournament game in Missouri, he hit me a ground ball that bounced up and caught me above the eye and I was bleeding all over the infield. Josh slapped a Band-Aid on it and told me to get back out there. He’d work me so hard he’d have me crying. I told my mom I didn’t want to play for him because he was so mean, and she said, “Honey, you don’t have to play for him if you don’t want to.” But I was right back out there.
Josh was huge on fundamentals. How-to stuff. I can’t say that he had all the mechanics broken down to a science, but his approach to the game certainly made an impression on me. Josh had strong opinions on how to do things—he knew exactly what he wanted—and he drilled into me that there was always a right way and a wrong way. He also made it clear that you’d never master the right way if you didn’t practice, practice, practice. I believe in practice.
Yeah, and I played football for Frank Kush at Arizona State. Talk about a guy who was hell in practice. If you didn’t do things the right way for Frank Kush, you’d be sure to regret it. He would put me through so much—mostly, having big linemen pound on me in one-on-one drills, with the whole team watching—that it brought tears to my eyes. One time it made me run off the field and quit until Charley Taylor, the former ASU player who became a great running back and receiver for the Washington Redskins, came after me and convinced me that I didn’t want to “let that ‘SOB’ win.” But Coach Kush instilled a toughness in me, mental and physical, that I didn’t know I had. He showed me what it took to be a great professional.
Because of that, I’d say he did as much to make me a good baseball player as anybody did—and my baseball coach at ASU was Bobby Winkles. Between those two, I came out of college equipped with the knowledge that any game worth playing is worth playing right.
I doubt that there are any big-league pitchers who didn’t play a lot of ball as a kid. It’s not essential that they were pitchers when they were young, but they had to throw the ball a lot.
For the last fifteen years or so, there have been all kinds of theories on why the pitching is so much worse than it used to be. People talk about smaller parks, steroids, the ball being juiced, and all that; and they’re probably right. But you also have to consider that kids these days don’t grow up playing baseball every day all summer long. In this age, if you come across a neighborhood ballfield on a sunny weekday in July, there’s probably nobody on it. It’s too hot. There’s too much other stuff to do. When I was a kid, that was the place to be.
The upshot is that kids aren’t playing as much ball as they used to, which means that they aren’t throwing the ball as much as they used to. You have to throw a lot to build up your arm, and you have to throw a lot to build the hand-eye coordination that leads to control.
At some point, though, a pitcher has to start pitching. Even in the big leagues, there are guys who were converted to pitcher in the minors because they had great arms, but those guys don’t make it to the majors in a month or even a year. Pitching is a muscle-memory thing. You have to develop command, and command comes from repetition. The more you pitch, the better your command—your control—is going to be.
It’s the same as shooting a basketball. Shooters have to shoot a lot. You have to develop that feel, that eye, that touch, that coordination, that consistency. You show me a good shooter and I’ll show you somebody who has taken a whole lot of shots in his life. That’s probably somebody who, as a kid, was on the playground all day shooting the ball, or in the gym at ten o’clock at night shooting the ball. Pitching is no different. You have to put the ball in the pocket, and if you don’t do it a lot you’re not going to be great at it.
Mechanics are important, of course. There are things you can do with your mechanics and your delivery to sharpen up your control. A control pitcher can lose his control by lapsing into bad mechanics. He can improve on his mechanics and get back to where he used to be. But improving your mechanics doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t practice that way. That’s why, even in the major leagues, guys work out in the bullpen.
In the final analysis, the best way to become a better pitcher is by pitching.
And a hitter has to hit. No hitter is so good that he can’t get better by spending time in the cage, or out on the field at three o’clock before a night game, taking swings against a fifty-eight-year-old coach.
That’s when you tend to your mechanics, and that’s the way you guard against bad habits. Slumps will happen because we’re human, but you can sometimes head them off by swinging the bat to stay sharp. The more pitches you see, the better you can tell if a ball is an inch and a half off the plate, or an inch and a half away from your power. There’s a feel you want to develop for keeping your shoulder in. There’s a certain length of stride that fits you, and you want to stay in that groove.
You want it all to become as familiar and natural as possible, because there will be times when you step into the box and everything’s foreign. It’s like you’ve never been there before. Your spikes feel too long, the dirt’s too hard, the ball has shrunk, and the pitcher looks like he’s standing in your lap. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes you feel like a stranger up there. That’s when you have to understand your mechanics.
You want them—you need them—to carry you through those times when nothing feels right, or when you’re mentally dragging and don’t even know it. That’s why it’s imperative to keep them crisp and sound. You might be tired because you’ve played sixty games in a row, with just three or four days off. Maybe you’ve been on the road for a week and a half and it’s wearing on you. Your mechanics might start to slide before you realize it. We didn’t have hitting coaches early in my career, so I’d pick a guy on the bench who didn’t play much and say, “Hey, could you do me a favor? Just watch me as often as you can to see if I’m falling into a bad habit.” Or Joe Rudi or Sal Bando might check me out if they’re hitting behind me and they might say, “Look, your hands are down.”
There’s no shortage of things that can throw off your mechanics. So you need to make them second nature. You need them to be there, solid, automatic—to be part of you, not only as a hedge against slumps and fatigue but so your mind isn’t cluttered with all the technical stuff when you’re trying to concentrate on what’s coming next from that closer who throws ninety-seven miles an hour.
It takes repetition. Practice.
Early in a game, a pitcher might have an opportunity to tweak a thing or two, like the length of your stride, as long as it doesn’t preoccupy you so much that it takes your attention away from the batter who’s up there with runners on second and third. But if you shorten your stride for two or three pitches and you’re not getting the results, there’s no more time for that. You’ll have to scratch your little experiment and take it up in the bullpen between starts.
That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d work on in the bullpen. Your control depends a lot on where your front leg lands. If you’re having a hard time getting the ball away from a right-handed hitter, chances are you’re locking yourself out, not opening up your body enough. If you keep throwing it inside, inside, inside, and when you try to go away the ball comes back over the middle, it’s probably because you’re leaving your left foot a couple inches to the right of where it needs to be when you land. So when you’re working in the bullpen, you can draw a mark where your foot comes down. If you land on that mark two or three times and you’re still having a hard time getting the ball outside, draw a new mark a few inches to the left and see if you can make that work without flying too far open.
A two-or three-inch difference at home plate can be a two-or three-hundred-foot difference when the ball comes down.
I once asked Catfish Hunter, “Catfish, why do you fix your hat every time? When you’re on the mound, you adjust your hat on every pitch.”
He said, “I do that because if my foot is not hitting in the same spot every time, then my hat gets a little cocked. So that’s how I check myself.” When a guy takes his stride and that foot and that spike mark start mating up over and over, he’s right. He’s going to hit that little three-by-five paperback book from sixty feet, six inches.
Catfish could monitor himself that way because he had worked it out in the bullpen and knew exactly where his stride had to be.
You can’t be ready without enough practice. And at the same time, you can’t get enough practice to make yourself ready for what you might face in a live game situation.
You might pitch and pitch and pitch in the bullpen and get to the point where your stride is dead-on and your control is impeccable in the bullpen. That’s great, and it improves your skill level, but there’s a little more effort involved when you’re pitching against Willie Stargell or Lance Berkman. All of a sudden, what you were doing in the bullpen might not mean so much because now you’ve got to throw a little harder. Just that ugh!, that grunt, that extra little bit of oomph, will change your mechanics and change the direction of the ball. It will change your location.
You find that when you throw a little harder you tend to throw a little higher, and if you don’t throw with that same intensity in the bullpen, you’ll be out of sync in a game situation. And the fact is, you don’t throw with the same intensity in the bullpen. You just don’t. There are no consequences if you miss in the bullpen—just a gee whiz and a shake of the head. If you miss in a game, the party might be over. There’s a tremendous difference, just like there’s a tremendous difference between shooting a fifteen-foot jump shot alone in the gym and shooting that same shot with Dennis Rodman in your face in a close game with the clock running down and twenty thousand people screaming and waving things.
You need both. You need the practice to get the repetition, and to get your mechanics mastered to the point that they come naturally; and you need the game experience. There’s no substitute for either.
I’m still waiting for a manager to put me in at third base. I took a lot of ground balls over there on the days after I pitched.
But the time wasn’t wasted. Even in the major leagues, I believed that you had to throw a lot to keep your arm strong. The more you run, the longer you can run, and the same goes for throwing. That’s how you develop your durability: throwing.
Most pitchers schedule a bullpen session midway between their starts, and that’s fine, but my arm—my whole body—was always sore on the second day after a ballgame. For some reason, I was never sore the next day. So I’d go to third base and field at least fifty ground balls, probably more, and get them across to first with something on them. The following day, I’d hurt so bad that I couldn’t do anything but sit around and agitate people. The day or two after that, I’d shag in the outfield and toss balls in from there, or take more grounders at third. When I was young I threw bullpens, but later on I was more concerned with saving my body—more so my knees than my arm—and stopped doing that.
At one point, fairly early in my career, there was a nun who took films of me when I was having trouble in the late innings. The films showed that my location was wavering because I was tired. So I started running stadium steps. But I didn’t do that any longer than I had to. Later, it got to the point where I didn’t like to run at all. We had artificial grass in St. Louis, with concrete a few inches beneath, and it was hard on the legs—and especially hard on my legs. My problem was a combination of age and injuries. I had three operations on my knee. Toward the end, I had no cartilage left in that knee, so things were just rubbing together in a way that compelled me to cross running off my to-do list.
That was why I liked third base. I could build up a sweat and get the kinks out of my arm and exercise my legs without putting miles on them. That was what worked for me. Nothing else I tried ever lasted.
Once, I polished my car in the morning and threw a one-hitter that night, so I thought I was onto something. I thought it loosened up my arm. But I did the same thing the next time and got lit up. So much for rituals.
I was more a creature of habit—not just in my workout, but in the whole preparation before a ballgame. It’s different for an everyday player. We’re not on five-day timetables. It’s the same agenda, game after game. There’s a routine that you develop without even realizing it. Something works, or feels right, and you don’t want deviation.
For example, I liked to wear two pairs of sanitary socks, and I wanted them new. I wanted two towels on my locker when I got in. I’d have a lucky T-shirt that I’d stay with for a long time if my luck held up. And that was about it.
My superstition, if you want to call it that—actually, I wouldn’t, because I had a reason for it—was wearing a long-sleeved shirt under my uniform. In Oakland, especially, I had trouble with hamstring pulls and muscle tightness, so I learned to wear long underwear in cold weather to stay warm. But I also wore it in hot weather to stay cool. Got that from Dick Allen, who recommended it. Brother, when Dick Allen gave advice, I took it. We’d play back east in the humidity and a hundred degrees, and I’d be sticking to my long underwear.
I did the same thing. I always wore a long-sleeved wool shirt. Always. The breeze would blow a little bit on there and cool you off. Even now, when I go down to spring training with the Cardinals, I always have a jacket on underneath my uniform. I don’t care how hot it is.
There was something reassuring about getting ready a certain way every time. I liked putting my uni on. I liked getting taped up. I liked getting my hat and my glasses and my sweatbands on. I liked my number forty-four. I liked it all.
Hmm. I never thought much about it. I’d just put the stuff on and go get ’em, then take it off and go home.
Pitchers have different considerations than everyday players, and different routines. For that matter, married players have different routines than single players, drinkers have different routines than nondrinkers, old players have different routines than young players.
Every day, I got up between nine and ten in the morning and made it a point to go to breakfast. I was single and didn’t cook, so I always went out to a local diner. I’d get something else to eat around two o’clock—a lot of greens and rice—so I could head to the ballpark at three; games started at eight or eight-oh-five in my era.
When I got to the ballpark I’d read the paper, put my underwear on, walk around, put my shirt on, walk around, grab some cookies, have some milk, shoot the bull with the other guys, walk around, maybe talk to somebody from the media, put my pants on … I didn’t get rubdowns or sit in the whirlpool until I was close to forty, but I just needed the time to be in the clubhouse. Some players—Bobby Grich was one—like to pull in at quarter to five if batting practice is at five. I couldn’t do that. I needed to get into my routine and get ready.
Then, when it was over, I’d have a beer. If it was New York, I’d ride downtown, go to McMullen’s for swordfish, relax, maybe drive through Central Park, listen to music. I didn’t drink. I’d spend some time with a special lady and by twelve-thirty or one o’clock I was heading to the hay. I’d wind down by watching television, then be up again the next morning at nine or ten.
I only stayed out all night one time. That was in New York when I played for Oakland.
It’s tough to stay out all night if you don’t drink.
It’s tough to stay out all night unless you run around with somebody who stays out all night. I didn’t do that.
I didn’t raise much ruckus on the nights before I pitched. But I didn’t try to get any extra sleep, either. I always got up early, and it wasn’t because I kept myself on a strict schedule. I just didn’t sleep long.
After I got up and had some breakfast, I might shop a little bit—mainly just look in windows. I’d have lunch about two o’clock, but didn’t pay much attention to what I ate. I didn’t know what a carbohydrate was; didn’t know any of that stuff. I ate everything but fish. I didn’t have fish at all until I was out of baseball. It was just my custom. As a black kid, I grew up eating a lot of pork and beef, a lot of beans and rice. We didn’t have a regimen. I eat more greens now than I did then. But I always drank a lot of milk, and still do.
On the days I pitched, I didn’t have to be at the ballpark at three—that was the way it was for everybody—so I’d get there about four-thirty or five. After batting practice, I’d wander into the training room, lie on the table, and get a rubdown. They’d massage my arm, try to loosen it up and stretch it, and I’d fall asleep. Sound asleep. The trainer used to put a towel over me because I snored so loud.
For me, the off-season was a big part of the routine. I’d take it easy for about a month, a month and a half, then around December I’d get back at it, running and lifting weights. I was younger than the guys I hung out with in spring training—Billy Williams, Willie McCovey, Fergie Jenkins, and Ernie Banks—and they always told me that when you get to be thirty, things are going to be different; you need to pay attention to your conditioning. I trusted what those guys said, so I started working out more intensely when I turned thirty. There were winters when I did twelve hundred sit-ups every other day.
Exercise is a way of life for these guys now. They wouldn’t know what to do if they weren’t exercising.
It was a way of life for me, and it still is. I can’t run like I used to, but I lift weights six or seven times a week. Not heavy ones, though. I’ve got a bad back from being rear-ended in 2005 by a Ford Expedition doing a hundred. Flipped my car three times and destroyed it.
Rather than lift, I played basketball in the off-season until the Cardinals got wind of it and said they didn’t want me to. If I were active today, I still wouldn’t work out with weights—not in view of the fact that I accomplished what I accomplished.
It’s amazing to me that so many players are getting injured today in spite of all the conditioning they do.
I’m not sure that’s a coincidence. I wish I knew whether all the weight training they do today was helpful or harmful. It seems to me that it’s like stretching a rubber band. It’ll hold at a certain point, but pretty soon it’s going to get loose and lax. My instinct tells me that all the muscle building is contributing to players breaking down, because their bodies aren’t getting the rest they need.
The body needs to recuperate. I don’t think you need to work out year-round to be a good and well-prepared ballplayer. You play ball most of the year and when you’re not playing you’re exercising? I don’t get that. If you listen to the exercise gurus, yeah, they’ll tell you that you need to do this or that, and they’ll keep you on an elaborate conditioning program. Naturally. They make their living by having people do that stuff. Meanwhile, the players today look good in their uniforms, but they’re on the disabled list all the time.
I believe in downtime, and what I did worked really well for me. Of course, all I have is theories. Judging by the money they’re making, I suppose that what these guys are doing now is working out all right for them.
There’s something to be said for taking a break. No doubt about that.
Over the winter I’d relax by working on my cars. I’d do Christmas shopping for my family. I’d read the Bible. Socialize. Have a nice time.
But I liked to be ready for spring training. I didn’t go there to get in shape; I wanted to be in shape when I arrived.
I looked at that a little differently. To me, spring training itself was the time for getting ready. That’s when you need to put your work in.
I did a lot of running in the spring to get my legs in shape, but mostly I was concerned about finding my rhythm and sharpening my hand-eye coordination. One year, after I was retired and helping out the Cardinals, they brought in this guy named Mack Newton to lead them in exercises. He’s a martial arts expert and a conditioning authority who has done a lot for the Dallas Cowboys and Oakland A’s and I don’t know who-all, and he had the players performing these rigorous calisthenics. A lot of the guys were complaining that they were sore. So one day, when they were talking about this in a meeting, Tony La Russa asked me what I thought of those exercises. I’m sure it wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but I told him that those things were pretty good, I guess, if you were a professional exerciser.
Obviously a ballplayer has to be in shape, but for my money, that’s a matter of playing ball. It would drive me crazy when the regulars didn’t want to be in the lineup for the exhibition games. I understand that everyday players are out there a lot more than pitchers, but they’re probably only seeing ten or twelve pitches a ballgame. You need more than three or four days a week of that. I wanted them ready when the season started.
That said, there are things that spring training just can’t prepare you for. A pitcher can go seven innings in the spring and feel no effects, and then after your first start in the regular season you hurt from your toes to your teeth. I might pitch a whole exhibition game without a breaking ball. I’m just trying to get control of my fastball, throw it over for a strike even if I have to let up a little bit. In spring training, you hold back. If the batter whacks one, you go, oh well, that’s something to work on.
In the regular season I never, ever thought like that.
