High Heat (17 page)

After the war, radar moved into everyday life, notably at airports and on the highways. Law enforcement employed it to corral speeders, and that was the link that brought radar to baseball. In 1974, Michigan State baseball coach Danny Litwhiler was reading the student newspaper. One of the local headlines reading “Be Careful! Don't Speed on Campus!” was accompanied by a photo of a campus policeman pointing a modern radar gun at would-be speeders. Litwhiler immediately wondered: Could a radar gun clock a baseball thrown by one of his pitchers?

Before taking over the Spartans' program, Litwhiler had played 11 years in the majors and had a .281 lifetime average. In 1942, he became the first major-league outfielder to play every inning of every game in a season without committing an error. His glove from that season found a home in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. Now another piece of equipment that Litwhiler would use would find its way there, too. He convinced the campus police to come down to the baseball stadium. Radar guns back then were far from portable. The device was powered by the automobile cigarette lighter, so Litwhiler had the police car drive out onto the field, parking it near the pitcher's mound. He had one of his young hurlers throw, and the radar gun began to pick up readings ranging from the mid-70s to the high-80s. Litwhiler contacted the company that made the radar gun, but it didn't see much potential in marketing the device to baseball. So instead, Litwhiler called the inventor, John Paulson, directly and was able to convince him to make a handheld model with a battery.

That spring Litwhiler took the portable radar gun to spring training, and Baltimore Orioles' Manager Earl Weaver “went crazy about it,” he remembers. Weaver had already coached several of the fastest of the fast, including the enigmatic Steve Dalkowski and future Hall of Famer Jim Palmer. After the ballclub wouldn't authorize the $1,200 to buy one of the first radar guns, Weaver decided to take the amount out of his own pocket.

“I'd save that much in bonus money by not signing some guy who couldn't throw hard,” Weaver explains. “This thing measures speed factually, without trusting to guesswork.”

But if the technology was perfect, much of the debate over who was the fastest of the fast would have ended with the rise of the radar gun. By the mid-1970s, three major-league clubs were using the gun, and today almost every scout has a portable device of his own. But there is a major difference between the various manufactures. Scouts say the JUGS gun, which Litwhiler helped popularize, measures the speed of the ball soon after it leaves the pitcher's hand. The Decatur RAGUN, which soon followed in development, is said to measure the speed of the ball closer to the batter and home plate. So the JUGS gun was soon known as the “fast gun” and the RAGUN as the “slow gun.” Routinely, there was a four-mile-per-hour difference between the two.

These days, most scouts use the Stalker Sport. Even though the gun is a high-powered, more consistent version of those earlier models, many believe grading baseball talent will always be a crapshoot. “I'll look around sometimes after a quality pitch and everybody will have slightly different readings,” Ducey says. “Part of this whole game is still about trusting your gut, too. Realizing what you're really seeing.”

Such was the case with injured catcher Cliff Blankenship. In the spring of 1907, he was sent west by Washington Senators manager Joe Cantillon. Even though Blankenship was reluctant to make such a long trip, Cantillon was insistent. He had been receiving letters extolling a young right-hander playing semipro ball in Weiser, Idaho. “This boy throws so fast you can't see 'em,” read one missive, “and he knows where he is throwing the ball because if he didn't there would be dead bodies strewn all over Idaho.”

Blankenship's road trip began in Wichita, where he signed a promising outfielder, Clyde Milan, for $1,250. The Senators' manager had seen Milan play the spring before on a barnstorming tour, and Blankenship confirmed that the kid had talent. (In fact, Milan would go on to be one of the best outfielders in Senators history.) After signing Milan, Blankenship was eager to return home. But Cantillon told him to first check out the young pitcher in Idaho.

Blankenship wrote a friend, as later detailed in Hank Thomas's biography, that he had “to look over some palooka who they say is striking
out everybody. Probably isn't worth a dime, and I'm on a wildgoose chase for Cantillon.”

When Blankenship saw Walter Johnson for the first time, however, he immediately knew that the 19-year-old was the real deal. Of course, he made his determination well before the days of the radar gun. Johnson lost the game that day, 1–0 in 12 innings, as his infielders booted a pair of grounders for the lone run. Afterward, Blankenship flashed a $100 bill, telling Johnson it was an immediate signing bonus and promising a contract that would pay the prospect $350 a month.

At first glance, Johnson had hick written all over him. He was 6-foot-1, 200 pounds, with dangling arms and, as Shirley Povich later noted, “a behind-the-plow gait.” Yet when it came to negotiations, Johnson proved as adept as he was on the pitching mound. He told Blankenship that he wanted expenses to travel to Washington. Blankenship agreed. But the scout was taken aback when the kid insisted that the Senators also guarantee his train ticket home, in case things didn't work out in the nation's capital.

What Blankenship didn't know was that several other major-league clubs had been scouting Johnson as well. The Pittsburgh Pirates missed out when they wouldn't pony up for the $9 train ticket that would have brought Johnson to the team's training site in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

After some dickering, Blankenship agreed to the travel round-trip expenses and Johnson was soon en route to Washington. “Fastest pitcher since Amos Rusie,” Blankenship wired Cantillon.

Anxious to take the heat off his struggling ballclub, Cantillon told the press. The story the next day in the
Washington Star,
June 29, 1907, reported that the Senators' manager “has added a great baseball phenom to his pitching staff. The young man's name is Walter Johnson.”

The story went on to say that “Blankenship is very enthusiastic, but fails to state whether the great phenom is right- or left-handed.”

 

 

S
ince the Big Train's heyday, every method imaginable has been tried to measure the sheer speed of a pitched baseball. Even
Johnson, the gold standard back in his era, was roped into demonstrating how hard he could throw.

In the closing days of the 1912 season, with the New York Giants and Boston Red Sox facing off in the World Series,
Baseball Magazine
convinced Johnson and Brooklyn's Nap Rucker, who was said to be the fastest pitcher in the National League, to travel to Bridgeport, Connecticut. There, at the Remington Arms Company's bullet-testing range, “a pitched ball was accurately measured for the first time in history,” the magazine proclaimed.

The range comprised a tunnel that was shoulder height and used to calculate the speed of bullets fired from a standing position. The speed was calculated by how fast a projectile—in this case a regulation Spalding National League baseball—broke one of the myriad of copper wires at the front of the chute and then smacked into a steel plate at the rear of the shooting gallery.

“The distance from the muzzle to the plate is accurately measured,” the magazine explained, “and a comparison of the time elapsing between the breaking of the copper wire and the strike of the bullet against the plate readily gives the velocity of the bullet in number of feet per second.”

“It may have made sense on paper,” Hank Thomas, Walter Johnson's grandson, reminds me. “But they forgot that Walter didn't throw over the top. He threw sidearm and had difficulty getting the ball to go straight through that plate with the copper wires.”

Baseball Magazine
reported that “after some effort and with a consequent loss of speed” Johnson was finally able to muster a reading. His best throw was clocked at 127 feet per second (86.6 miles per hour). The best Rucker could do was 113 feet per second or about 76 miles per hour.

As Thomas outlines in his biography of his grandfather, such numbers require some perspective. The best we can do is to compare them to another series of tests done two decades later. In June 1933, Lefty Gomez of the New York Yankees and Van Lingle Mungo of the Brooklyn Dodgers headed up to West Point and were tested with similar equipment. The top pitches were less than impressive, as Mungo hit 77.4 miles per hour and Gomez 75.7 miles per hour.

In 1946, Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith borrowed a cumbersome photoelectric cell from the U.S. Army post in Aberdeen in order to test the speed of the fastest pitcher of that day—the Cleveland Indians' Bob Feller. The device was used in the military to determine the speed of projectiles. “The military used that thing to test everything from bullets to shells,” Feller tells me. “It was a helluva lot more accurate than what you see used in some ballparks today.”

Well, maybe. In any event, Griffith heavily advertised the event and reportedly had a walk-up gate of 20,000. Unfortunately, he forgot to run the scheme by Feller.

“He never contacted me at all,” Feller wrote in his autobiography. “I was on the rubbing table in the clubhouse, getting ready to warm up. Our trainer was stretching my pitching arm and legs when Mr. Griffith came in. He told me it was about time to get out there and start throwing smoke. I told him as soon as he paid me for it I would.”

The Indians' ace didn't agree to the stunt until Griffith agreed to pay him $700. (“I mean I had to get something out of the deal, too,” Feller recalls.) At that point, there wasn't a faster or better pitcher in the game. The wildness that had hampered Feller earlier in his career was gone and he was on his way to winning 26 games and striking out 348.

The photoelectric cell, a cumbersome cratelike framework that the ball had to be delivered through, was set up atop home plate. Before the game, Feller warmed up for about 10 minutes and then threw about five pitches through the contraption to a catcher, who squatted on the other side of the device. More than 30,000 fans sat in near silence that evening, awaiting the announcements of the specific speed levels. Feller claims that the device was able to calculate the highest average speed, as well as the velocity of the ball as it reached the framework over home plate. He says his best average speed was 107.9 miles per hour and the highest clocking at home plate topped out at 98.6 miles per hour. “That was also my body temperature when I calmed down after my showdown with Mr. Griffith,” Feller says.

Steve Dalkowski was another pitcher tested by the Aberdeen equipment. He was told to throw the ball through a metal box, roughly the width of home plate, in which a laser was being beamed. Sounds simple enough, right? But as with most things surrounding the career of the unpredictable left-hander, things didn't go according to plan. Even though the mechanism and physics were similar to those in Feller's test, Dalkowski had to throw off a flat surface. At least Feller had been able to throw off a mound at Griffith Stadium. In addition, Dalkowski had pitched the night before his Aberdeen test, which some claim took 5 to 10 miles per hour off his best heat. Despite it all, Dalkowski was game to try. The season was 1958, when Dalkowski fanned 17 and walked 16, throwing 283 pitches, in a single game. At Aberdeen, it took him 40 minutes to throw anything close enough to the sensors to even get a reading. The device clocked him at 93.5 miles per hour at the target, 5 miles per hour slower than Feller. At that point, everybody decided to call it a day. “That was a crazy, crazy time,” Dalkowski recalls. “It made no sense. Like so many things that happened, it seemed like things were stacked against me.”

In 1960, Sandy Koufax was one of a half dozen pitchers to be timed by a high-speed camera in a test by
This Week
magazine. Koufax was joined by his hard-throwing Dodgers teammate Don Drysdale, as well as Herb Score of the Cleveland Indians, Steve Barber of the Baltimore Orioles, and Bob Turley and Ryne Duren of the New York Yankees. Unfortunately, the test took place in spring training and was the only time Koufax was clocked.

“You would have thought they would have waited a couple of months until we were in peak condition,” Drysdale told
Street & Smith's Baseball
magazine. “We were told there was going to be a test of some sort but it was not big deal. We didn't ever set up for it and it was actually done without us knowing when.”

Barber led the pack with an offering of 95.5 miles hour, followed by Drysdale (95.3), Koufax (93.2), Duren (91.1), Score (91.0), and Turley (90.7).

In 1974, the California Angels tried to be more precise by using the best scientific equipment of the time to test their fireballer,
Nolan Ryan. Four Rockwell International scientists rigged up an infrared radar device from the press box. Fans were invited to guess to the nearest one-tenth of a mile per hour how fast Ryan could throw. Entries were sent care of Ryan Express at the Angels, with the grand prize being a trip for two to the American League Championship Series that season.

The event was hyped on CBS Sports, and by the time the day came around—a September 7 game versus the Chicago White Sox—Ryan had had enough of the hoopla. “I didn't like it,” he said afterward. “It takes too much away from your concentration.”

The infrared device only tracked strikes, and Ryan voiced his concern that “a lot of balls outside the strike zone have more velocity.” A pitched ball needed to pass through an infrared beam 17 inches wide and 2 inches high to record a reading.

Tom Egan, Ryan's catcher that day, added that he had seen the Express in better form. “He didn't have his real stuff,” Egan told the Associated Press. “All that activity took away his concentration. I don't know why there is all that fuss anyhow. Everybody knows he's the fastest that ever lived.”