K

I may not be able to watch baseball, but I can read about it, as I did with K, by Tyler Kepner, which is all about pitching (K, as baseball fans know, is the symbol for a strikeout on a scorecard). "The pitcher is the planner, the initiator of action. The hitter can only react. If the pitcher, any pitcher, finds a way to disrupt that reaction, he can win. You need a little luck and relentless curiosity," Kepner writes. He adds, "A major league pitcher is part boxer and part magician; if he’s not punching you in the face, he’s swiping a quarter from behind your ear."

Kepner organizes the book with a chapter about ten different types of pitches: slider, fastball, curveball, knuckleball, splitter, spitball, change-up, cutter, sinker, and screwball. Over the course of the book he quotes well over a hundred different experts, whether they be former pitchers, hitters, or coaches. He also quotes players from long ago via old publications. Almost every pitcher of note throughout baseball history, from its infancy to today, gets a mention. Some pitchers were great with more than one pitch, and get more mention, especially Greg Maddux.

As such, K would be tough sledding for a casual fan. Even for me, who has been watching baseball for more than fifty years, it can get overly technical. I know baseball, but I never played it at a high level, and as such don't know what it's like to stand in against a pitcher. I could never be a broadcaster, because except for a few pitches, like an extremely hard fastball or a big breaking curveball, I can't tell the difference simply by watching.

The book also seems incomplete, because as much as Kepner describes the grip on pitches, there are no diagrams to go with them. For example, "A sinker is really just a fastball, usually thrown with the index and middle fingers aligned with the seams at their narrowest point, the hand slightly pronated at the finish." For someone who has pitched, that may make sense, but not much for me. Ideally we'd have video to match, but that's impossible, of course, but the publisher should have hired an artist to draw the grips and how the pitches break.

But those quibbles aside, the book is a treasure chest of information for the hard-core baseball fan. Each chapter describes the origins of the pitch in question, and we learn that most pitches have been around forever just known by different names. The cutter, for example, became known as the best pitch for Mariano Rivera, but has been around for decades. The only pitcher who has been credited as being the inventor of a pitch, at least by the Hall of Fame, is Candy Cummings, who is said to have thrown the first curveball. This is doubtful.

It's also interesting how the pitches are passed down. They are usually taught by one pitcher to another, and have a family tree. Rivera taught the cutter to Roy Halladay. "Halladay beat the Yankees three times in the second half of the 2008 season; when Rivera’s teammates learned of his generosity to a rival, they fined him in kangaroo court." A pitch can also revive a moribund career. Bruce Sutter went to the Hall of Fame with a spit-fingered fastball, but struggled before that. "Sutter learned it in 1973, when his future was bleak. His manager that season, Walt Dixon, wrote this in a report to his bosses: “Bruce Sutter will make the major leagues when a communist regime is ready to take over this country.”"

Kepner, as with many sportswriters, is a poet at heart, and he sprinkles a lot of bon mots through the book. Of the screwball, he writes, it "is the Sasquatch of baseball: believed to exist but with no credible evidence from many experts." Writing about the change-up, he writes, "The hitter brings a bat to the cage match. The pitcher brings a feather duster." And he lays down some basic laws. Quoting Maddux, "Make strikes look like balls and make balls look like strikes." Or, simply, "The best pitch in baseball is a well-located fastball."

K is a lot of fun, especially in this time of no baseball. It now needs a documentary to go with it so we can see what he's writing about.