Ten Innings at Wrigley by Cook Kevin

Author:Cook, Kevin [Cook, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781250182036
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

TOP OF THE 9TH

Due up for the Phillies: Boone, Meoli, Reed

Chicago’s sixth pitcher was the one the Phillies never wanted to see. Sleepy-eyed with bushy sideburns and a Fu Manchu mustache, Bruce Sutter threw a split-finger fastball Sports Illustrated described as “unique and overpowering.” The magazine called him “the best reliever in baseball—and, just possibly, the best in baseball history.”

Appearing in his ninth game of the season, the first he’d entered without a lead to protect, Sutter had six saves and an earned run average of 1.06 through the season’s first six weeks. Throwing the splitter almost exclusively, he had allowed eleven hits and struck out twenty in seventeen innings. According to his catcher, Sutter’s specialty was three pitches in one. “It looks like a fastball,” Foote said, “gets to the plate like a change, and then drops like a spitter.” As Sports Illustrated described it, “Envision, if you will, an auto speeding on a pier, braking at the last moment and then plunging over the side into the drink.” The pitch plunged due to its reduced spin, a result of Sutter’s choking the ball between his long fingers. “A man trying this with ordinary-sized fingers would never play the piano again.” The term split-finger fastball was a misnomer, of course, a relic of Fred Martin’s coaching sessions. The minor-league pitching coach wanted his pupils to release it exactly as they released a fastball, so that’s what he called it. In fact it was a changeup.

Sutter didn’t throw the splitter as he took his warm-ups before the ninth inning. No need to give the Phillies any extra looks. His warm-ups, eight tempting batting-practice fastballs, kept his arm loose while the buzzing crowd cheered his name on the public-address system.

Bob Boone had faced Sutter a total of six times and was oh-for-six with four strikeouts. Still, he was upbeat as he led off the ninth. The Phillies catcher had added twenty-five points to his batting average so far today with a homer, a double, and a single. Anything more would be gravy. The best sort of gravy would be scoring the winning run.

He took a split-finger pitch in the dirt. The Phillies’ game plan against Sutter was to try to wait him out. “Make him lift it. Make him throw it for a strike, that was the conventional wisdom,” Boone recalled. Such an approach meant taking pitches that looked knee- or even thigh-high on their way to the plate, expecting them to drop. If they didn’t—if a particular pitch was the poky fastball Sutter mixed in now and then to keep you honest—you looked bad. That look was described by some hitters as standing there with your dick in your hand.

With the count 1-0, Cavenaugh gave Sutter a borderline strike. His 1-1 splitter dipped into the dirt again. The Cubs were about to put the same grimy ball back in play when Boone called time.

“Boonie wants the plate umpire, Dick Cavenaugh, who’s had quite a workout today, to look over that ball,” Harry Kalas explained on Phillies radio.

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