“A base on balls,” replied Warner, without cracking a smile.
That’s always been Wagner’s “groove.”
There used to be a player on the Boston team named Claude Ritchey who “had it on me” for some reason or other. He was a left-handed hitter and naturally drove the ball to left field, so that I could not fool him with a change of pace. He was always able to outguess me in a pinch and seemed to know by intuition what was coming.
There has been for a long time an ardent follower of the Giants named Mrs. Wilson, who raves wildly at a game, and is broken-hearted when the team loses. The Giants were playing in Boston one day, and needed the game very badly. It was back in 1905, at the time the club could cinch the pennant by winning one contest, and the flag-assuring game is the hardest one to win. Two men got on the bases in the ninth inning with the score tied and no one out. The crowd was stamping its feet and hooting madly, trying to rattle me. I heard Mrs. Wilson shrill loudly above the noise:
“Stick with them, Matty!”
Ritchey came up to the bat, and I passed him purposely, trying to get him to strike at a bad ball. I wouldn’t take a chance on letting him hit at a good one. Mrs. Wilson thought I was losing my control, and unable to stand it any longer she got up and walked out of the grounds. Then I fanned the next two batters, and the last man hit a roller to Devlin and was thrown out at first base. I was told afterwards that Mrs. Wilson stood outside the ground, waiting to hear the crowd cheer, which would have told her it was all over.
She lingered at the gate until the fourteenth inning, fearing to return because she expected to see us routed. At last she heard a groan from the home crowd when we won in the fourteenth. Still she would not believe that I had weathered the storm and won the game that gave the Giants a pennant, but waited to be assured by some of the spectators leaving the grounds before she came around to congratulate us.
All batters who are good waiters, and will not hit at bad balls, are hard to deceive, because it means a twirler has to lay the ball over, and then the hitter always has the better chance. A pitcher will try to get a man to hit at a bad ball before he will put it near the plate.
Many persons have asked me why I do not use my “fade-away” oftener when it is so effective, and the only answer is that every time I throw the “fade-away” it takes so much out of my arm. It is a very hard ball to deliver. Pitching it ten or twelve times in a game kills my arm, so I save it for the pinches.
Many fans do not know what this ball really is. It is a slow curve pitched with the motion of a fast ball. But most curve balls break away from a right-handed batter a little. The fade-away breaks toward him.