Pitching in a Pinch; or, Baseball from the Inside

by Christy Mathewson

“Because I could hear the rattle of the tin can you wanted to tie to me, all over the lot,” replied Evans. And eventually, by that subtle dodging, he landed in the Big League under Bresnahan and has made good out there.

I believe that a pitcher by profession has the hardest time of any of the specialists who go into a spring camp. His work is of a more routine nature than that which attaches to any of the other branches of the baseball art. It is nothing but a steady grind.

The pitcher goes out each morning and gets a catcher with a big mitt and a loud voice and, with a couple of his fellow artists, starts to warm up with this slave-driver. The right sort of a catcher for spring rehearsing is never satisfied with anything you do. I never try to throw a curve for ten days at least after I get South, for a misplaced curve early in the season may give a man a sore arm for the greater part of the summer, and Big League clubs are not paying pitchers for wearing crippled whips.

After warming up for an hour or so, three or four pitchers throw slow ones to a batter and try to get the ball on the half bounce and compete as to the number of fumbles. This is great for limbering up.

Then comes the only real enjoyment of the day. It is quick in passing, like a piece of great scenery viewed out of the window of a railroad coach going sixty miles an hour. Each afternoon the regulars play the Yannigans (the spring name of the second team) a game of six innings, and each pitcher has a chance to work about one inning. The batters are away off form and are missing the old round-house curve by two feet that they would hit out of the lot in mid-season. This makes you think for a few minutes that you are a good pitcher. But there is even a drawback to this brief bit of enjoyment, for the diamond at Marlin is skinned—that is, made of dirt, although it is billed as a grass infield, and the ball gets “wingy.” Little pieces of the cover are torn loose by contact with the rough dirt, and it is not at all like the hard, smooth, grass-stained ball that is prevalent around the circuit in mid-season. Grass seed has been planted on this infield, but so far, like a lot of bushers, it has failed to make good its promises.

After that game comes the inevitable run around the park which has been a headliner in spring training ever since the institution was discovered. A story is told of “Cap” Anson and his famous old White Stockings. According to the reports I have heard, training with the “Cap” when he was right was no bed of roses. After hours of practice, he would lead the men in long runs, and the better he felt, the longer the runs. One hot day, so the story goes, Anson was toiling around the park, with his usual determination, at the head of a string of steaming, sweating players, when “Bill” Dahlen, a clever man at finding an opening, discovered a loose board in the fence on the back stretch, pulled it off, and dived through the hole. On the next lap two more tired athletes followed him, and at last the whole squad was on the other side of the fence, watching their leader run on tirelessly. But “Cap” must have missed the “plunk, plunk” of the footsteps behind him, for he looked around and saw that his players were gone. He kept grimly on, alone, until he had finished, and then he pushed his red face through the hole in the fence and saw his men.

“Your turn now, boys,” he said, and while he sat in the grand-stand as the sole spectator, he made that crowd of unfortunate athletes run around the track twice as many times as he himself had done.

“Guess I won’t have to nail up that hole in the fence, boys,” “Cap” remarked when it was all over.

Speaking of the influence of catchers on pitchers during the training trip, there is the well-known case of Wilbert Robinson, the old catcher, and “Rube” Marquard, the great left-handed pitcher of the Giants. “Robbie” devoted himself almost entirely in the spring of 1911 to the training of the then erratic “Rube,” and he handed back to McGraw at the end of the rehearsal the man who turned out to be the premier pitcher of his League, according to the official figures, and figures are not in the habit of lying.

“Robbie” used to take Marquard off into some corner every day and talk to him for hours. Draw up close, for I am going to tell you the secret of how Marquard became a great pitcher and that, too, at just about the time the papers were mentioning him as the “$11,000 lemon,” and imploring McGraw to let him go to some club in exchange for a good capable bat boy.