“Now ‘Rube,’” would be “Robbie’s” first line in the daily lecture, “you’ve got to start on the first ball to get the batter. Always have something on him and never let him have anything on you. This is the prescription for a great pitcher.”
One of the worst habits of Marquard’s early days was to get a couple of strikes on a batter and then let up until he got himself “into a hole” and could not put the ball over. Robinson by his coaching gave him the confidence he lacked.
“‘Rube,’ you’ve got a lot of stuff to-day,” “Robbie” would advise, “but don’t try to get it all on the ball. Mix it with a little control, and it will make a great blend. Now, this guy is a high ball hitter. Let’s see you keep it low for him. He waits, so you will have to get it over.”
And out there in the hot Texas sun, with much advice and lots of patience, Wilbert Robinson was manufacturing a great pitcher out of the raw material. One of Marquard’s worst faults, when he first broke into the League, was that he did not know the batters and their grooves, and these weaknesses Robinson drilled into his head—not that a drill was required to insert the information. Robinson was the coacher, umpire, catcher and batter rolled into one, and as a result look at the “Rube.”
When Marquard began to wabble a little toward the end of 1911 and to show some of his old shyness while the club was on its last trip West, Robinson hurried on to Chicago and worked with him for two days. The “Rube” had lost the first game of the series to the Cubs, but he turned around after Robinson joined us and beat them to death in the last contest.
Pitchers, old and young, are always trying for new curves in the spring practice, and out of the South, wafted over the wires by the fertile imaginations of the flotilla of correspondents, drift tales each spring of the “fish” ball and the new “hook” jump and the “stop” ball and many more eccentric curves which usually boil down to modifications of the old ones. I worked for two weeks once on a new, slow, spit ball that would wabble, but the trouble was that I could never tell just when or where it was going to wabble, and so at last I had to abandon it because I could not control it.
After sending out fake stories of new and wonderful curves for several years, at last the correspondents got a new one when the spit ball was first discovered by Stricklett, a Brooklyn pitcher, several seasons ago. One Chicago correspondent sent back to his paper a glowing tale of the wonderful new curve called the “spit ball,” which was obtained by the use of saliva, only to get a wire from his office which read:
“It’s all right to ‘fake’ about new curves, but when it comes to being vulgar about it, that’s going too far. Either drop that spit ball or mail us your resignation.”
The paper refused to print the story and a real new curve was born without its notice. As a matter of fact, Bowerman, the old Giant catcher, was throwing the spit ball for two or three years before it was discovered to be a pitching asset. He used to wet his fingers when catching, and as he threw to second base the ball would take all sorts of eccentric breaks which fooled the baseman, and none could explain why it did it until Stricklett came through with the spit ball.
Many good pitchers, who feel their arms begin to weaken, work on certain freak motions or forms of delivery to make themselves more effective or draw out their baseball life in the Big Leagues for a year or two. A story is told of “Matty” Kilroy, a left-hander, who lived for two years through the development of what he called the “Bazzazaz” balk, and it had the same effect on his pitching as administering oxygen often has on a patient who is almost dead.