The Futility Infielder

Pat Jordan has become one of my favorite baseball writers over the past few years. A minor-league pitcher in the late '50s, Jordan's career was finished by an extended bout of Rick Ankiel-esque wildness, a topic he's come to grips with via his writing career. Jordan eloquently told his own story in A False Spring, and went on to write several other books including another memoir, A Nice Tuesday, that's in my reading pile (more on that soon). He also writes meaty, insighful articles for the New York Times Magazine; his best one tells the Ankiel story, then pulls back to discuss his own failure. It reads like a story told by a ghost on a highway. "What's happening to you happened to me in 1961. I forgot how to pitch," Jordan tells Ankiel, "I've been thinking about it ever since."

Jordan writes about pitchers often, and he's got a new article called "The Hardest Stuff" this week about triple-digit fastballs and the men who throw them. I haven't read it yet, but I'll happily refund your money should you check it out on this blind recommendation and not dig it.

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Just as I suspected, the Jordan article good stuff, though perhaps a bit more slight than the author's usual fare. The pitcher takes brief looks at hard throwers such as the Cubs' Kerry Wood, the Astros' Billy Wagner, and Angels' minor-leaguer Bobby Jenks, examining both the physical and psychological sides to what they do. I gleaned two interesting facts from all of this:

• According to physicist Robert Adair, a 100 MPH fastball reaches the catcher four-tenths of a second after it's thown, and the batter has about .15 seconds to react.

• Early pitchers whose fastballs were recorded as crossing the triple-digit barrier were Bob Feller, whose heater was timed against a speeding motorcycle, and early '60s minor-league legend Steve Dalkowski. Given that Dalkowski was measured with a Juggs gun, which tracks the speed of the ball as it leaves the pitchers hand, and the fact that the ball loses up to 5 MPH on its way to the plate, it's estimated that the hard-throwing Orioles farmhand could throw 103 MPH.

103 miles an hour. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

As I've written before, Dalkowski's statistics are absolutely eye-popping. During his first year of pro ball, in 62 innings, he allowed only 22 hits and struck out 121 -- but walked 129, and went 1-8 with an 8.13 ERA. One year he struck out and walked 262 men in 170 innings. Former O's minor-leaguer-turned-screenwriter Ron Shelton used Dalkowski as the basis for the character Nuke LaLoosh in his movie Bull Durham.

Dalkowski never appeared in a major-league game, undone by alcoholism and an arm injury on the day he was issued a big league uniform. But last week the Orioles honored the pitcher, now 64, by having him throw out the first pitch of their September 8 game at Camden Yards. It's nice to see the man finally get some recognition.