Sometimes the best pitching coaches have to include certain warnings amidst their kit bags of advisories for their charges. High on the list of those warnings: be careful what you wish for. Especially when it comes to trying new pitches for which you're not exactly renowned and respected.
Tarik Skubal would tell you if he didn't still remain hell-bent on throwing a better slide than the one he's got. Stories abound of late that the young Tigers ace might have a plus slider in its own right but what he's really aching to throw is future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw's.
"I've been trying to get Kershaw's slider for four or five years and I can't get it," he told ESPN's Jeff Passan in late April. "I just can't get it. So it's frustrating. But at the same time, the beauty of the sport is you're just one cue away from getting the pitch shape you want or getting the velocity."
The problem, often enough, and too often for comfort still, is that you're also just one cue away from getting the pitch that kills your career. Or, even developing the pitch that brings you to the mountaintop and then throws you to the rocks below. That's whether it was your own brilliant idea or an idea imposed upon you by your pitching coach or even your manager. I still remember a few examples and these are only the best known or remembered:
Joe Black — You could ask the National League's 1952 Rookie of the Year. Intimidating fastball and a tight little slider the type the oldest school called "the nickel curve." The best reliever on the '52 Brooklyn Dodgers, then the first black pitcher to start and be credited with a win in a World Series that October. Next season: manager Charlie Dressen insisting Black try throwing pitches he was physically unable to grip thanks to unusual index finger tendons. Confidence and, in very short order, career shot, thanks as well to an arm bone crack of unknown origin.
Dick (The Monster) Radatz — Mickey Mantle gave him his nickname. For three full seasons and much of a fourth, Radatz lived up to it above and beyond once his Red Sox minor league manager Johnny Pesky convinced him relief pitching was his destiny. Like Black, he had an exploding fastball and a tight slider. Come 1965: by his own admission, Radatz began experimenting with other pitches that spring, particularly a sinker Ted Williams suggested he could throw effectively. Starting in 1966: four more major league stops in search of his lost consistency, then gone.
Sudden Sam McDowell — The 1960s American League's version of Sandy Koufax, at least in terms of his fastball and his five-times-league-leading strikeouts. Flaw number one: his tendency toward walks. (He led the entire Show five times.) Flaw number two: for whatever reason, the day came when the self-admittedly-insecure McDowell decided he needed to add a changeup to his repertoire. Said Thomas Boswell retroactively, "Hitters prayed for it." (That was before McDowell's battle with the bottle finally drove him out of baseball and toward his second life as a cleaned-up and in-demand sports therapist.)
Steve Stone — Good but often hard-luck pitcher who decided, as an Oriole, that come 1980 he needed to throw more curve balls in one season than he might have thrown in his entire preceding major league life and whatever would be, would be. The good news: he won the Cy Young Award after a 25-7 season that wasn't quite enough to put the defending pennant winners back into the postseason. The bad news: throwing all those 1980 curve balls left Stone with tendonitis so severe that he could only post for 15 games in 1981 and called it a career after that season. The happy aftermath: he's been a successful and popular broadcaster for the Cubs and the White Sox in the decades since.
Fernando Valenzuela — Fernandomania dominated the earth in 1981. So did Valenzuela's screwball, which nobody discouraged him from throwing at least as often as Stone was throwing those 1980 curves. Sure, he had other solid pitches, but the scroogie was his money pitch and, when married to overwork, his doom. Thomas Boswell, spring 1993: if only Valenzuela had really been three or four years older, maybe the Dodgers wouldn't have incinerated his career and left the best of him in the past before he ever reached his 25th birthday. But he was so good, so legendary, so unbelievable, that they could not keep from abusing him with overuse. And Fernando was too polite, too dedicated, too in love with the game to say, "no."
Dwight Gooden — In 1984-85, Gooden ruled baseball planet even more profoundly than Valenzuela had. Rising, riding fastballs and curve balls so voluptuous that Uncle Charlie wouldn't suffice for a nickname: Gooden's were known as Lord Charles. "I'd trade my past for his future," said no less than Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax. With batters barely hitting .201 against him after those two seasons, of course. Oops. Spring 1986: Too many Mets brain trusters decided Gooden needed more pitches. Shades of Joe Black, but to the tenth power:
"I always thought they should have left Doc alone. [Pitching coach] Mel [Stottlemyre] thought teaching him a third pitch would be to his advantage. But he didn't need it. He needed someone to say, "Hey, you've been successful. Just keep going at it." But they didn't. I also think it hurt his shoulder. The pitches didn't feel natural to Doc, and pitching was so natural to him. It just wasn't smart." — Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter
Gooden got lucky when all was said and done. He'd never again be Dwight the Great. But he would put a long enough and respectable enough career together in spite of that 1986 mess-around and his coming issues with substance abuse and shoulder troubles. To this day Met and other fans wonder just what might have been.
If Tarik Skubal and others at his talent level want to endure well, they will perform some serious introspection and remember what happens when you try to fix what doesn't need the repairman. (The foregoing, I repeat, are just the best-known examples over time.) And their coaches will make sure they perform it.
Skubal might care to follow his hero Kershaw's example in another way. In search of the lost chord? Kershaw's been in search of the lost changeup. "For the entirety of his 18-year career," Passan wrote, "Kershaw has entered spring training in search of a usable changeup, only to throw it a dozen or so times a year. Sometimes a pitch isn't meant to be." Skubal should stick with what's been working unless he'd like to be known like too many predecessors. The career that wasn't meant to be.
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