My dad was the manager for all the little league teams I played on except two years when he was doing Uncle Sam’s bidding in the jungle.

 

He taught me to pitch. He started me early, I was maybe six and we would go out to the ball field at the school and he would squat down and be my catcher. He even went and bought a catcher’s mitt, so I would have a target to throw at.

By the time I was a new teenager I was pretty formidable, I could throw hard and I could hit my spots. He was beginning to teach me about location of my pitches and I was pretty unhittable my last year in the Majors.

When I got to Senior League he taught me a curveball. He wouldn’t even let me try a curveball before then. He said I’d hurt my arm, and hurting arms don’t pitch. He showed me a way to hold the ball in my palm and wrap three fingers around the ball and bend my index finger so that it would just touch the ball with the fingertip. He told me to throw it sidearm and let it roll off the one finger, then it would hit the heel of my palm and spin.

It did, and the first pitch I threw like that almost turned around and came back. I didn’t even snap my wrist. Then he told me I had to learn how to control it. He said, “Throw it at the hitter’s head, it’ll break and be a strike.”

The first game I pitched after that was maybe the most fun I ever had pitching. The guys would step up to the plate, and I’d throw a couple of fastballs, then I would rare back and throw the curve right at their head. They would dive out, land on their back and the ball would go right over the plate. “Strike Three, Yer outa there!!”

It was funny. I had fun with that all year. But some guys, real hitter guys, started getting it. They stopped bailing out and started swinging at it, so I had to use it sparingly on good hitters.

My dad had told me the pitch wouldn’t work when I got older. I couldn’t throw it hard enough to get out good hitters and the curve, though huge, was very predictable. So, with that in mind, when good hitters would come up, I wouldn’t throw it.

I was pitching one day and not doing that well. The other guys were getting hits and runs, and I wasn’t striking out my normal amount of hitters. And I wasn’t throwing the curve. The old man called time and came out to the mound to talk.

He asked me why I wasn’t throwing the curve, and I told him because I was afraid they would hit it. He told me to try throwing it overhand instead of sidearm. He said it’ll be like a boat with a hole in it and sink right into the dirt when they took their swing.

I did, and they did. It was like learning a completely new pitch. My catcher didn’t like it much, but he was damned good and blocked most of them. It was divine.