Finding the story where at first there appears to be none
Dave Kindred |
May 6, 2010 1:08 p.m.
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"Dave, I saw the attached on the Cardinals website. . . ."
Rosenfeld asked, "Do you know what kind of pitch Adam Wainwright is throwing here? Is that his slider grip? I’d like to say, ‘I’ve never seen a grip like that before,’ and have it mean something. But it’s more than likely readily recognizable to, well, anyone who knows more than me – which is a huge demographic."
About here I remembered a lesson from the late Jack Kent Cooke. He once sold encyclopedias door-to-door in the wilds of Canada. He eventually owned the Washington Redskins, the Los Angeles Lakers and Kings, the Fabulous Forum, the Los Angeles Daily News, and New York City’s Chrysler Building. He was the money man on the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, traded to put Wilt Chamberlain with Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, gave Sparky Anderson his first managing job, and hired Joe Gibbs from anonymity.
Cooke always said, "If you don’t know the answer to a question, the proper answer is, ‘I dunno, but I’ll find out.’"
Education, after all, is not knowing everything.
It’s knowing where to find it out.
Rosenfeld’s question intrigued me because I like to talk with athletes about how they do what they do. The best come with unique genetic gifts, but that’s only part of the equation; they maximize their talent by knowing how to use it. To see Greg Maddux pitch was to see a master at work. He threw in the mid-80s, little more than a batting-practice fast ball – except he changed speeds, knew where he wanted to put each pitch and could put it precisely there. He came with the fast ball when the hitter had every reason to expect a change-up, and he came with the change when the hitter finally figured out the fast ball was next. Not only did Maddux have the rare gift of perfect control, he knew how to pitch – and that was no gift. He earned the knowledge, as I learned one day.
"I saw in the paper today," Maddux said, talking about a guy who’d reached him for a home run the night before, "that he said, ‘I hit a change low and away.’"
Here Maddux smiled, a slow, mysterious smile, a Mona Lisa smile, and said, "Wasn’t a change."
"What was it?"
"Not saying."
Whatever it was, I knew this: That guy would never get that pitch again.
"What I’d really like to do some day," I said, "is watch you through a game and talk to you later about how you made decisions on pitches. Like, ‘Thinking along with Greg Maddux.’"
Maddux, a gentleman, did not laugh out loud.
He said, "Not going there."
"Aww, how come?"
"Hitters read the paper, too."
Sometimes when there appears to be no story, that is the story. So I wrote about Maddux’s stone-cold refusal to talk about his secrets and how he came to discover them. But, happily for the columnist, many of the best often just keep talking. A famously taciturn infielder from the Dominican Republic talked with me for an hour about his first glove – cut from a cardboard box and held to his hand by a shoelace. An NFL coach said he watched film on a state-of-the-art projector that, he said, "cost more than the first four houses I owned." One of Kentucky’s great basketball players grew up shooting at a coat hanger twisted into a circle and nailed to a clothesline pole. A stock car star wrote himself a note, in orange paint, on his car’s accelerator pedal: STAND ON IT.
Listen long enough, you learn that they’re wired differently from you and me. Watch them long enough, you know they’re the best animals in the forest, bigger, quicker, stronger.
Just this week, a professional golfer told me he had practiced writing with his off-hand, the left, because he knew the fine muscles of his left hand were important in the putting stroke.
"And now I can write left-handed as well as I can right-handed," he said.
Here’s a small thing from a baseball game. It’s about the way a baserunner’s mind works. Ryan Zimmerman of theWashington Nationals was on second base with none out. A long fly ball went to dead center. Might be a double, might be caught. Zimmerman had started toward third only to move back to second. The dull mind – Red Smith said baseball is dull only to those with dull minds – might have wondered, "What’s Zimmerman doing?"
He did it because he knew it didn’t matter what happened with the ball.
If it were caught, he could advance to third.
He also knew that if the ball fell in, he didn’t need the head start that a dull mind might have thought necessary; he could score from second, anyway.
In that moment, I learned that not only can Zimmerman play, he knows how to play. So many questions for him: Did he know how well the centerfielder ran, how well he threw? Did Zimmerman know which way the ball would bounce off the wall? Had he scored from second on a standing start before? As he did this time, how often had he moved to third on a fly to center?
All that, we could talk about.
With Adam Wainwright, there’s that grip seen in an extraordinary photograph of the pitcher’s arm in motion.
His index finger is high off the ball. His thumb is curled way under it.
A slider? A change of some kind? What?
I asked someone who would know for sure – or could find out. An old friend, Joe Strauss, now at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch covering the Cardinals, sent me an e-mail.
"The answer to your question is his curveball," Joe wrote. "Wainwright begins his delivery with the index finger pressed against his middle finger. As his arm begins to descend, the finger comes off the ball and the middle cuts through the ball. Probably more info than you need, but there it is."
Perfect, Joe. We could talk for an hour.
