he was one of the
smartest pitchers
he knew that every pitchers career was like a graph
start out twenty four twenty five the big leagues it starts going up thirty you're at your peak
twenty-five game winner
and then thirty one thirty two thirty two you start going down you're losing your fastball
you go down and if you don't discover something new you're out of baseball by thirty five
so Spahnies attitude was
some guys wait until they lose their stuff
and then say oh
i have to come up with another pitch
and it takes them two years to come up with another pitch
at which point they're
eight and fifteen
nine and fifteen
then they're twelve and twelve then they're sixteen and ten again okay
he says i don't want to wait to lose those two years so while he was a fast ball pitcher
he began experimenting
with off speed pitches
like he picked up a change-up screwball
slider slider used to be just basically overhand fastball overhand curve
classic
left-handed josh beckett
while he was at the peak of his game he was still working on other pitches
so spahnie never had that valley
you look at his career you never see the drop off that you see in the thirties
that you would see with most other pitches
he just kept winning twenty-five games all the way through his
thirties until he was forty
he ended up with what three hundred and sixty three wins three hundred and sixty three wins somebody once told me
steve carlton was the greatest left hander who ever lived
I said excuse me
go check warren spahn's record
and you know of course spahn like ted williams
lost three years to the war
that's why he didn't come up 'till he was twenty five
williams lost more than that he was in two wars
I think he lost a total of four years over to wars he was in the korean war he was
in the second world war
yeah he lost about
uh... maybe a hundred and eighty home runs
something like that
Spahn lost well he didn't come up 'till he was twenty-five where as otherwise he would have come up when he was twenty two
something like that
so twenty two so even if he won ten games a year twenty two twenty three twenty four he would have won thirty games so he would have been close to
four hundred victories
what did glavine do
glavine I talked to tommy when he was uh...
years ago
I asked him why he doesn't throw more curve balls and all that
he said I was always a nibbler I was never a power pitcher
he said so he
you know i mean he was all
what killed glavine and maddux
was when they redefined the strike zone with the umpires a couple years ago 0:02:40.319,0:02:42.680 they were outside inside pitchers
six inches off the plate
and the umpires used to call outs
now the umpires are calling more up and down
and they can't throw up and down
tell me something I mean they can but they get hurt
i read a
uh... baseball book uh... recently by tom verducci
who you must know 'cause he writes for sports illustrated
I know the name and he said
that what happened in baseball
is that
guys like glavine and maddux by nibbling at the corners for awhile caused the umpires
to extend the lateral range of the plate
at the same time
when you and I were kids up here
was a strike you had to come down here I don't know what happened but somewhere
along the line the strike zone shrunk
it became from the waist to above the knees
that was a strike
but it stretched
it became six inches outside six six inches inside
well not inside because six inches inside you hit the guy in the knee
it became an outside thing
and uh...
uh... remember the game livan hernandez pitched in the world series
struck out fifteen batters
and i think greg was the umpire
forrest greg
I'm not sure of his last name
those pitches were a foot outside he was calling strikes