Skip: He walked 18.
Larry: A new league record!
Skip: He struck out 18.
Larry: Another new league record. … In addition, he hit the sportswriters, the public address announcer, the Bull mascot — twice. Also new league records. But Joe, this guy’s got some serious #@$%#.
Sure, Steve Dalkowski threw a no-hitter where he walked 18 and struck out 18. You know what he called that? A Tuesday. Dalkowski did stuff like that all the time. He threw six no-hitters in high school, counting his time in summer ball, and he struck out and walked double digits in three or four of them. He had a game where he struck out 20 and walked 19.
And high school was just the beginning.
In 62 innings in Kingsport, Tenn., he gave up 22 hits … and threw 39 wild pitches.
In Class-C Aberdeen, he threw another no-hitter and struck out 21 batters even though he threw only one curveball the entire game (“Almost hit a batter,” he said).
In Knoxville, he struck out 82 batters in 42 innings and didn’t allow a home run. And his ERA was still 7.93 because he walked 95 batters.
In Stockton, he set a California League record with 262 strikeouts in only 170 innings. He also set a California League record with 262 walks.
Dalkowski once threw six wild pitches in a row, once walked the first nine batters he faced, once allowed 21 stolen bases in a single game, once broke a guy’s arm with a fastball, once tore off a batter’s earlobe with a fastball, and once threw a pitch that glanced off the top of catcher Cal Ripken Sr.’s glove and hit umpire John Lipini in the head, sending Lipini back 18 feet and knocking him out cold.
“Hey Dalkowski,” a fan sitting behind home plate yelled before a game. “You pitching tonight?”
“Sure looks that way,” Dalkowski said.
The man’s face went white. Dalkowski had pitched the night before and on three consecutive pitches, he’d thrown the ball high over the catcher’s head into the wire netting. All three balls had torn through the netting and smashed into a seat.
“If that’s the case,” the man yelled, “I’m getting the hell out of here, and I’m taking my kids with me.”
Dalkowski nodded. Couldn’t blame the guy.
Steve Dalkowski? Yeah, this guy had some serious #@$%#.
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| Check out the walk totals |
The thing you have to remember through all of this is that he is very real. Nothing about Steve Dalkowski sounds real or feels real. But he pitched not so long ago. He was born just two months before Carl Yastrzemski and just a little more than 100 miles away. We are not talking about a Negro Leagues player or 19th-century player whose legends have been carried through the years. No, Bobby Cox played against this guy. Davey Johnson played against this guy. Pat Gillick was a teammate of this guy.
He grew up in New Britain, Conn., the same area as George Springer and Carl Pavano and Rob Dibble. He was an athletic prodigy. Dalkowski was the star quarterback and halfback of two undefeated New Britain High football teams. He was a slugger who crushed long home runs even as a 14-year-old playing in the summer leagues.
And that arm — well, you already know about that left arm.
All 16 big-league teams made a pitch to him. Dalkowski ended up signing with Baltimore after scout Beauty McGowan gave him a $4,000 signing bonus, the largest allowed at the time. Yes, it’s true that the other 15 teams probably also offered him the maximum bonus, but I’m not sure how many of the others paid him 12 grand under the table and bought him a new car. Anyway, that’s how the story went.
Whatever the Orioles paid, they undoubtedly would have paid more. An arm like that comes along once a century — maybe not even that often. “Steve is faster than any pitcher I’ve ever seen,” former big leaguer Billy DeMars said, “and I played against Bob Feller and Rex Barney.”
The pitch was an absurdity. It’s not like Dalkowski was some giant. He was a sturdy 5-foot-11, weighed 175 pounds or so, but there was something about his arm action, something about his wrist action, the baseball just jumped to light speed when it left his hand.
And he had no earthly idea where it was going.
Oh, he had a decent sense of the width of the plate. Of course, he wasn’t exactly going to pitch to corners, but in general, his problem was not longitude. He could get somewhat over the plate.
But how far over? Well, that was a problem. The Orioles would tell him to aim for the dirt in front of the plate, he’d throw the pitch nine feet over the catcher’s head. There was some thought among the Orioles coaches that he simply put too much backspin on the ball and that made it rise beyond his ability to control it.
Was the ball really rising? It’s actually a more interesting question than it might seem because you’ve probably heard that rising fastballs don’t actually rise. The baseball simply doesn’t fall at the expected pace, which gives the illusion of rising.
This is also true of 100-meter sprinters who appear to be going faster at the end of the race when they pull away. In fact, they are just slowing down less than the other runners.
But this fascinating story by David Kagan, a physics professor, shows that actually it is possible — if you throw the ball hard enough and with enough backspin — to make the ball rise. The reason nobody talks about this is that nobody actually throws the ball even close to hard enough to make it happen. Kagan looked at pitchers in 2016 and found the closest was (obviously) Aroldis Chapman, who threw the fastball at an average of 104 mph with 2,360 rpm of backspin. This was not enough to make the ball rise, but Kagan figured that if he could throw the ball 113 mph and push up the backspin to 3,100 rpm, he could get it to rise.
Did Dalkowski achieve that seemingly unimaginable level of speed and spin?
People who saw him pitch swear that he did. Even going back to when he was a kid — his junior high coach told the Baltimore Sun his fastball “made a loud buzzing sound.” Cal Ripken Sr., who you know caught (or sometimes didn’t catch) Dalkowski’s fastball, estimated it went 110 mph. Cincinnati Reds manager Birdie Tebbetts called it a “radio pitch,” — “can’t see it, but you can hear it” — after his team faced Dalkowski in an exhibition game.
That was quite the scene. Dalkowski threw eight warm-up pitches. Five of them hit the screen behind home plate. He faced three batters that day — Don Hoak, Dee Fondy and Alex Grammas — and all three struck out happily and quickly because their only goal was to not get killed.
“I’ve been playing ball for 10 years,” Grammas said. “And nobody can throw a baseball harder than that.”
The story goes that an aging Ted Williams was curious and stepped into the batting cage* against Dalkowski, saw one pitch, dropped his bat and said that he didn’t need to see that pitch again. He’d survived this long in baseball, he didn’t need to take any more chances.
*People who saw Dalkowski pitch say that when he threw to hitters in a cage, he sometimes missed the cage.
Sportswriter George Vecsey tells a story of seeing a New York Yankees team with Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle face Dalkowski in spring training … and he watched as they jumped out of the way, pitch after pitch, and then went to the dugout to compare their bailout techniques.
The Orioles did everything they could think of to help Dalkowski find his control. Everything. They had a coach standing behind him during simulated games offering positive reinforcement between pitches. Didn’t work. They had two batters standing on each side of the plate at the same time to give him a tunnel view of home plate. Didn’t work. They tried to tire him out by having him warm up for an hour or two before the game, hoping that would exhaust him so he wouldn’t overthrow the ball. Didn’t work. The kid was inexhaustible. He’d throw 200 or 250 pitches in a game, and the last of them was just as hard and wild as the first.
They tried to break down every part of his pitching motion, trying to change his arm angle, his stride, his grip, where he stood on the rubber, on and on. But nothing worked. And as time went on and each experiment failed, Dalkowski’s personal life began to disintegrate. He’d always lived close to the edge — “Playboy Dalkowski,” the newspaper writers called him — but over time, he lost control. He began to show up at ballparks hungover … or drunk. One teammate, Herm Starrette, recalled that rooming with Dalkowski was just like rooming with a suitcase.
But the Orioles couldn’t give up. “Stick with him,” Hall of Fame pitcher Hal Newhouser said. “You’re never going to see another arm like that.”
Finally, Earl Weaver took over. Weaver was still young then, full of fury, yes, but also full of ideas. He managed Dalkowski in Elmira and he figured the Orioles had been handling the kid all wrong. They kept throwing all these different ideas at Dalkowski, but Steve couldn’t process all that. The only way to get through to Dalkowski was to give him one simple directive.
So Weaver told Dalkowski to pitch nice and easy and into the catcher’s glove. Just play catch out there. Weaver insisted he didn’t care how hard the pitch was — lob it in there if necessary — just throw the ball to the glove.
And when the time was right, when he got two strikes on a hitter, Weaver would whistle — and that was a signal for Dalkowski to throw the next pitch as hard as he could.
Incredibly, it worked, at least for a while. What Weaver knew was that even if Dalkowski thought he was throwing the ball easy, it was still going very, very fast. Dalkowski had that sort of arm. And he knew that Dalkowski would do everything in his power to throw those strikes because that would mean Weaver would whistle and let him unleash.
“He loved to hear that whistle,” Weaver would say.
In 1962 in Elmira, Steve Dalkowski was an entirely different pitcher than he had been his first five seasons in the minor leagues. He was still close to unhittable — he pitched 160 innings and allowed just 117 hits, only two of those being home runs. He struck out 192 — that 10.8 strikeouts per nine innings was well below his typical pace, but it was plenty good enough when you added in his newfound control.
He walked only 114 batters in those 160 innings.
For just about any other pitcher in baseball history, 114 walks in 160 innings would not be seen as a breakthrough. It would be seen as career-ending. But for Dalkowski, well, I’ve shown this in stories before but it’s so incredible that it’s worth seeing again. Here is Dalkowski’s walks per nine innings through his minor-league career leading up to Elmira:
He was an entirely different pitcher — he even threw a complete game without walking anybody. “I just don’t know,” Dalkowski said of his transformation. “I sure hope it continues.” At age 23, he was a full-fledged prospect, so much so that Topps put him on a Rookie Stars baseball card. He came to spring training in 1963 and pitched well enough to make the club. But then he hurt his arm and never got to throw a single big-league pitch.
His arm was never the same again. He did pitch three more years in the minor leagues, trying his luck with Pittsburgh, California and Baltimore again, but the fastball was no longer as hot.
Dalkowski’s life after baseball has been sad and difficult; he suffered from alcoholism, couldn’t keep a job and disappeared for a time. He now lives in an assisted living facility in Connecticut. When Jon Hock directed the movie “Fastball,” he caught up with Dalkowski and asked him to show the pitching motion. Dalkowski held out his arm.
“What are we looking at,” Jon asked him. “What did that arm do?”
“Threw the ball faster than anybody that ever lived,” Dalkowski said. “Anybody.”
For the movie, Jon obviously tried to find some film of Dalkowski pitching. He looked everywhere. The Hall of Fame. Local television stations. He even put out a request to any hobbyists who might have filmed Dalkowski pitching with their home movie camera.
Yes, Steve Dalkowski was very real.
But as far as anybody knows, there is no footage of him throwing a baseball.
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