He’s a Profile of Greatness in Pitching

It is the nose you notice first. It is an imperious instrument, aloof, disdainful, regal. You imagine Caesar had such a nose. Cyrano. De Gaulle certainly did. It has a nobility all its own. The nose of a man who likes to take charge.

The eyes that sight down along its moraines and crevasses are alight with inquisitiveness, wariness, alertness. They are the eyes of the scout going through Indian country in advance of the wagon train. They see everything, miss nothing.

The profile is right off a buffalo nickel, and for 21 years in the big leagues, National League batters would curse when they saw it out on the mound taking that peculiar, long windup like a condor taking off, kicking that right foot high in the air--and sending a ball plateward that came up there like a hound dog going home along a picket fence, full of detours, stops or unexpected reappearances.

Anyway you want to look at it, Warren Spahn is the best left-handed pitcher baseball has ever seen.

You want victories? He had 363 of them. With four years out for military service.

You want 20-game seasons? He had 13 of them, more than any other left-hander who ever pitched.

You want strikeouts? He led the league four times in those.

No-hitters? He got two of those, one when he was 39 and the other when he was 40.

Shutouts? He had 63 of those.

You look at the numbers and you picture to yourself some troglodyte with a blue-steel beard and a tattoo and a fastball in the 105-m.p.h. range.

Warren Spahn had a fastball, but you didn’t need a radar gun to clock it. A calendar might have done on some nights. It didn’t glow in the dark on its way to the plate. But it never came up there in the same place twice. It never came where--or when--the batter was expecting it.

He didn’t even have a curveball. Not in the sense that Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax did.

Warren Spahn never threw a predictable pitch in his life. The batter who guessed was at his mercy. He studied hitters the way some people study butterflies. And pinned them the same way.

“They are creatures of habit,” Spahn says. “They will react in a given situation in the same way three times out of three.”

Hitters have pitches they will never swing at, according to Spahn. You throw these for strikes. Hitters also have pitches they will always swing at, he says. You throw these for balls. “The best pitch in baseball is the pitch that looks like a strike but isn’t,” he says.

Spahnie had a whole arsenal of those. On the mound, he was part Feller and part Freud.

“I played with the hitter’s ego,” he says. “I flattered him up there. The trick was to get him aggressive. Once you got him in a macho frame of mind, you could play games with his mind.”

It was kind of like lion-taming for Spahn. The madder he got the animals, the easier it was to get them to do what he wanted them to do.

But Spahn rendered to these Caesars the things that were Caesar’s. “I gave them the whole middle part of the plate,” he says. “I didn’t deal with that at all. The plate is 16 inches wide, and I let them have the 10 inches in the middle. All I wanted were the three inches on either side. I wanted the black part of the plate. The hitter could have the white.”

It was once said that Satchel Paige could throw a whole afternoon of pitches off the mound and across a gum wrapper in the same spot. And Warren Spahn could throw it across a dollar and make change for you. “He never walked a man unintentionally,” the late Charlie Dressen used to say.

A 2-and-0 count in baseball is widely considered as a pitcher being behind the hitter. Warren Spahn had the hitter right where he wanted him on a 2-and-0 count.

“Most pitchers load up for a ‘cripple’ in that situation,” he says. “So, the pitcher starts to aim the ball--a batting-practice pitch.”

Spahn always gave them the pitch with the false whiskers and wig in that situation--the one that looked like a strike but underneath the hair and dark glasses was Ball 3. Manager Fred Haney used to chirp when the count was 3-and-1, “Well, Spahnie is ahead of the hitter again.”

“I never threw to the catcher, I threw to the backstop,” Spahnie says. “You want to feel as if your catcher is stopping the ball just as it’s beginning to do its tricks, not after they’re through. Most pitchers concentrate on just getting the ball to the catcher. That’s why their curveballs bounce.”

You would think a paragon of pitching virtuousity like this, a modern equivalent of Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Carl Hubbell, would have commanded seven-figure salaries in his prime--or at least six.

Warren Spahn was paid $250 a month when he first came up to the big leagues, if the 1942 Boston Braves could be called the big leagues.

When he came back after four years at war, he was rewarded with a raise--to $500 a month.

When he won 21 games in 1947, he held out for a salary of $21,000--$1,000 per victory. If Dwight Gooden wins 21 games this year, he will get $95,298 per victory.

The most Warren Spahn ever got for a season was $87,500. Mop-up pitchers won’t work for that today.

So, Spahn is in town to see if he can pull off one more 20-game season for the grand old game. This time for all the ballplayers who worked in this game for small pay and upper berths and one bar of soap for the whole road trip.

Spahnie remembers those cost-saving days. When he broke his nose in spring training as a rookie, the team president, Bob Quinn, advised him against getting it fixed. “Nose jobs give you sinus trouble later on,” he soothed. “Besides, you don’t exactly look like Robert Taylor or Tyrone Power, anyway.”

Spahnie has needed two handkerchiefs to blow his nose ever since, but it was true. He never had sinus trouble. Neither do elephants.

The Equitable Life Assurance Society of America is sponsoring a series of old-timers’ games, three-inning games preceding regularly scheduled major league games and contributing to a fund in support of old-time ballplayers. A disgraceful condition has cropped up, with some all-time stars like Enos Slaughter reduced to a $400 pension or with the wives of late great players like Gil Hodges struggling to make ends meet.

The Anaheim portion of this laudable venture will take place Saturday at 5:30 p.m. Legendary Angels like Leon (Daddy Wags) Wagner, Albie Pearson, Bobby Bonds, Rudy May & Co., will take on Spahn and fellow Cooperstowners such as Bob Gibson, Ernie Banks and Eddie Mathews, plus Orlando Cepeda, Tommy Davis and Mudcat Grant.

The old-timers are way behind on the count. In fact, it’s 3-and-0 and the bases are loaded against them. Of course, that’s exactly the kind of situation Spahn always liked. He’s got ‘em now. Let’s watch him come in with his pitch.