A Big-Time Loser Creates Big Winners

There is an axiom in baseball that it takes a good pitcher to win 20 games a season--but only a great one can lose 20 games a season.

So, what would you say of a pitcher who lost 46 games in two consecutive seasons? Who holds the listed National League record for consecutive losses in a season--18 in a row in 1963?

You would probably say that this guy either knew where a lot of front-office bodies were buried--or knew a lot about throwing a baseball.

In the case of Roger Craig, the answer is No. 2.

Roger Craig lost 24 games in 1963. But that’s nothing. The team (the New York Mets) lost 120. Both are (modern) league records.

In 1963, when Roger Craig lost 18 in a row, the Mets only managed to lose 15 in a row. But they weren’t bearing down. In ‘62, they’d lost 17 in a row. Their specialty was missing bases, missing tags, missing team buses and missing strikes. They were also good at getting thrown out at home. To say nothing of at first.

Craig had a better case for non-support than the town drunk’s wife, but incredibly, he pitched 27 complete games in those two seasons. To give you an idea, that’s more complete games than Mike Scott pitched in his nine-year major league career up to this year.

A guy doesn’t get to lose 24 games in one season and 22 in another unless he has good stuff.

In the season when he lost 24 games, he lost five 1-0 games and got shut out 11 times. “I started 33 games, and in one-third of them my team didn’t score a run for me,” Craig says. “I won 10 games, which was one-quarter of all the games the Mets won. That year, Don Drysdale won 25 games and the Cy Young Award. But the Dodgers won 102 games. So, he didn’t win quite one-quarter of his team’s games. The Cy Young Committee wasn’t impressed, though.

“In 1966, Sandy Koufax announced his retirement, and I think the stock market went down. I got released by three clubs, and nobody even sent me a card.”

Craig’s career was not without high spots. He came to the old Dodgers (then in Brooklyn) with a 90-m.p.h. fastball, a good hook and a deceptive slider. He beat the New York Yankees in Game 5 of the historic 1955 World Series, the only one the Brooklyn Dodgers ever won.

He hurt his arm in the last game the Brooklyn Dodgers ever played--at Shibe Park in Philadelphia in 1957. He came West with the team but was reduced to pitching by guile and cunning. He nonetheless had a 2.06 earned-run-average in 1959--no small feat pitching in the Coliseum.

Roger was never more than a spot pitcher after that, although he won another World Series game (for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964), and in the Dodgers’ pennant year of ‘59, it was Roger the Dodger who pitched the game in Chicago that tied the team (with the Milwaukee Braves) for the pennant.

But Roger Craig will go down in history not for his 74-98 record or his 20-game seasons (losses that is). Roger makes his mark because he broke with baseball tradition. He believed it was possible to teach old dogs new tricks.

Baseball is the most under-instructed sport in the whole spectrum of games people play. Football refines and re-refines its product. Golfers are always looking for a guru to take strokes off their games. Tennists have their private tutors in 9 cases out of 10.

Baseball figures, hey, you’re a big leaguer! Go figure it out for yourself. Baseball practices, it doesn’t teach.

Roger Craig stumbled on the most valuable instructional tool a mentor can have when he was conducting a baseball camp for youngsters in San Diego after his retirement. He needed to find a pitch that would put no strain at all on young arms. Curveballs are contra-indicated for still-forming young bones.

Roger devised a breaking ball that could be thrown with no stress at all on the elbow. It was a version of the venerable forkball except that it did not call for the pitching fingers to be positioned down the side of the baseball, merely spread or split a bit on the seams.

It was so teachable, it was laughable. It was a pitch that not only looked and acted like a fastball, it hummed like one. It could be thrown with almost the same velocity. The forkball was an off-speed pitch, but the split-finger came up to the plate with the speed and sweep of the fastball--then dropped out of sight as if it had hit a trapdoor. The beauty of it was, it was not illegal.

Craig never threw the pitch in competition himself. “The key to it was, I found an easy way to teach it,” Craig says. “All a pitcher needs is a fastball to begin with and fairly large hands. The good part is, even if you don’t throw it for a fastball, it’s a good straight change for you.”

You probably can’t teach a guy to hit. God had to beat you to it. But pitching, like putting, is a learned skill. When Roger went to Detroit as pitching coach for the wily Sparky Anderson, the staff improved from 11th in the league to first, and the Tigers became World Series champions as Craig taught Jack Morris, Milt Wilcox, Juan Berenguer and other staffers his new “out” pitch.

Baseball being baseball, it let Craig retire to rustic San Diego County--till the spring of ‘85, when he taught an in-and-out Houston pitcher the mystery pitch. Mike Scott electrified the league in ’85 and ’86. A 5-11 pitcher suddenly became an 18-8 Cy Young Award winner. “The good news is, a JV pitcher suddenly becomes a varsity star with this pitch, a triple-A player becomes a major leaguer, and a starter becomes a star,” Craig explains.

The lesson was not lost on the canny Al Rosen when he moved from Houston to San Francisco to take over the Giants in September of ’85. He did everything but send flowers to get Roger Craig as manager.

The result has been a division title for San Francisco, a pitching staff full of pitches that dive like a cormorant after a fish. The team went from a 100-loss season and last place to an 83-win season and third place to a 90-win season and the playoffs.

Baseball should have known what to expect. Anybody who can lose 24 games one season and 22 the next has got to be one of the best pitchers who ever lived. That ought to rank with the double no-hitter. An experience like that would turn anyone into a great teacher. Or a monk.