Bob Gibson — dazzling, menacing and indefatigable — was the prototype for today’s aces
The Padres eliminated Gibson’s old team, the St. Louis Cardinals, with Craig Stammen as an “opener,” with Austin Adams getting the win with one out in middle relief and with Trevor Rosenthal fanning the side in the ninth. Yes, all three were discarded in recent times by the Nationals.
In fact, with two of their regular starting pitchers injured, the Padres used 26 appearances by 13 pitchers to cover the 27 innings of their series against the Cardinals.
They don’t make ‘em like they used to. They don’t make pitchers who throw 28 complete games, including 13 shutouts, in one season with a 1.12 ERA like Gibby did in 1968.
That’s what you are thinking, right? You know you are. I have been getting that email for 20 years. Why can’t pitchers go more than seven innings? Or six? Or five? And why, in recent postseasons, are some starters congratulated for lasting just four innings? What has happened to the game, to the pitching breed and to toughness?
I would like to reverse that. The premise is backward. In recent years, when you are watching peak Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, Chris Sale and a handful of others who throw close to 100 mph but also have one or two wipeout, hard-breaking pitches — plus a quirky delivery, pinpoint command, a fierce demeanor and a willingness to pound the entire lineup inside until they back off the plate — then you are really watching Bob Gibson, just 50 years later.
Gibson was the prototype. They are the excellent imitations and, as some top pitchers now master a fourth or fifth pitch, slightly better forms of the original.
But if Bob Gibson took the mound today, against an era of free swingers who have trouble hitting elite velocity at the top of the zone and elite plunging pitches that dive out of the bottom of the zone, the man nicknamed “Hoot” would be a perfect fit. I don’t know whether he would fan 250 or 325 a year, but that’s the range. And he would contend for the Cy Young Award.
A few other pitchers from his era (1959 to 1975), such as Sandy Koufax, would translate perfectly, too. Both had the velocity and the electric movement. But plenty of the good ones then did not have the size of the long-armed, 6-foot-1 Gibson or the all-sport athleticism — Gibson played for the Harlem Globetrotters in his first year out of college.
The proof that the pitching descendants of Gibson still exist was very much on display during last week’s first-round series. Gerrit Cole and Clayton Kershaw struck out 13 in their starts, and young Lucas Giolito, another ex-Nat, whiffed eight in a perfect game bid. They all have slight variations on the Gibson package — a swing-and-miss fastball at the letters and an almost unhittable slider, split-finger, curveball or change-up at the knees.
Such pitchers can still dominate, at least for 100 to 115 pitches, until they start to run out of gas. Everybody looks for them — the Stephen Strasburgs with a change-up and curveball that look almost the same until they break in opposite directions or a Patrick Corbin who, like Gibson, can throw his slider at various speeds and with different breaks.
But here is where the modern game diverges from the mythic tradition of pitchers such as my high school hero, Warren Spahn, who went 23-7 with 22 complete games when he was 42 in 1963. And here is where MLB has no choice but to innovate.
Unless you have some Gibson or Koufax in you now or unless you have some vague facsimile of the stuff of those who followed them, such as Nolan Ryan, Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson, or unless you cruise at 95 to 97 mph with at least one other high-quality pitch, you are just a food source for hitters.
When I came on the MLB beat full time in 1976, I regularly haunted old-timers games to talk to pitchers such as Gibson, Spahn and Koufax and anybody else who flirted with the Hall of Fame. How did you do what you did, and why can’t the pitchers that I am covering do it anymore? For more than 25 years, I heard variations of the same answer on why they could pitch 20-plus complete games but, now, three might lead the league.
Spahn may have been the first who told me, but many others, including Gibson, followed. The consensus: lineup depth. In the eras of Spahn and Gibson, there were rarely more than three or four home run threats against a pitcher who could command a fastball.
Often, those pitchers could cruise through most of the batting order, hitting spots, changing speeds — pitching, in other words — while knowing that “max effort” was not necessary. The worst that would happen was probably a single. If a jam developed, then they would start “reaching back” for the good stuff as needed.
In this century and some of the last, lineups got longer and tougher. Cheating with PEDs, starting with Jose Canseco and a few others as far back as the late 1980s, transformed physiques down the lineup. The result brought the need for max effort on almost every pitch to every hitter. Why? Because you were in a jam as soon as anybody stepped into the box.
Slowly, the ability to max out but still have enough stuff left to get through the batting order a fourth time disappeared. The complete game evaporated. In the past decade, many teams have accepted that some pitchers can only get through a lineup twice. Hitters have long hated breaking balls. But by the third time they see a junkballer, after going back to the clubhouse to watch their previous at-bats, the mystique has worn off and the bombs start exploding.
The ultimate example of this trend is the Padres’ nine-pitcher shutout to eliminate the Cardinals. Average pitchers can become good ones if they face only handpicked matchups — and not just righty-righty or lefty-lefty but matchups by whether the next few hitters prefer to bat against flyball pitchers or groundball pitchers, hard throwers or soft tossers, even those who tend to hit breaking balls but not change-ups.
In coming days, Gibson will be remembered and heralded for many things, including the fierce, borderline terrifying anger he brought to the mound. Gibson once told a young Goose Gossage: “Half of that plate is mine. Now you’ve got to figure out which half I’m comin’ after.”
In retirement, as he mellowed (slightly) and became willing to show his reflectiveness, he would openly discuss the source of that anger-turned-to-accomplishment: “I’m not angry now. I was then. Anger came from racism. Of course it did. But racism was a way of life. It was something I had to deal with on a day-to-day basis. … It followed me all the way through my childhood … but also through the first part of my major league career, too. It was there.”
This has been a tough year on my childhood baseball cards as well as my adult memories: Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Don Larsen, old Senators such as Dick Hyde and characters such as Jay Johnstone, who once tackled his manager, Tommy Lasorda, in a sliding pit in spring training, then led a renegade band of Dodgers in stuffing sawdust into his whole uniform.
When I heard Gibson passed away, I remembered his blazing-pink 1959 Topps rookie card, No. 514. I searched in my old shoe boxes of cards and almost gave up. Then I realized I had made it the very first card, in the first row of the first box in its own plastic case — a singular place of honor.
Just where it should have been.
