Editor’s note: The following excerpt from the book “Don Drysdale: Up and In: The Life of a Dodgers Legend,” by former Orange County Register columnist Mark Whicker, is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books.
Joey Amalfitano played Major League Baseball for 10 years, managed in parts of three others, was a major league coach for 31 more, and became a minor league instructor. When most baseball people had either forgotten the fundamentals of the sacrifice bunt or condemned it altogether, Amalfitano was teaching them to minor league teenagers. He could tell you how to make any play at second or third base and he knew when to wave in runners or hold them from the third-base coaching box.
The key was knowing who he was. As a player he hit .244 with nine home runs — total. He wasn’t a real threat to Don Drysdale. But one day in 1964, Amalfitano stepped into the box at Wrigley Field and smacked a long line drive off Drysdale. “I thought, Hey, I caught one off this guy,” he said. But Tommy Davis, the Dodgers’ left fielder, leaped and grabbed it.
Amalfitano jogged past Drysdale on the way back to the Chicago Cubs’ dugout. “Joe, you’re swinging the bat pretty hard,” Drysdale said. “I didn’t think anything about it,” Amalfitano said.
The next time they met, Drysdale slung a fastball at him. “The ball went through my left sleeve and then through my right sleeve,” Amalfitano said. “Down I went.”
That night Amalfitano went out to dinner in Chicago. Drysdale waved him over to his table with his customary smile. “Why don’t you have dinner with me?” Drysdale asked him.
Amalfitano sat down. After a drink or two, he asked, “What did you do that for?”
Drysdale laughed. “You were swinging the bat pretty good,” he said. “I was only hitting .250,” said Amalfitano, who hit .150 against Drysdale “But that was just him. He was going to intimidate you if he could.”
Drysdale pitched in 518 major league games and hit 154 batters. That ranks 20th all time. Of the 19 pitchers ahead of him, only 12 pitched exclusively in the 20th or 21st centuries. Of those, Walter Johnson is the leader with 205—15 more than Randy Johnson and Eddie Plank. Two others, Tim Wakefield (186) and Charlie Hough (174), were knuckleball pitchers whose success depended on a pitch that behaved irrationally and independently. The only active pitcher who has surpassed Drysdale is Charlie Morton, who is in 12th place with 168. Ten of those 19 are in the Hall of Fame, and Roger Clemens (159) would assuredly be there if not for his suspected involvement with performance-enhancing drugs. The all-time leader is Gus Weyhing, who hit 277 batters, 79 of them in 1886 and 1887, his first two seasons. His career ended after the 1901 season. For much of his career, pitchers stood 50 feet away from the batter instead of the standard 60 feet, six inches. Weyhing was also famous for marrying Lou Gehrig’s cousin, Mamie, and for becoming the final pitcher to agree to wear a glove. He ranks fifth all time in wild pitches.
Throwing at hitters is the most dangerous part of baseball or used to be. Beanballs have ended careers and in one case ended a life. Drysdale never hurt anyone seriously. But he was the pitcher most associated with the high, hard one. He personified the art, even though many of his contemporaries were just as aggressive. Throughout baseball and particularly the National League, there were times in the 1960s and 1970s when all hitters knew that a knockdown pitch was coming. The difference with Drysdale was emphasis and lack of concern. He and Bob Gibson announced their contempt for a hitter’s mere existence. But Gibson wasn’t as tall and didn’t throw from such an extreme angle that the release point to right-handed hitters appeared to be centered over the Santa Monica Pier. “I hate hitters,” Drysdale said. “I start the game mad and I stay that way.”
Drysdale always denied that he drilled hitters on purpose, maintaining that his control was good enough to put the HBP (hit-by-pitch) record out of sight had he chosen to. But he never denied the use of the inside pitch as a preemptive weapon. Anger was part of the equation. Drysdale’s mood was never fouler than in the Dodgers’ first four years in Los Angeles when they played in the Los Angeles Coliseum, and Drysdale felt the left-field fence pressing at his back. Beginning in 1958 Drysdale hit 14, 18, 10, and 20 hitters, leading the National League each year. Those were the Coliseum years. “I’d get so mad that I’d get tired,” Drysdale told the Los Angeles Times. “Later in my career, I realized I was getting tired of getting mad.”
In 1956 and 1957, his first two years with the Dodgers and their final two years in Brooklyn, he had hit only 10 batters in 320 innings. The Dodgers moved into Dodger Stadium in 1962, where the air was cool, and the fences were only faintly visible. Visiting pitcher Frank Funk would call it “pitching at an airport.” Suddenly Drysdale was the best pitcher in baseball, winning 25, losing nine, posting an ERA of 2.83, leading the league in innings and strikeouts, winning the Cy Young Award, and finishing fifth in the Most Valuable Player Award voting. In those 321 1/3 innings, Drysdale hit only 11 batters. Bob Purkey of the Cincinnati Reds was the league leader with 14.
The endgame for Drysdale was to deny comfort. Like many successful pitchers, he used an arrhythmic delivery to his advantage. He maximized his height by firing from the side, and right-handers couldn’t see the baseball as quickly. Their feet were notably light already.
Catcher Jeff Torborg remembers a game in which Willie Mays walked into the batter’s box and started digging in. Mays had not looked toward the mound yet. “Willie, you do know who’s pitching today, don’t you?” Torborg asked.
Mays looked up, saw those familiar teeth, and frantically started trying to fill the hole. Too late. Drysdale floored him anyway. “Threw it right under his chin,” Torborg said. “Willie had that high-pitched voice. He got up and started yelling: ‘You don’t have to do that!’”
Mays’ slugging teammate Orlando Cepeda would join Mays and Drysdale in the Hall of Fame. “The best advice,” Cepeda said of Drysdale, “is to hit him before he hits you.”
“He throws baseballs like they were knives and he will lose his letter if he misses,” said Jim Brosnan, the Cincinnati right-hander famous for writing “The Long Season,” a precursor to “Ball Four,” the 1970 expose by Jim Bouton. “His idea of a ‘waste pitch’ is a strike.”
In the beginning, Drysdale thrived on two pitches. One was a fastball that rode into the right-handers and was responsible for many of the unintentional HBPs. The other was a breaking ball that dove toward the outside corner and stayed down. That one made Drysdale a ground-ball artist.
Joe Becker was Drysdale’s first pitching coach with the Dodgers. He got Drysdale to throw the curveball from a three-quarters delivery so he could “get on top” of the pitch and make it break downward. Then he doctored Drysdale’s change-up. Because Drysdale threw with a “stiff wrist,” Becker had him spin it from the inside of his fingertips, a motion that was most associated with screwball pitchers. “Except it won’t act like a screwball,” Becker said. “It’ll just slow up.” More than anything, Becker recognized the unique mix of elements. There was delivery, there was speed, there was assertion. “Tight to right-handers, away from left-handers,” Becker told him. “That’s your strength.”
Years later, Phil Regan joined the Dodgers and showed Drysdale a different ingredient. Drysdale was able to reach into the cabinet and put together what Torborg would call “the super sinker.” In English that was a spitball.
It caused major theatrics at times, involving the umpires and opposing managers, and Drysdale promoted the legend of the super sinker, figuring it planted one more apprehension in the hitter’s mind. Giants manager Herman Franks was a frequent accuser, but he saw opportunities in it, too. In 1968 Franks made a Vitalis hair tonic commercial with Drysdale. It began with Drysdale rubbing his hair before he stepped on the rubber. Franks roared out of the dugout. “It’s a greaseball, it’s illegal,” Franks charged.
Exasperated, Drysdale walked into the clubhouse as the fans booed, then came back and held up a bottle of Vitalis to the crowd, who cheered. “Vitalis has no grease,” the announcer said, as Franks shook his head and left the field.
When Milwaukee’s players, particularly pitcher Lew Burdette, began the chorus, Drysdale replied, “I don’t throw it. What they say isn’t the gospel truth. What I throw is a knuckle forkball.”
In his book Drysdale wrote that he’d actually learned the mystery pitch during his one Triple A year in Montreal. Drysdale saw Emilio Cueche loading it up without really pretending he wasn’t. So Drysdale got a crash course from his Montreal catcher Johnny Bucha.
Drysdale also chewed tablets that came from the bark of slippery elm trees. They were intended to soothe inflammation. “All it was … was a piece of wood,” Torborg said. But it activated saliva and made it easier to load up. “He wanted me to try it one time. You know that warm feeling you get right before you throw up? That’s what it felt like when I had it in my mouth. He was laughing at me. But it never bothered him one bit.”
This excerpt from the book “Don Drysdale: Up and In: The Life of a Dodgers Legend” by former Orange County Register columnist Mark Whicker is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit TriumphBooks.com/UpandIn.