Word: pitcher
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...changing. Cal Ripken Jr. sets a new record for consecutive games every time he steps onto the field. Juan Gonzalez may beat the record for RBIs that Hack Wilson set in 1930. The Yankees threaten to win more games this year than the 1906 Cubs, who won 116. Rookie pitcher Kerry Wood tied the record of 20 strikeouts in a game--and did it at age 20. The most famous mark in sports, Roger Maris' single-season home-run record of 61 in 1961 (Can you see why we weep?), is being attacked on three fronts: McGwire...
Like Ruth, who got his nickname for being so much younger than his teammates, McGwire was a phenom. At eight years old, in his first Little League at bat, against a 12-year-old pitcher, he smacked one over the fence. And like Ruth, who was a dominating pitcher, McGwire was the best righthander on his sophomore U.S.C. team, allowing fewer runs than teammate Randy Johnson, who has since won a Cy Young award...
...starve batters--he just serves them table scraps, stuff they can't really smack. Lots of his pitches dribble into the infield. Almost none fly out of the park (only five this year and none in his five face-offs against McGwire). Jim Palmer, a Hall of Fame pitcher, calls Maddux "a master at late movement," a baseballese way of saying his pitches dance away at the end, eluding the bat when it's already flying forward. He connives to throw, from the same unhurried motion, at a wide variety of speeds. Wade Boggs once called Maddux "the David Copperfield...
Once I happened to be on the field at Yankee Stadium before game time when the players were warming up. Wade Boggs and Don Mattingly tossed a ball between them without a trace of effort, bodies rearing up and pivoting gently in a casual parody of a pitcher's full windup toward the plate. Every easy toss was delivered at a speed greater than a good high school fastball pitcher could generate. Thwack, thwack, thwack in the leather. And the silence between the men on the field. It was interesting to note that even at their level, this was still...
...slowed? In 1975, the Elias Sports Bureau says, the average length of the American League game was 2 hr. 25 min. Last year it ran 2 hr. 57 min. (National League games run about 10 min. shorter, probably because the American League's designated-hitter rule has removed the pitcher from the batting order; pitchers usually make for quick outs.) That half an hour is a huge increase, yet it fails to measure the agony of those games in which the earth's rotation seems to stop, in which the stillness is broken only by the faint sounds of grass...