Word: pitches
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...five-cent head. Nuke is a little raw. He's meat in need of curing, and Annie sees that as her mission. So she straps him into her bed and reads passages from I Sing the Body Electric. You remember Walt Whitman; according to Annie, he pitched for the Cosmic All- Stars. And his dithyrambs, invoking "limitless limpid jets of love," could be in praise of a fastball pitcher whose arm doesn't turn to overcooked pasta in the top of the ninth. They could also be about sex. "When you know how to make love," Annie tells Nuke...
...student was not the Undergraduate Council chairman, nor was he a reporter. He was an employee of the audio-visual department, and he was videotaping Spence's fundraising pitch...
...Rather he finds images that seem to trail a whole narrative history behind them, but obliquely -- so that you, as viewer, are put at the threshold of a hidden life that may, if you look closer, be yours. Fischl is a true American realist, but he works at a pitch of psychological truth ! (especially about adolescent sexuality) not known in the American narrative art of his forebears in the '30s. At his best he seems, roughly, a cross between Edward Hopper and the Philip Roth of Portnoy's Complaint. Thus it seems just right that Roth has written a catalog...
From here, Angell can see the less tangible but more meaningful, subtle, and lasting aspects of the game. Instead of grilling Bob Boone or Jim Sundberg on why they called a certain pitch at a certain point in the game, Angell asks them about their craft. What ensues is a wonderful chapter, a round-table conversation with some of the game's best catchers, including Boone, Carlton Fisk, Terry Kennedy, and Ted Simmons, on how they go about their job. You find out how catchers call a game, settle down high-strung pitchers, seize up-and-in, rising 95-m.p.h...
...this chapter is that Johnny Bench, without a doubt the greatest catcher of his time, probably set back the art of catching, on account of his own great skills. Only Bench, with his extraordinarily quick release and balance, Angell's argument goes, could get away with catching the pitch one-handed, which normally catchers are taught not to do so that their throwing hand is on the ball if a Rickey Henderson or Vince Coleman tries for second base...