Word: wilhelm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...realized when I was pitching high school ball, says James Hoyt Wilhelm, "that I wasn't fast enough to get by. I had read about Dutch Leonard and the kind of junk he was throwing for the Senators, and I set out to see if I couldn't throw some too." Hoyt Wilhelm's "junk" is the craziest knuckle ball in baseball today. It floats up to the plate, dances tantalizingly before batters' eyes like a butterfly, then breaks sharply and unpredictably. One night last week his knuckler broke all over the place, kept...
...Giants gave up on Wilhelm after the 1956 season, when he temporarily lost the knack of getting men out in tight spots. His knuckler was missing the corners, and when he got behind the batters, Hoyt was forced to use a fast ball or slider, with disastrous results. "Hoyt began to worry and try different things, and the more he changed, the worse it got," says Wes Westrum, the Giants' catcher in those days...
...Wilhelm was sent to the Cardinals, then to Cleveland in the American League. The Indian batters gave him no support, their catchers could not hold his knuckle ball and despite a 2.46 earned run average, he had a 2-7 record...
Traded to Baltimore near the end of the season, Wilhelm was assured by Manager Paul Richards that he could be a starting pitcher. It seems to have made all the difference. As a starter, he did not have to throw so hard, could pace himself, concentrate more on control with softer pitches. Manager Richards figures that his knuckle-ball ace has four or five years of good pitching left: "He's my best pitcher now, and he's getting better." On that statement, Richards will get no argument from the rest of the American League...
...tale about a mole, a water rat and a scapegrace toad, called The Wind in the Willows. The London Times wrote stiffly that "as a contribution to natural history, the work is negligible." But Grahame's fable caught on with such varied readers as Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm, came to be one of those rare books recognized by both children and adults as a children's classic. It still sells about 80,000 copies a year...