Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1613: The Need for Steve

Episode Date: November 7, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and guest co-host Steven Goldman of Baseball Prospectus banter about MLB’s Friday news dump, covering the Red Sox hiring Alex Cora, the Mets cleaning house in the front office and the potential for new owner Steve Cohen to be baseball’s offseason spending savior, and the league announcing that it wouldn’t discipline the Dodgers’ […]

I will always be the one to break the news if it's alright. I never want to bring you down, no. I will always be the one to speak the truth if it don't hurt. I never want to see you frown, no. I never want to bring you down. Hello and welcome to episode 1613 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Sam Miller and Meg Rowley are off today, so I have the pleasure to be joined by my pal Steve Goldman, who is a writer and editor for Baseball Perspectives and the host of the excellent Infinite Inning Podcast. Hello, Steve. Hey, I'm so flattered to be third on the death chart.

Yeah, happy to have you back. It's been a while and we have a bunch to talk about today. We actually have a guest. We'll be doing an interview. So back in April, I guess it was, Meg and I talked briefly about Steve Dalkowski because he had died at age 80. And we recounted some of the myths and the legends about the player who never made the majors but is reputed to have been the hardest thrower in baseball history. Before there was Sid Finch, before there was Nukalalush, there was Steve Dalkowski. And unlike those other two, he actually existed. He pitched in the Orioles minor league system in the 50s and 60s. And at the height of his fastball powers, he would strike out 17, 18 batters per nine innings. The only problem was that he would walk 16, 18, 20 batters per nine innings. So he never made the majors, but he came quite close. now there's a new biography about him. I think it's really the first dedicated biography about him. It's called Dalko, and we will be talking shortly to one of its authors, Brian Vikander,

who is an experienced pitching coach and mechanics expert himself, in addition to being an author. So I enjoyed that conversation, and we will get into the life and times of Dalkowski and try to figure out exactly how hard he actually threw. But before we get to that, we are recording on a Friday afternoon here. And there was quite a Friday news dump in baseball today. It's almost as if a couple teams maybe wanted to time certain announcements for the moment when no one would be paying attention. I don't know, maybe I'm ascribing motivations to them that don't actually exist. But it was somewhat suspicious that very shortly after Joe Biden took the lead in the Pennsylvania count, John Heyman broke the news that the Red Sox had hired Alex Cora. So that was the perfect time if you just wanted to sort of slip that under the radar and get the minimum amount of backlash to that. Not super surprising, I suppose, given that A.J. Hinch was hired by the Tigers last week and there were a lot of signs pointing to a reunion here. But what did you make of the official news?

It is sort of like, to tie it to the election, the way that the pardons will be going out at 11 59 p.m on the last day yeah just try try not to think too hard about this alex cora thing you know i'm not that exercised like it it seems like the trash can banging thing has been contained and will always remember it. But I don't necessarily see Cora as some kind of irredeemable evil genius. I think he exploited the situation as it existed then. It doesn't exist the same way now. Does he have a second nefarious plan? I don't know. But what I think not bothers me, but renders this as something that I'm kind of ho-hum about, is that this is not the same Red Sox team that he last had. It's not even though, I mean, the 2019 team wasn't the one that he had in 2018.

True. But, you know, Betts is gone, and Chris Sale had surgery, and we don't know when he's going to be back or what shape he's going to be in. Most of that pitching staff is gone, in fact. Eduardo Rodriguez missed the whole year. He's still here. Evaldi is still around and I guess pitched decently during this attenuated season. But we don't really know how impactful he's going to be because we don't know what he's going to have to work with. And that's kind of the global thing with this whole offseason. You know, Ben, the thing that we don't know in a normal offseason,

you and I might be talking now and we could be saying, you know, the Rockies, they haven't really had a great first baseman or even a good one since like that one season Justin Morneau had, or maybe since Todd Helton's prime. How are they going to improve at that position? Will they care? Often they don't. Will they sign this winter's Ian Desmond instead of doing the obvious thing? Often they don't. Well, they signed this winter's Ian Desmond instead of doing the obvious thing. But instead of that, we'll be talking about how they're more likely to ditch a Nolan Arenado to save money. So we don't even know. And John Henry has made some noises that, yeah, they're going to be back in it and so on. How quickly, how aggressively teams will upgrade and if the Red Sox will really have any relevance. And I think we know enough about managers now to know it's the roster. It's not the genius in the dugout. Yeah. And he seemed to really click with that team. But as you said, that team is not really around, not in the way that it was. And I think it's not surprising in that they never really seemed to fully move on from him. They just stuck with Ron Renneke, who had been the bench coach for a year. They didn't really hire someone on a permanent long-term basis. And so it seemed like the stage

was set for him to come back. And it was clear that they wanted him. There had been rumors about this. And evidently, they went to Puerto Rico to interview him. So they went to him. It was pretty clear, I guess, that maybe by that point, they were already convinced unless he came out and said, yes, I plan to steal signs again in the interview. But I think what he was implicated in was the Astros sign stealing scandal. And he was implicated in a different way than Hinch was. Hinch, we've talked about it on the podcast, he really had kind of an ineffectual response. He seemed to be against what was happening, but didn't really take any effective steps to stop it. Whereas Cora was seemingly instrumental in actually setting up the scheme. of any knowledge or wrongdoing. And I suppose you could be skeptical and say, well, if he was doing this in Houston, then how would he not know that the Red Sox were doing some aspect of that

themselves? But the report cleared his name. And so he was kind of preemptively fired by the Red Sox, I think, before the report came out. And he didn't actually do anything wrong that we know of while he was with the team. So I don't know if that made a difference to them. But I think he seemed like he had a bright future ahead of him when he won that World Series, and maybe he still does. He probably doesn't deserve to have that hang over his head forever to the extent that it prevents him from getting another chance. I think the aspect of it that does sort of surprise

me is that there is a new GM in Boston, Hein Blum. And I don't know whether this is something that was more ownership mandated. It was reported that Blum had the final call, but it's really hard to say because I think even the White Sox, even Rick Hahn said that he had the final say on La Russa or at least some input, and that seemed dubious. So I don't know whether Bloom had to go along with this or whether he wanted to because usually the new executive wants to bring in someone new as opposed to someone who predated him. And maybe he just agreed that he was the best man for the job, or maybe he didn't have any serious objections, or maybe he did but wasn't really allowed to do anything about it.

Maybe he was overruled. I do want to say, by the way, that Heimblum and I overlapped at BP. He was an intern when I first got there. My memories of him are all positive, and we did meet up in person a couple of times. But I would tease him about the glee club. And if I knew he was in his college Glee Club, and not in a bullying way, as you know, I write music, I like to sing, I've sung in public. So he seemed to take it with good humor. But if I'd known he was going

to be the general manager of the Red Sox, I probably wouldn't have done that. I would have sucked up more, even though he's like 20 years younger than me. So if you're listening, Haim, it really was all in good fun and call me, okay? And if you're listening, please don't poach any more of my podcast co-hosts. I can't spare them. If there is a backlash to this, it probably won't primarily be coming from Red Sox fans. It may be coming from people around the game who feel like Cora should have had to wait a little longer. He should have had to earn his way back in. He didn't even really miss a full season or a full season that was as long as it was supposed to be. So it's not like he had to do any extra penance.

He was just welcomed back with open arms immediately. But Red Sox fans and players, I'm sure they like the guy for the most part. And you can see why, because he took over a team that was one of the most successful in recent history, and probably the most successful in franchise history. So in a lot of ways, he is probably as good a managerial candidate as is out there. It's just that he does come with this package that not a lot of other guys do, but it just didn't seem like teams were going to hold that against Hinch and Cora, and this just seemed to be a predestined outcome. And now I'm kind of curious if and when Carlos Beltran will get another chance. It would have been interesting if they

had been more successful this year. You know, there's a kind of analog in what happened with Leo DeRocher in 1947, and it would take us about three years to explain why he was suspended for the 1947 season. But they got a caretaker manager, and they were successful. They won a pennant. They didn't win the World Series, but still they were fine. And the plan all along was for DeRocher to come back in 48 after this year's suspension that he had. And they realized, you know, we kind of had more fun without him. And so they, after short order, arranged for him to move on and he wound up with the Giants, which was similarly kind of a cognitively dissonant thing for Giants fans because they had learned to hate him so much with the Dodgers. much with the Dodgers. This is not the same because it was a rough year, almost a planned rough year for the Red Sox. And Renneke, as you said at the outset, was clearly a caretaker. So that conflict doesn't really exist. It's set up for him to kind of ride to the rescue and have

there be all upside. But again, unless they are going to be really assertive about solving the many problems the roster has right now, I don't think that's going to be a rapid thing. And in other news dumps that surfaced on Friday, this was more about departures than additions and arrivals. But the Mets cleaned house, again, not completely unexpectedly, because we had heard that Steve Cohen, who is officially the owner of the Mets now, that was finalized on Friday and wasted no time, I suppose, in either forcing people out or maybe they read the writing on the wall and left willingly.

But Cohen said a while ago that he was going to be rehiring Sandy Alderson as the team president, probably overseeing the baseball operations and business sides. And it just seemed likely that Brody Van Wagenen was not going to stay on as GM with someone elevated above him and with a new owner who might not have wanted him anyway. The surprise is that not only did Van Wagenen leave, but he took everyone with him, or at least they all went with him. So it wasn't just Van Wagenen who left, but former GM Special Assistant Omar Minaya, Assistant General Managers Howard Baird and Adam Guttridge, and the Executive Director of Player Development Jared Banner.

So they are seemingly starting over. They're starting fresh. Unless Jeff Wilpon contractually got to keep his corner office. Maybe Steve Cohen has the key, however, and no one is obliged to open the door. They just slide food through some kind of slot. I think in a sense, this is a good time for it. And I don't mean to be cynical, but there have been so many layoffs and cuts around the major leagues due to pandemic-inspired belt tightening, which really seems like an excuse because, again, the people at the top make millions and the people who are being cut make fractions of that. But they do have, the Mets do have, a wide array of choices with which to restaff the

organization, right? Yeah, I would think so. It seems like a pretty enviable position because at least there's buzz that Cohen will be willing to spend, which it doesn't seem like a lot of other people will now. He has already restored employees' pre-pandemic salaries, which, as we've discussed, is a drop in the bucket when it comes to his net worth, but is still a step that most other team owners or a lot of them have not opted to make. So it does seem like a job that a lot of people would want. It's a big market team. It's a team that has underperformed historically. It seems like they should be set up to be a perennial winner, and they have not. And we've seen in the past that when they have won, the city has embraced them.

There's a lot of upside there. So if they believe in Cohen that he is going to put his money where his mouth is and that he is going to listen to what his baseball people tell him to do, seems like a great place to go as opposed to some of the other openings around the game where you have various reasons to worry about ownership interference or cheapness or other reasons that would make those jobs less attractive. So you'd think that they would have their pick of the litter. I do wonder too if that sort of like Cora is a longer term thing. Cohen has promised to spend, and in a normal year, you would think he would, to make a splash, to win the fans back, to get everybody's confidence. But one of the things that we don't know for the spring is if there will be fans in the stands in large numbers, if we will open the season on time, if we will have some semblance of normality.

open the season on time, if we will have some semblance of normality. And as we're saying this, this is a dark time for the coronavirus. There is a resurgence happening around the country, and numbers are really skyrocketing. And states like my state, New Jersey, are talking about going back into some kind of partial lockdown, at least to the extent that we've eased it. And so what I kind of wonder is if in a normal year, somebody as wealthy as Steve Cohen is very capable of saying, well, I'm willing to deficit spend to this amount because our revenues are going to offset it. But in the year that we might have, that's not necessarily true. Or at least that that gap that deficit will be that much longer Because no one's buying beer and hot dogs and foam fingers

And so I wonder and and again, maybe he's so flush with money And I mean he is that he can say all right double the losses triple losses. I don't care, but I'm not sure of that I'm not sure if that's really the way it's going to be, especially because sort of the league average, the bar for rebuilding may be that much lower based on what everyone else is doing. pays them what they would be worth in a normal offseason, then maybe he can wind up with George Springer and Trevor Bauer and JT Real Muto and he can collect all of the free agents. But maybe it's over-optimistic to think that way. It seems like people are positioning the Mets as the saviors of this offseason. And maybe they will be. But also, if Cohen, you know, if he's someone who is going to approach spending like a lot of teams have recently, well, that hasn't really looked like paying premium prices for free agents on long-term deals. So I don't know that he will go down that road that is not so well-trafficked anymore.

And also, if no one else is bidding, then he doesn't have to outbid them by that much to get them. So I don't know. Maybe it's believing too much in the rhetoric that he's going to come out there and single-handedly save the free agent market. But it would be nice if someone were willing to spend. And I should add that if Cohen doesn't spend anything but simply revises certain practices that seem to be endemic during the Wilpon years, then the Mets will improve. where they would say, you know, today's starting pitcher, he has a bit of a sore shoulder. Let's give him 100 pitches and see if he works that kink out. And then we'll send him for an MRI. And then maybe we'll give him two more starts to see if he loosens up from that. And then maybe send him for another MRI and yell at him a bit if he has to go on the deal. Like just these sort of common sense things where they could more rationally run the franchise

and not drive guys into surgeries because they view injuries as a manhood issue, that would be better all by itself and it doesn't cost a dime. Yeah. We've talked to David Roth on this podcast about this and you've talked to David Roth about this on your podcast. He's a popular fellow, that David Roth. We've made the point that they've developed a lot of talent. A lot of that talent is still there. So if they could surround it with good players and avoid that self-sabotage, then it wouldn't take too long necessarily for them to be good. I mean, they're already competitive. They managed to miss the playoffs in a year with 16 teams in the playoffs, but barely. They almost made it, and a lot of things went against them. And I think

probably they had the talent to make it. So it wouldn't take a long-term rebuild or an enormous investment to make them a competitive team in 2021. One Zach Wheeler instead of two of Mike Wacca and Rick Porcello, and they probably would have made it. Yes. So let's complete the trifecta here on our Friday News Dump. The other item is that Justin Turner will not be suspended for his actions following World Series Game 6, when he came back out onto the field after testing positive for the coronavirus and was palling around and hobnobbing with people on the field, in some for the coronavirus and was palling around and hop knobbing with people on the field, in some cases without wearing a mask and embracing and acting irresponsibly. And there was sort of a joint statement by Turner and Rob Manfred and Stan

Kasten of the Dodgers. Turner, he apologized for his actions and he attempted to explain, if not excuse, why he did what he did. I'll read a little bit of Rob Manfred's statement here in which he announces why he decided not to discipline Turner. And I should note that I don't know what his options were exactly for disciplining Turner. And maybe that is why they made the decision that they did, because the season, I guess, was technically over at that point. So I don't actually know if MLB has the authority to do anything. Maybe it did, but I think maybe they were also worried that if they disciplined Turner, they would bring attention on themselves. So I'll read a little bit about this. Manfred says, First, Mr. Turner's teammates actively encouraged him to leave the isolation room and return to the field for a photograph.

Many teammates felt they had already been exposed to Mr. Turner and were prepared to tolerate the additional risk. Second, Mr. Turner believes that he received permission from at least one Dodgers employee to return to the field to participate in a photograph. Although Mr. Turner's belief may have been the product of a miscommunication, at least two Dodgers employees said nothing to Mr. Turner as he made his way to the field, which they admitted may have created the impression that his conduct was acceptable. Third, during the somewhat chaotic situation on the field, Mr. Turner was incorrectly told by an unidentified person that other players had tested positive, creating the impression in Mr. Turner's mind that he was being singled out for isolation. And this is interesting. Finally, Major League Baseball could have handled the situation more effectively. Big of Mr. Manfred to take some responsibility on himself here. He says, for example, in retrospect, a security person should have been assigned to monitor Mr. Turner when he was asked to isolate,

and Mr. Turner should have been transported from the stadium to the hotel more promptly. And then he goes on to say that Turner has recognized that what he did was wrong and has expressed remorse, etc., etc. It doesn't say anything about MLB's actions in not removing him from the game earlier when there was that inconclusive test in the second inning, which some people have questioned whether MLB had an obligation at that point to take him out of the game, and others have suggested that perhaps not that perhaps in the quasi bubble and with all of the negative tests that had been received that maybe the odds were such or the risks were low enough that it was acceptable for him to stay in that game even though during the regular season he probably would have or should have been removed. So Manfred doesn't acknowledge any wrongdoing there,

but he backs off a little bit, I suppose, of the initial MLB statement, which put all of the onus on Turner and accepts at least a little bit of the responsibility. I agree. I think it's kind of Sato Voce that this was on them. But really, the buck should stop with Major League Baseball, with the commissioner's office. There should have been a security officer there or some representative of Major League Baseball there making sure that everyone was safe. Some equivalent of Smokey the Bear, Chokey the COVID prevention bear, should have been there holding up his big paw and saying, stop, and whisking Turner the heck out of the stadium. I think it was a chaotic environment. I imagine that no one wanted to deprive the Dodgers of one of their best players and team leaders in a Crucial World Series game. That's a heavy thing to do. At the same time, as I was saying over on my show this week, that there have been players who have missed Crucial World Series games for injury or illness over time, and their teams were either harmed by them or managed to overcome that.

But it's just part of baseball. And in this case, the difficulty with COVID as a whole, and for everyone in sort of the cultural arguments that we've fallen into, but this applies to baseball also, is that you are making a decision in leaving Justin Turner, not just for Justin Turner, but for two rosters of ballplayers and whoever else is on the field. And that is taking a lot of responsibility. And yes, the odds were low. And yes, as you said, they were in a bubble and they've had false positives and so on.

But it seems to me that the morally correct thing to do is, as we've learned, I've learned to hate these words, out of an abundance of caution, to eject him from the ballpark, essentially, to isolate him and his wife, unfortunately, and just go on from there. It's not necessarily acceptable to just say, well, oh, well, the damage has been done. I guess we'll let it play out. Yeah, this was definitely not an abundance of caution. It seems like maybe a minimum of caution was happening here. But in the immediate aftermath, I wasn't sure where to lay the blame really, because I had some sympathy for just, as you said, the chaos of the situation and all of these people running around. And also, I wasn't really clear on the sequence of events.

And was there some harried security person there who was expected to forcibly remove Justin Turner? Was he barreling past this person to get to the field? Is it that person's responsibility to block Justin Turner, thereby maybe infecting themselves. I wasn't exactly clear on what the expectations would be there. From Manfred's comments here and from Turner's comments, it seems like no one was really getting in his way or strenuously objecting to his return. He says he was waiting there for a while. He asked whether he would be permitted to return to the field with his wife to take a photograph. He says he assumed by that point that a few people were left on the field. And he says he was under the impression that team officials did not object to his returning

for a picture. And then he goes on to say that he unwisely removed his mask while he was out there and that in hindsight, he should have waited anyway. But if what he says is accurate and if what Manfred says is accurate, it doesn't sound like anyone was blocking his way and he physically forced past them. It sounds like no one was really laying down the law here. So while it is on him, it's also on MLB and maybe to some extent the Dodgers, I think, for not making it clear that that was not permissible. It's poor judgment on his part and poor execution on baseball and the Dodgers part. And this is a longer discussion, but when you have complex systems and various bureaucracies, they don't always function in a way that you can pin blame on one person. There can just be cascading dysfunction. And I think that's what we saw here. And as far as I

know, Turner's okay. That's the important part. And there haven't been any spread of the disease that we know of. So maybe we all ducked one here. And as I was alluding to earlier, this is a lesson that probably will have to be carried forward into March and into the regular season. Yeah, there was actually just a new report that five members of the Dodgers organization and a family member have tested positive for COVID, according to the L.A. County Department of Public Health. to the LA County Department of Public Health. The LA Times story about this cites a person with knowledge of the situation who said that none of the five positive tests came from people inside the Dodgers playoff bubble in Texas last month. So if that can be believed, those infections may not be related to Turner's behavior. But whether they are or they aren't, it was clearly the kind of behavior that could have caused infections. And that's why we were all pretty appalled by it when it happened.

So just scanning the headlines at MLB Trade Rumors, it doesn't look like anyone has been hired or fired or rebuked since we started talking here. So I guess we can pause for a brief break. And we will be back with Brian Vikander to discuss the sad and fascinating saga of Steve Dalkowski. All right, we are joined now by Brian Veitkander. He is one of the authors of Dalko, the untold story of baseball's fastest pitcher, which came out last week, the biography of Steve Dalkowski. Brian, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be with you. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

So everyone discovers Dalkowski in their own way and in their own time. What was your journey to learning about the legend? And then what made you feel like you wanted to research his story seriously? 1960, I was a little leaguer in California, and I heard about this guy throwing octane in a place called Stockton. And quite frankly, as a little leaguer, I wasn't quite sure what minor league baseball was. I knew all 16 major league teams and every player that played on them, but I wasn't sure about this. And we all went out and everybody tried to throw as hard as they could to equal the myth that had somehow circulated from Stockton to Pasadena. Later that year, my father, reading Time magazine,

saw an article on Dalkowski and said, is this the guy you've been talking about, Brian? And I said, I think that's the guy. I think that's the guy. And I've been following Dalkowski ever since. We have a real need for the sense of mystery in our lives as human beings. And Dalkowski brings a lot of mysteries to the forefront. It's a wonderful journey. There have been many fascinating prospects in baseball who didn't quite pan out for whatever reason. Dalkowski, in some ways, reminds me of a pitcher the Pirates had just a few years before he started making his journey through the minor leagues, Ron Nechai, who didn't have the stuff that Dalkowski did, but put his own stamp on kind of a legendary career by having a perfect game in the low minors with 27 strikeouts.

So what is it about Dalkowski that separates him from some of the other prospects who never totally exploited their talents? The thing that separates Steve is the fact that he is reputed to have thrown harder than anybody in the history of the game. That brings in some big names, doesn't it? You got Big Train, you got Rapid Robert, you got The Flame, you got all kinds of people who could really bring it. And yet everybody, that is everybody who ever saw Dalkowski throw,

especially early in his career, said he was number one, and you can argue about two through ten in any fashion that you would like. That credibility is enhanced, certainly, by Hall of Famers like Pat Gillick. You know, Weaver said he was the hardest thrower you ever saw. Sudden Sam McDowell saw him throw in the early 60s, and he said he threw a lot harder than me. And Sudden Sam, 100-mile-an-hour club, he's somebody that's always mentioned in the top ten. So that's what separates Steve from the others. Nobody else ever had that kind of a rep.

How did his fame compare in his day during his career to what it is now when he helped inspire Nucleolution? A lot of people know him from that. And his story has circulated and in some ways maybe grown even more memorable and better known over the decades since he stopped pitching. In the moment, was he as well known as he is now or more so or less so? He was more of the legend in his time than he is now. You know, this is what the journey of the hero is. We've talked about this in

mythology for as long as we've been writing things down. The hero departs, the hero fulfills, the hero returns. And Dalkowski was on that mission. There wasn't anybody in the minor leagues that hadn't heard about Steve Dalkowski. There wasn't anybody who hadn't heard about how hard this guy threw. There wasn't anybody who didn't hear the how hard this guy threw. There wasn't anybody who didn't hear the sound of the baseball coming in on that higher pitch. We all know when you've been around the game enough, you've got a sound between 91 and 94. You go from 95, 97, you got a different octave. Then you go from 97, 98 to 101, you got another sound. When you get over a 101, there's a very threatening sound that comes in. This was legitimate stuff.

This was not stories made up. Let's be fair. A lot of what's happened to Dalko over the years is that people have made up stories. They've exploited him. They've abused him. They've lied about him. They haven't told the truth. These guys in 1957

were seeing the legend do it, and they were jelly-legged. Nobody wanted to dig in. Nobody wanted to get in the batter's box when Dalko was on the hill. I'm glad you mentioned the hero's journey, because one thing that seemed to be a dominant theme when Dalkowski passed away was a sense of loss, a sense of failure. But it seems to me that sometimes it's the journey and not the destination. He had amazing stuff. People saw the amazing stuff. They still talk about him today. Do you look at this as a story of someone who failed to succeed or something that we can celebrate? Well, there's an irony here. When you think about it, Ben, what he couldn't do in his lifetime was process. He was stuck in result.

OK, he couldn't ever get over the fact that I am the hardest thrower of all time. I'm supposed to strike everybody out, and I can't tell where the ball's going. That's a lot of luggage to take out to the hill with you every time you go out there. At the end, he was in the process. He wasn't in the result. It's probably what we see most lucidly when we look at his late career. Why was he throwing so well in 1965? He didn't care anymore. His career was over. Everything had happened wrong for him. And so he wasn't focused on all the negatives that were running through his mind. He was focused on something absolutely different.

And I think one of the things that sort of mystifies me is just how little is known about him. And we can talk about what is known and what it's possible to know about how hard he threw and how he threw. But we can't know everything, not only because the speed wasn't measured accurately at the time, but because we don't even have footage of him throwing. I don't think there's even a good sequence of photographs of him mid-delivery that would allow his whole delivery to be reconstructed and analyzed. And you do address this somewhat in the book, but that's what confuses me because this is not the dark ages. This is the 50s and the 60s. And we have footage of guys going back to

the very early part of that century. And so even though he was not a major leaguer and there would have been less media attention and fewer people watching him from the stands, how is it that no one shot any footage or at least footage that's been found? I know that when Jonathan Haack did his documentary on the fastball about five years ago, he put out a call hoping that someone would find something in an attic somewhere, and nothing has been turned up since. So how is that, that he just escaped posterity? Well, it is one of those great mysteries that we associate with both life and Dalkowski. It's remarkable that there is no film of him throwing. Absolutely remarkable. Every major league club went to spring training and filmed everybody, everybody that had any kind of chance or any kind of hope of helping them sell tickets. So the greatest arm of all time was the only guy they avoided.

That is unconscionable. I can't imagine that for one minute that they did that. So I have to believe that somewhere along the line, they did shoot some film of Dalko over on the sidelines. We have some early 1960s stuff with Ian Burkine throwing on the sideline. Why they wouldn't have shot some film, I just don't know. A friend of mine talked to me not long ago, and I wrote this in one of the pieces that we have on the website. A friend of mine came across somebody who had just bought a house in Los Angeles. The garage of this house had been sealed for 30 years, and the former owner of this house had collected

sports films from the 1950s and the 1960s, sealed up the garage and never opened it again, died, and then the people that bought the house wanted all the junk out of it. They called a group of junk removers. The junk removers came in, threw all the film out in the trash, and kept the steel containers, which had a value. That's where I'm afraid Steve and film has gone. If we had been able to, and this I've presented also, if I'd been able to have 7 to 12 or 14 still images of Dalco throwing, even if they weren't at the same period of time, so that I would have seen him in his leg lift, I would have understood his equal and opposite. I would have been able to take the disassociation of front hip, back shoulder and build out the maybes. association of front hip, back shoulder and build out the maybes. There's some kind of chance that I could have put a slightly more obvious hypothesis together on how he did what he did,

but we don't even have that. That's hard to believe too, that people who went to the, went to, this was like a circus. Everybody went just to see Dalco either blow up, throw hard, he had a fan and a hot dog line, something else. He was treated as a freak and nobody took his picture. I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. And that is part of the reason that we have such a fluid website. The dalcobook.com website is intended to allow this to stay alive. And as people read the book and become more associated with the legend and the stories about Steve Galkowski, including the true one, which we tell in our book, then we're going to

start to get little anecdotes that we can put on the website. We've started doing that. And that's going to lead us to someplace else, because now it's active. People have a chance to find it. You know, Jonathan Hawke running out in any fashion, and this is not dismissive, it's merely a statement of fact, how do you get to the people who might have seen him pitch in North Dakota in 1957? Now, who's going to hear Hawk pleading for film on that? Probably nobody. Probably nobody. We did similar kinds of things, even down in Mexico, in an effort to try and find it. But I do hold hope that one day we're going to have that holy grail show up, and I'm going to be able to take this frame by frame to say, here is where he did something that was extraordinary.

And that's what led me down to ASMI, American Sports Medicine Institute, where Dr. Andrews does his orthopedic work, Dr. Glenn Fleissig, the consultant for Major League Baseball down there. And I presented my theory on what would have had to have happened if in fact, Dalkowski were going to be throwing in that rare air of 110 to 120. And they gave credibility to the theory to say, yes, we can't say it did happen, but if it did happen, it's possible that he could have reached those kinds of numbers. Fascinating. Fascinating. The story about the garage is very familiar. And I'm sure Ben knows that as someone who lives in New York, that some of these old pre-war apartment buildings,

they have tenant storage in the basement. And every once in a while, someone will start cleaning it out and find a steamer trunk from 1920 or something that's been there since the resident passed away in past decades. And then occasionally it just gets thrown on the sidewalk, but sometimes they will crack it open and you'll find interesting things. There've been diaries and other things published that reveal past lives. So I do hope it happens. Well, let me ask this then. I mean, is there comparable footage or pictures of prospects who are going through the Orioles system at the same time or in other organizations such that there's kind of documentation of everyone else but not him? Essentially, that's it. Now, I haven't run an absolute 40-man

roster on every year that Dalco played ball from, you know, 57 to 65. I haven't done that. But I'm saying they had Bo Balinski, they had Steve Barber, they had all of these guys who were not considered to be as high a prospect

as Dalco. And they had footage on this. Now, the caveat here, the Orioles, when they moved to Camden Yards, took much of the stuff that they had in archives at the old field and chucked it. I mean, you have to wonder sometimes. I mean, even on eBay, that stuff would have fetched a fortune. They threw it out. Some of it went to the Babe Ruth Museum in Baltimore, but they threw a whole bunch of stuff out. That's amazing to me. George Steinbrenner did the same thing in the early 70s. Did he really?

Yes, when they moved from the old Yankee Stadium to the reconstructed Yankee Stadium. Chuck the Archives. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I thought the Orioles were one of a kind in having been this myopic, but I'm glad to know there was someone else that joined them in the dugout on that. I had never heard that before. Dr. Fleissig at ASMI. What's your best guess for how he did it, how he achieved the speeds that he achieved, whether mechanically or just, you know, through some freakish body part that enabled him to sustain forces that most pitchers can't? Well, it's possible that if we build it out from the bottom, right, from the feet and build them all the way up through the biomechanical sequences, through his kinematic sequencing, there's a way in

which we could postulate that this is possible, that he might well have been able to do something like this. Probably things that we do have, there's a lot of information that we get from former players talking about the disassociation of his front hip and his loaded throwing shoulder that ask us to believe that he was getting. We know that major leaguers should have between 40 and 60 degrees when you put those two angles together.

We don't have anybody out far enough on the edge of the bell curve to know whether or not 60 plus degrees is going to be advantageous. We don't really know what the answer to that is. But if we take that hypothesis and say that it does have value and you can load it and you can hold on to that shoulder until foot strike, take your chest to the glove, keep the glove firm and out front, and then take that short inside route with a throwing shoulder quickly enough to deliver the ball, then there's going to be some added velocity there. That's the kind of thing that's going to give you that opportunity.

Now, we know Dalco wasn't any giant human being. He wasn't Gene Connolly or Randy Johnson or somebody in that 6'10 plus neighborhood. A pretty average looking guy. He was athletic. But it is conceivable. While you can have denser bones and you can build stronger muscles, there's absolutely nothing you can do to improve your lot on whatever your soft tissue is, the ligaments and cartilage and whatever's going on in your arm. If, in fact, somebody had something that had greater density in there than that, then that would also open the door to the possibility that somebody could throw this hard. As Glenn will tell you, the first thing is we shouldn't be able to throw a baseball at all, period, not 100 miles an hour at all. We don't even have the arm built for that. It should break and be there.

But those are the kinds of things that we would have to build out. His balance and posture, the fact that he was moving his lead hip to home plate. I've got an early picture of Dalco that is very reminiscent of Koufax when Koufax turned it around in 61. And that picture looks exactly like Sandy when he started to find it and what he was doing. Now, it's only one picture, one frame from one period of time, so it's very difficult to know what was happening. So his stride, his stride length probably was longer than his body height, so it would have been over six feet. The momentum that he was able to do, he'd keep his center line over the axis of his body as he hit foot strike, equal and opposite angles with his elbows.

All of these things would have helped him in delivering a baseball more quickly if he could do it flawlessly. When people talk about him, Ben, on the sidelines, they talk about bullet after bullet in the glove. He never missed a glove. When he got on the mound, all of that baggage that he hauled out there with the wagon overtook him, and he became tremendously stressed out. He choked is what he did. And I don't mean that in a negative sense. We've all choked. We all know what it's about. Choking is thinking too much. And that's what Dalco was doing out there.

He was thinking about results. He was never able to get himself tied into the process. If the process had been repeatable for Steve, he would have been throwing strike after strike after strike from the mound, not just on the bullpen mound. So I was going to ask, and I think you just answered this question in a sense, what separated him, given all these inferences that you've made about his mechanics, from pitchers who do throw that hard and are able to consistently throw strikes like Aroldis Chapman? And it seems like what you're suggesting is the mental aspect

of the game. And that brings up the claim that Roel Weaver made based on the IQ tests that he administered to his minor league players when he had Dalkowski, that Dalkowski was challenged in some way. And I know the IQ test is a very blunt and inaccurate measure, but was there some validity to that? Well, we were not able to prove that that did or did not occur. Now, let's just assume for a second that Steve was diffident. Let's just say he was not a loquacious fellow when he was around the ballpark and when he went to the mound. I've had a number of pitchers over the years that I've worked with who are simply quiet and coaches can't handle that. They want a rah-rah guy. They want somebody

who's out there rooting for the team. That ain't their calling. That's not what they do. Just let them pitch, man. Get out of the way and let them pitch. But they want somebody else. And I've had more than one coach come to me and say, well, I think he's stupid. I think he's just not very bright and he just can't figure this out. It has been said, and we address it in the book, it has been said that an IQ test was administered to Steve. His IQ was 60, which put him between a rock and a tree. He didn't have the intellectual acumen to be able to do what was going on. I'm not confident that happened. That would be a very unusual kind of test for minor league managers to be administering to players, most of whom are never going to go to the majors.

Maybe you would think about doing it for your 25-man roster, but why would you be doing it to guys that every year two or three move up the pole and 22 go away and get a job at the supermarket. I'm not confident that that is accurate. The jury's out on it. It's one of those mysteries that remains, and we don't know for sure. He was capable of processing information on a football field, and in many respects, that's far more difficult. There's a lot more going on. There's at least 22 guys on the field, unless Woody Hayes runs out to slug somebody.

There's always 22 guys on the field, and you've got to account for a lot of stuff if you're going to be successful. He had back-to-back state championships. He was able to do that. So I really don't think that Steve Jalkowski was mentally challenged. That's a personal thing. We don't have the absolute.

Maybe that test was in the jettisoned material that the Orioles got rid of when they went to Camden Yard. There's never been any absolute proof of it. We have words that somebody said it. absolute proof of it. We have words that somebody said it. Guys who are on that team don't recall ever having had an IQ test, so why would they just give it to seed? I don't know what the answer to that one would be either. Steve, in responding to the IQ thing at one point in time, said, you know, I just blew it off. You know, they gave me some stupid thing, and I gave him a stupid answer, and that was it. And then maybe he did. We don't know for sure. That's all. And what was it then that Weaver did to help unlock his potential? Because it does seem like

his most effective pitching came on Weaver's watch and he was able to dial down his walk rate to a more manageable level. So what was the secret? Well, there probably were secrets on several levels. First of all, Steve found somebody in Earl Weaver that he could trust. And he finally had a solid relationship with somebody. Now, is it a father relationship and something that perhaps he didn't have with his own dad ken we don't have the answer to that one either but he did find something in weaver weaver took the approach that steve had already been told everything there was nothing to tell him so he let him go out there and pitch a couple of other things that that that stick me in the side as I think about this, Ben. He was taught a slider at some point in time.

It's a pitch that I stay away from with most pitchers because I consider it an arm record. The reason is we all learn to throw a spin ball early when we're in Little League by jacking our elbow and jacking our shoulder. And so when I teach somebody a real breaking ball, I don't want them going back to that kind of an equation. As Jim Palmer would tell you, Earl only knew one thing about pitching, and that was he couldn't hit it. And he couldn't hit a slider for sure. So if somebody was teaching Steve these kinds of things, and we've got Pat Gillick, Hall of Famer, saying that he was slowing his arm down, then he was changing things mechanically in what was going on.

Perhaps he was looking to simply aim and get the ball in there because his rep was secure. Guys went to the plate jelly-like. They were not interested in taking good deep cuts off him. His reputation as being wild and fast preceded him every inning when he went out to the hill. So it's hard to say for sure, but it was because Weaver really cared about Steve. He had somebody in Earl that he could trust. He had a solid reputation. And there was something going on in this transition. You know, I've dealt with a lot of 100-mile-an-hour pitchers,

and it's very difficult for them to grasp the concept of how to keep people off your fastball mistakes. They want to throw hard, harder, and hard-ass. They do not have an interest in throwing a change-up or some kind of off-speed. Certainly Steve was of that ilk for a long time. But in 1962, we've got enough eyewitnesses saying his velocity had come down. He was throwing a lot more breaking balls, whether they were sliders or nickel curves

or cut-fast balls or real curve balls. Everybody debates what the pitch really was, but he was throwing a lot of them. Now, if he'd changed himself mechanically to do that, he was leading himself toward a problem down the road, but Earl helped him in understanding a lot of things that made him more successful out on the hill. You know, there's a mechanical issue here that I think you could address that would be really helpful to me because I've always been curious about this, Dalco being a lefty as well. It seems like for hard-throwing left-handers, there's always a longer adjustment period, particularly as they make the transition from the minors to the majors. And whether it's Koufax, who you alluded to earlier,

or Randy Johnson, there's often some wildness that has to be overcome, and it seems to happen more slowly than it does for a right-hander. And so I'm wondering if as a southpaw, if Dalko and maybe lefties in general, or hard-throwing lefties, face kind of an extra hurdle in that process of transition. Well, that's a fascinating question, one for which I don't have an answer, unfortunately. It's interesting to me that when working with pitchers, lefties always have a sneaky fast somehow. There's something about it. There shouldn't be any difference. The left arm, right arm ought to be pretty much the same.

Shoulder ought to be the same. I mean, all these things across the anatomical spectrum should be very much the same. But lefties have sort of a sneaky fast. So lefty can throw at 88 and look like he's 92, but righty throws a heavy fastball. It is 92, looks like a 92. It doesn't sneak down to 88. Now, what is the possibility here that there is something different. There's nothing to substantiate this, Ben. So this is all postulation on my part. I think that hard throwing lefties have a tendency to ride the ball a touch longer. So as their arm is getting out toward release point, let's say that release point is near a 30 degree mark and they can hang on to that ball a touch longer. They've gone through

sharp focus to out of focus in the hitter. That takes timing away from the hitter when he's trying to react to that pitch. And if they ride that pitch just a touch longer, they're going to get tighter revolutions on the ball, which is greater depth on secondary movement. I can't be sure, but I certainly play those cards when I'm working with a hard-throwing lefty and what's going on. There are a lot of examples of right-handed pitchers that fall into the same ilk that you were just talking about.

Ryan Duren took seven years to try and get his axe squared away, and then had three really stellar years with the Yankees, and he pitched longer than that. But his years with casey were uh were outstanding but the one distinction that i would would would bring up about lefties and it differs a little from what what you were asking and i apologize for not having the answer i don't i don't know what it is but lefties go from sharp to unsharp focus maybe a little bit longer and ride the ball a little bit longer that's why that secondary movement. And if we talk about what people said about Dalkowski, we've talked to the physicists

at the University of Chicago, a baseball cannot rise. Well, that's not true. A baseball can rise at some point. What they haven't figured out is what is the point that a baseball rises. Once again, when Dalkco was throwing his hardest, there was absolutely nobody that didn't say his fastball rose, whether it was Cal Ripken Sr. or Pat Gillick or anybody who ever saw him. This ball rose, and it rose significantly. It wasn't a touch. Well, the only way that could happen is riding the ball a little bit longer,

tightening up the revolutions on the ball, and getting more backspin on the baseball. It's something that we approach people on in a couple of physics departments because the question being answered, if you can tell me that you have to throw 618 miles an hour to get a fastball to rise,, then we know absolutely Delco's fastball did not rise, right? However, if they were to come back and say, you know what, it'd have to be at least 117 miles an hour for a fastball to rise, then we would have another piece of credible information to work from, wouldn't we? We'd have something else that we could go on in that situation and say, well, we got 611 accounts here of a rising fastball. We got everybody saying he is the hardest throwing pitcher in the history of the game.

And when you put those things together, these things have to equal 117 to get there. It would be a great answer to a question to have. A couple of people said they want to do that as their PhD thesis at Berkeley. I hope they holla and get it done so that I can get the answer before I check out or something, you know? Yeah, I guess it's tough to figure because it depends on the spin on the pitch, too. So it's not to separate his speed from his control problems. Because you could imagine that if a pitcher doesn't know or care where the ball is going, then he could throw all out and not have to take a little bit off to make sure that the pitch is going where he's aiming it.

You know, so if Aroldis Chapman can throw 105 in a game when he's trying to throw strikes, does that mean that, well, if he was just trying to throw as hard as he possibly could and he didn't know where it was going, that he could get up to 107 or 108 or who knows what? So that's what I'm kind of curious about with Dalkowski. Can you say that he would have thrown as hard if he had been able to control his pitches, or was the velocity tied to the lack of control in some way? Well, history would tell us that the velocity and control are issues that are tied together. You know, whether it's Koufax, Bob Feller never seemed to have this issue, but if it's Koufax, he said when he finally recognized that he didn't have to present every pitch as a blue bayou on the hitter,

then he became a pitcher and started to do other kinds of things. And I think that's part of the game plan of understanding what the process is. And these are the kinds of things that both the statisticians for guys who knew the game in and out and sports psychologists, which obviously didn't exist at all in the 1950s and sixties when Dalco was around was if we could have given him some information to, to focus on that, he, he would have, would have really understood to, to get him into a place. I think,

I think we see answers to that, Ben, in the 1962-63 time frames, his time down in Mexico, those kinds of things. Everybody said he was still throwing hard, probably throwing overnight, but he was not in that very rare air. Now, if somebody had presented to Delco that 50% of all hitters take the first pitch and that when they face you, Steve, most managers have said don't swing at anything until you see a strike, and that Major League hitters hit 067 on 00 curveballs.

We could have given this information to Dalco to say, this is how you pitch ahead, buddy. We need for you to throw strike one, pitch ahead. When you're behind pitch to contact, focus on the next pitch and get him into a realm that he never got to. Now, these are the kinds of things that didn't exist at that time. The information was there on the perimeter, but nobody was sharing it with that kind of specificity to help him understand, Steve, nobody's going to dig in against you.

Nobody's even swinging on the first pitch, just lollipop one in. And then if somebody starts to dig in and look like they do, barrel it up. Go get the big one out of the arm and throw 120 mile an hour job in there. It doesn't matter where it goes. The guy's going to be thinking about that for the rest of his at bat. He's not focusing on hitting and you can go right after him. These are the kinds of things that Steve needed. These are the kinds of simple strategies that would have allowed him to move to that next level. And I think most of that would have gone along the lines of what you're saying. His velocity would have gone down and with it, with it going down, he would have thrown more strikes. And that seems to be what he was doing from the 61, 62, 63 time periods as he was progressing and he was improving.

The problem was it appears that they made some mechanical adjustments. And those mechanical adjustments didn't serve him well and led to whatever his arm problem was. I suspect it was probably a UCL, but it could well have been something else. You know, you mentioned Ryan Duren a few minutes ago, who was roughly contemporaneous with this. And the problem with coaching, I think, and for most players, this is not an issue, but for some it is, is that it's not 24-7. You only have the player a few hours a day and you don't have

influence on what they're doing the rest of the time. Duren, who, as I said, pitched around the same time, estimated that maybe half of major leaguers in that period were alcoholics, problem drinkers. And the attitude in the game about drinking was very primitive to what it is now. I was just reading something about the great Hall of Fame manager, Joe McCarthy, who would take a player aside and say, listen, I've got to talk to you about your drinking. You need to switch from beer to whiskey because beer will make your legs heavy, whereas whiskey won't have that effect. So if you're going to drink, do that. So it wasn't the same way that we it's a truth. He had a problem himself. His drink was white horse scotch and he he kept a bottle in the drawer of his office at Yankee Stadium and frequently resorted to it. So he had issues, too. fear with him getting whatever messages the coaches were capable of giving him or Oral Weaver

as his manager were capable of giving him and retard his progress? Well, interesting thought. A great deal of free time in baseball and certainly during the, I can't say what happened before the 50s, but certainly during the 50s and 60s, there was a great deal of drinking going on. And he had plenty of time to do the drinking. Most managers played the card that I don't really care if you drink, Ben, as long as you're ready to do your job when you come to the park. So Whitey and Billy and Mickey would all go out and have a good time, and they were all always ready to do what they needed to do. Certainly early in Dalco's career, while he drank at some level, and again, there's some dispute here. He's had roommates and said they never saw any evidence of him drinking at all with four

guys in a very small room, not something easy to hide, you know, if possible. But Dalco, by everybody's account, came ready to play. He got himself cleaned up, and he was ready to pitch. It was his turn to pitch, and he was supposed to do it. He was always ready to do that. However, once his arm went bad and he realized the writing was on the wall, he stopped caring, and his drinking really got to be a distraction. And Steve was alone anyway. He was dealing with

loneliness. And when you're alone and you're dealing with loneliness, you're going to be attracted to substances. And his substance was alcohol. Unlike Bo Blinsky said, Bo liked both alcohol and funny cigarettes. He was into drinking and that's what he did. There are a lot of people that say that he only drank beer. Then there are other people who say, you know, he lined up 24 scotches on several occasions on the bar and what was going on. So I think he held it in advance. He really felt that he could go out and perform well enough, that he could perform well, not well enough. He could go out and perform well, period. No matter how it was, he could keep it under control. But once he got hurt, then the drinking really got out of control.

And he didn't care anymore. One of his finest games that he pitched at the very end of his career and before he got released he had been out getting hammered and he was in the shower vomiting he was tremendously ill he had to go out and pitch and he went on and pitched a great game how come his focus was on survival it wasn't on getting people out his focus was was on i just got to get through this. I've got to get through this rather than I've got to throw as hard as I can. What happened? He pitched because his focus shifted. He shifted into something that actually helped him, actually put him in a positive realm. I just don't think that the alcohol was a truly negative impact at one point in his life and what was going on. It became a tremendous problem. It

ruined his life. You know, the alcohol-induced dementia precluded our being able to get tens and tens, maybe hundreds of answers to questions in the Dowco mystery. The only guy who would really know was him. And he got to a point that he was reliving stories and adding pieces to it on his own. Right. So that's the most tragic aspect of his life and career, what happened to him after he hung it up. But the second most tragic aspect maybe is that he got hurt just on the precipice of making the majors. He was all ready to make the majors with Baltimore. And, you know, by that point, he was in his mid-20s and he had taken something off the fastball, whether he had just lost some of that speed with age or whether he had done it intentionally or a mix of both. I don't know which, but he hurt

himself just as he was about to break through. It seems like he probably tore his UCL, which would be fixable now, but wasn't back then. My question is, what sort of pitcher do you think he would have been at that point in his career if he hadn't gotten hurt pitching as he was at that stage? If he had stayed healthy, would he still have been an impact pitcher, or was he sort of a shadow of his former self in some ways by that point? Fascinating question, Ben, and one that I have ruminated over many, many times, because Dalkowski was pitching flawlessly. You know, he had his best string in 62 in Elmira with Weaver. That was the best series of games that he'd ever strung together. He pitched in the Winter Leagues. His arm hurt, and he had to go home from Puerto Rico, and he went home at that point in time. He was pitching very, very well. Pitching, he was dealing. He was not throwing.

He was not throwing anywhere near as hard by all accounts in 1963 in the spring. He was not throwing anywhere near as hard by all accounts in 1963 in the spring. It would have been very interesting to see what would have happened when you jump out of, you know, 3A, 4A kind of baseball, go to the major leagues. And now you've got all the all-stars that you only had to face maybe one guy in each lineup where he was previously. What would he have done to react to that situation? What would the manager have done to help support him in that focus that he needed to maintain there? These are entertaining questions, because if he started to get lit up, if he was throwing with different arm speeds, as several people suggest, and telegraphing what pitch was coming

in, or at least saying it ain't the heater. It's something else off speed. Depending on the count, the hitter's going to wait until he gets the fastball because he thinks he can deal with that better than whatever the breaking ball would be. So it would have been interesting to see where Steve was. I don't think that Richards was too great of a communicator. I don't think that Burkine was a great communicator. And again, I'm not trying to diss these guys or speak ill of them. I just don't think they had those tools. They tried. They really wanted to help Dalco. They wanted to help all their guys. They really did.

I just don't think that they had those kinds of answers. And Weaver didn't really have them until four or five years later when he took over the club and became a Hall of Fame manager. He was a great communicator in his way. The only other guy that would have been good in that kind of a sense was Casey. Casey Stengel in the 50s always knew guys that he could put into the lineup and have them there for a particular reason and had a role picked out for them. And they knew what the role was. And because they had that role and they understood what the role was,

their focus was clean. So it's a little bit of an open question on how Dalco would have gone. He would have changed settings. He would have changed managers. He would have changed the immediacy. He could have a couple crummy games down at deep, all right? Nobody cared. You don't get too many chances to bog it up when you're up with a big club.

And so it would have been interesting to see what happened to Dalka there. Did he really believe in himself for the first time in his life? Did he really believe in himself that he could do this and not have to throw 120 miles an hour in every pitch and get everybody out? I don't know. I don't know. It's one of those great mysteries

that remains with this story. So the real moral of the tale, it seems to me, and this is different from the way I think it's typically been told over the years is not that he was incapable of learning control, that he was just amorphously wild. you know, ruined his arm, maybe because he threw 150 pitches a game or because the Orioles or some Orioles insisted he throw off speed stuff. That's all detail stuff. But the real lesson that you're imparting, it seems to me, is about mindfulness and his inability or his difficulty in getting past the anxiety that he faced whenever he got to the mound and instead of dwelling on his stuff, dwelling on his pitching. And if that's the case, do we have a better understanding of how to convey that lesson

to young players now or to just people in general? I think we do. First of all, the mind's a very dangerous place and there are far too many negatives living in the head. And the body goes where the mind takes it. And Steve was laden with baggage, like I said before. He took those three things to the mound every time. I'm the hardest thrower ever. I strike everybody out, and this is – I don't know where the ball is going,

so I hope everything goes fine here and what's going on. Yes, we can change a lot of those kinds of things and make a pitcher repeatable. You know, I always say to pitchers that I work with, if you're a 92-mile-an-hour guy, when you're done working with me, and it's not after one session, Ben, don't get me wrong, I'll get the 92 out of you, but we won't get 93 because you don't have 93. It's not in you. So then we need to build off your repertoire in what's going on here for you to be successful when you go out to the hill. We need a repeatable process. And for

example, if in fact, Dalco was wild high and low, the ball was over the plate, but he was high or low, well, we know that's a glove fix. We can fix that kind of a situation and it's pretty easy. But that's about the only thing on the mechanical side that you'll ever mess around with. When I get full trust of a player, when I get the opportunity that somebody really understands that my desire is not my ego. My desire is to see you pitch in the best way that you possibly can. Almost all of my pitchers get to a point of being able to throw from the mound, from the stretch, not from the

windup as a balance issue, but throw from the stretch position and be able to throw a strike without their eyes being open. We take visual acuity out of the equation and we rely on the other four senses that give us tremendous amounts of information, but we negate it and we rely just on the eyes. So yes, there are skills out there. I'll mention a couple of other interesting things to me. Go back to this most current world series. Kershaw's last outing. He's out there for the second, gets his second win. He throws seven pitches

in the first two innings that all should have been barreled up and nobody got him. Where was the pitching coach? Where were the people that needed to talk to him about his timing? His curve ball was up and then his curve ball would get spiked. What's the issue? Doesn't the coach know how to do this?

Well, if the curveball is up, he was too fast to foot strike and too fast from foot strike to ball release, and the ball's up. If the ball is spiked, it's just the opposite. Now, why wasn't somebody out there giving him that information? I don't know. I don't have that. Then he gets in a jam. First and third, nobody out. Game's on the line.

He gets out of the jam. Outstanding. Next thing, he comes out, throws two pitches, two outs First and third, nobody out. Game's on the line. He gets out of the jam. Outstanding. Next inning, he comes out, throws two pitches, two outs, and the manager shows up. Take him out of the game. What does that do to your psyche? I mean, what does it do to your psyche? I just threw two pitches, got two outs, and now I'm gone?

Or how about Snell? In his last outing, they were saying they didn't want him to go through the order the third time. Why? Because Mookie Betts had set marvellous at-bats against him? Come on. Give me a break. Mookie Betts has caught up the play going, this guy's dealing and I've got a problem. He's not going up there. He was lucky to get me out. He was pitching well.

So his manager goes out there and shuffles the order. What did he do? Well, he was able to get the World Series away. Now, not that the Dodgers wouldn't want it anyway. But yes, there are still examples that I think are excellent on the field right now that could be cleaned up and aided to help everybody mentally in what's happening. question that people ask you in these interviews is, how hard did he throw? Everyone wants to know that, and there are various theories, and you've touched on it a bit, but if you could just briefly summarize the one real attempt that was made to measure how hard he threw, not that it really tells us anything of use, unfortunately, and how hard you have concluded that he threw, because even though we don't have radar gun readings, because radar guns weren't around at the time, we do have many testimonials. And that is a form of information and data that can teach us, too. So if you've come to a conclusion about this, I'd be interested in hearing it.

about this. I'd be interested in hearing it. And if you think it's two different answers, I'd want to know how hard you think he threw and B, how hard you think he could have thrown effectively, you know, if, as we were talking about earlier, he would have had to take something off in order to not walk the ballpark. Well, I think the first part of your question was about the test that was conducted on him in 58, right, when he went to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. And he threw the absolute octane number of 85.8. Most people still can't even get the correct number. There's still people out there saying 98.6 and other things. Now, that number is ridiculously low.

You know, I was throwing that a couple of years years ago, so I know DALCO was throwing harder than that. Now, they said there were some things that could have been misreading on the, I mean, this testing equipment at the proving grounds for the military would suggest the test velocity of shells, and it's possible that the light cells are measuring because it was the middle of the day were not acting correctly. It's also possible that Dalko was simply letting up and not throwing his gas. We don't have a really accurate assessment of what was going on there and whether or not he was rearing back and throwing as hard as he could or that he was just trying to get it in the neighborhood and throw.

We don't know. But the number they came away with was 85.8, and that's a joke. I don't think even with a torn UCL he threw that slowly. So that's the one piece. The next thing is there are two eras that we have to talk about, Ben, when we think about what he was doing with velocity. The velocity that he had, let's say, between 57 and 59 is certainly different than the velocity that he was showing

between 61 and 63, when everybody said he was throwing slower. It doesn't mean he was throwing like Eddie Lopat, but it does mean that he was not up in that rare air. And if I base my numbers on what I think he was capable of doing, perfect scenario, okay? Zeus builds the perfect pitcher, and we give him all the opportunities to do that. I think it is conceivable that he could have thrown over 110 miles an hour. I think that is really possible that he could have done that. How much further over that? Boy, that's all speculation, but I do believe, based on the accounts that everybody has provided to me, that he was

throwing harder than anybody that they had ever seen. That's Bob Feller. That's Bob Turley. That's Rex Barney. That is Ryan Duren. That's Sandy Koufax. That's Nolan Ryan. These guys had a chance to see all these people and said, yeah, this guy threw harder, including McDowell. So I think that that is a possibility. That's certainly what I hold out. The other point here is that between 61 and 63, his velocity did decline. Fred Valentine will tell you that. Steve Barber said that. Pat Gillick says that. A lot of people say he was still throwing hard, but he was probably in the low-middle 90s and not in that rare air. And why? I don't know.

Was it because he had those 280-pitch games that he threw? It was because they had him throwing on the sidelines mercilessly day after day for five hours trying to tire him out so he could throw strikes? Was it the wholesale mechanical changes hours trying to tire him out so he could throw strikes was it the wholesale mechanical changes that they made to him that we did not fit with how steve dolkowski was supposed to throw baseball because we're all individuals the way you throw up in the way i thought are different so when i put you together i put you together in the ben way not the brian way what's

going on so we had three velocity reads here that i talked to. One is 85.8, which is ridiculously low. That's what they got out of Aberdeen in 1958. I think it is legitimate and probable that he threw very rare air at that 110 plus in the 57 to 59 kind of range, and that he was probably low middle 90s after that. And as a corollary to that velocity, we've seen fictional pitchers like Charlie Sheen playing Ricky Vaughn or Tim Robbins as Nuke Lelouch, who was at least partially inspired by Dalco, actually put batters in the hospital. But Dalco actually did that with at least one player and one umpire, am I correct? That is correct. That is correct. He drilled a player, an opposing player by the name of Bob Beavers in the head. And the legend grew that he had torn an ear off a batter's head. That is not correct. He hit Beavers in the earlobe. It was a bloody mess. beavers in the earlobe it was a bloody mess and then the second part of the beaver story is that he was he was so dinged up cranially that he could not play anymore that's inaccurate also he had to take some time off after having been hit the head of his protocol and then he got

married and needed to get a job and he left baseball not because he had to leave not because he couldn't play he went He went the other way. There are at least two individuals that we spoke to that talked about Steve was very concerned about hitting somebody and hurting somebody. And that is legitimate. But you have to, again, this is where the sports psychologist, this is where the manager comes in, and you've got to share with your pitchers. I have to share with my guys. That ain't your problem, man.

Their job is to get out of the way. Your job is to throw it. Now, I don't want my guys out there headhunting or anything like that. Ben, don't misunderstand me. But my point here is, if somebody had shared that with him, that this is what's going on, and we had provided him with how to get the process repeatable, he wouldn't have this kind of a worry to go with at all. And he did drill an umpire, a guy named Lupini,

when Cal Ripken Sr. was asking for the breaking ball, and Dalko at that point didn't have glasses, he didn't see the sign, and he threw a fastball right over Ripken's head, nailed Lapiti, broke his mask, turned him horizontal and put him out cold. And they took him to the hospital with a concussion. True story. And that's a that's a beauty, isn't it? I mean, you just have to visualize that one and you're cracking up. And are there any other legends or myths about Dalkowski that you were able to refute? I mean, you talked about not being able to verify some, like the IQ test, for instance. And I know you had some trouble trying to pin down the story about Ted Williams supposedly facing him and saying he was the hardest-throwing pitcher he ever saw.

Was there anything else along those lines that you were not able to confirm or, I guess, alternatively, something that you thought was a tall tale that turned out not to be? Well, the Williams story is an interesting one. And the reason that it's that it's interesting is that Steve Dalkowski has been objectified over the years. He has not been looked at as a human subject. He's been exploited, abused, lied about, whatever you want to say. And the story about Williams was one more of those things to objectify him and keep him from being a human being. We don't know what happened here. I had a couple of occasions to talk with Ted and not about Dalkowski, but he did say that he could count the stitches on the baseball coming in. He did say that he could read the commissioner's name coming in. And while I doubted it, Ben, I really did doubt it. The last thing I was going to do was say that to a lifetime 344 hitter and say, I think you're full of it, Ted.

I really don't think anybody could do that. Well, there was, you know, as we recount the book, he couldn't recall the episode. It first came to light with Pat Jordan's article in Sports Illustrated that this did in fact occur. Yowse, the super scout for the Orioles, recounted that he had a legitimate story from Ted that it occurred, and Ernie Harwell, who wasn't a guy who lied a lot, said that the hardest thrower Ted told him he ever faced was Dalkowski. I think the most important thing is, the thing that we started off with at the onset, is that the mystery of Steve Dalkowski continues. Our need for mystery is really greater than our need for answers in many

respects. We have the website, as I mentioned, dalkobook.com, in an effort to continue to bring more and more information to light about the story. We've already considered now the possibility of going to a second edition of the book and talked about it. We get that much information because now there's an active place for people to go to, to give us that, that information. So I think the most fascinating part truly, Ben, is the mysteries still exist. These mysteries are going to continue to exist. We don't have Steve to ask, do we?

And we're going to continue to get secondhand information from other people that are going to give us a point that we can support, that we are going to be able to say there's strong evidence that we believe this did occur. And I think that is the fascinating piece of what we got rather than the binary response, got it or didn't get it. The mystery's alive. So, and forgive me if you've answered this before, but you put me in mind of a more recent Orioles left-hander, a reliever from the early 90s, Brad Pennington, who also threw really hard and struck out, at least in the majors, about 10 per nine. And unfortunately, he could never get past walking 11 or 12 per nine. So if a Dalkowski came along today, if he showed up in a draft class right now where he is 14 or 15 and pitching in the Dominican Republic, are we capable of helping that player realize his potential or more so than the Orioles were back in the 50s?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, let's be fair. Are all human beings equal? Well, they write about that in the Constitution, don't they? But I'm not confident it's accurate. Are all sports psychologists equal? I'm not confident that's accurate either. Did Jung go to school and learn all the stuff that he wrote about? No, not exactly. What he did was go study a little psychology and then took it off and went on his own. He could convey the information. He could communicate the information.

He could find ways that it worked in life, and that's what happened. So the very best of the sports psychologist world, I'm confident you can take a guy like Steve Dalkowski and you can turn him around. You give him information. You give him a foundation from which he can work. These were all the things that allowed him to continue to go to the negatives and take the baggage to the mound. I'm absolutely confident that could be done. I wish I'd had the opportunity to work with Dalko. I really do. I really do. I really wish I'd seen him throw in 57, too. It's one of my great baseball wishes, along with Maris hitting his 61st. These are a couple of things that I've thought about many, many times. I would have loved to have seen Steve Dalkowski throw a baseball. bad about how much we have fixated on how hard he threw because that was all anyone wanted to talk about when he was around that was seemingly what he was fixated on himself and maybe that was part of the problem is that he was so attached to how hard he threw and then when he didn't throw that

hard he didn't have much left to hang his hat on but from talking to friends or family members, is there anything about his personality, what he was like just as a friend, as a brother, as a son that would be interesting to know just so that we don't reduce him to the arm purely as he was often reduced during his life? We have only positive remembrances of Steve Dalkowski, and they come from all of his teammates that I spoke to. They come from opposing players saying that Steve was never cocky or arrogant. He never said, I'm the hardest thrower. I'm the guy. I'm better than you.

He never had that. Managers all loved his work ethic. His high school football coach loved him. His high school baseball coach loved him. We didn't find an example of anybody having anything denigrating to say about Steve Dalkowski. He was reputedly a very, very nice human being. And when you read the book, Ben, I think we have put the human touch to Steve Dalkowski. We've taken that objectification away from him.

We've taken the lies out of the existence that he has had to live and endure with. And we've told the real story about a human being that had successes and failures, had strengths and shortcomings. I think that's the greatest service that we could do for Steve Dalkowski. All right. Well, the book, again, is called Dalko, the untold story of baseball's fastest pitcher. We have been talking to one of its co-authors, Brian Vikander, who wrote it along with Bill Demski and Alex Thomas. You can go get the book now. You can also check out the website where there is a lot of additional information. That's DalkoBook.com. You can also read the foreword and the first where there's a lot of additional information. That's dalcobook.com.

You can also read the foreword and the first chapter there for free. Brian, thanks so much for the work and for the time today. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you. I've enjoyed it tremendously. And Steve, thanks as always for filling in. And I encourage everyone to go listen to Steve every week on his home turf, The Infinite Inning, as well as reading him at Baseball Prospectus. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. All right.

A couple of things I wanted to mention. First, if you're a regular listener or reader, you're probably aware that I don't totally share Brian's assessment of the Snell decision, but that didn't seem like the time to rehash that. Also, I think the difference between lefty and righty pitchers that he was talking about, how it seems like a pitch from a lefty can come out of the hand faster and be harder to hit, that seems to be related to a lack of familiarity. You don't see left-handed pitchers as often, and you really don't see them as often when you are at the lower levels, when you're just

learning the game. There is an interesting article about that published at Fangraphs just in September called The Southpaw Advantage that made that case. The authors wrote, This body of research clearly supports the notion that hitters will have more trouble recognizing and responding effectively to pitches from a left-handed pitcher. For hitters, this effect may register as greater discomfort when facing a southpaw or a misperception that their pitches have greater movement. Indeed, the persistent myth of the crafty lefty who disrupts hitters with nasty pitch movement, Check out that study.

I will also link to an article from the Hardball Times from a few years ago about the physics of a rising fastball. Also, I corresponded with Craig Wright, the pioneering sabermetrician and the author of The Diamond Appraised back in April when Dalkowski died. And Craig wrote about Dalkowski, so I asked him some of the same questions I asked Brian. And Craig, whose evaluation I put a lot of stock in, said, believe a human could release a ball at 115. I doubt they could do it at 110. And I stretch to believe 105 from someone with the durability to throw 120 plus pitches, which Dalkowski did in nearly every start. But I think it more likely than not that Ryan essentially did that for a period in his career. And folks familiar with both say Dalkowski was faster than Ryan. So I guess 106 to 107 with a high spin rate. I appreciate Earl Weavers and Pat Gillicks and Steve Barber's assessments of Dalkowski's speed from being with him for extended periods in his prime, and I think of Ripken catching him for two seasons and then being a lifer in baseball who saw so many

great fireballers. But the testimony that means the most to me is that of Doug Harvey, an umpire with a long career is going to see more pitches up close and have a great seat to get a feel for how the batter is reacting more than any other person in the game. Ivan Rodriguez probably saw more pitches at the plate than any player in the history of professional baseball, about 370,000 between catching and hitting as both a minor leaguer and major leaguer. Doug Harvey saw almost 50% more pitches than that as a home plate umpire in his pro career. They were also spread in greater variety among pitchers in a season and also spread out over 35 seasons compared to 23 for Rodriguez. Harvey saw more great fireballers from this vantage point than just about anyone, and he was confident in his opinion that none of

them could bring it like Dalkowski. Craig also notes that even though the average fastball speed has gotten a lot faster over time, the speed of the average fastball might not have that strong a relationship to the speed of an extreme outlier like Dalkowski, which could explain how he may have been the hardest thrower ever at a time when pitchers on the whole were throwing a lot slower than they do today. That'll do it for today, and for this week, thanks as always for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Emily Ross, Greg Mitchell, Adam

Crowe, Liz Piniella, and Doug Graham. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on iTunes, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Megan, Sam, who will be back next week via email at podcast at fan graphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Have a wonderful weekend. And we will be back to talk to you early next week. You can't break me. You can't make me go away. I'm not gonna go away.