Month: May 2016

Pitchers generally try to throw the baseball hard. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they do the exact opposite. Sometimes they throw the eephus pitch.

You can keep your home runs and stolen bases, your hundred mile-an-hour fastballs and your picturesque 6-4-3 double plays. The single best play in baseball is the eephus — the lob, the rainbow pitch, the moon ball, the Bugs Bunny curve, a big swooping beauty and a statement of pure chutzpah.

History credits Rip Sewell, the former Pittsburgh Pirate, as the first to throw the eephus in the big leagues, but surely it’s been a part of the game ever since they spelled it “base ball.” It’s a natural progression. Pretty much every pitcher throws a changeup, intentionally slow in order to catch the batter off guard and make ensuing fastballs appear all the faster. So why not slow a changeup down even more? Why not toss the ball up there at fifty miles an hour, arcing fifteen feet in the air before it plummets down through the zone like you’re playing slow-pitch softball?

Well, aside from the off chance the pitch doesn’t catch the batter off guard, in which case it ends up 475 feet away in the upper deck instead of snugly in the catcher’s glove, and you’re left standing on the mound looking like quite the schmuck.

It takes some cojones to throw an eephus, is what I’m saying. Continue reading “An Ode To The Eephus”

The thought hit me sometime during the backstretch of the men’s 1,500 meter final at the Pac-12 Championships last Sunday at Husky Track, as Washington’s Izaic Yorks began to inexorably pull away from the rest of a world-class field of middle-distance runners, his legs churning, the afro atop his head resting impossibly still, the murmur that had pulsed through the crowd for the opening three laps starting to approach a roar. The thought being this: Why on earth isn’t this sport more popular?

It used to be. During the first half of the twentieth century (and again for a brief resurgence during the 1970s), track and field was among the country’s most popular pastimes — right up there with boxing, horse racing and baseball, to give you an idea of how much things change. For a brief moment in time during the early 1950s, it even surged to the forefront of the global sporting consciousness, buoyed by one event in particular that captured the world’s imagination: the mile. And three men in particular were responsible for that race’s rapid rise.

Those men were England’s Roger Bannister, Australia’s John Landy and America’s Wes Santee, the three milers who during 1953 and 1954 dueled to determine who would be the first human being in the millennia of our existence to cover 5,280 feet of ground on foot in fewer than four minutes. They were front-page fixtures and national heroes. Their chase is the subject of Neal Bascomb’s excellent 2004 book “The Perfect Mile,” a rip-roaring chronicle of the three men’s disparate backgrounds, their chase of the four-minute barrier, and Bannister’s ultimate triumph. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to go find a track and run as fast as you can. It was one of the two recent reads that sent me down this rabbit hole. Continue reading “Running In Circles”