Thursday, January 27, 2005
If you are an ESPN Insider, you can read about the greatest baseball player in the history of Swarthmore College in Rob Neyer's column about the best control pitchers of all time.If not, here's an excerpt:
"Most of you don't remember Dick Hall, but he's worth remembering. Hall graduated from Swarthmore College in 1951, and signed with Pittsburgh...
...except Hall couldn't hit. Rickey was a brilliant judge of talent, but he missed his fair share of them, and Hall just wasn't a major league player … until 1955, when the Pirates turned him into a pitcher. Hall wasn't left-handed, but he was six-feet-six and athletic – and in those days the Pirates were desperate. It took a few years, but in the 1960s Hall finally established himself as an outstanding reliever, and the game's No. 1 control artist.
Brooks Robinson would later recall that Hall "wasn't a flaky reliever – in fact, he worked as a CPA in Baltimore. He was a student of the game. When he got to the mound he'd wet his finger and stick it in the air and adjust his little slider to the way the wind was blowing. He had perfect control and just pitched away, away, away all the time."
Here's the most amazing thing about Dick Hall: in 16 major league seasons (as a pitcher) and 1,260 innings, he was charged with exactly one wild pitch. Hall later blamed that single errant offering on fooling around with a knuckleball, at the behest of Branch Rickey. But while it's true that Rickey did make his Pittsburgh pitchers throw the knuckler, Hall's wild pitch came near the end of his final season (1971) … long after he'd left the Pirates, and nearly six years after Rickey's death."
¶ 3:19 PM
"Most of you don't remember Dick Hall, but he's worth remembering. Hall graduated from Swarthmore College in 1951, and signed with Pittsburgh...
...except Hall couldn't hit. Rickey was a brilliant judge of talent, but he missed his fair share of them, and Hall just wasn't a major league player … until 1955, when the Pirates turned him into a pitcher. Hall wasn't left-handed, but he was six-feet-six and athletic – and in those days the Pirates were desperate. It took a few years, but in the 1960s Hall finally established himself as an outstanding reliever, and the game's No. 1 control artist.
Brooks Robinson would later recall that Hall "wasn't a flaky reliever – in fact, he worked as a CPA in Baltimore. He was a student of the game. When he got to the mound he'd wet his finger and stick it in the air and adjust his little slider to the way the wind was blowing. He had perfect control and just pitched away, away, away all the time."
Here's the most amazing thing about Dick Hall: in 16 major league seasons (as a pitcher) and 1,260 innings, he was charged with exactly one wild pitch. Hall later blamed that single errant offering on fooling around with a knuckleball, at the behest of Branch Rickey. But while it's true that Rickey did make his Pittsburgh pitchers throw the knuckler, Hall's wild pitch came near the end of his final season (1971) … long after he'd left the Pirates, and nearly six years after Rickey's death."
¶ 3:19 PM
