Hairs vs. Squares Read online

  Despite being the Cat-alyst of the A’s great staff of the seventies, Hunter was an underappreciated star. Writer Dan Schlossberg noted at the height of Hunter’s powers that the quiet Carolinian was often overlooked when great pitchers were discussed.

  Unlike other members of the A’s, including owner Charlie Finley, Hunter did not have a flamboyant personality. It was Finley who gave him the flashy nickname “Catfish” because the boss thought Jim Hunter just too plain a name.

  Hunter didn’t possess a flaming fastball like Blue or outsized personality like McLain. The Cat, however, was a prankster—he incurred the wrath of manager Dick Williams in an incident with a stolen megaphone—and had a sharp tongue at times. He and Bando sat in the back of the A’s bus and when necessary—usually during a losing streak—broke the team’s tension by insulting each other and their teammates. They would rip Reggie for his showboating and erratic throwing arm, Holtzman for wearing similar clothes every day, and Darold Knowles for his mismatched outfits.

  No one on the club was safe, and before long, Rollie Fingers, Dick Green, Blue Moon Odom, Mike Epstein, and the entire team would be in on it. The whole point, Hunter said, was to make sure there were no prima donnas on the team. Meanwhile, the bus, and the A’s, kept right on rolling along. So too did the Catfish, who continually went out and gave masterful but low-key performances on the mound.

  “Nothing mysterious about Hunter,” Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver, an admiring rival, once said. “He just throws strikes.”

  There were critics. After Hunter beat the Brewers, Milwaukee boss Dave Bristol called a clubhouse meeting and told his players, “If you can’t hit Catfish Hunter, you can’t hit anybody.” Because he relied on control rather than power, Hunter didn’t generate excitement among writers. Following a 2–1 win against the Angels in 1971, a writer rose from his seat in the press box and said mockingly, “Well, folks, another exciting game pitched by the Catfish.”

  But Alvin Dark, who coached the Cat during two stays with the A’s and also managed against him when Dark skippered the Cleveland Indians, recalled Hunter’s being such a great pitcher that Dark expected him to throw a shutout every time the Cat took the mound.

  Stuffing his jaw with chaw and tugging on the gold bill of his oversized A’s hat between pitches, the Catfish changed speeds and consistently worked the corners of the plate. Like his boyhood idol Robin Roberts, Hunter was a control artist, a thinking man’s pitcher. He wore his A’s hat a size too big for a reason: if he had to resettle it too much following each pitch, he knew he was overthrowing.

  The solidly built Hunter threw an above-average fastball that would ride and another that would sink. His sweeping curve had downward movement, and he had a hard slider and an off-speed slider. He also changed speeds on all of his pitches. At his best he could pinpoint his fastball, slider, and curve, and he pitched in an “X” pattern—up and in, down and away, etc.—changing it from batter to batter and inning to inning as he engaged in a game of mental gymnastics with hitters.

  Trying to judge Hunter on his fastball alone would be missing the point, said A’s pitching coach Wes Stock, who considered Catfish an “artist on the mound.” Hunter was almost always ahead of the hitter because he almost always had his control. Usually the Cat wouldn’t show his fastball until he had the batter off balance. Then, Stock said, the Catfish would pop one and it was strike three.

  Hunter excelled at throwing strike one as well. He would establish his control and command at the start of the game, and by the seventh inning he had expanded the width of the plate in the umpire’s eyes from seventeen inches to as much as twenty-one.

  Hunter told writer Larry Bortstein at the time that he would rather be out there on that mound than anywhere. “That’s my business and my pleasure,” Hunter said, “and I work at it.”

  Indeed Jim Hunter may have been unassuming, but the Catfish was a ferocious competitor. When told by Williams during the 1971 season he was being passed over in the rotation to give Blue additional starts, Hunter responded by walking out of the skipper’s office and tossing a chair in the clubhouse. It was the Cat’s turn to start on July 4, 1971, against the Angels, but he was passed over ostensibly so that Vida could be ready for the July 13 All-Star Game in Detroit. As Sport magazine writer Pat Jordan later stated, the move was really made so that the Angels would be guaranteed a huge holiday crowd. As a reporter said then, “Who the hell will pay to see Catfish Hunter pitch?”

  The slight angered Hunter, who had a combative attitude when it came to his craft. He carried that combativeness to the mound. Though not a strikeout pitcher, Hunter liked to go at batters with his fastball. Weaver admired the way Hunter challenged hitters, and Stock called Catfish as much a competitor as Pete Rose, who was known to slide on his belly even in an exhibition game.

  Reggie Jackson said he had seen Hunter surrender six runs in the early innings and grind out a 7–6 win. Getting roughed up doesn’t bother Catfish, Jackson said then. “He just comes right back at you.”

  When Epstein was with the Washington Senators, he faced pitchers who had better stuff than Hunter but were afraid to challenge him. Catfish was never afraid to challenge him, said Epstein, who called Hunter a “helluva competitor.”

  NBC’s Tony Kubek remarked during a 1972 Game of the Week Saturday telecast from Boston’s Fenway Park, in which Hunter was dueling fellow mound artist Luis Tiant, that the Cat was something special. “He has good control and I don’t mean just getting the ball in the strike zone,” Kubek said. “He hits the corners, doesn’t throw many balls down the middle of the plate. . . . He spots his pitches pretty well.”

  Hunter spotted his pitches so well A’s coach Vern Hoscheit barely had to move his glove in bullpen warmups; Hunter’s fastball, curve, and slanting slider continually hit the exact spot Hoscheit placed his catcher’s glove.

  Like Kubek’s former teammate, Yankees ace Whitey Ford, Hunter won with guts and guile. In retirement, Ford said Hunter was one of the pitchers he most enjoyed watching. Like Whitey, the Catfish excelled in big games. He was the A’s go-to guy in must-win situations. Williams called Hunter the best clutch pitcher he ever coached and said the A’s liked to see the Catfish climb the mound in big games. Bando said that if he had one game to win and one pitcher to throw it, “I’d want Catfish Hunter.” Jackson saw Hunter not only as the A’s most valuable pitcher, but also their most valuable player. “We can’t win without the Catfish,” Reggie said at the time. “The Fish is automatic.”

  Reliever Paul Lindblad, Hunter’s roommate with the A’s, called the Cat pressure-proof. Hunter just pushed pressure aside, Lindblad said. Hunter’s wife, Helen, said once that when her husband took the mound in a big game, she was certain he was the calmest person in the stadium. Knowles, another member of the Oakland bullpen, had never seen a man pitch with more determination than Hunter. To Knowles the Cat was a “deadly professional.”

  After Ray Fosse replaced Dave Duncan as the A’s starting catcher in 1973, he came to consider the Catfish a “bulldog,” a baseball term for a pitcher who grinds it out every fourth or fifth day and gobbles up two hundred-plus innings per season. Decades later, as an A’s color analyst, Fosse traveled with the team to Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia in June 2011. Fosse thought Philadelphia Phillies ace Roy Halladay, then at the peak of his powers with a recent perfect game and just the second no-hitter in postseason history, was cut from the same cloth as Catfish.

  Oakland in the early 1970s featured three aces—Hunter, Holtzman, and Blue—and Fosse thought Hunter the easiest to catch of the three. Against right-handers, Hunter had what Fosse called a “super slider.” The Catfish also came up with a change-up he used against left-handers. In his first season behind the plate for the A’s, Fosse said Hunter didn’t shake him off when it came to pitch selection more than three times. Dave Duncan, who shared Oakland’s catcher’s duties with Gene Tenace in 1972, said if he called for a curveball and the Cat was thinking fastball, rat
her than shake Duncan off, Hunter would just reprogram himself to throw the curve. It made him an easy man to catch, Duncan said.

  Hunter and Holtzman liked to work fast to stay in the groove. They wanted to get the game over as quickly as possible. Blue was different, Fosse said. He had a little bounce on the mound; Vida wanted to have a little fun out there.

  The differences extended to the Big Three’s personal lives as well. Blue said the three aces weren’t of the same mind when it came to off-the-field activities. The reason was simple, Blue said. “We weren’t that much alike.”

  Still the A’s aces talked pitching constantly at a time when a lot of pitchers, as Hunter pointed out, didn’t talk to each other. In that way the Big Three were like a brotherhood, a feeling that was familiar to Hunter, who had grown up in Hertford, North Carolina, as part of a farm family that included nine older children.

  Hunter recalled that baseballs were rare down on the farm when he was growing up, so they made due with potatoes, corncobs, or anything else that was round and firm. When they did get a new ball, they wrapped and rewrapped its cover, ultimately slipping an old sock over it. They may not have had much money, but they always had the game of baseball.

  Hunter and his family and friends played in cow pastures and yards. Hunter’s father, Abbott, had been a catcher, and he never lost his love for the game. He would drive his youngest son to Baltimore to watch the Orioles, and Hunter recalled Robin Roberts pitching for the Birds in many of the games they attended in the early 1960s. As soft as Roberts was throwing, Abbott would say, he was sure he could get a hit off of him.

  No, Jim would tell his father. Roberts knows where the ball is going, and the batter doesn’t. Hunter would adopt Roberts’s strategy as his own. “My philosophy for pitching,” Catfish said, “is to make them hit your pitch.”

  He would throw strikes, try to get ahead of the hitter, and try not to nibble too much. Because he was always around the plate with his pitches, Hunter surrendered his share of home runs. Some of the drives he gave up were legendary. The Cat recalled a moon shot by Mickey Mantle in the 1960s and a similar sky-scraping blast by Dave Kingman in the 1970s. There was a memorable drive by Frank Howard that Hunter joked must have landed in a Third World country.

  When asked about all the homers he gave up, Hunter would shrug. That’s usually just one run on one pitch, he reasoned. Give up three hits and a run, and that’s a lot of pitches and wear and tear on the arm.

  Though he was just twenty-six years old in 1972, Hunter had already been around the big leagues for eight seasons. At the time, he was one of the few major leaguers to have never played in the minors. Like Blue, Hunter had been a multi-sport star in high school. He was all-state in football; he won the state 440-yard dash; and his teams won state titles in baseball and football. His junior year in high school he struck out 29 batters in a twelve-inning game.

  His triumphs over adversity weren’t limited to the playing field. His senior year at Perquiman High in Hertford, he rose with the sun on Thanksgiving Day and went wading through a swamp with his brother Pete, the pair armed with shotguns and looking for small game. Pete’s shotgun went off accidentally and got Jim in the foot. “He had the nerve to faint on me,” Hunter recalled. “I had to slap him to wake him up.”

  At the time, Hunter thought he might never pitch again. He had gone 13-1 his junior season and pitched his team to the state championship, but some major league teams stopped following him once they learned of his hunting accident. After his right foot healed, Hunter pushed off the pitching rubber the way he always had; he didn’t have to change anything in his delivery.

  Finley didn’t change either. The Athletics owner and one of his scouts, former major league catcher Clyde Kluttz, still believed Hunter could become a major league pitcher. Kluttz had taught Hunter how to grip a baseball so that his fastball sank a good six inches and how to hold it across the seams so that the pitch rose like it had a mind of its own.

  Finley visited the Hunter family in June 1964, on the eve of Jim’s second straight appearance in a state title game. Finley described Abbott and Lillie Hunter’s dwelling as a “sharecropper’s home with a tin roof.” When Finley arrived, Lillie was hoeing the weeds in a peanut patch; Abbott was in the smokehouse turning bacon and hams.

  Hunter remained a country boy at heart. When he was a star with the A’s, he would wear Edwardian sport coats, white twill bell bottoms, and blousey-sleeved body shirts. But he still spoke with a down-home Carolina drawl and spent his off-seasons doing the same things he had done as a kid—walking in the woods for as much as thirty miles on a given day hunting squirrel, raccoon, quail, and deer; fishing for trout and, yes, catfish; spraying his peanut crops; harvesting corn; and loading melons onto trucks. As a boy, he loaded watermelons for twelve hours a day; once he worked from sunup to sundown and then pitched the next afternoon. He said farm life had made him twice as strong at age eighteen than he was in his mid-twenties, when he was only working forty days a year as a starting pitcher.

  His baseball future was on the line when Finley arrived at his home. After talking with the family for an hour, Finley asked about Jim’s injury. When Hunter took off his boot, Finley almost fell over. The top of Hunter’s right foot was loaded with buckshot. Others had backed off in their pursuit of Hunter, but Finley would not. He later told the New York Times he had fallen in love with the Hunter family. Finley told the Hunters that even if Jim never pitched again, he could keep the $75,000 signing bonus and he would personally see to it that Hunter got the best medical treatment available.

  Hunter signed, and Finley asked about a nickname.

  “What do you like to do?” Finley asked. “Hunt and fish,” Hunter replied.

  Fine, Finley said. When you were six years old you ran away from home and went fishing. Your mom and dad had been looking for you all day. When they found you about four o’clock in the afternoon, you’d caught two big catfish and were reeling in a third. “And that,” Finley said with some satisfaction, “is how you got your nickname.”

  Finley, like St. Louis Cardinals minor league manager Blake Harper before him, loved nicknames. Legend has it that Harper handed one of his fiery, feisty players the moniker “Pepper” because his birth name, John Martin, was just too ordinary. “Catfish,” like “Pepper,” looked good in headlines and was another way for Finley to add color to his club.

  The newly named Catfish spent the 1964 season recovering from his accident and was ticketed for the minors in 1965 when an injury to an A’s pitcher opened a spot for him on the Athletics’ major league roster. He had just turned nineteen. Also on the club that summer was Satchel Paige, soon to be fifty-nine years old. A publicity photo was taken of the youngest and oldest pitchers in the majors in 1965: Hunter, the bonus baby, sitting on the grandfatherly Paige’s lap. It was an experience, Hunter said, to be around a mound master like Paige. Hunter and Paige sat in the bullpen, and Satchel talked about the old days. Hunter watched in fascination as Paige and his “hesitation” pitch surrendered just one hit—a Carl Yastrzemski single—in three innings against the Red Sox.

  Hunter won a combined 17 games over his first two seasons and on May 8, 1968, pitched the major league’s first perfect game since Sandy Koufax had shut down the Chicago Cubs in 1965. In what may be the best-pitched game in major league history, Koufax outdueled Bob Hendley, who surrendered just one hit and one walk in going the distance. Hunter’s gem, a 4–0 final against a Minnesota lineup boasting Rod Carew, Harmon Killebrew, and Tony Oliva, would be the majors’ last perfect outing for the next thirteen seasons.

  Al Helfer, teamed with Monte Moore, made the call on the Athletics’ radio station: “Jim Hunter comes again with the 3-2 delivery. . . . Fastball in there. . . . Strike three! The boy has pitched a no-hitter! . . . He pitched a perfect ball game and goes into the record books [with] the immortals.”

  Hunter wasn’t the only member of Oakland’s Big Three to make baseball history. Blue threw a no-hitter in 1
970 and would combine with Lindblad and Fingers to no-hit the California Angels in 1975. Holtzman threw two no-hitters, both with the Cubs. The first came August 19, 1969, and the 3–0 win was made more impressive since it came against the eventual Western Division champion Atlanta Braves and a lineup listing Hank Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, Rico Carty, and Felipe Alou.

  Holtzman had to survive a pulled drive to left by Aaron in the seventh. Cubs longtime announcer Vince Lloyd made the call: “Aaron swings, look out, that baby is hit. . . . It is way back there. . . . Billy Williams, back to the wall . . . back to the corner. . . . He grabs it!”

  Holtzman’s second no-hitter came two years later in Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, a 1–0 victory over the reigning league champions. Jack Brickhouse, the Cubs’ colorful television announcer, provided the call on Chicago’s WGN: “Here is Lee May. . . . Here we go, two out in the ninth. . . . Ball two, strike two, everybody on the edge of their seat here at Riverfront Stadium. . . . Strike three! It’s a no-hitter for Kenny Holtzman! He did it again!”

  It was close to being Holtzman’s third or even fourth no-hitter. He had one-hit eventual Western Division champion San Francisco in 1971 and five years earlier had nearly done the unimaginable: no-hit the great Koufax and the champion Dodgers. Holtzman took a no-hitter into the ninth against Los Angeles on September 25, 1966, before third baseman Dick Schofield singled to center field. Holtzman finished with a complete game two-hitter and outdueled Koufax 2–1.

  The Holtzman-Koufax matchup had come the day after Yom Kippur, and Holtzman’s mother, Jacqueline, was torn between rooting for her son and rooting for Sandy, whose name was being extolled in Jewish households as the “New Patriarch.” “Maybe,” Ken’s mother reportedly told him, “you can get a no-decision.”

  Holtzman’s mother was a housewife; his father, Henry, worked in the machinery business. Ken played for the University City High School team, earning Most Valuable Player honors on a state championship team. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in business administration. Originally told at a Minnesota Twins tryout camp that he was too small to play professional baseball, Holtzman was taken by the Cubs in the fourth round of the Amateur Draft and signed for a $65,000 bonus. The bonus was important, Holtzman knowing that if he opted for a career in baseball, by the time he turned thirty he would be ten years behind guys with whom he had graduated college. He had to be assured he would earn enough money in baseball to make it financially worthwhile to him. He believed his signing bonus did that.