FOX Sports presents "The Boys in the Hall," a series featuring
interviews with legendary members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Check your local listings on May 13 for showings of "The Boys In The
Hall" featuring Robin Roberts.
The meeting room in the downtown Indianapolis hotel, the exquisite
Conrad Hilton, was overheated and the room was full of perspiring
people, but the sweat belonged to a room full of Hall of Fame baseball
players and some veteran baseball executives.
It was the 2009
baseball winter meetings and the room was populated by members of the
Veterans Committee, an august group gathered to choose that year's Hall
of Fame inductees.
Somebody decided it was time for a 10-minute break and with the age of some us, those old bones rattled when some stood.
But
I was fascinated by the man seated next to me and when he didn't stand,
I, too, remained seated. It was an opportunity to chat with a legend.
My
neighbor in the next chair was Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts, who
pitched in the majors for 18 years, mostly for the Philadelphia
Phillies. He won 286 games with a career 3.41 earned run average.
Roberts
folded his gnarled hands, the right one of which threw thousands and
thousands of pitches, across his belly, leaned back in his chair and
said with a smile, "Know how much money I made? I made $538,000. That
wasn't for one year. I made $538,000 for the entire 18 years of my
career (1948-1966)."
We chatted about current starting pitchers
who leave games after six innings with a lead or leave a game shortly
after 100 pitches.
Roberts smiled and said he remembered Opening Day, 1957, against the Dodgers.
"Gino
Cimoli beat me with a home run in the top of the 12th," he said, taking
a sip of iced tea. Top of the 12th? And Roberts was still in the game?
"Oh,
yeah," he said. "I'm not good with computers, but my grandson got
online and looked it up. I lost, 7-6. I threw 138 strikes that day. Not
pitches. Strikes. I threw 198 pitches, all told. Probably not the
smartest thing I ever did, but that's the way it was in those days. You
wanted to finish what you started."
Finish what he started? In 1953, Roberts had 33 complete games, one year after completing 30 games.
During
out short chat, Roberts didn't mention 1950, when the Phillies Whiz
Kids lost four straight to the New York Yankees. Roberts pitched Game 2,
all 10 innings of it in a matchup with Vic Raschi. It was 1-1 when New
York's Joe DiMaggio led the 10th with a home run off Roberts and the
Phillies lost, 2-1.
Roberts remembered his many battles against
left-handed Hall of Famer Warren Spahn, in which both threw close to 200
pitches (or more).
"I was like 3-8 against Spahnie, and he got
the better as he got older," Roberts said. "He came up with a new pitch
late in his career, and I read somewhere that he won more games after he
was 38 than he won before he was 35."
Spahn actually recorded
187 of his 363 wins after he was 35, including six straight seasons of
20 or more wins after he turned 35.
And that says much about
Roberts, who turned a conversation about himself into a conversation
about Warren Spahn, even though Roberts didn't play second chair to any
pitcher of his era.
Roberts won 20 or more games six times -- six
years in a row from 1950 to 1955 and won 28 in 1952. He led the
National League in wins four straight years from 1952 to 1955 and made
seven All-Star teams. He was Major League Player of the Year in 1952
when he won 28 and was second in the MVP balloting.
And he led the league in strikeouts in 1953 (198) and in 1954 (185).
"You
don't have to make a big study of batters before a game," he once said.
"When I have good stuff, I threw four fastballs out of five pitches.
When you talk about a hitter in a clubhouse meeting, no matter what his
weakness is, it's to end up low and away or high and tight and the
curveball must be thrown below the belt. That's what they always say.
That's the whole story of pitching. Keep your life and your pitching
real simple, and you'll get along."
Pitching for some bad teams
later in his career, Roberts lost 245 games, including 18 in 1956 (when
he won 19) and a 10-22 record in 1957.
And it ate at him like spicy foods giving you heartburn.
"I
never slept when I lost," he said. "I'd see the sun come up without
ever having closed my eyes. I'd see those base hits over and over, and
they would drive me crazy."
Roberts, though, kept hitters awake, too, then put them to sleep at the plate.
Said
Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Fame first baseman Willie Stargell, "He
looks like the kind of pitcher you can't wait to swing at, but you swing
and the ball isn't where you thought it was."
Former pitching
teammate Curt Simmons put it this way: "He was like a diesel. The more
you used him, the better he ran. I don't think you could wear him out."
