Joe Posnanski

This post ran on the old Soul of Baseball blog last May. I thought I would rerun it in honor of Bob Gibson: I apologize about the spacing between lines — don’t know how to fix that.

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I love lists. For a while a few years ago, I had a Web site called “listednumbers.com” and I put together dozens of lists with friends … I remember a few:

Top 10 Godfather lines.
Top 10 Bruce Springsteen songs.
Top 10 Schoolhouse Rocks
Top 10 Twilight Zones
Top 10 Uniform numbers
Top 10 U2 songs.
Top 10 Halloween candies
Top 10 Breakfast cereals
Top 10 Seinfeld episodes
Top 10 Disco songs

And so on. I lost the lists somewhere along the way — you might be aware that I’m not the most organized or computer savvy person who has ever lived. You know once my laptop computer flipped out when I was in Surprise, Arizona (probably from the strain of watching the Royals). I took it into a Best Buy, where some 14-year-old kid fixed it with a pencil eraser. He was like MacGyver with acne. I’ll have that kid in my will.

ANYWAY, we’re losing focus here. I love lists. So, I was thrilled the other day when I ran across Sports Illustrated’s, “Fifteen Most Intimidating Pitchers Ever.” That’s exactly the kind of list that gets me going — you take an imprecise sports word like “intimidating” and try to rank players by it. I love words like that. That’s why I’m so fascinated by the MVP award (built around the imprecise word: valuable), the Heisman Trophy (imprecise phrase: “most outstanding) and the U.S. constitution, (imprecise phrase: right to bear arms).

The Sports Illustrated list is not bad at all … but predictable.

SI’s Most Intimidating Pitchers
        1.        Bob Gibson
        2.        Don Drysdale
        3.        Early Wynn
        4.        Roger Clemens
        5.        Nolan Ryan
        6.        Randy Johnson
        7.        Juan Marichal
        8.        Sandy Koufax
        9.        Goose Gossage
        10.        J.R. Richard
        11.         Pedro Martinez
        12.        Sal Maglie
        13.        Bob Feller
        14.        Walter Johnson
        15.        Sam McDowell

Like I say, this isn’t a bad list at all — it’s a good list, in fact. It’s pretty much the list you would come up with if you were hanging out with your baseball loving friends at a game and decided to come up with a most intimidating pitchers list.

You would decide that “intimidating” means a “guy who glares a lot” and “throws really, really hard” and is “likely to throw at a guy’s head if he was crowding the plate.” So you would certainly pick Gibson first, and Drysdale is probably the second guy who comes to mind. Wynn was famous for that whole grandmother thing — someone said he was so mean he would throw at his own grandmother and Wynn said: “I’d have to. My grandma could really hit the curveball.”

We all know Clemens is intimidating, especially in contract negotiations (UPDATE: And also in phone calls to former trainers). Ryan had the fastest fastball ever, Marichal hit Roseboro in the head with a bat, Koufax threw pretty hard if memory serves, Gossage hit Ron Cey in the head with a pitch, J.R. Richard was about 11 feet tall, Pedro hit Reggie Sanders with a pitch during a perfect game (causing the normally genial Sanders to lose his mind and charge the mound), Sal Maglie was called “The Barber” for his close shaves, Feller was fast and wild, Big Train was fast, Sam McDowell was fast.

So, that’s a fine list. The trouble is, it doesn’t SAY anything. It doesn’t surprise. It doesn’t make you mad. It doesn’t create an argument. There’s no real reason why Wynn is listed ahead of Clemens or Pedro is behind Gossage. It’s just opinion, top of the head stuff, and while that’s fine, I really wonder: If you could break it down statistically, who are the 15 most intimidating pitchers ever? That sounds like a blog challenge, no?

Step 1: You need a more precise definition of “intimidating pitcher.” The word “intimidating” means “to fill with fear.” So naturally everyone assumes that an intimidating pitcher will be a hard-throwing guy who might, at any time, throw at a player’s head. But I have to say, I think that’s only part of the deal.

What is it that scares hitters? Is it the danger? Sure. Some. But I think, generally speaking, we’re projecting our own fears on Major Leaguers — many of us were afraid of hot fastballs in Little League, in high school, whatever. WE were afraid of getting hit by the ball. Major League hitters — I don’ t think that’s a big part of their makeup. They’re really not afraid of the ball.

I think hitters fear being made to look like a fool. I suspect that hitters (in general) lose as much sleep thinking about Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball as Joel Zumaya’s fastball. It’s hard to think of Wakefield being “intimidating” — that’s just not how we view the word — but I feel pretty certain that on those days when Wakefield’s knuckler is really dancing, he will make hitters sweat through their uniforms.

So, we’ll go with that definition: The pitchers who most fill batters with fear.

Step 2: Let’s find statistics that speak to intimidation. I’ve come up with three:

1.        Hit by pitch. This one’s obvious — it tells you how likely a pitcher is to plunk a batter. It doesn’t measure close shaves, unfortunately, but it’s best we’ve got.


2. Hits allowed per nine innings. This tells you how likely a hitter is to be successful — I cannot imagine that any pitcher in baseball history was more intimidating than Nolan Ryan during his no-hit, low-hit games. I have a story in the book about Ralph Garr — he has this piercing high-pitched voice. He led off a game against Nolan Ryan, stared at three blinding fastballs, struck out, and went back to the dugout. And then all through the stadium, you could hear Garr’s voice shout: “Boys, we got NO shot today.”


3. K’s per nine innings. What’s the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a hitter. Well, it might be what happened to Mike Sweeney a couple of weeks ago — he squared up to bunt, the ball hit his bat and literally knocked him down. And then there was Jason LaRue striking out on an attempted sacrifice bunt … anyway with those exceptions, you would have to say the strikeout is the most embarrassing thing — you have to walk back to the dugout, everybody’s watching you, the pitcher knows he beat you, etc. Strikeouts are not quite the anathema they used to be (I’m pretty sure I’m using “anathema” incorrectly there, but it’s a good word). But they’re still embarrassing.


Step 3: Contact Bill James. Well, you knew that was coming. I got a great email back from Bill on this — filled with all sorts of fabulous thoughts. I’ll try to sum up some of them here.

– Bill thinks “intimidation” is probably not the kind of thing you can or should measure with some goofy statistical formula. It’s something you view from the heart. He quotes the e.e. cummings poem:

as long as we have eyes to see
and lips to kiss and sing with
what does it matter if some son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure spring with

– That said, he suggests that if I really AM going to come up with an intimidation formula (of course I am), I should include two more stats: Height and homers per nine innings. He says this would be worthwhile because:

a. There’s simply no question that height plays a role in intimidation. Billy Wagner may throw harder than Randy Johnson, but at 5-foot-10, he is not the presence that Johnson is.
b. If batters hit home runs off of you (or feel like they can) they are not intimidated by you.

He offered a few other fun thoughts. … He wondered if Eric Plunk should get bonus intimidation points since his name is “Plunk.” … He also wondered if Ugueth Urbina gets some machete bonus points … He looked at the Top 100 pitchers in strikeouts per nine (500 ip minimum) and was stunned to learn that Ted Lilly, Stan Belinda, Paul Assenmacher, Jay Witasik and Darren Holmes are on the list. Bob Gibson is not.

He also sent me his 20 most intimidating pitchers in baseball history. I’ll include that list at the end — that way you have to read my junk first (assuming you don’t, er, just scroll down).

First my list. I came up with a formula that is so confusing, I don’t understand it. I do know it measures pitchers (against league average) for hits per nine innings pitched, strikeouts per nine, homers per nine, hit batsmen per nine and height. It weighs these at different levels — I don’t even remember the levels anymore. I played with it and played with it, and it’s late, and I’m not going to go back and check my work. The Intimidation Quotient is set up so that 100 is a very intimidating pitcher — Sad Sam Jones scored 100. Goose Gossage scored 102.

15. Mariano Rivera.
IQ: 108.
I just got a book in the mail — “The Ultimate Top-Ten Rankings of the Best in Sports,” written by Christopher Russo, who is of course the Mad Dog, and while I have not had a chance to really delve into it, I did look at his 10 greatest baseball players of all time. At No. 10 — Mariano Rivera. The 10th best baseball player ever. I didn’t really get the chance to glance much beyond that. …

I don’t know how well this formula is working with Rivera ahead of players like Early Wynn, Sandy Koufax and Gossage, but I do think that he intimidates hitters, or at least he did until this year (UPDATE: This was May — he went right back to intimidating hitters). There was a finality when Rivera came into the game — and I don’t think there has been another great pitcher who so plainly said: “Here’s what I’ve got — one pitch. Try to hit it.” Well, none come to mind anyway. … Mo’s on the list in large part because of his astonishing ability to prevent home runs — the last six years he’s never given up more than three in a season.

14. J.R. Richard
IQ: 109
There’s a great show I saw once late at night on ESPN Classic — it was a report someone had done years and years ago for CBS News (I think) on J.R. Richard. He was still in high school then in Louisiana, and at the time nobody knew for sure if he would be a hitter or a pitcher in the big leagues. But everyone knew he would be great. For a five year period until his stroke — 1976-1980 — Richard was better than Nolan Ryan. … Anyway in the Classic show, there’s a wide shot of all the scouts who were watching Richard play in a high school game. There had to be about 50 of them. But only one of them was black. And then you heard the black scout’s voice: “This guy can PLAY!” That was my friend Buck O’Neil.

13. Ryne Duren
IQ: 109
Well, the formula got him right, I think. Blind Ryne had a high-90s fastball and absolutely no idea where it was going. He plunked 41 batters in 589 innings, the highest ratio on the list (he actually plunked twice as many men as Koufax in about one-fourth the time). Duren supposedly used to throw the ball against the screen on purpose to scare the next hitter — the ol’ Nuke Laloosh trick. But he threw so hard and was so wild and unstable, they were already scared.

12. Don Drysdale
IQ: 110
He hit a lot of batters — especially for that time frame — and that’s why he’s on the list. But you know for a great pitcher in a great pitcher’s era (on a mound roughly the size of Yao Ming) he was surprisingly hittable. He really just barely made the list. … This seems as good a time as any to point out a possible myth. Lots of people seem to think pitchers were more likely to hit batters back in the old days. You always hear those stories about how “you just took it like a man” back then and “pitchers used to own the inside part of the plate” and all that. Well, maybe. But hitters are getting plunked about twice as often these days compared to the 1940s through the 1980s. Drysdale hit .40 batters per nine innings — which was a very high rate in the 1960s. But it would be just about average in 2006. Now, there’s no way to measure how many times hitters were knocked down in the old days — maybe they were just better at dodging the inside pitches. Maybe the stats are faulty. Or, maybe — just maybe — memories are faulty.

11. Smoky Joe Wood.
IQ: 110
He’s one of the many pitchers who may have had the fastest fastball of all time. A partial list of candidates: Walter Johnson, Smoky Joe Wood, Smokey Joe Williams, Slim Jones, Bob Feller, Satchel Paige, Dazzy Vance, Herb Score, Sam McDowell, Steve Dalkowski, Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson, Goose Gossage, Rob Dibble, Mark Wohlers, Randy Johnson, Colt Griffin (only high schooler to be clocked at 100 mph — fine Royals pick), Billy Wagner, Joel Zumaya. Whew.

Walter Johnson was quoted saying that Joe Wood had the fastest fastball in the world (”Listen my friend, there’s no man alive who can throw faster than Smoky Joe Wood”). And Johnson, while a modest fellow, was not naive. Years later, when he saw a young Bob Feller, he was impressed. But Johnson still believed that in his prime, he threw harder than Feller. … Wood’s career was cut short after he broke his thumb during a play. He had one legendary year for the Red Sox, 1912 — 34-5, 1.93 ERA, won three games in the World Series (UPDATE: I followed this with a lame Gary Thorne joke that no loner seem relevant).

10. Sam McDowell.
IQ: 111.
I wish he had been higher on the list to be honest — but I don’t have any control over these numbers. Sudden Sam had an amazing ability to lose games even when nobody could touch him. In 1965, he had a league leading 2.18 ERA. The league hit .185 against him. He led the league in strikeouts. And he still went 17-11, because he also led the league in walks and wild pitches and and he lost two games 2-1, one game 3-1 and one game 1-0. … Three years later, in the wild 1968 season, he went 15-14 with a 1.81 ERA and league leading 283 strikeouts. That record might be due to the Indians being shut out five times when McDowell was pitching. … In 1970, he finally won 20, though even that year he had a couple of 2-1 losses. … I remember a former teammate of McDowell’s telling me that Sam was absolutely the meanest son of a gun he ever played with, bar none. He said: “When he drank, which was all the time, he was a ruthless SOB. But you know, he wasn’t all that nice when he didn’t drink.” These days, McDowell is a drug and alcohol counselor.

9. Bob Gibson
IQ: 116
Yes, I’m embarrassed. Everybody knows Gibson was the most intimidating pitcher ever and it’s humiliating to have Gibson this low (especially when you see some of the guys above him). But if there’s a bright side, having him here allows me to make a point that Bill and I are discussing: Doesn’t it seem like Bob Gibson gets better every single year?

Sure he was an all-time great pitcher, no doubt about it, I’m not denying that. I’m a very big Gibson fan. But a halo-effect definitely takes hold when it comes to certain players. Joe DiMaggio was a better player in 1965 than he was in ‘55, better still in ‘75, better yet in ‘85. I was just talking to a friend, an old scout, who swears that Mickey Mantle ran a 3.3 from home to first on a bunt. Buck O’Neil had the great Negro Leagues star Oscar Charleston hitting 40 homers a year when when we first started traveling together, and by the end of the road trip it was 50 homers a year.

Gibson has a special quality that makes him grow in memory. He was a larger than life. It’s a rare and beautiful thing. And I’m not here to say that Gibson wasn’t the most intimidating pitcher ever — we’re just having fun with a goofy blog. But I’ll say this: He had a reputation as a guy who would knock a guy down just for the way he looked; but he really didn’t hit that many batters. He was a strikeout guy, but on this list everyone but Drysdale has better strikeout numbers (Rivera’s numbers are the same as Gibson’s). His hit and homer numbers are terrific, of course, but again in this company they are average or below.

If we had a poll of every living baseball player and asked “Who is the most intimidating pitcher of all time?” there is no doubt in my mind that Gibson would win going away. I don’t have any doubt that Gibson intimidated more hitters than anyone ever. But it’s also true that enough of those intimidated players got hits and homers, and so Gibson is ninth on the list.

8. Pedro Martinez.
IQ: 119.
For about seven years, he was the best pitcher I ever saw. … For some reason I’ve always associated him with Greg Maddux (which possibly makes sense) and my brother David (which makes no sense at all). I don’t know if I can explain this, but I’ll try: I’ve always been a huge Maddux fan, even though he is the exact opposite of Pedro (and the exact opposite of intimidating). Pedro is all “Here I am, come and hit me, I’ll stick this ball in your ear, who do you think you are getting a hit off me?” And so on. And Maddux is the guy who pitches nine innings and everyone in the losing clubhouse thinks they had a good day until they see the box score.

So, when I was a kid, we had an early bed time. Something like 9 p.m. But on Tuesday nights we both wanted to stay up to — like I need to say it — watch “Three’s Company.” (Chrissie! Yummy!) OK, so we each had our own strategy. My strategy was to be really quiet so that my parents wouldn’t notice that I was still up. And my brother’s strategy was to make some grand speech about how we had earned the RIGHT to stay up until 9:30, and ALL THE KIDS OUR AGE got to stay up AND who did our parents think they were holding us back and so on.

He was Pedro. I was Maddux.

7. Rube Waddell
IQ: 122
I could be miscounting, but I’ve got three alcoholics on the list so far, right? Duren, McDowell and Waddell. … Waddell is not often listed on “most dominant” lists and maybe he shouldn’t be, I don’t know. But he was an absolutely remarkable strikeout pitcher in the 1900s. … They say he used to leave in the middle of games to chase fire engines. … Bill writes that before one game he was being baited to wrestle by Boston’s Candy LaChance and at some point Waddell simply picked up LaChance and body slammed him. Then Waddell went out and won the game. That’s intimidation. … Connie Mack: “(Waddell) was the atom bomb of baseball long before the atom bomb was discovered.”

6. Bob Feller
IQ: 123
Feller is on the list even though he hardly hit anybody in his career. Among the players on the list, only J.R. Richard hit fewer batters per nine innings … I’m both fascinated and appalled by Feller. I remember once I was interviewing him and I would say that, no joke, he told me 20 times that the Bob Feller Museum was in Van Meter “just 17 miles from Des Moines.” Twenty times, minimum. In the next day’s column I mentioned that the Bob Feller Museum was 17 miles from Des Moines several times (not 20), which led Feller to rip me, which was fine. He also said: “Hey, if you don’t promote yourself, who will?” And I really like that. … Another time I was talking to him on the phone — this was probably about 15 years ago — and after a perfectly pleasant 20 minutes he snapped: “What time are you going to pick me up from the airport?” I said, “Um, do you need me to pick you up from the airport?” And he said, “Never mind. You’re useless.”

5. Dazzy Vance
IQ: 127
Vance’s strikeout numbers don’t look all that special now — he struck out about 2,000, same as Orel Hershiser — but in the 1920s they were mind-boggling. He led the National League in strikeouts every single year from 1922-28, and he usually led by a lot (in 1925, for instance, he had 221 strikeouts. Dolf Luque was next with 140. Nobody else had 100. In 1924, he had more strikeouts than the second and third guys combined. Batters did not strike out then, except when Vance was pitching). … Vance is an amazing story. He was a rookie when he was 31 years old. He had hurt his arm by banging his arm on a poker table. An unknown doctor (perhaps a Frank Jobe ancestor) performed some emergency surgery, and Vance was suddenly throwing the ball harder than ever. He had a little mean streak too, even though they called him Dazzy.

4. Randy Johnson
IQ: 129
I actually saw Randy Johnson pitch in the minor leagues. I went to Jacksonville to cover a playoff game between the Charlotte O’s and the Jacksonville Suns … this had to be 1987. It was my first road trip as a sportswriter. I was 20 years old, Johnson was 23, and what I remember is that he was viewed as a freak of nature. Everyone in the little wooden press box was talking about how he was too tall to pitch in the big leagues. … The thing I like about Johnson on the mound is that he’s always looks like the guy who’s just about ready to start a bar fight. You know that guy: He’s sort of in control but you know that if just one thing went wrong — the wrong song came on the jukebox, the wrong ex-girlfriend walked in — he would snap and start throwing beer bottles.

3. Roger Clemens
IQ: 134
I’ve always felt kind of bad for Dan Duquette. Just a little. When he made that “Twilight of his career” comment about Clemens, well, Clemens had been pretty crappy for four seasons. Well, maybe “crappy” is overselling it, but he was 11-14 with a 4.46 in 1993, 9-7 in the strike year, 10-5 and 10-13. And that’s when Duquette said it. Lots of people believed the same thing (though they were smart enough not to say it publicly). Then Clemens goes to Toronto, has his best season in a half dozen years, and then he goes on to become win 187 Cy Young Awards and become one of the great old pitchers in baseball history. Kind of a raw deal for the Duke, if you ask me. (UPDATE: Just nine months later, this little comment has taken on a whole new meaning, no?).

2. Walter Johnson
IQ: 144
The Big Train had this reputation as baseball’s ultimate gentleman. In fact, the story goes that Ty Cobb used to crowd the plate against Johnson because he knew that Johnson would not hit him with a pitch. If that’s true, Cobb was taking his health into his own hands because Walter Johnson hit 203 batters in his career, more than any player in baseball history. … It’s fun to play the make believe sports game — like how good would Jim Brown be if you could pluck him right out of 1964 (no weight training, no nothing) and put him in a starting NFL lineup? Would he still run over people? Or would he get killed because now linebackers weigh 275 pounds and run faster than he did? … How would Tiger Woods do if he played against Harry Vardon in 1907 — but he had to use the wooden shafts, and hit that crappy ball they hit, and he had to putt on greens that are rougher than Warrensville Road in my old Cleveland hometown? … My favorite question involves Walter Johnson: How would he look to us if he just showed up tomorrow, straight out of 1913? Would we be wowed by his fastball or would it really look like Rodrigo Lopez’s fastball? Would he blow away hitters with his motion and overpowering stuff? I don’t have any answers for this, but I wish …

1. Nolan Ryan
IQ: 149
What was Ryan on the SI list? No. 5? I guess I don’t see that. He blows everyone away statistically, and I still cannot imagine that there has ever been a more intimidating presence. He threw impossibly hard, he had a ridiculous curveball, he was wild and more often than any pitcher before or since he was unhittable. And he body slammed Robin Ventura. That, to me, equals intimidation.

Quick wrap-up: Early Wynn never even got close to this list. And neither did Juan Marichal. I don’t dispute that they were intimidating, but the numbers I chose simply didn’t show it … The next five after Rivera were: Rob Dibble (good choice), Sandy Koufax (good choice — didn’t make the list because he didn’t hit ANYBODY in his career), Jeff Nelson (um), Jim Kern (one of my childhood heroes) and Bob Veale (I don’t know — maybe a good choice).

And finally, without comment (because I’ve been working on this blog WAY too long) we enclose Bill James’ 20 most intimidating pitchers ever.

Bill James list
1. Randy Johnson
2. Sam McDowell
3. Roger Clemens
4. Bob Feller
5. Nolan Ryan
6. Walter Johnson
7. J.R. Richard
8. Goose Gossage
9. Bob Gibson
10. Don Drysdale
11. Ewell Blackwell
12. Rube Waddell
13. Dick Radatz
14. Ryne Duren
15. Bob Veale
16. Joe Wood
17. Stan Williams
18. Rob Dibble
19. Johny Vander Meer
20. Hippo Vaughn