Throwing 100 mph isn’t enough in majors

Steve Dalkowski and his fictional alter ego, Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, had little in common.

Dalkowski was a 5-foot-10 left-hander who wore glasses, didn’t really look like a ballplayer and never acquired a cool nickname. He drank too much and remained stuck in the minors until his career flamed out in 1966. LaLoosh, a tall, fun-loving, good-looking righty bound for the big leagues, lives forever in the classic film “Bull Durham.”

What they shared was the ability to throw a baseball extraordinarily fast and comically wild (although Nuke eventually learns to harness his energy). Neither pitcher, in real life or on film, was accurately timed, but it’s a given they hit 100 mph - a magic number that by itself guarantees little success but connotes the mythic quality of an achievement beyond the reach of most mortals.

“It’s the triple-digit thing,” said Ron Shelton, a former minor leaguer who used Dalkowski as inspiration for LaLoosh in the movie he wrote and directed. “It’s a goal, whether it’s meaningful or meaningless. It reverberates. There’s a digital board in every stadium, and after every pitch, you look up there.”

In a few months, Nationals fans might be doing the same thing with Stephen Strasburg, whom the club is expected to take Tuesday with the first pick in major league baseball’s first-year player draft. Generally regarded as the best pitching prospect in years, Strasburg has an arsenal of weapons. But the one everybody talks about is a fastball clocked at upward of 102 mph.

Welcome to the 100 mph club, kid.

“It’s a number that is recognized as the elite of arms,” said Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan, the all-time strikeout king who threw harder for longer than any pitcher in history. “So when someone throws at that level, it gets people’s attention.”

Said Shelton: “We like strikeouts, and we like home runs.”

In other words, fans like speed and power, and the 100 mph fastball, often heard but not seen, combines both. If you can throw that hard, you’re called a “power pitcher.” Even better is when you can throw that hard for strikes. It took a few years for Ryan, now the Texas Rangers’ president, to learn how to do that. Dalkowski never did.

Shelton followed Dalkowski by a few years in the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system and heard all the stories about his speed and wildness. Dalkowski reputedly hitting an announcer in the press box and a mascot. Dalkowski hurling a baseball through a wooden fence on a bet, firing three pitches through a backstop during a game, breaking an umpire’s mask in three places and causing a concussion. He supposedly pitched a no-hitter while striking out 18 and walking 20.

Ted Williams faced one batting-practice pitch from Dalkowski before dropping his bat and leaving the cage. Williams and others said Dalkowski was the fastest they ever saw, but he never escaped the minors, where he went 46-80 with a 5.59 ERA in nine seasons. In 995 innings, he struck out 1,396 and walked 1,354.

He also was a serious alcoholic.

In a way, Shelton said, “It was like talking about Michael Jordan or LeBron James. This was some other kind of a creature. He was 5-10, wore glasses and short-armed the ball. He’s the last guy in the world you’d think could throw that hard.”

Shelton said he was enthralled with “the idea of a guy with this gift from the gods that doesn’t know what to do with it.”

Other hard throwers have known what to do with it, but how fast did they really throw? Timing the speed of pitches always has been problematic. Even now, radar gun readings vary. In the 1940s, Bob Feller was timed at 98.6 by a photo cell device at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The only serious effort to time Dalkowski’s fastball took place in 1958, also in Aberdeen, not far from where Ripken Stadium now stands. Using a primitive radar device, he was timed at 93.5 mph, but that was laughable. It took Dalkowski 40 minutes of nonstop pitching to get a reading - a day after he threw about 150 pitches in a game.

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