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STEVE DALKOWSKI: WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY, THEY FIRST GIVE A FASTBALL
It is highly likely that no one ever threw a baseball faster than Steve Dalkowski, who died last Sunday aged 80. It took almost a week for the news to be made public, although that was not surprising, because Dalkowski was such a mythic figure, most of those who knew about his legend probably assumed he had passed long before. People have always looked to sport for metaphors; in the early days of sports-writing, stars were Homeric in their qualities, of which character was the most important; in Britain today ‘character’ is still regarded as the cause of winning, and winning the proof of character. But as those educated in dead white men know, Homer’s Greek gods punished hubris, and more than that, assumed that tragedy was the very stuff of mortal life.
If that were the case, Steve Dalkowski indeed deserves immortality. And there’s no reason to doubt how fast he threw: you just have to listen to anyone who saw him. In the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system, Cal Ripken Sr. was a catcher. He said Dalkowski was the fastest he’d ever seen. Earl Weaver managed him, and said Nolan Ryan wasn’t nearly as fast. Minor league teammate Pat Gillick, who became GM of the Blue Jays, said he was the fastest he ever saw. So did another minor league teammate, Herm Starette, who had a long career as a pitching coach. But if no one ever threw faster than he did, few, if any pitchers were ever wilder. He once threw a too-high fastball that shattered the umpire’s face mask in three places and left him with a concussion. Dalkowski pitched nine seasons in the minor leagues, mostly for the Orioles, only coming close to the big leagues once. He threw 956 innings as a professional. He struck out 1,324 batters: 12.5 per nine innings. He also walked 1,256, or 11.8 per nine. He was the inspiration for George’s Plimpton’s Sidd Finch, and for Nuke LaLoosh, the wild pitcher in Bull Durham, whose writer/director Ron Shelton played in the Orioles system a few years after Dalkowski, and heard all the stories.
The most famous ode to Dalkowski was a piece from Sports Illustrated in October 1970, after he was released from a baseball team for the last time. The writer, Pat Jordan was another hard-throwing Connecticut high school pitcher, two years behind Dalkowski, and his memoir of his own failed baseball career, A…
