 |
| Bill Fischer set an all-time major league record when he went 84 1/3 innings without issuing a walk for the Kansas City Athletics late in the 1962 season. He broke the record of 68 innings set by the legendary Christy Mathewson in 1913. |
By Phil Ellenbecker
What do Christy Mathewson and Bill Fischer have in common?
Well, they were both major league pitchers, with widely contrasting career results. "Big Six" Mathewson is tied with Pete Alexander for the most National League victories of all time and third-most overall, with a 17-year record of 373-188 and a 2.13 ERA. He was one of the original six players voted into the Hall of Fame in 1936.
Fischer? A little bit short of Cooperstown. He went 45-58 with a 4.34 ERA over a career that covered nine seasons in the major leagues.
Mathewson was also one of the greatest control pitchers of all time, seven times leading the NL in least walks per nine innings. And that's where he and Fischer have something in common.
When Fischer, pitching for the Kansas City Athletics, got Baltimore's Brooks Robinson to hit into a fielder's choice to close out the Orioles' half of the seventh inning Sept. 15, 1962, Fischer joined Mathewson in the history books. In fact, he'd surpassed him.
With that third out that inning that Saturday night at Kansas City's Municipal Stadium, before an "appreciative" crowd of 7,884, Fischer had now pitched 68 1/3 innings without issuing a walk. That broke the record of 68 innings Mathewson had held since 1913 for consecutive walkless innings, and it still stands.
Fischer carried his masterful control through to the fifth inning of the final day of the season, Sept. 30. When Detroit's Bubba Morton coaxed a base on balls with one out at Tiger Stadium, Fischer's string was over at 84 1/3 innings -- a little more than nine straight nine-inning games. And then he promptly wild-pitched Morton to second. And gave way to a reliever at the end of the inning.
And Fischer took the loss as Jim Bunning and the Tigers prevailed 6-1.
That gave Fischer, who'd spent the early part of the 1962 season at Triple-A Portland,
a final record of 4-12 with a 3.95 ERA. So no, all the while he kept from hurting himself with walks, he wasn't exactly mowing 'em down. In fact, his record was 2-10 during his walkless streak, which had begun Aug. 3 when another Bubba, Bubba Phillips, was issued a free pass leading off the game for Cleveland.
But hey, this is the Kansas City A's we're talking about here, so any bit of positive immortality that came their way was most welcome. Most of the time it was in a negative manner that they made their mark in their 13-year history in K.C. before moving to Oakland.
Example? Well, on April 22, 1959, Kansas City pitchers managed to issue 10 more walks in one inning than Fischer dealt in his 84 1/3 stretch.
Yes, the Chicago White Sox collected 10 walks and managed to score 11 runs on one hit in the seventh inning in a 20-6 snoozer at Municipal. The A's came within one walk of the major league record for an inning set Sept. 11, 1949, by the Washington Senators against the New York Yankees.
Another example: Mickey Mantle says the hardest ball he ever hit was a shot off the facade of the right-field roof at Yankee Stadium in 1963 against the A's. He nearly became the first player to hit a ball out of The House That Ruth Built. And who served up that mammoth blast?
None other than Mr. Fischer.
But on the positive side, and you take it where you can get it with the Kansas City A's, Fischer's walkless streak might rank with Bert Campaneris' playing nine positions in a game in 1965 as the most distinguished individual feats in Kansas City A's history.
And although his final 1962 record wasn't sparkling, his ERA ranked second behind Diego Segui's 3.86 among K.C. pitchers with 100 innings and was just under the league average.
He ran into some hard luck during those 84 1/3 walkless innings, absorbing three 1-0 losses, including Jack Kralick's no-hitter for Minnesota on Aug. 29, and two others where the A's scored a total of one run. His ERA from Aug. 3 on was a quite sturdy 3.91.
To gain some more appreciation for what Fischer accomplished in avoiding those walks, I took a look at the American League's top 10 in drawing bases on balls for 1962. Included in that number are Hall of Famers Mantle and Harmon Killebrew and other sluggers such as Norm Cash, Rocky Colavito and Roger Maris.
Those 10 batters had 44 at-bats during Fischer's streak without squeezing a walk out of him. And that doesn't mean they were feasting on his strikes. Take away 3-for-4 outings Cash and Colavito had against him, and those hitters went a collective 6-for-36, for a .166 average.
So Fischer was doing some good by managing to avoid those walks. It just didn't add up in the win-loss column.
But hey, like we said, the Kansas City A's. With that closing loss to Detroit, they finished 1962 with a 72-90 record, ninth and next-to-last in the American League. But it was an 11-win improvement over 1961, when they'd also finished ninth. It was their most wins since a 73-81 mark in 1958 good for seventh (AL was eight teams then). And then they won 73 in 1963. But then 57 and 59 the two years after that.
Like we said, the Kansas City A's.
Getting back to Fischer breaking Mathewson's record. As he was toiling for the hapless A's, and wasn't otherwise setting the world on fire, Fischer kind of crept up on Matty.
“Nobody even noticed it until I pitched a game in Chicago,” he told Tim Pearrell for a 1997 Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch article. " I got taken out of the game in the seventh inning and they put up on the scoreboard, ‘Fischer has now gone 60 innings without a walk.’ It was the first I knew of it. Then they started blowing it up a little bit.”
To be technical, in that Sept. 10 game Fischer referred to (in which he took a 4-3 loss) he was pinch hit for in the seventh inning, and the walkless streak had reached 61 1/3 innings. But at any rate, he was on the radar.
And five days later he'd supplanted "Big Six" after he got Robinson to hit that grounder to shortstop Wayne Causey in the seventh. He was replaced with two out in the eighth and the A's leading 4-3. Alas, they lost 5-4 in 11 innings.
So how sharp was Fischer's control before the streak? Not so razor, as he walked eight in his other 42 2/3 innings. Still, he had a final average of 0.6 walks per nine innings. Dick Donovan, the league's leader that year in that category among qualified pitchers, averaged 1.68. And ironically, Mathewson's BB/9 the year he'd set that walkless record in 1913? 0.6.
(Mathewson's '13 ratio extends to 0.6176, which is the third-best of all time since 1900 behind Carlos Silva's .4301 in 2005 and Babe Adams' .6160 in 1920. Again, talking about pitchers with enough qualified innings.)
Fischer shrugged off his accuracy in the typical self-effacing, aw-shucks manner he always displayed.
"There are only two reasons a guy is wild," Fischer told John O’Connor of the Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch in a 1998 article. "He’s got bad mechanics or he’s afraid. I had pretty good mechanics, and I was too dumb to be afraid."
As for Fischer's control the rest of his years, the closest he came to that 0.6 in '62 was 2.1 in '59 with Washington, and with enough qualifying innings he ranked sixth in the AL. His mechanics must have improved, for his BB/9 had been 3.2 in 1958 and he'd ranked fifth in the AL in wild pitches in '57.
For his career, Fischer came in with a 2.3 BB/9.
As for Fischer's overall pitching through the years, it was rather up and down, the very definition of a journeyman pitcher.
And one of Fischer's pitches ended way, way up. That would be the one Mantle sent into orbit in the 11th inning May 22,1963 with the score tied 7-7, for an emphatic game-ender. According to the Society of American Baseball Research's "Home Run Encyclopedia," it struck the façade on the Yankee Stadium right-field roof approximately 370 feet from home plate and 115 feet above field level.
“Almost everyone in attendance believed that the ball was still rising when it was interrupted in midflight by the roof structure," William J. Jenkinson wrote. "Based upon that belief, this drive has commonly been estimated at about 620 feet if left unimpeded.”
So in this case, Fischer's control betrayed him, you might say, and he paid. According to Fischer's SABR bio by Bob LeMoine, A's manager Eddie Lopat, a former Yankees pitching standout, had a $200 fine in effect for anyone who gave Mantle a good pitch to hit in a win-or-lose situation.
"I got this one outside, but a little bit too high," Lopat told The Sporting News.
Fischer's best major league season as a starter was 1959, when he went 9-11 with a 4.28 ERA. On April 22 of that year he lost a 1-0 14-inning decision to the Yankees and Hall of Famer Whitey Ford. He shut out New York for 10 innings before giving way to a reliever. Ford went the distance.
His best season as a reliever was 1963, when he was 9-6 with a 3.57 ERA. But even then Fischer wasn't too impressed with what success he had.
“It’s nice. It’s
great,” Fischer told Jack Hand of The Associated Press. “But I’m just a …what is it they say? … a Humpty
Dumpty. I’m 32. I’m not going to be a star. I’m just a mediocre pitcher."
Fischer's final big league season was 1964, but he hung on for four more years in the minor leagues, giving him 20 years of pro ball. In another example of his knack for finding the plate, on May 3, 1965, with Indianapolis, Fischer pitched a 1-0 two-hit shutout over San Diego in which 70 of his 90 pitches were strikes.
 |
Fischer the coach
After retiring as pitcher Fischer became a distinguished pitching coach, on the minor or major league level with the Kansas City Royals, Boston Red Sox, Cincinnati Reds, Atlanta Braves and Tampa Bay Reds organizations. Among the accomplished hurlers he worked with were Dennis
Leonard, Dan Quisenberry, Bret
Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza, Roger Clemens and Tom Seaver.
And among those pitchers were ones well-noted for, you guessed it, control. Saberhagen's walks per nine innings ratio of 0.6598 in 1994 is the fourth-best all time since 1900. Quisenberry had BB/9s of under 1.0 from 1982 through 1984 and a career mark of 1.4. In both of Clemens' record-setting 20-strikeout games, he didn't walk a batter.
"He deserves a great deal of credit for what he has done," Clemens told Larry Whiteside of the Boston Globe in 1991. "I think I owe
him just as much for the third (Cy Young Award) as I did for the other two.”
From his boss at Cincinnati, Reds manager John McNamara, came this praise in The Sporting News: “I’ve worked with a
lot of excellent pitching coaches in my time, but Fischer has
the best knowledge of mechanics I’ve seen."
In Fischer's last position, as the Royals' senior pitching adviser, he appropriately enough became known by players a quarter of his age as “Walking Wisdom.” He had this to say about that:
“Walking wisdom, eh?” he told Joe Posnanski of The Kansas City Star in 2008. “Yeah, they should have been there that day when Ol’ Walking Wisdom pitched for the Kansas City A’s and decided to throw a bleeping fastball to Mickey Mantle. The Mick blasted it off of the bleeping right-field façade at Yankee Stadium. They called it 620 feet. They called it 734 feet. Whatever, it was bleeping far.”
Fischer, whose baseball career spanned 71 years, died Oct. 30, 2018, at age 88.
Sources:
Box score, play-by-play, start of streak: https://www.
Box, play-by-play, record-breaking game:
https://www.retrosheet.org/
Box, play-by-play, end of streak: https://www.
Bill Fischer's pitching log for 1962: https://www.retrosheet.
Fischer biographical information: https://sabr.org/
Historical Kansas City A's moments: https://
No comments:
Post a Comment