The Pecan Park Eagle

Ewell Blackwell: The Scariest Pitcher I Never Faced

Hall of Fame pitcher Warren Spahn put it this way: “Hitting is about timing. Pitching is all about upsetting that timing.” Hall of Fame catcher and hitter Yogi Berra put it this way: “When I’m batting, I’m not thinking anything; I’m hitting.”  Cardinal Lance Berkman recently backed up Berra’s famous pronouncement when he was asked what he was thinking when the World Series came down to only one more strike for him in Game Seven before he cracked a game-tying ninth inning single into right center field. “I wasn’t thinking anything,” Lance Berkman said, “I was hitting.”

I never played baseball at anything approaching the level of these famous stars, but I can still honestly say that their reasoning makes total sense to this old former East End sandlot and parochial school league player. We could have wished to have known about the wisdom of Spahn and Berra back then in our small world struggles with the little white ball and its red-stitched seams, but the few coaches we had didn’t know them either, so where were we going to get them?

All I ever got as a hard-throwing pitcher with sometime control was the coaching advice to “throw it as hard as you can for as long as you can.” The problem there was that I usually lost my control before I lost my speed or stamina. That led a lot of walks, but a few guys bailing in fear for their lives in the dust around home plate. Remember: In that 1950-1952 era, nobody wore batting helmets or any other primitive form of protective head-gear. Not in the Houston East End, we didn’t.

Bill McCurdy, cf-p, St. Christopher Travelers, 1951-52

Back in 1951-52, I played for St. Christopher’s Catholic School in Park Place, which was (and still is) just down the road from Pecan Park, where I grew up. We had an opposing pitcher in our league from St. Pius X in Pasadena, a fellow named Ed Burke, who was one of those early growth, tall and wiry real athletes that made most of the rest of us 13-14 years old look like the pudgy, immature pretenders that we actually were. Ed Burke stood about 6’2″ back then and he threw the ball with that long-armed whipping motion I had only heard about and seen on baseball cards of big leaguer Ewell Blackwell.

I feared the thought of facing Ewell Blackwell as a pitcher. With “Long Ed” Burke, my teammates and I simply feared the actuality of facing the guy who stood out there 60′ 6″ from our heads and fired that ball at our totally right-handed batting order with that inside-out crossing pattern of blurred heat.

We weren’t so worried about the pitches that made the complete inside-to-out cross. Those either sailed outside as balls or caught the outside corner for a called strike. We swung at just about anything, anyway. Ed Burke upset out timing by making sure that we had none as we stood in there and impassively rained fire upon our dazed self-defensive swinging warriors.

We had never heard the expression “chin music” back then, but we had tasted the experience many times over with Ed Burke. As I said, we didn’t worry that much about the crossover pitches that actually completed the trip. It was those pitches that stayed on an inside path toward our heads that chilled our blood and spilled our falling-away bodies in the dirt. I remember one that literally hissed in my suddenly heated left ear as it zoomed past my “ground-control-to-major-tom” crash-landing body.It was the scariest close call I ever had, even though I was hit several times in the head by slower throwing pitchers. How more of us were not killed back in the day, I’ll never know.

Ed Burke never no-hit us, but we never beat him either. We did chase him in the later innings once, but that moral victory was a little flat-sided by the fact that we were already down by eleven runs when the rally started. As I look back on that game today, it now feels more like they may have just pulled Burke because he had tired of getting us out and that here was a good opportunity for some other younger guy to get some mop up time on the mound. Sorry I brought it up.

Ed Burke, if you are still alive out there, I want you to know that this old opponent wishes you well, even though we never really spoke before or after our games. It was a different era. No fraternizing was the rule back in 1952. I just wanted you to know that  I did get my hits off you, including a couple of doubles, but that you taught me more as a pitcher about the need to overcome obstacles than just about anyone else I ever played against. You were the closest I ever came to facing a pitcher like Ewell Blackwell.

It really is like Spahn warns and Berra advises. If you are a hitter, you can’t let a really dominant pitcher get his grip on your whole club. You have to be ready to mess up his game plan too, if at all possible, but you can’t do it by starting to think after you enter the business side of the batters’ box. Once you get there, you have to be ready to hit – not think.

Now that Christmas is done, the wish for spring just grows stronger.