Too Much Motor for the Chassis. Tinkers to Evers to Chance, I relay this great baseball story via Paul Campos of Lawyers Guns and Money. The baseball scholar Steve Treder, heretofore unknown to me, tells the tale of Steve Dalkowski, an immensely gifted though erratic pitcher who never got to the majors but is known as the hardest thrower of them all.
There are a lot of “characters” in baseball, but Dalkowski is — I was going to say the Malcolm Lowry of baseball, but Lowry got out Under the Volcano. And Fred Exley got out A Fan’s Notes. There are no farm leagues for writers and, writers being what they are (god damn them), they are less apt to publicly admire the gifts of colleagues who fell by the way. But many pros testify to Dalkowski’s wicked stuff in the minors, above which he was never able to rise.
He allegedly had a 110 mph fastball — Ted Williams, after the one time he challenged him in batting practice, pronounced him the fastest he’d ever faced. An observer said you couldn’t even see the ball on its way to the plate. His placement was shaky, though. In Treder’s telling, Dalkowski’s pitches “once tore off part of a batter’s ear” and put an umpire in the hospital for three days. He walked about as many as he struck out. He never learned anything like control.
This was apparently true of his personal life as well. The Dalkowski drinking stories Treder recounts are almost unbelievable. (“The next night they just carried him off the mound in the fourth inning.”) He makes Billy Martin look like Cal Ripkin Jr. Dalkowski is still alive but, Treder says, “due to permanent brain damage from all the alcohol, Dalkowski retains little memory of much of his life.”
He has been cited as the inspiration for Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham and Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn in Major League. I admire both movies, but those characters are cheerful winners acting out more or less traditional uplift narratives — conquering wildness in one case, exploiting it in another. Dalkowski was irremediable and unsalvageable. After baseball he worked on farms and on his drinking till he was worn down completely. Treder suggests he was mentally disabled, unable to cope with the simplest needs of social life or baseball. Basically he was a mustang, a wild horse that couldn’t be broken, and though we are accustomed to think of such creatures as symbols of indomitable spirit, they are also very poorly suited to the reins and we all know what happens to anything and anybody like that. This is not to plead victim status for Dalkowski, but to say how things are.
Look at him here, during a youthful tryout with the Orioles, and later with the minor league Red Wings. Does he look like a happy man? What sort of man does he look like? He doesn’t seem violent or aggressive in the ways we are accustomed to seeing heat-throwers in the present day. He looks like someone more plagued by than comfortable with his gifts — as a youthful acquaintance once described Eugene O’Neill, someone with “too much motor for the chassis.”
There’s a very fine account by a minor league player who faced Dalkowski here: “Later, I was awarded a Bronze Star for my actions in Vietnam, but I should have gotten a Silver Star for spending 20 minutes in a batting cage with Steve Dalkowski.”
