He Would Not Move You Off The Plate

Robin Roberts threw as hard as anybody in the National League and gave up more home runs than any pitcher in history. Those two facts are related. So is a third one that says more about him than either.

He would not move you off the plate.

In an era when knocking a hitter down was standard operating procedure, Roberts refused. Dizzy Dean called him out for it on national television. His own pitching coach criticized him in the newspapers. Writers tagged him as the pitcher who was too polite. He hit 54 batters in 4,688 innings. In 1953 he threw 346 innings and hit two.

By his own count, he intentionally threw at a hitter exactly twice. One of them was Ted Kluszewski, after Klu took him deep twice in one afternoon at Crosley Field. The pitch caught Kluszewski in that enormous right bicep and dropped straight into the dirt. He picked it up, flipped it back to Roberts, and jogged to first.

That is not softness. It is a philosophy. Roberts believed the way to get a hitter out was to throw the ball past him, and for six straight seasons of 20 wins and 300 innings, he was right. The stubbornness that produced 28 complete games in a row is the same stubbornness that kept him from ever using fear as a pitch.