Claude Osteen (left) and Hal McCoy talk baseball over barbecue in Arlington, Texas on Friday. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
He won 196 games and pitched 140 complete games in an 18-year career with the Reds, Washington Senators, the Dodgers, the Astros, Cardinals, and White Sox. Claude Osteen knows something about the art of pitching.
He grew up in Reading, Ohio…graduated from Reading High School in 1957. And Claude Osteen wanted to play college baseball with the Buckeyes, but somehow got confused with another freshman pitcher and it never happened.
So he signed with the Reds out of high school and so began an 18-year baseball journey that saw him win 196 games as a major league starter, pitch 140 complete games, compile a career ERA of 3.30 in 480 career starts, log 3,460 innings…and walk just 940 hitters over that twenty year span, and average of about 1.7 walks per nine innings pitched.
After his playing days, he served 15 seasons as a big league pitching coach for the Dodgers, the Rangers, the Cardinals and the Phillies.
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So when we had the chance to eat authentic Texas barbecue with him on Friday at Hurtado’s (where you go to eat bar-be-cue in Arlington), I offered to buy lunch if Osteen would explain to me why so many young pitchers have trouble throwing strikes…an issue which seems especially poignant in college baseball.
He smiled at the question, pushed his chair back, and assumed a comfortable position as if he was comfortable with both question and answer.
“Velocity, velocity, and velocity,” he began, like a real estate agent. “Everyone wants to throw the baseball 95 miles per hour, when they can’t control that kind of effort and velocity.
“I threw hard myself, or hard enough, when I was a young pitcher out of high school, but it wasn’t until I learned to take something off the fastball, learned to make it move, and learned to pitch to contact that I had success as a pitcher. The attitude now seems to be throw it as hard as you can to avoid contact.”
He dwelled on the issues with trying to throw harder than necessary – harder than you need to get hitters out.
“First of all a lot of young pitchers have not learned how to control their body, coordination, and balance during the delivery. Everything is relative with control and throwing the baseball where you want.
Osteen as a Dodger, where he twice won twenty games on the same staff with Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax.
“And second, I learned that the harder I tried to throw the straighter the ball became, and that’s when you get hit hard. When I took something off I found that I could make the ball cut, and drop, and sail. I had better stuff when I didn’t try to throw the ball so hard.”
When he was the pitching coach with the Phillies, he had one particular example of how it works when you don’t try so hard.
“We had this right-hander named Steve Bedrosian who came from the Braves. Big-bodied guy who threw hard, but always had trouble with giving up home runs, like every time he came in to pitch. Pat Corrales was the manager of the Phillies in 1987 and he came to me and said, “Can’t you fix him?” I said yes I can, but you’re going to have to do without him for three or four days. Corrales said, “Do it, then.”
“Bedrosian knew why he gave up so many home runs, and it was because he missed his spots. So I simplified his motion, got him to have better control over that big body, and we talked about taking something off the fastball for better movement in the strike zone. Within weeks he set a club record for consecutive saves out of the bullpen and won the National League Cy Young Award that year.”
Given his own discovery and experience, Osteen chuckes over baseball becoming, in his words, “velocity-mad.”
“It’s all that people talk about,” says Osteen. “How hard can you throw? But pitchers, especially young pitchers, can’t hold up to the added strain of max effort with every pitch. Nor, can they control the body to the point of executing pitches in the strike zone. I’m the example. When I learned to take something off and focus on movement and placement of the baseball, I became a successful pitcher.”
He lives in the Dallas area and plays a lot of golf.
“I can still hit the driver straight,” he laughed as we got up from lunch. “Because at 85 I can’t swing it as hard as I used to.”
And there’s a message there. Sometimes you do better…when you take a little off.
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