A Baseball History Explores 10 Iconic Pitches

Tyler Kepner is the national baseball writer for The New York Times. This means he gets to go pretty much wherever he thinks there is a good story. It also means he had the time and resources to conduct the interviews and research necessary to produce one of the most interesting books about baseball to come down the pike in a good while.

That book is “K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches” (Doubleday, $28.95).

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, July 10, Kepner was asked about the structure of the book.

Each chapter is devoted to one of 10 pitches, starting with the slider and moving through the familiar pitches — fastball, curveball, knuckleball.

Then things get a little arcane — splitter, screwball, and sinker — before returning to more familiar 2019 season territory with the changeup. It ends with the cutter.

Kepner said he didn’t want to write a chronological history of pitching.

“It’s not good reading.”

He initially found himself concentrating on pitchers of the 1960s through 1980s, and decided to broaden the time frame.

For instance, the curveball chapter starts with a discussion of Mike Montgomery, who was the Chicago Cubs pitcher who got Michael Martinez of the Cleveland Indians to ground out in the ninth inning of the 2016 World Series, thus providing the Cubs with their first championship since 1908.

“The reaction to Montgomery’s curveball was overwhelming joy, bottled up since 1908. By then the pitch had been around just 45 years, from its beginnings on a craggy beach in Brooklyn. Or so the legend goes.”

Kepner then shifts deftly into baseball history.

The author conducted over 300 interviews for the book over a period of three years and change. 

“I needed the time,” Kepner said, noting he has four children and a full-time job.

“I wanted to do it without getting crazed. I wanted the time to do it justice.”

He said the relaxed pace worked in his favor. Potential subjects would ask about the deadline, learn it was a year or two away and get back to him in their own time.

Kepner was asked about the current controversy over the record-setting number of home runs. More specifically, has the ball been changed to generate more offense?

Kepner said he trusts pitchers when they tell him the ball is somehow different, although he stops short of believing in a conspiracy to add more crowd-pleasing home runs.

He also cleared up something that has puzzled this fan, listening to baseball announcers talk about “command” and “control.”

Kepner said when he was a young reporter he thought the terms were synonyms.

But he learned the difference soon enough.

“Command is throwing the ball wherever you want. Control is simply throwing strikes.”

“K” is a great read. But if you expect to charge through it in a couple of sittings, don’t have a baseball handy. As I read about the different grips, I kept fiddling with the ball, with the result that I finished the book about 15 minutes before I was scheduled to call Kepner.