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Baseball Story
Aug. 18th, 2007 12:25 pmhttp://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=jp-hamilton081707&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
Accidental villain
By Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports
August 17, 2007
Jeff Passan
Yahoo! Sports
Back in Morning Sun, Iowa, they didn't teach baseball pitchers to aim for the corners of home plate. If you were born with the kind of arm that could put a dent in the barn, the kind that God loved to bestow on country boys, the ethos was simple.
"I just went out and threw hard," Jack Hamilton says. "That's all I knew enough to do."
Imagine Hamilton's amazement when, in 1967, he started to control his pitches. As a rookie with Philadelphia five years earlier, Hamilton led the National League in walks and wild pitches, a 95-mph fastball his wild horse. Of all the things to help Hamilton tame himself, learning the spitball – an illegal pitch in which he lubed up the horsehide with a sheen of phlegm, sending it tumbling like a dive bomber – somehow did the job.
"I was throwing excellent," Hamilton says. "I was finally starting to get the ball over the plate."
Hamilton sits in his office in Branson, Mo., kitsch capital of the United States. A vacation in 1986 convinced him to pack up all his stuff in Burlington, Iowa, and retire there with his wife to open a restaurant. Little did he know Branson would turn into a Midwest tourist trap and encourage visitors from so many places. New York, he says, and Los Angeles, and Dallas, and, yes, Boston.
When tour buses from the Northeast roll into Branson, Hamilton readies himself. The baseball memorabilia on the walls of the restaurant invites the first round of questions, and after a few, Hamilton's name comes up, and when it does, he hears what he has heard now for 40 years.
"Are you the Jack Hamilton?"
( Read more... )
Accidental villain
By Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports
August 17, 2007
Jeff Passan
Yahoo! Sports
Back in Morning Sun, Iowa, they didn't teach baseball pitchers to aim for the corners of home plate. If you were born with the kind of arm that could put a dent in the barn, the kind that God loved to bestow on country boys, the ethos was simple.
"I just went out and threw hard," Jack Hamilton says. "That's all I knew enough to do."
Imagine Hamilton's amazement when, in 1967, he started to control his pitches. As a rookie with Philadelphia five years earlier, Hamilton led the National League in walks and wild pitches, a 95-mph fastball his wild horse. Of all the things to help Hamilton tame himself, learning the spitball – an illegal pitch in which he lubed up the horsehide with a sheen of phlegm, sending it tumbling like a dive bomber – somehow did the job.
"I was throwing excellent," Hamilton says. "I was finally starting to get the ball over the plate."
Hamilton sits in his office in Branson, Mo., kitsch capital of the United States. A vacation in 1986 convinced him to pack up all his stuff in Burlington, Iowa, and retire there with his wife to open a restaurant. Little did he know Branson would turn into a Midwest tourist trap and encourage visitors from so many places. New York, he says, and Los Angeles, and Dallas, and, yes, Boston.
When tour buses from the Northeast roll into Branson, Hamilton readies himself. The baseball memorabilia on the walls of the restaurant invites the first round of questions, and after a few, Hamilton's name comes up, and when it does, he hears what he has heard now for 40 years.
"Are you the Jack Hamilton?"
( Read more... )
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