A baseball writer pitches questions on the fastball

It's spring training once again, and baseball has headed south. The Yanks look set to repeat as World Series champs, and the Phillies ain't too bad, either. (Sorry, Mets fans.) But one of the Major League's worst teams, the Washington Nationals, is making headlines, too. The awful Nats aren't going to win the World Series anytime soon, but they have a kid on their roster - 21-year-old phenom Stephen Strasburg - with a 103-mph fastball.

A good fastball down the middle is one of the most feared weapons in the pitcher's arsenal. A fireballer like Strasburg can give his team a confident edge, even if nobody knows whether he'll be the second coming of Nolan Ryan or just another never-quite-made-it.

"Only a rare few were bestowed with the ultimate blessing of pure, undeniable speed," Tim Wendel writes in his entertaining book "High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball" (Da Capo, $25). "Fewer still were able to wrestle this angel toward Earth, to harness and truly embrace the gift from above."

Speaking by phone from his home in Vienna, Va., Wendel - a longtime baseball writer and founding editor of USA Today Baseball Weekly - says the ability to throw a 90-plus mph fastball is a "paradox: you've been given this great gift - well, maybe not. Oh, you can throw hard, you're going to be great. But the reality is different." To excel at throwing fastballs, you have to have great speed and pinpoint accuracy. It's an elusive combination.

Wendel looks at how the fastball developed in the early years of the game, and travels the country talking shop with sports medicine experts about the mechanics of the pitch - there's no correlation between physical size and the ability to throw hard - and gets into lively debates about who, exactly, had the best fastball in history.

Wendel salutes great hurlers like Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, Lefty Grove, Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson. But perhaps the most intriguing figure here is Steve Dalkowski, who was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in the early '60s. Dalkowski had demonic stuff - one of his pitches allegedly topped out at 109 mph - but he had neither the discipline nor the sense of vocation to refine his natural talent. (In 1960, as a minor leaguer, he had 262 strikeouts - and 262 walks.) Dalkowski, whom Wendel ranks No. 2 on his list of fastballers (Ryan is No. 1), is one of the great "what ifs" in baseball history.

I posed the following question to Wendel: Given the choice between a fastballer and a finesse pitcher with a mixed bag of tricks, who would you give the ball? "I should pick the guy with the nice repertoire," Wendel says. But heat gets the nod: "The myth, the intangibles of the fastball - this is what we fall in love with, even guys that should know better. Nothing can get you thinking about the realm of possibility quicker than a fireballer."