John Robertson, my predecessor at the Montreal Star on the Expos’ beat in the ’70s, was once asked if he knew how to throw a screwball (It’s entirely possible Robbie also asked the question). In any case, he said he knew.
“Place two fingers across the top of Mike Marshall’s head…”
Marshall was often referred to as the pitch he used to throw, when coming out of the bullpen for the Expos and seven other major-league teams over his 14-year career. Why the human definition was applied to him could be determined by these words from under that screwball grip that appeared in Sports Illustrated during his career season:
“I am in the College of Education, Department of Physical Education, majoring in physiology with a cognate degree in physiological psychology. My specialty is child growth. The topic of my dissertation is Maturation at Adolescence in Males. No one ever seems to get all that straight.”
His cerebral views of baseball were equally difficult for the peons of the press to comprehend, which he never hesitated to point out when he was asked to explain the pitch, or how he could pitch in 13 consecutive games or 106 games in a season.
“It’s simple,” Marshall once explained. “All you have to understand is what the latissimus dorsi muscle can do for you. And then you get to use the triceps brachii and the inner teres. It’s right there.”
For baseball writers, and many teammates, this was a foreign language.
My encounters with Marshall were few, and not unpleasant. Given time, perhaps they would have been. Known for never signing autographs, he once told me kids should ask their dads for autographs, not their sports heroes. He loathed being famous for playing a game: “I am an educator,” he said.
And the world was his student.
I was the beat writer the winter the Expos traded him to Los Angeles for Willie Davis, and called his home for a reaction. No answer. At the World Series where he pitched in five straight games, I asked about his plans to retire at 30. “What I said was I hoped to finish my dissertation [doctorate in kinesiology] and baseball at the same time…30 seemed reasonable.”
He played until 38. Nobody else has ever pitched in 106 games in one season. The two closest are 92 and 90, by Mike Marshall. In four seasons with the Expos, twice he was in the top 10 for the MVP and Cy Young awards. He became the first relief pitcher to win the Cy Young, in Los Angeles. He was largely responsible for making the Expos respectable and taking the Dodgers to the World Series.
Marshall’s studious screwball is thrown no more, disregarded as being hard on the arm. “Throwing screwballs,” he said, “is safer than throwing pitches that require baseball pitchers to supinate their pitching forearm through release.” A few years ago, he explained that in analytical depth length on TV…hard for everyone but him to understand. Highly educated, he was always contrarian.
Marshall went to his after-life as the Expos’ best relief pitcher — ever. He died three years ago in Zephyrhills, Florida, of Alzheimer’s.
That just seems so wrong.
