The Sinkerball Wizard

On August 1, 1978, a 5-foot-10 pitcher named Randy Jones threw a complete game shutout against the defending National League Champion Los Angeles Dodgers.

He did not throw a single pitch faster than 79 mph.

Randy Jones was not some trick pitcher. No. He did not throw a knuckleball. He did not throw an eephus pitch. He did not come at you from a hundred different arm angles. No, he was a sinker-slider pitcher like so many others. Sometimes he’d even throw fastballs. He could pump his fastball into the low 80s on his peppiest days. He didn’t like doing that, though.

“The harder I throw my fastball,” he used to say, “the more it flattens out.”

“Randy Jones,” Pete Rose said bitterly, “throws his fastball 27 mph.”

He said that bitterly because Pete Rose hit .183 off Jones in his career.

On that day in 1978, a scout in the crowd clocked every pitch with a radar gun. It’s unclear why — this was a matchup between Randy Jones and knuckleball specialist Burt Hooton, so it’s quite possible that no game in baseball history ever had LESS need for a radar gun. But the scout dutifully charted every pitch, maybe for giggles, and he joyfully told reporters that the fastest anyone threw all day was when Steve Yeager tried to throw out a base stealer.

Yeager fired that ball 86 mph.

“I had a fastball once,” Randy Jones used to say. “Back in high school. I averaged 15 strikeouts a game. But then I lost my balance on a pitch when I was at Chapman College in Los Angeles, and something snapped.”

He shrugged. He wasn’t too worried about it — Jones didn’t think he had a Major League future even when he had his fastball. He was studying business, had a plan to go into real estate, but he kept on pitching, and then he threw in a summer league in Alaska when a couple of scouts saw something in him that he didn’t see in himself.

One of those scouts was a guy with a wonderful baseball name — Cliff Ditto. We must pause on Cliff Ditto because:

Actually, impossible as it is to believe, there is something even better than No. 4. Ditto signed the two most similar and different pitchers in baseball history. Similar? Yeah, they were both left-handed. They both won Cy Young Awards. They were both named Randy.

Different? Yeah, one was 5-foot-10, portly, and, in his own words, couldn’t pitch his way out of a wet paper bag.

The other was 6-foot-10, gangly, and once threw a ball so hard the pitch killed a bird.

Yeah, that’s right, Cliff Ditto signed Randy Jones AND Randy Johnson.

A scout should go into the Hall of Fame for something like that.

The Padres took Randy Jones in the fifth round of the 1972 draft because, and I kid you not, they’d kind of run out of ideas. Ditto had recommended Jones, the Padres didn’t have that many recommendations — you could imagine they had a few scraps of paper with names on them — so they took him. “We didn’t have to take him there,” Padres GM Buzzie Bavasi would say. “We knew nobody else was going to take him.”

He went to pitch in Alexandria, Louisiana, where Padres’ minor league pitching instructor Warren Hacker taught Jones a different grip for his sinker. Jones immediately saw the difference, saw how his pitches would just dive as they closed in on the plate. He also noticed that the slower he threw it, the more the ball would sink. He couldn’t throw hard anyway, but now he leaned into throwing slow.

“I really think 75 mph is too hard to get maximum movement,” he said.

After less than five months of minor-league baseball, Randy Jones was in the big leagues. And in his first big-league season … he led the league with 22 losses. In 12 of the 22 losses, the Padres scored one or fewer runs.

In his second season, he won 20 games, led the league in ERA and finished second to Tom Seaver in the Cy Young voting.

Reporters called Jones an artist, which he was, sort of, but he was more performance artist than anything. He came at hitters relentlessly, same pitch, same spot, sinker away to righties, slider away to lefties, always on the corner, again and again. He never gave hitters a moment to breathe — Jones pitched fast, crazy fast, impossibly fast, barely even waiting to get the ball back from the catcher before beginning his windup again. In one game against the Astros in August, he threw a two-hitter, gave up one run, and the game lasted one hour and 37 minutes.

“I like to get ‘em over so I can go out and do something else,” Jones told reporters.

Jones’ most magical year was 1976, when he started 40 games, completed 25 of them, won 22 games, and took home the Cy Young. He gave up more hits than any pitcher in the league, but he also had the lowest WHIP. He’s the only pitcher in the last 90 years to pitch 300 innings and strike out fewer than 100 batters. He induced hitters to ground into 34 double plays, and this was before the Padres had a shortstop named Ozzie Smith.

A few game times to ponder:

“How does Randy Jones do it?” a columnist named Jack Lee mused. “Well, they say his pitches are too good to take and not good enough to hit.”

In his last start of the 1976 season, against Cincinnati, he threw a slider to César Gerónimo and felt something snap in his left forearm. He tried to pitch on, but the pain was too much. Jones would pitch for another six seasons after that, and he would have some good moments along the way, but he was never quite the same pitcher again.

There’s a powerful feeling that a pitcher like Randy Jones couldn’t succeed today, not against these kinds of hitters. That was what you heard on Wednesday, when Jones passed away on Tuesday at age 75. He was, the feeling went, a wonderful man from a wonderful time that will never come around again.

And it might just be true that a pitcher with no fastball and a 70-mph sinker couldn’t get out Shohei and Judge and Vladdy Jr. and all the rest of the wonderful hitters. But here’s what you have to remember: Randy Jones didn’t make sense in his own time. Nobody thought a pitcher like Jones could get batters out in the 1970s. He did anyway.