Something screwy usually happened to Cardinals batters when they faced Jack Baldschun, but the one time they beat him, it opened a crack in the solid hold the Phillies had on first place in the National League.
Soon after, when the crack turned into a chasm, the Phillies fell and the Cardinals climbed past them to win the 1964 pennant.
A right-hander who relied on a screwball and thrived on a heavy workload, Baldschun was one of baseball’s best relievers in the early part of the 1960s. He was 86 when he died on June 6, 2023.
The right stuff
As a youth in his hometown of Greenville, Ohio, 40 miles northwest of Dayton, Baldschun was interested in several sports, including harness racing. “My dad owned some horses and drove them in races in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois,” Baldschun told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I traveled with him (as a stable boy) in the summer.”
Baldschun was good at playing golf and the piano, but even better at baseball. He attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, for two years, then entered baseball’s minor leagues in 1956 when he was 19.
Pitching in the Reds’ system, “I only threw 80, maybe 83, mph,” Baldschun said to the Philadelphia Daily News. “I’d never get by with just a fastball.”
Baldschun experimented with a variety of other pitches but nothing clicked. Then in 1960, when he was with Class A Columbia (S.C.) of the South Atlantic League, Baldschun discovered a way to make a screwball move sharply onto the corners of the plate. “I threw it three-quarters, off the backside of my fingers,” he told the Philadelphia Daily News.
Columbia manager and former big-league pitcher Max Macon encouraged Baldschun to use the pitch in games and successfully converted him from starter to reliever.
“I’ve got three different screwballs,” Baldschun said to the Dayton Daily News. “I can make it break straight down, down and in, and down and out.”
Macon said he recommended Baldschun “two or three times” to the Reds during the 1960 season but they weren’t interested, the Greenville Daily Advocate reported. After the season, the Reds didn’t put Baldschun on their 40-man winter roster and the Phillies picked him in the draft of unprotected players.
“He comes highly recommended,” Phillies manager Gene Mauch told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Max Macon said he’d stake his reputation that Baldschun has what it takes to help a big-league club in relief.”
Power pitcher
Making the leap from Class A to the majors, Baldschun, 25, earned a spot with the 1961 Phillies. The rookie was a bright light in a dark season. The Phillies lost 23 in a row and finished 47-107, but Baldschun (5-3) had a winning record and led National League pitchers in appearances (65, all in relief). In July, he pitched in eight consecutive games and allowed only one run in that stretch.
“He has done it by using a bewildering screwball, the confidence of a burglar, and a right arm that looks like it belongs to Popeye,” Ron Smith of the Philadelphia Inquirer concluded.
Estimating he unleashed the screwball for 85 to 90 percent of his pitches, Baldschun told the newspaper, “I believe I could throw 10 straight screwballs, tell them it’s coming and still get them out, somehow, eight of the 10 times.”
The rookie also began a workout regimen to help his right arm withstand the strain of delivering screwballs. “He performed a set of isometric exercises before each game and increased the strength of his forearm until it was as big as his bicep,” the Greenville Daily Advocate reported.
Mauch told the Dayton Daily News, “Baldschun is blessed with some kind of arm that defies all the rules. I never saw a man with a freak pitch who could work as often. That’s where his personal exercising program comes in. His entire right side is actually brutish.”
His rookie season was no fluke. The next year, Baldschun was 12-7 and led the 1962 Phillies in ERA (2.96), saves (13) and appearances (67). He followed that with an 11-7 record and 2.30 ERA in 1963, achieving team highs in saves (16) and appearances (65). On Easter Sunday, Baldschun won both games of a doubleheader against the Cardinals at St. Louis. Boxscore and Boxscore
Down and out
Tempers flared when the Phillies and Cardinals played in St. Louis on May 4, 1964. After the Phillies’ Dennis Bennett knocked down Julian Javier with a pitch, Bob Gibson retaliated when Bennett came to bat.
The next time Gibson batted, Baldschun was pitching. His first pitch made Gibson skip away from the plate. The next one plunked him in the thigh. Gibson flipped his bat toward Baldschun, who caught it with his glove hand. Gibson was ejected, but the Cardinals got revenge. On the first pitch from Baldschun after he hit Gibson, Carl Warwick slammed a two-run home run.
The Phillies, who won 10 of their first 12, remained contenders in 1964. In July, Mauch pitched Baldschun in 19 games, including five in a row.
When the Cardinals came to Philadelphia on Sept. 9, 1964, the Phillies (83-55) were in first place, six games ahead of three teams in second: Cardinals (77-61), Reds (77-61) and Giants (78-62).
Phillies ace Jim Bunning pitched six innings in the series opener against the Cardinals before being lifted for Baldschun, who was tasked with protecting a 4-3 lead. Baldschun pitched a scoreless seventh and a scoreless eighth, then drove in a run with a double (the only extra-base hit of his big-league career) versus Barney Schultz and extended the lead to 5-3. “I felt sure we’d win after that,” Baldschun told the Philadelphia Daily News.
The Connie Mack Stadium scoreboard showed two significant results: the Giants lost to the Dodgers and the Reds lost to the Pirates. If Baldschun could secure a win over the Cardinals with a shutdown ninth, the Phillies’ lead in the standings would increase to seven games.
“If they win it, they break it open,” Cardinals third baseman Ken Boyer told the Philadelphia Daily News. “A seven-game pad would have been tough.”
In the ninth, the Cardinals scored a run, making it 5-4, and had Lou Brock on third, two outs, with Boyer at the plate. With the count 1-and-2, Boyer stroked a single to center, driving in Brock with the tying run.
Mauch stuck with Baldschun. He pitched a scoreless 10th, but in the 11th, his fifth inning of relief, the Cardinals knocked him out, and won, 10-5. Boxscore
Instead, of being seven games back, the Cardinals were five behind.
A week later, Baldschun lost back-to-back games against the Dodgers. Mauch tried others in the closer role, the Phillies lost 10 in a row, and the Cardinals clinched the pennant on the last day of the season.
Changing the script
Though Baldschun led the 1964 Phillies in saves (21) and appearances (71), Mauch proposed changes to him in 1965. “He wanted me not to throw the screwball,” Baldschun recalled to the Philadelphia Daily News. “I just hated to give up my best pitch.”
Mauch said he thought Baldschun was nibbling the corners too much with the screwball and getting behind on counts, and that the pitch would be more effective thrown with two strikes on the batter, or in special situations, instead of most of the time, the Dayton Daily News reported.
In the book “We Played the Game,” Phillies reliever Ed Roebuck said, “Baldschun was an excellent relief pitcher but he always went deep in the count, and this really upset Mauch.”
Another Phillies pitcher, Chris Short, told the Philadelphia Daily News, “I know that three-fourths of the gray hair Gene Mauch got _ and he got a lot _ came from Jack Baldschun. He had a great year for us, but he was always falling behind in the count. We used to call him ‘Three-and-Oh.’ “
Baldschun pitched in 65 games for the 1965 Phillies but shared the closer role with rookie Gary Wagner.
On Dec. 6, 1965, Baldschun was traded to the Orioles for Jackie Brandt and Darold Knowles. Three days later, the Orioles sent him with Milt Pappas and Dick Simpson to the Reds for Frank Robinson.
(According to The Cincinnati Post, Reds owner Bill DeWitt Sr. said the club initially wanted Pappas and Curt Blefary, but the Orioles wouldn’t part with Blefary. The trade was revived when the Orioles acquired Baldschun and offered him.)
Baldschun (1-5, 5.49 ERA) flopped with the Reds in 1966, and spent most of 1967 and 1968 in the minors. “The Reds wanted me to die in the minor leagues,” Baldschun told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “In my heart, I knew I could pitch.”
An expansion team, the Padres, picked him up in 1969. Roger Craig was their pitching coach. Though Baldschun pitched in 61 games for the 1969 Padres and had a 7-2 record, he confessed to the Philadelphia Daily News, “The screwball wasn’t breaking. It was rolling.”
Baldschun, 33, pitched his final big-league games with the Padres in 1970. The Cardinals, the first team he faced in the majors, also were the last he pitched against. Boxscore
In 49 games versus the Cardinals, Baldschun was 5-1 with three saves. Overall for his big-league career, he was 48-41 with 60 saves.