The world changed for Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell on Dec. 7, 1941, but not for the obvious reason the date suggests.
Sewell went hunting with a group in Florida’s Ocala National Forest on that day, the last of deer season.
“I was walking down the fire lane,” Sewell recalled to the Tampa Tribune. “It was a path as wide as your living room, but one of those fellows was crouched down in the scrub pines, heard something, turned and fired his shotgun at it.”
Sewell was 30 feet away when two loads of buckshot from the double-barreled gun struck him in the legs and feet. The impact caused Sewell to turn a complete backwards somersault. The big toe was shot off his right foot. The blast “shattered every nerve in my legs,” he told the Tampa Tribune.
When the shooter and others reached him, they thought “I was dead,” Sewell said to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
He was taken to a hospital, where a nurse told the hunters she thought it was too late to save Sewell’s life. He almost bled to death, the Tampa Tribune reported.
In the book “Baseball When the Grass Was Real,” Sewell said to author Donald Honig, “That shot tore holes in me as big as marbles.”
In the hospital, they “managed to dig out 15 of the 18 buckshot slugs,” Sewell told the New York Times. “Now I’m able to understand how a deer must feel.”
Four months after the accident, Sewell was the starting pitcher for the Pirates in their 1942 home opener against the Cardinals.
Twisty travels
Sewell was from Decatur, Ala. His father was a streetcar conductor there, then became a boxcar builder for the L&N Railroad, Sewell told the Tampa Tribune.
Enrolled at Vanderbilt on a football scholarship, Sewell majored in mechanical engineering, “but I soon came to realize I wasn’t going to make it as a mechanical engineer,” he told author Donald Honig.
He left school, took a job at a DuPont rayon plant in Tennessee and played semipro baseball. A friend helped him get a minor-league contract. A right-hander, Sewell had 17 wins for the Raleigh (N.C.) Capitals in 1931.
The Detroit Tigers brought Sewell, 25, to the majors in June 1932. “When I went into the clubhouse and saw the name ‘Sewell’ on my locker, I was in shock,” he told the Tampa Tribune. “I was in the big leagues. I looked at the locker next to me, and there was Charlie Gehringer getting ready to play second base. It was the greatest thrill in my life.”
In his first appearance, a relief stint against the Athletics, Sewell retired Mickey Cochrane and Al Simmons, then gave up a home run to another future Hall of Famer, Jimmie Foxx. Boxscore
A month later Sewell was back in the minors. He wouldn’t return to the big leagues until six years later with the 1938 Pirates.
Quite a comeback
After the 1941 shooting, “I had to learn to walk all over again,” Sewell said to author Donald Honig.
On the pitching mound, “The injury forced him to alter his delivery because he could no longer drive off the foot as he had,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
Sewell developed a motion like he was walking toward the batter and learned to throw a slider to compensate for reduced velocity on his fastball.
On April 17, 1942, his first regular-season appearance since the shooting, Sewell pitched a complete game and beat the Cardinals, limiting them to two runs, in the Pirates’ home opener. Boxscore
Sewell went on to win 17, including five shutouts, for the 1942 Pirates.
Perhaps the batter who hit best against Sewell was the Cardinals’ Stan Musial. His first-big-league home run came against Sewell in 1941 and his first big-league grand slam was hit against him a year later. Boxscore and Boxscore
Specialty pitch
Working on his revised pitching motion in practice sessions, Sewell discovered he could throw a pitch about 25 feet high and make it drop across the strike zone.
“I’d been fooling around with the pitch in the bullpen and Al Lopez, our catcher, kept egging me on to try it in a game,” Sewell recalled to Joe Falls of the Detroit Free Press.
He unveiled the pitch in a 1943 spring training game against the Tigers. “I was working three innings this day and I had two out in my last inning and Dick Wakefield was the batter,” Sewell said to Falls. “I decided, well, what the heck, I’ll give it a try.”
As Falls described it, “The pitch went almost straight into the air like a kid losing his balloon at the circus.”
Wakefield swung from the heels and missed the pitch by at least two feet.
After the game, reporters asked Sewell what kind of pitch he threw Wakefield. Seated nearby, Sewell’s teammate, Maurice Van Robays, piped up and said, “It’s an eephus pitch.”
“What’s an eephus?”
“It ain’t nothing,” replied Van Robays, “and that’s what that pitch is _ nothing.”
Also known as the blooper, the dew drop, the parachute, the rainbow and the balloon, the pitch was used by Sewell for the rest of his career.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Joe Browne described it as “the craziest pitch in the history of baseball _ and one of the most effective.”
In the book “Baseball When the Grass Was Real,” Sewell said, “I was the only pitcher to pitch off of the tip of his toes, and that’s the only way you can throw the blooper. It’s got to be thrown straight overhand. I was able to get a terrific backspin on the ball by holding onto the seam and flipping it off of three fingers. The backspin held it on its line of flight to the plate. So that ball was going slow but spinning fast. Fun to watch, easy to catch, but tough to hit.”
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the blooper “goes through the strike zone at an angle new and strange to the batters. It is dropping sharply and to meet it head-on the hitter would have to swing almost directly upward.”
Using the same motion as his fastball, Sewell threw the blooper pitch up to 15 times a game, usually when ahead in the count and not with a runner on base. He told the Free Press he could get it over the plate six out of 10 tries.
Most batters hated the eephus pitch. According to The Sporting News, the Cardinals’ Whitey Kurowski “spat tobacco juice at the ball when Sewell threw him the blooper,” and the Reds’ Eddie Miller one time “grabbed the pitched ball on its downward flight and threw it back to Sewell.”
“Anytime I’ve got a batter looking for the eephus, I’ve got him where I want him,” Sewell told the Free Press. “He’s duck soup then for a fastball.”
Nobody in the National League hit the eephus pitch for a home run, but Stan Musial came close.
On Sept. 8, 1943, at St. Louis, Musial hit two home runs against Sewell. None was off the eephus pitch. In the eighth inning, Sewell threw the blooper and Musial hit it squarely but pulled it just a bit too much and the ball “crashed into the seats in the upper deck of the right field stands, above the pavilion roof, but foul by a few feet,” the Post-Dispatch reported. Boxscore
According to Bob Broeg of the Post-Dispatch, the longest fair ball hit off Sewell’s blooper pitch in a regular-season game was a triple Musial ripped to the far reaches of right field at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field in 1944. Boxscore
For his career, Musial batted .492 versus Sewell and had five home runs among the 31 hits.
Show stopper
Sewell was a 21-game winner for the Pirates in 1943 (when he allowed a mere six home runs in 265.1 innings) and again in 1944.
In May 1946, he suffered a mild stroke in the Pirates’ clubhouse, The Sporting News reported, but kept pitching that season.
At the 1946 All-Star-Game in Boston’s Fenway Park, the American League was ahead, 8-0, when National League manager Charlie Grimm sent Sewell in to pitch with instructions to “throw that blooper pitch and see if you can wake up this crowd,” the Associated Press reported.
With two on and two outs, Ted Williams came to the plate. Sewell threw the blooper and Williams hit it foul. Another blooper landed outside the strike zone. Then Sewell surprised Williams with a fastball that was taken for strike two.
Sewell came back with a pitch he described as a “Sunday Super Dooper Blooper.”
“It was a good one,” Sewell said to author Donald Honig. “Dropping right down the chute for a strike. He took a couple of steps up on it _ which was the right way to attack that pitch, incidentally _ and he hit it right out of there. I mean, he hit it.”
The ball carried over the fence in right for the only homer hit off Sewell’s blooper. Boxscore and Video
That year, using All-Star Game revenue, Sewell and Cardinals shortstop Marty Marion “worked out the framework of a plan that was to lead to the establishment of baseball’s player pension fund,” The Sporting News reported.
Sewell’s career record in the majors is 143-97. He was superb against the Cubs (36-19, 2.84 ERA) and not so good versus the Cardinals (9-19, 4.85).
According to The Sporting News, “the consequences of Sewell’s (1941) hunting accident forced doctors to amputate both his legs below the knees in 1973 because of life-threatening circulatory problems.”