Remembering Roger Craig, Sage of the Split-Fingered Fastball (1930–2023)

Across a career in baseball that spanned over 40 years, Roger Craig was at various points a hotshot rookie who helped the Dodgers win their only championship in Brooklyn, the first and best pitcher on an historically awful Mets team, the answer to a trivia question linking the Dodgers and Mets, a well-traveled pitching coach who shaped a championship-winning Tigers staff, and a culture-changing, pennant-winning manager of the Giants. He was particularly beloved within the Giants family for his positive demeanor and the way he shook the franchise out of the doldrums, though it was via his role as a teacher and evangelist of the split-fingered fastball — the pitch of the 1980s, as Sports Illustrated and others often called it — that he left his greatest mark on the game.

Craig didn’t invent the splitter, which owed its lineage to the forkball, a pitch that was popular in the 1940s and ’50s, but he proved exceptionally adept at teaching it to anyone eager to learn, regardless of team. For the pitch, a pitcher splits his index and middle fingers parallel to the seams, as in a forkball grip, but holds the ball further away from the palm, and throws with the arm action of a fastball. The resulting pitch “drops down in front of the batter so fast he don’t know where it’s goin’,” Craig told Playboy in 1988. “To put it in layman’s terms, it’s a fastball that’s also got the extra spin of a curveball.”

Given its sudden drop, the pitch was often mistaken for a spitball, so much so that it was sometimes referred to as “a dry spitter.” It baffled hitters and helped turn journeymen into stars, and stars into superstars. After pioneering reliever Bruce Sutter rode the pitch to the NL Cy Young Award in 1979, pitchers such as Mike Scott, Mark Davis, Orel Hershiser, and Bob Welch either learned the pitch directly from Craig, or from someone Craig taught, and themselves took home Cy Youngs in the 1980s. Jack Morris, Ron Darling, and Dave Stewart won championships with the pitch, as did Hershiser. Years later, the likes of Roger Clemens, David Cone, Curt Schilling, and John Smoltz would find similar success with the pitch, though it eventually fell out of vogue due to a belief that it caused arm problems, an allegation that Craig hotly refuted.

Not that Craig was a hothead. Indeed, he was even-keeled, revered within the game for his positivity. Such traits were reflected in the tributes paid to him after he died on Sunday at the age of 93, after what his family said was a short illness. “We have lost a legendary member of our Giants family.” Giants CEO Larry Baer said in a statement. “Roger was beloved by players, coaches, front-office staff and fans. He was a father figure to many and his optimism and wisdom resulted in some of the most memorable seasons in our history.”

Will Clark, who debuted with the Giants in 1986, Craig’s first full season at the helm, and starred during the remainder of his managerial run, paid tribute on Twitter:

Humm Baby, my second dad and the man who taught me the game of baseball. It was my pleasure playing for such a great manager and person!! Please make sure all of the guys up there in heaven are gamers!!! All my best to your wonderful family.
Will Clark pic.twitter.com/TEdSIH5MMh

— Will Clark (@WillClark22) June 5, 2023

Craig became a pitching guru after a 12-year major league career (1955–66) that included championships with the Dodgers in ’55 and ’59, expansion-driven agony with the Mets, and another World Series ring with the Cardinals in ’64 as he bounced around the league. For his career, he went an unremarkable 74–98 with a 3.83 ERA (105 ERA+), his won-loss record weighed down by a combined 15–46 mark in his two years with the Mets. At one point he set a record (since broken) by losing 18 decisions in a row.

“Losing was a tremendous influence in shaping my pitching philosophy,” Craig wrote in Inside Pitch, an account of his championship-winning 1984 season with the Tigers. “I learned the value of being competitive, regardless of the circumstances. I learned the value of positive thinking and the power of self-esteem.”

Craig passed along those lessons while serving as a pitching coach for the Padres, Astros, and Tigers from 1969 to ’84, a stretch that was interrupted by a two-year stint managing in San Diego. Though he didn’t expect to coach or manage again after stepping down from his Tigers post, he found himself piloting the Giants less than a year later, setting up a seven-year run that put the team back on the baseball map.

Roger Lee Craig was born on February 17, 1930 in Durham, North Carolina, the eighth of 10 children of John Thompson Craig, a traveling shoe salesman, and his wife Mamie Irene Craig, who worked as the housemother of a nursing home. At Durham High School, he played shortstop — an anomaly as he grew to his full height of 6-foot-4 — and pitched. In 1949, during his senior year of high school, his mound work came to the attention of Frank Rickey, a bird dog scout whose more famous brother, Branch Rickey, was the president and general manager of the Dodgers. Though Craig initially headed to North Carolina State on a basketball scholarship, in the spring of 1950 he quit to sign with the Dodgers.

Craig began his career with Newport News of the Class B Piedmont League in 1950, but after walking 23 batters in 19 innings, manager Al Campanis sent him down to Valdosta of the Class D Georgia-Florida League, where he went 14–7 with a 3.13 ERA. He returned to Newport News with greater success the following year, overcoming an astronomical 7.1 walks per nine to go 14–11 with a 3.67 ERA. While spending 1952 and ’53 fulfilling his military service obligation at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, future major league catchers Ed Bailey, Frank House, and Haywood Sullivan told him his stuff was good enough for the majors.

Crossing paths with Campanis in 1954 caused him another setback. The day before spring training, Craig fell and broke his left elbow while playing basketball. He concealed the injury, simply wearing an ace bandage for a couple of weeks. While he was doing one-handed pushups, a curious Campanis noticed and give his left arm a squeeze, exacerbating the fracture and putting him out of action for awhile. After a disjointed season split between three teams, he moved up to Triple-A Montreal of the International League in 1955, where he went 10–2 with a 3.54 ERA in 117 innings. In July, the Dodgers called him up to join a staff that had helped the team build a commanding lead in the NL pennant race but was suddenly full of sore arms; Carl Erskine, Billy Loes, Johnny Podres, and Karl Spooner were all ailing.

Debuting in the opener of a doubleheader against the Reds on July 17, Craig pitched a complete-game three-hitter. Thereafter, manager Walter Alston moved Craig back and forth between the rotation and bullpen, and he ranked among the team’s top three in innings in July, August, and September. In 10 starts and 11 relief appearances, he went 5–3 with two saves and a 2.78 ERA in 90.2 innings.

The Dodgers won the pennant by 13 1/2 games and once again faced the Yankees in the World Series, having lost to them four times in the previous 14 seasons. In Game 5, with the teams tied at two games apiece, Craig pitched six strong innings, allowing just two runs; he departed with a 4–2 lead in the seventh after Bob Cerv homered and Elston Howard walked, with Clem Labine escaping the jam and finishing the game. The Dodgers won in seven games behind Podres’ 2–0 shutout, giving them their only championship while based in Brooklyn.

Craig helped the Dodgers to another pennant in 1956, going 12–11 with a 3.71 ERA (108 ERA+) in 199 innings. Facing the Yankees again in Game 3 of the World Series, he carried a 2–1 lead into the sixth but served up a three-run homer to Enos Slaughter and took the loss. In Game 7, he came in out of the bullpen but failed to retire any of the five batters he faced as the Yankees blew the game open.

Craig didn’t pitch well or often in 1957, posting a 4.61 ERA in 13 starts and 19 relief appearances totaling 111.1 innings. The most notable moment of his season — one for the trivia books — was his September 29 start, which was not only the final game of the season, but also the last Brooklyn Dodgers game ever. It was also a turning point in Craig’s career. On a cold, damp day at Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium, Craig threw seven innings of two-run ball, but experienced a sharp sensation in his shoulder. “Something went ‘snap’ in there and I felt a lot of pain,” he later told writer Bill Conlin. “I gritted my teeth and kept on pitching. I know now it was the rotator cuff. But there was no such thing as a rotator cuff in 1957, no such thing as an arthroscope… I went out and pitched eight more seasons in the big leagues. And every pitch I threw hurt like hell.”

With an ailing shoulder and a missing fastball, Craig spent most of 1958 and a good chunk of ’59 in the minors. He was brilliant upon returning to the now Los Angeles-based Dodgers in mid-June of the latter season, going 11–5 with a 2.06 ERA in 152.2 innings and coming up particularly big in September as the Dodgers were embroiled in a tight three-way race against the Braves and Giants. Over his final three starts, he won three consecutive complete games and allowed a total of two runs, beating the Giants on September 19, shutting out the Cardinals four days later, and stifling the Cubs on the final scheduled day of the regular season, forcing a best-of-three playoff against the Braves that the Dodgers swept. His four shutouts (not including a relief effort of 11 scoreless innings) tied for the NL lead, and he would have led in ERA as well had he thrown another 1.1 innings to meet the qualification threshold. In the World Series against the White Sox, Craig started twice, getting chased early in Game 1 but throwing six scoreless innings in Game 4 before getting tagged for four runs in the seventh. The Dodgers eked out a win nonetheless and took the series in six.

Injuries and ineffectiveness limited Craig to a total of 228.1 innings in 1960 and ’61, and when the Dodgers left him unprotected in the expansion draft, the Mets chose him. Manager Casey Stengel tabbed him as the team’s Opening Day starter, and so on April 11, 1962, he threw the first pitch in franchise history, thus providing a bridge from the team’s Brooklyn predecessors. He didn’t last long that day, getting chased after allowing five runs in three innings to the Cardinals.

Those Mets were utterly hapless, going 40–120 to set a modern-day record for losses in a season. Craig did what he could to keep the team from total embarrassment once every four or five days, going 10–24 with a 4.51 ERA (92 ERA+) in 233.1 innings. He led the NL in losses but was the only pitcher on the team to post a double-digit win total; by bWAR, he tied Al Jackson for the team lead with 3.0.

In Jimmy Breslin’s book on the 1962 season, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, Breslin described a May 27 game against the Giants in which Craig twice picked off Orlando Cepeda only to have first baseman Ed Bouchee drop both throws. Before the second one, Craig knocked Willie Mays down, then hit Cepeda in the ribs with a pitch. As Craig failed to pick Mays off second, Mays spiked second baseman Elio Chacon, opening a wound that would require 10 stitches. Chacon punched Mays and was body-slammed to the ground, and Cepeda and Craig brawled as well. Chacon was the only one to exit; after play ensued, Bouchee’s second dropped pickoff attempt led to two unearned runs, breaking the game open. “You can’t win the game,” Craig later told Breslin. “You go out there knowing that. So you try harder. Try too hard, it usually turns out. You’re out there concentrating so hard that the first thing you do is make a mistake.”

Is this the biggest baseball brawl ever?

It happened in 1962, Mets vs Giants. Willie Mays literally grabbed Mets shortstop Elio Chacon and slammed him to the ground. Orlando Cepeda walloped pitcher Roger Craig with a powerful left hook to the face. https://t.co/Nk1mk2CYQn

— Metsmerized – Joe D (@MetsmerizedJoeD) April 24, 2022

The losses continued for Craig and the Mets, as he led the NL again in 1963, going 5–22 with a 3.78 ERA. From May 4 through August 4, he went 0–18 with a 4.16 ERA; in five of the losses, the Mets were shut out, while in five more, they scored just one run. Mercifully, in November, Craig was traded to St. Louis for outfielder George Altman and righty Bill Wakefield. Splitting his time between the bullpen and the rotation, he went 7–9 with five saves and a 3.25 ERA in 166 innings, helping the Cardinals win the pennant. In the more notable of his two World Series appearances against the Yankees, he entered Game 4 in the first inning, after starter Ray Sadecki surrendered hits to the first four batters and fell behind 2–0. Though Craig allowed one of the two inherited runners to score, he pitched 4.2 innings without allowing another run. Replaced by a pinch-hitter in the top of the sixth, he was still the pitcher of record when Ken Boyer’s ensuing grand slam provided all the scoring the Cardinals needed to even the series at two games apiece. The Cardinals won in seven.

Craig spent two more years in the majors, one with the Reds (to whom he was traded in December 1964) and one with the Phillies, but he was hardly done with baseball. After he spent 1967 scouting for the Dodgers, the team hired the 38-year-old to manage their Double-A Albuquerque team the following year. Overseeing a pitching staff that included longtime big leaguers Charlie Hough and Fred Norman, he led the team to a 70–69 record and a second-place finish in the West Division of the Texas League.

Craig returned to the majors in 1969, beginning a decade-and-a-half long odyssey as a coach and manager. He spent 1969–72 as the pitching coach of the expansion Padres under managers Preston Gomez and Don Zimmer, though he was supplanted by Podres, who was close with the latter. After spending 1973 as a minor league pitching coach for the Dodgers, he rejoined Gomez, who was managing the Astros, in ’74–75, then returned to the Padres for ’76–77 under managers John McNamara and Al Dark.

In 1978, Craig took the reins himself after the overly controlling Dark — who banned alcohol on team flights and set up Bible study for the players — was fired during spring training. Overseeing a squad that featured future Hall of Famers Dave Winfield, Ozzie Smith (then a 23-year-old rookie), Gaylord Perry (who would win that year’s NL Cy Young at age 39), and Rollie Fingers, plus 1976 NL Cy Young winner Randy Jones, Craig guided the team to an 84–78 record, its first finish above .500. But when the team backslid to 68–93 the following year, he got the axe.

While with the Padres, Craig crossed paths with Sutter and Cubs roving minor league pitching instructor Fred Martin. It was Martin, who spent three of his 20-some professional seasons in the majors, who had taught Sutter the split-fingered fastball in 1973, when he was on the verge of being released by the team’s Class A affiliate. Throwing the splitter 90% of the time, Sutter went on to become one of the game’s top relievers upon reaching the majors in 1976, making six All-Star teams, winning the NL Cy Young award in ’79 (and finishing among the top five three other times), helping the Cardinals win the World Series in ’82, and getting inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2006.

In Roger Kahn’s 2000 book Head Games, Sutter told Kahn that he and Martin taught Craig the pitch:

“I was the guy who showed Roger Craig how to throw a splitter… Craig was pitching coach for San Diego. Fred Martin was there with me on the major league club that day, and on the sideline there I showed Roger how to throw it. Then Fred spent some time talking to him about it. I’m sure Roger came up with modifications, but it was Fred Martin and I who showed him the pitch.”

If Sutter’s recollection is correct, the meeting must have dated to 1976 or more likely ’77, when Craig was still a pitching coach and Sutter in the midst of his first All-Star season, featuring a 1.34 ERA and 31 saves. That timeline jibes with reporting that Craig taught the pitch to several Padres pitchers while he was managing (though Perry was said to have been throwing a splitter as well as a forkball in the early 1970s, both of which mimicked the unpredictable dives of his signature spitballs). Craig himself offered an alternate history to Sports Illustrated’s Ron Fimrite in 1986. In that account, in the winter of 1979–80 while coaching teenagers at the San Diego School of Baseball, the 50-year-old Craig learned to throw the pitch himself. “I was trying to find a breaking pitch that those youngsters could throw that wouldn’t put a strain on their arms… I remembered that at the end of my own career I’d tried everything, including a forkball.”

Wrote Fimrite: “In his school, Craig found that if he used a variation of the forkball grip, holding the ball farther away from the palm, and threw with a fastball motion, strange and wonderful things happened.” More:

Craig defines three stages in the development of the split-finger. In the first, the pitch becomes more of a straight change-up, which, since it is thrown with fastball arm speed, makes it confusing enough. In the second, the pitch develops a knuckle-ball or forkball flutter — effective certainly, but not as deadly as the crash-dive effect it achieves in the final stage when it tumbles from the split fingers looking for all the world like a fastball down the middle.

During the 1979–80 offseason, Craig was hired to be the Tigers’ pitching coach, thus reuniting him with manager Sparky Anderson, who had coached the 1969 Padres before being hired to manage the Reds, whom he led to four pennants and two championships in a nine-year run. Anderson claimed not to like or understand pitchers, but in Craig, he had a sidekick who did. Craig taught the splitter first to righty Milt Wilcox in 1981; Morris took up the pitch after receiving a grip tip from Wilcox in the bullpen in ’82. Suddenly it all clicked into place. “So I threw about three more and the fourth one was just — whomp, straight down,” Morris told Tyler Kepner for his book K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches. “And immediately I go, ‘Holy shit, this is like cheating. If I get this down, there ain’t nobody alive gonna hit it.’ And two starts later, I was throwing it in games.” Rotation-mates Dan Petry and Juan Berenguer picked up the pitch as well, and in 1984, they helped the Tigers to 104 wins and a World Series victory over the Padres, of all teams. Morris and Wilcox combined for three of the four wins.

The Tigers’ success with the pitch prompted Astros manager Bob Lillis to send Scott to Craig. Scott, a 29-year-old righty, was coming off a season in which he’d gone 5–11 with a 4.68 ERA (71 ERA+) for the Astros, and had been below replacement level for his six-year career. For a fee, he spent eight days with Craig, learned the splitter, and revitalized his career. He went 18–8 with a 3.29 ERA (105 ERA+) in 1985, which helped net him a three-year, $2 million contract. The following year, he went 18–10 with a 2.22 ERA and 306 strikeouts in 275.1 innings; those last three stats all led the NL, and he narrowly beat out Fernando Valenzuela for the Cy Young. He helped the Astros to the NL West title and befuddled the Mets (his former team) to such an extent during the 1986 NLCS (when he walked one, allowed one run and struck out 19 in two complete-game victories) that they accused him of scuffing baseballs. A year later, Craig echoed the charge, saying, “I know where he hides his sandpaper.”

Scott was far from the only high-profile practitioner of the splitter in the 1986 postseason. Both starters of the World Series opener, the Mets’ Darling and Boston’s Bruce Hurst, featured the pitch; the latter would have been the World Series MVP if not for Bill Buckner’s infamous error in Game 6. Speaking of October heartbreak: Angels closer Donnie Moore, whose life took a tragic turn in the wake of his failure to secure what would have been the pennant-clinching out in ALCS Game 5, learned the pitch from Martin while in the Cubs’ system.

At a 30-year reunion of the Dodgers’ 1955 champions, Craig showed the split-finger grip to Ron Perranoski, who wasn’t part of that squad but was the Dodgers’ current pitching coach. He taught the pitch to Hershiser, Welch, Tom Niedenfuer and Jerry Reuss. Hershiser went on to win the 1988 NL Cy Young and led the Dodgers to a championship; Welch won the 1990 AL Cy Young for the World Series-winning A’s.

As Craig shared his wisdom with the likes of Scott and Perranoski, little did he know that he’d be creating problems for himself. The Tigers’ 1984 victory gave Craig his fourth World Series ring. Weary of the traveling that coaching entailed, he retired as the team’s pitching coach and declined an offer to return to San Diego in that capacity. He spent most of 1985 scouting NL teams for the Tigers but in September accepted an offer to manage the Giants, who were en route to a 100-loss season and fired both general manager Tom Haller and manager Jim Davenport. The Giants went 6–12 under Craig, who along with new general manager Al Rosen recognized the need for a cultural change on a team that had practically institutionalized a defeatist attitude towards chilly Candlestick Park and its own competitive chances — understandable given sub-.500 finishes in 10 of the previous 12 seasons and an absence from the playoffs since 1971. Craig “told his players to zipper up their jackets and zipper up their mouths. No complaining about frosty conditions, he said,” wrote United Press International’s Mike Barnes.

With a signature line that became both a rallying cry and a nickname — “Humm Baby” — Craig’s eternal optimism won the Giants over, and a talented youth movement didn’t hurt either. With a pair of rookies, first baseman Clark and second baseman Robby Thompson, joining the lineup in 1986, and with Craig teaching the splitter to his pitching staff, the team went 83–79, a 21-game improvement. The next year, Clark emerged as a superstar, Kevin Mitchell arrived via a blockbuster trade with the Padres (who received Davis, who would blossom into a Cy Young-winning reliever), and the pitching staff allowed the fewest runs in the league. The Giants won 90 games and the NL West flag but lost a seven-game NLCS to the Cardinals.

San Francisco dipped to 83 wins in 1988 but rebounded to 92 wins in ’89, with Mitchell clouting 47 homers, Clark turning in an MVP-caliber season, and Rick Reuschel and NL ERA leader Scott Garrelts anchoring the the rotation. The Giants beat the Cubs in a five-game NLCS, sending them to their first World Series since 1962. Alas, they were swept by the A’s in a series that was interrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake, which registered 6.9 on the Richter scale, killed 67 people, and caused over $5 billion in damage. It struck just half an hour before Game 3 was to start and delayed the series by 10 days.

Before the quake, Sports Illustrated’s Peter Gammons wrote, “With both pitching staffs mixing the split-finger heavily into their repertoires, the Battle of the Bay quickly became the Fracas of the Forkball,” referring as much to a semantic beef between Craig and A’s pitching coach Dave Duncan, who had taught starters Stewart and Mike Moore the splitter but referred to it as the forkball. By any name, the pair each won two games, so efficient that Welch and Storm Davis, their other two splitter-throwing starters, never even pitched.

Craig spent three more years at the helm with diminishing returns. He retired following the 1992 season, as Giants owner Bob Lurie sold to the Peter Magowan group, which kept the team in San Francisco after a Tampa Bay group was poised to buy the franchise and relocate it. Hitting coach Dusty Baker took over as manager, and the team signed free agent Barry Bonds, ushering in a new era of Giants baseball, one that owed a great debt to the transformation wrought by Craig.

In retirement, Craig stayed away from baseball until 2001, when Bob Brenly, who had succeeded Buck Showalter as manager of the Diamondbacks, invited him to spring training; Brenly had caught for the Giants during the first part of Craig’s tenure (1985–88) and served as his first base coach in his final year. Craig offered to teach the splitter to the Arizona pitchers save for Randy Johnson, who was in the midst of a run of four straight Cy Youngs. “Him, I told not to learn it,” he joked. When the Diamondbacks won the World Series that year, Brenly gave Craig another ring.

In the years after Craig’s final hurrah, the split-fingered fastball declined in popularity due in part to the belief that it caused arm injuries; in the pitch-tracking era, it has accounted for less than 2% of all offerings, and even one of the pitch’s most successful practitioners, Shohei Ohtani, downplayed it in favor of a cutter. Several pitchers reported that the repeated spreading of the fingers caused them elbow and forearm pain. Darling, for one, expressed the belief that the pitch shortened his career, but other practitioners such as Clemens, Morris, Schilling, Stewart, and Chuck Finley pushed their careers to the edge of 40 or past it. Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Glenn Fleisig, who has made a career of studying arm injuries in pitchers, told Kepner there was no scientific data to suggest that the splitter was inherently dangerous. Craig believed that forkballers “put [the ball] so deep they put some pressure on your arm. But the split-finger, if you throw it right, the way I taught it, you might hurt your arm — but you might hurt your arm throwing a rock,” he told Kepner.

Still, the pitch has its acolytes, and so long as it remains a part of pitchers’ arsenals, the name Roger Craig, and the history of the offering’s rise — and sudden drop — will be remembered.