"The Most Heartbreaking Thing I Have Ever Seen in Baseball" (1974)

On Steve Blass, and knowing when to let go.

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"Catching up to his greatness" (1983)

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I.

Fifty years ago, in the fourth inning of a spring training game in Bradenton, Florida, Steve Blass imploded on a pitcher’s mound for the final time. He’d worked his way through the first three frames, but then came the fourth, and then came the moment when Blass witnessed his own demoralizing end: In one inning, he walked eight batters and gave up eight runs. He threw fifty-one pitches, seventeen of them strikes. He ran the count to 3-2 on a hitter, then threw a pitch behind him to give up a walk. The fans in the stands at the Pittsburgh Pirates spring training facility began to boo, and kept booing until Blass was lifted from the game. One baseball man who was there that day, Roland Hemond, called it “the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen in baseball.”

Three days later, in April of 1974, the Pirates held a press conference and put Blass on waivers. One of the best pitchers in baseball, and one of the key cogs in the Pirates’ 1971 World Series win over the Baltimore Orioles, was wanted by no other major-league team. He would be forced to retire at the age of 32. He had lost his way over the course of just a couple of seasons; he could no longer throw strikes consistently, and the reason why, as the late Roger Angell wrote in his epic New Yorker profile of Blass, was a complete mystery. Even now, there is nowhere near a complete understanding of the condition that became known as Steve Blass Disease, and would soon come to be known as The Yips.

“I don’t think anybody will ever understand his decline,” said his pitching coach, Dan Osborn.

“Maybe your control is something that can just go,” Blass told Angell. “It’s no big thing, but suddenly it’s gone.”

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II.

There were (and are) a million theories as to Blass’s decline, and one of the theories that Angell put forward was that the game itself had changed, and that perhaps this was what had changed Steve Blass. Perhaps the pressure had become too great; perhaps the fact that “sports is no longer a release from the harsh everyday American business world but its continuation and apotheosis” had led Blass to lose sight of himself. Perhaps sports was now just like business, or politics, or any other venture where the outside pressures could lead to a fear of failure, which could lead to actual failure. “So much money and so many people depend on you,” said Blass’s former teammate, Nellie King. “Pretty soon you’re trying so hard that you can’t function.”

There is that moment, Angell wrote, when “the man out there is no longer just another great athlete, an idealized hero, but only as a man—only ourself.” It is uncomfortable to watch when it happens—when someone who so many people depend upon suddenly seems to have lost his fastball—and I don’t think we’re equipped to deal with it, whether it’s in baseball or in business or in politics. There is no way of knowing when it’s time to walk away, but at least Steve Blass knew when it was over, and at least he was still young enough to have a second act for the next fifty years, working primarily as an excellent, self-deprecating color commentator on Pittsburgh Pirates games.

That spring, in 1974, Angell wrote, Blass understood that he had no other choice. He couldn’t keep fighting it. He had to let go.

“At least that problem could be solved now,” Angell wrote. “He didn’t want to subject (his wife) Karen to more of the struggle. It was time to get out.”

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