Friday, September 12, 2003

Inside the old house toward the dead end of North Aiken, Howard Herrington busies himself within a somehow manageable stockpile of manila paper that seems relevant enough to start the Howard Herrington Presidential Library.

Of course, that's unlikely. Howard is 78, after all, and he's not really, you know, running for anything.

As Sinatra's infallible clarity wafts in from the kitchen, he spreads out some files for me on the dining room table, files that include basically everything right down to his father's report card from chiropractic school. Howard has the vague sense that centuries of his family's story should be preserved, and he's definitely right.

For decades a widower and the father of three grown and successful daughters, he fought with the Marines at Okinawa. His uncle was a school superintendent, then a physician and a writer. His nephew is a decorated Vietnam veteran who has written three acclaimed books on that conflict. Another nephew directed Bruce Willis in "Striking Distance" and put Howard on the crew.

"Once we worked all night on that movie," he says, "and Bruce Willis says to me, 'This is rough, workin' all night, isn't it?' I said, 'Yes sir,' but I should have said, 'Well, it's a little rougher for me since I'm getting six dollars an hour and you're getting 13 million."

Yeah, the things ya think of after Bruce Willis leaves.

But of all the stories Howard likes to tell, and for all the reverence he has for the varied and voluminous accomplishments of Herringtons coast to coast, the story that seems to intrigue him most acutely concerns his grandfather, Walter Herrington, a story that is part myth and part magic and quite possibly tied to the original historical fabric of baseball.

Of this there is no doubt: Walter Herrington is the man who taught Jock Menefee to throw a curveball.

"It was when I was 16," Menefee told the Pittsburgh Press for a story now long yellowed. "Some college professor had said it was impossible to throw a curveball, but I learned it from a fellow named Walter Herrington. He said he could show me how to do it and he showed me how to snap my wrist to get the right spin."

Now to remember Jock Menefee pitching in the National League, you'd have to be, oh, 110, 120 years old, an age at which most folks can't remember the beginning of this sentence, if anything. Menefee pitched for Pittsburgh, Louisville, New York and Chicago and won 58 games over nine seasons ending in 1903. He lost 70.

Maybe that made Walt Herrington wish he had taught it to somebody else, but it probably didn't dissuade anybody in the proceeding Herrington genealogy from the notion that Walter might actually have invented the pitch. This is dubious, although not on its face.

Herrington wasn't a physicist but a businessman who owned the Griswald Hotel on Smithfield Street, a poolroom on Penn Avenue, a confectionery in Shadyside, etc. He was also a baseball coach.

He was one of those characters, Howard seemed to agree, who was always this close to hitting something really big.

"He was always investing in things that really didn't take off," Howard said. "Then a guy approached him about investing in a new product, Wrigley's Chewing Gum. My grandfather said, 'How much will it sell for?' and the fella said, 'Penny a stick.' My grandfather said, "Nobody can make any money on a penny a stick.'"

Uh-huh. Look, as a man whose investment career ended with the pronouncement, "Tony, listen to me; there will never be casino gambling in Atlantic City," I empathize.

Anyway, in case you're still around looking for a point to all of this (thanks for waiting), it is that perhaps had he been in another place in the early 1880s rather than knocking around Scottdale instructing amateur baseball teams, Walter Herrington could well be remembered as the father of the curveball, arguably the strategic combustible that rocketed baseball from a local curiosity to a national art.

Credit for the curveball is generally assigned to Candy Cummings, who thought of it as a practical joke but labored for years before he could throw it purposefully or even understand why it worked. Cummings thought of it when he and some friends were throwing clamshells and watched them sail off a straight path, sometimes left, sometimes right. He fantasized about throwing a baseball like that to frustrate the other kids. Cummings spent only two years in the majors but is credited with throwing the first curveball in 1876.

Jock Menefee said Walter Herrington showed him the pitch about 1884, which is not to say that Herrington himself didn't come up with it at roughly the same time as Cummings.

"Because that professor said it couldn't be done, that it was against the law of physics, I thought I was breaking the law when I threw it and wanted to run away," Menefee said. "But we finally went on tour with a team from Scottdale and all kinds of people came out to see the curve."

So that's one of Howard Herrington's favorite nuggets amid the archives. It's not like he's saying that the game's greatest curveball artists -- Nolan Ryan, Bert Blyleven, Sandy Koufax, Darryl Kile, et al. -- owe something to his grandfather. But he's saying something like that. It's a kind of historical curveball that just catches the outside corner. It's a beauty.

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