Word: pitching
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...buttress the pitch for Government aid, the report features a somewhat lurid accounting of what would happen if the company went bankrupt. The total cost to the nation, Chrysler says, would be $16 billion. Some 400,000 workers could not only lose their jobs, but they could also remain unemployed long enough to require unemployment benefits totaling $1.5 billion. As many as 35,000 workers, most of whom are black, could be laid off in Detroit alone. Yet these estimates seem exaggerated, because it is highly unlikely that the company would ever shut down totally. At worst some plants would...
...James Earl Jones is so unrelievedly grave he could turn an audience to stone. This series, which casts Jones as Police Detective Woody Paris, brings out the actor's worst. Watching Paris explain his crime-solving logic is about as much fun as hearing an insurance sales pitch. The show's troubles do not end there. The supporting cast is amateurish, and the identity of the murder culprit in the opening episode can be guessed after the first scene. It does not take much longer than that to deduce the ultimate fate of Paris...
...family tells the story, Phil Niekro Sr. was the first one to throw the knuckleball. He used the pitch to confound batters on the amateur baseball teams around the coal mines of Ohio and West Virginia where he worked. Later, he taught it to his elder son Phil, who by the age of eight could dig his fingertips into the ball and send it floating without spin toward the strike zone, dipping and zigzagging in the air currents. Younger Son Joe tried the pitch, but his hands were too small, so he concentrated on the conventional pitcher's repertory...
Phil has been throwing the knuckler ever since he came up with the Braves in 1964, a rarity since the pitch is usually mastered in desperation by aging veterans. Joe started as a fireballer who played with the Chicago Cubs in 1967, then bounced around from club to club as his fastball faded. In 1972, when he was sent to the minors, those backyard sessions finally asserted their hold: Joe perfected the knuckleball. In 1975 he joined the Astros, who now have a flutter at the pennant...
...Brothers Niekro throw the most difficult pitch to control. Once the ball leaves the hand, no one, not even the man on the mound, knows where it will end up. Gripped with the fingertips and, unlike every other pitch, thrown with a completely stiff wrist, the ball should not spin. A revolving ball slices through the air; a spinless knuckleball floats free in the breeze, its trajectory altered by every passing zephyr. A gale wind in Candlestick Park or, it would seem at times, a cough from a fan in the front row of the Astrodome can change its course...