front leg before it kicked out as the arm pulled back and the
shoulders tilted, as if aiming for the mezzanine.
This is how Papa showed him how to do it. He called his
maternal grandfather Papa. Dave Walker was his first pitching
coach, an engineering savant from the oil business in eastern
Kentucky who had a knack for unpacking the way things
worked, including Verlander. Papa grew up in Alba, Mich.,
as a Tigers fan. If he was going to teach his grandson how
to throw, then the Detroit ace was going to be the template.
The boy learned Verlander well.
“Snake eyes!” Papa would call out to Walker while he was
pitching. “Snake eyes!”
Papa said it so many times that to this day, Walker still
hears Papa’s voice. Snake eyes is the metaphor for the ideal
position of the fingernails of his first two fingers in the fastball
grip: “Having your fingers on top of the ball instead of out
A PITCHER is a catapult, at root a simple machine analogous
to what the ancient Greeks invented to launch arrows or
stones at the enemy. Its name survives from the Greek kata,
or “downward,” and pallo, “to hurl.” The modern translation,
as it relates to five-ounce spherical payloads, is “Koufax.”
In function and form, no pitcher typified the engineering
marvel of propelling a baseball like Sandy Koufax. He was the
human version of Da Vinci’s design of the perfect catapult.
Whereas Leonardo conjured a leaf spring and a rope pulled
taut around a drum to accumulate power, Koufax would raise
both hands over his head, lift his right knee chest high, and
pull the baseball down to the crick behind his bent back leg
until his shoulders tilted as if aiming for the upper deck.
Only then, maximally loaded, did he unloose hell on hitters.
One night last October, baseball’s Leonardo sat serenely in
the second row at Dodger Stadium, between the L.A. dugout
and home plate, for Game 3 of the World Series. On the same
mound that Koufax had mastered half a century before stood
Walker Buehler, a 24-year-old rookie preparing to throw his
108th pitch in his 177th pro inning of the year. At bat was
Boston’s J.D. Martinez, the Hank Aaron Award winner as the
American League’s best hitter, and the second-best fastball
hitter in baseball. The night air tingled with tension. The
Dodgers led the highest-scoring team in baseball 1–0 in a
matchup they had to win, having lost the first two games.
At 6' 2" and 185 pounds, and with an attempt at a mustache
that resembled a thinning patch of August lawn, Buehler
evoked not a weapon but a high school senior, four-year stu-
dent council officer, National Honor Society member with a
4.3 weighted GPA and 30 ACT, and aspiring political science
major thinking of a career in politics—all of which Buehler
was six years earlier at Henry Clay High in Lexington, Ky.
But then the art and science of human engineering began.
Buehler raised both hands above his head, a change he made
in his delivery as a junior at Vanderbilt after he read that
almost all Hall of Fame pitchers did so. For the next few beats
he looked just like Justin Verlander: body tucked tight as if
off a high dive, front foot under the hamstring of the raised
32
SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED
• AUGUS T 12, 2019
WALKER BUEHLER
KEVIN SU
LLIVAN
/ORAN
GE CO
UN
TY REGISTER/SCN
G/GETTY IM
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