The Steve Dalkowski Story: The ‘fastest pitcher ever’ and inspiration for the Nuke LaLoosh character in ‘Bull Durham’ dies at 80

(Originally published by the Daily News on May 17, 1998 with the headline: SAFE AT HOME: ‘Fastest pitcher ever’ getting back on track)

EDITORS’ NOTE: Steve Dalkowski died Sunday in New Britain from the coronavirus, his sister Patti Cain confirmed on Friday. He had been living in the same nursing home that Patti had brought him home to as featured in the below Sunday ‘End Zone’ article published in 1998. He was 80 years old.

NEW BRITAIN, Conn. — The field is empty and quiet on this day, in many ways a reflection on the man who once filled it with the buzzing sound of people — thousands of people — who came here to bear witness to a phenomenon.

The fields Steve Dalkowski would toil on years later in tattered jeans and a T-shirt, picking fruit in an unrelenting summer heat of Bakersfield, Calif., are today nothing more than a blur in the recesses of his mind. But mention this field, or any of those other early fields where a baseball was his tool of trade and the pitcher’s mound was his own private bastion of peace, and a faint smile crosses his face.

“I know I could have won 15 games a year if I’d have ever made it,” he says. “I was that good. There were nights when I’d curse the gods for what happened to me. But I didn’t drink to forget, I just drank.”

It is no wonder Dalkowski can’t or doesn’t want to remember the bad times. To all of those who loved him throughout them, though, it is at least heartening that he can still hear the cheers. Because it doesn’t really matter if he never made it to the big leagues, or how hard he tried to drink the pain and frustration of it all away. Steve Dalkowski could never run away from his legend of being the fastest pitcher of them all.

“It was truly a magical time back then when Stevie pitched his high school game there,” said Dalkowski’s sister, Patti Cain, pointing to the field just beyond the ridge in Walnut Hill Park. She was standing in front of the Walnut Hill Care Center, where the man they called “the living legend” miraculously still lives. “People would come from hundreds of miles away to see him pitch. You had to get to the park two hours ahead of time to get a good seat.”

There was one particular day in 1957 when Dalkowski struck out 24 batters and basically left the multitude gasping. All the scouts were there, of course, as they had been for three years, watching in wonder at this smallish (5-10, 175 pounds) bespectacled lefthander with the sling-shot delivery who threw harder than anyone they had ever seen before. “They called it Steve’s ‘radio pitch,’" Patti said. “You could hear it but you couldn’t see it.”

A few weeks later, the man from the Baltimore Orioles , Frank McGowan, won the prize over 15 other clubs and signed Dalkowski to a $4,000 bonus - the major league limit at that time - and from there began the wildest, most unbelievable journey every taken through the ranks of professional baseball.

The first stop was Kingsport, Tenn., where Dalkowski quickly served notice to the Oriole high command that they had a project on their hands. He struck out 121 batters in 62 innings, but won only one game, losing eight and leading the Appalachian League in walks with 129. The next year, after similar bouts of untamed wildness at Knoxville and Wilson, N.C., Dalkowski was assigned to Aberdeen, N.D. Despite all the horrific advance notices, his manager there, ex-major league shortstop Billy DeMars, took an immediate liking to the happy-go-lucky little lefty.

Watching Dalkowski throw in his first game at Aberdeen, DeMars spotted what he thought to be a likely source of the kid’s wildness. “He never let his foot come off the rubber,” DeMars, now a Phillies minor league instructor, recalled. “Essentially he had no follow through. It was unbelievable when you think about it. This kid was throwing 100 miles with his arm alone. I told him ‘Stevie, I’m gonna yell from the bench to let it go every time you don’t follow through.’ We worked on it and in his next start he walked only five batters and struck out 20. They took our pictures together in the local paper and I got quoted as saying he was the fastest pitcher I’d ever seen. I think that’s how the ‘fastest ever’ legend got started.”

And from there the legend grew — to mythic proportions. There was the time when Cal Ripken Sr. was catching him in Aberdeen and got crossed up on a pitch. Instead of the slider Ripken had called for, Dalkowski threw a fastball that struck home plate umpire John Lupini in the face mask. The mask was shattered to bits and Lupini was momentarily knocked unconscious. Longtime National League umpire Doug Harvey, who crossed paths with Dalkowski a few times in the minors, once said: “I’ve umpired for Koufax, Gibson, Drysdale, Seaver, Maloney, Marichal and Gooden and they could all bring it, but nobody could bring it like Dalkowski.”

And it was Dalkowski who director Ron Shelton used as the prototype for his “wildman” character “Nuke LaLoosh” in the movie “Bull Durham.”

To this day, the mere mention of Dalkowski’s name to anyone who played, managed or umpired professional ball in that ear, 1958-65, evokes one tale more unbelievable than the next.

“Only guy I ever saw bean a guy in a concession stand,” remembered Hall of Famer Bob Lemon. “It was in Miami and Dalkowski was throwing batting practice. He let go of a pitch that sailed right over the backstop into the stands and hit a guy in the back of the head who was buying a hot dog.”

“Dalkowski introduced the fear factor in baseball to me,” said Cardinal manager Tony La Russa, who batted against him in the Eastern League in 1962. “He acted like he couldn’t see and he seemed to relish being wild.”

And then there is the most recounted chapter of all in the Dalkowski legend.

As the story goes, Dalkowski was throwing batting practice at Miami Stadium prior to an Orioles-Red Sox spring training game when Ted Williams ambled by the cage for a look. The “greatest of all hitters” had just retired and was working as a spring training instructor for the Red Sox. After watching the crowd stir with one crackling Dalkowski fastball after another, Williams could no longer resist the temptation to grab a bat and step into the cage. A hush came over the stadium as stood on the mound, squinting at the sight of his New England boyhood idol waiting to take his licks at him. Dalkowski went into his delivery, raising his right leg and, in an instant, the ball was in the catcher’s glove, unseen, unheard and untouched.

Williams looked back and walked out of the cage. Afterword, the crowd of writers asked him how fast Dalkowski really was and Williams reportedly confessed he never saw the pitch, adding that he’d be damned if he’d ever step into the cage against Dalkowski again. Thirty years later, Williams said he couldn’t recall the incident. But even in his own limited capacity for recalling so many of the events in his life, Dalkowski remembers.

“I was thinking about trying to strike him out,” Dalkowski said of Williams. “I just didn’t want to hit him. I threw him more than one pitch and when one of them kinda took off, he put up his hand and yelled, ‘I’m gettin’ out.'”

For all the awe and fear Dalkowski’s fastball may have engendered, however, the Orioles were still at a loss at how to harness it. The same could be said for Dalkowski’s off-field behavior. There wasn’t a minor league manager in the Oriole system back then who didn’t have to bail Dalkowski out of jail. DeMars in particular felt like a father to him and even let him live with him in order to keep him straight.

“But one day after he got rained out of a start in Lewiston, Idaho, I told him he’d be starting the next day and told him not to stay out late,” DeMars related. “I did a room check and found out he came in at 2 a.m. That was it for me. I’d hear from him periodically years later, usually a late-night call when he’d be drunk. The last time was about 10 years ago. He said, ‘I’m sorry for everything. I love you, Billy.’”

“He wasn’t a bad kid,” said Cincinnati Reds coach Harry Dunlop, who managed Dalkowski at Stockton in 1964. “Everybody loved him. He was just easily led astray and he couldn’t stop drinking.”

Meawhile, Paul Richards, the Orioles’ general manager and acknowledged pitching guru, tried everything to get Dalkowski to throw strikes. One spring, Richards had a huge wooden target constructed with a strike zone painted on it. The experiment lasted for the 13 minutes it took Dalkowski to completely splinter it. Next, Richards had Dalkowski throw 76-100 pitches before each start in order to tire his arm out. Finally, in the spring of 1962 at the Orioles’ minor league camp in Daytona Beach, Clyde King, one of Richards’ pitching instructors, came up with the idea of having Dalkowski pitch to two batters on each side of the plate — at the same time.

“I had to ask for volunteers,” King said. “As I remember it took a couple days to get two guys with guts enough to stand in there against him. But after watching Dalkowski at Richards’ request, I couldn’t see anything wrong with his mechanics. He just needed to take something off his fastball. And darned if his first six pitches didn’t go right between the two batters. I impressed on him that you can still get people out throwing 94. He had taken a lot of pride at being wild and watching guys diving into the dirt, but it wasn’t getting him to the major leagues.”

Whether it was King’s advice or simply a matter of maturity as a pitcher, Dalkowski began to put it all together under Earl Weaver at Elmira that ’62 season. Although he still had a losing record (7-10), he had more strikeouts (192 in 160 innings) than walks (114) for the first time and his ERA (3.04) was two runs per game lower than he’d ever achieved.

When Dalkowski came to spring training the following February and continued throwing strikes, the Orioles thought at last they had something. In mid March, Dalkowski had thrown six hitless innings of relief and the Orioles decided he was going to be their closer. They told him he’d made the club. Then, on March 23, 1963, Dalkowski was called into a game against the Yankees in the sixth inning. He struck out Roger Maris and Elston Howard before Hector Lopez broke his spring hitless streak with a single. The next inning, facing Phil Linz, he broke off a slider and felt something pop in his elbow.

It was probably the ulnar nerve, but in those days they didn’t have MRIs or arthroscopic surgery. All we know is, Dalkowski never threw with the same velocity again. Although he did compile his first winning season at Stockton under Dunlop in 1964, his off-the-field carousing finally wore out with the Orioles. In November of 1964, The Sporting News ran a small article with the headline: ‘Living Legend Released.' His final record for nine minor-league seasons: 46-80, 5.59 ERA, 1,396 strikeouts, 1,354 walks in 995 innings.

His dream shattered, Dalkowski embarked on a 30-year freefall to oblivion. He drank all day, every day now. He drifted to Bakersfield, picking fruit and chopping cotton as a migrant farm worker. It was there, staying in a rundown rooming house, that he met his wife, Virginia. She did her best to take care of him, but when Ray Youngdahl, a former teammate who’s now a probation officer in San Mateo, offered to get him into a hospital, she welcomed the help.

“In 1973, I got him enrolled in the ‘Project 90’ drug and alcohol program,” Youngdahl said. “When he got out, I took him in with me and set him up to get a landscape job. But he wanted to go visit Virginia first and on the bus ride to Oildale where they lived, he got off at San Jose and went to a bar. He never came back.”

Some 18 years later, former Orioles catcher Frank Zupo, Dalkowski’s batterymate at Stockton who works with BAT (the baseball Assistance Team), drove to Oildale from his home in Anaheim along with a freelance TV producer, Tom Ciapetta. Zupo convinced Dalkowski to go to a hospital in Los Angeles, but after a few weeks there, he walked out. On Christmas Eve 1992, an Hispanic couple found Dalkowski, disoriented and incoherent, in a laundromat in Los Angeles.

Once they were able to determine who he was, Virginia came and got him and took him to her family’s home in Oklahoma. It was when Virginia died suddenly in January of 1995 that Patti, with the help of Zupo, got Dalkowski back to New Britain.

“For nearly 30 years, I had lost my brother,” she said, “and it was time for me to take care of him.”

Sitting in a conference room at the Care Center, Dalkowski, now 58, strains to recall anything about those lost years. “Catching a bus at 3 a.m. to go out in the fields ... building bonfires to keep warm before the sun came up ...”

His eyes have a vacant look, the one visible scar from trying so long to drown his broken dreams in the companion of a whiskey or wine bottle. Otherwise, he is remarkably healthy. His high school coach, Bill Huber, comes by every Sunday to take him to church, and for DeMars, Dunlop, Youngdahl and all the others who shared his best of times and dreaded the worst, there is a happy ending after all.

Steve Dalkowski is safe at home.