“Lookit, he caught it right on your head!” screamed Pierce’s wife, Gloria, in the living room of the Pierces’ home in southwest-suburban Lemont. Pierce shook his head and laughed.
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Pierce was among the most durable pitchers of his era, throwing more than 200 innings season after season. Buehrle is matching that. Pierce was popular with both fans and teammates, as is Buehrle. Both put in stints as their team’s player representative. Buehrle is not a headhunter, and neither was Pierce. Some baseball experts have suggested that had Pierce been willing to dust off a batter now and then, he might have been even more successful. “It’s possible,” Pierce says. “It wouldn’t have been worth it. You don’t want to hurt anybody—and you can hurt somebody very easily.”
That was on a summer evening 51 years ago, on the other side of 35th Street from U.S. Cellular, long before Comiskey Park became Comiskey parking lot.
Yet Pierce threw harder than Buehrle. Buehrle mixes speeds to fool batters; Pierce blew them away with one of the best fastballs of his day. (There’s little evidence that pitchers today, with their greater size and bulk, throw harder than pitchers used to.) Pierce credits his speed to his big, sweeping windup; he got his entire body behind the pitch, he says. Sherman Lollar, Pierce’s catcher on the White Sox, once said, “He has wonderful coordination. And he sure is pretty to watch, the way he pumps and rocks and throws.” Pierce, who’s still frequently asked to throw out the first pitch at games of all levels, from Little League to the majors, allows that with age he’s lost a little off his heater. “The arm feels fine!” he says. “I throw just as hard, the ball just don’t go anywhere.”
Now, as manager, Lavagetto chose right-handed hitter Ed Fitz Gerald to face Pierce. For the entire season to that point, Fitz Gerald, a backup catcher, had collected ten hits. “He was a first-ball fastball hitter, so we threw him a curve,” Pierce recalls. Swinging at the first pitch, Fitz Gerald sliced the ball down the right-field line. It zipped just beyond the reach of first baseman Ray Boone toward the outfield. Fair or foul?
Soon after the game, Pierce’s teammates were telling reporters that Fitz Gerald’s hit probably cost Pierce $15,000 in endorsements. “And that was more than a third of my salary then,” Pierce says.
