Roger Craig Will Be Remembered As The Chief Advocate Of The Split-Fingered Fastball

If ever there was a roller-coaster career in baseball, it belonged to Roger Craig.

He went from a world championship with the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers to an 18-game losing streak as a pitcher for the pathetic New York Mets seven years later but later won accolades as the pitching coach who popularized a pitch widely known as “the splitter.”

Craig, who won three World Series rings as a player and one as a coach, lived a long life that ended at age 93 Sunday.

The 6’4″ right-hander from Durham, NC never made much money from baseball. He accepted a $6,000 bonus from the Brooklyn Dodgers to forego a basketball scholarship at North Carolina State, hung up his spikes 10 years before the advent of free agency sent the average salary into the stratosphere, and later walked away from his job as pitching coach for Sparky Anderson’s Detroit Tigers when the team rejected his request for a raise in the wake of its 1984 world championship season.

Craig, whose career started in 1955 and ended in 1966, was most successful as a coach and manager, spreading the gospel of a pitch originally called the split-fingered fastball. Its disciples included future Hall of Famers Bruce Sutter and Jack Morris plus such World Series standouts as Ron Darling, John Smoltz, and David Cone.

During his tenure as pitching coach for the Houston Astros, Craig shared his secrets with Mike Scott, who suddenly blossomed into a Cy Young Award winner for a playoff team.

Mike Scioscia, who caught for the Dodgers and managed the Angels, called the splitter “the pitch of the ’80s.” But it was also controversial because critics contended pitchers who relied on it lost velocity from their fastballs.

A Korean War veteran who missed two full seasons, Craig was 25 by the time he broke into the big leagues with the Dodgers. He later pitched in the last game for the team before it moved to Los Angeles and, five years later, the first game of the 1962 New York Mets after the expansion team made him its third pick in the National League expansion draft. He was defeated in both.

As a manager, Craig won more than he lost – but just barely. He went 738-737 as pilot of the San Diego Padres in 1978 and 1979 and San Francisco Giants from 1985 through 1992. He took the Giants to an NL West crown in 1987 and their first pennant since 1962 two years later.

The team eventually lost an epic World Series that was interrupted for 10 days for a Bay Area earthquake.

Craig’s pitching record was only 74-98, thanks mainly to his two years with Casey Stengel’s struggling Mets, but his earned run average was a respectable 3.83. He pitched for the Cardinals, Reds, and Phillies in addition to the Dodgers and Mets.

His best year was 1959, when he led the National League with four shutouts and won 11 times in 17 starts for a Dodger team that finished tied with the Milwaukee Braves before winning a best-of-three pennant playoff.

Three years later, when he lost the first game in Mets history, an 11-4 debacle at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals, Craig launched two years of frustration that resulted in a 15-46 record. But, topping 230 innings in both seasons, he somehow completed 27 of his 64 starts for the error-prone embryonic ballclub.

Stengel once told him, “You’ve got to be good to lose that many.”

In truth, the manager had few other choices on a team that finished 40-120 and had only one pitcher with a winning record. Craig even tried changing his uniform No. 38 to No. 13 in the hope that the digits – shunned by superstitious people – would reverse his fortune. They didn’t.

With the Mets years subtracted from his record, Craig was 59-52, completed 58 games, and earned 19 saves in relief. He helped bring Brooklyn its only world championship by winning Game 5 of the ‘55 World Series against the Yankees and beat New York again with 4 2/3 scoreless innings of relief for the Cardinals in the fourth game of the Fall Classic in 1964, earning another World Series ring in the process.

Craig collected his fourth and final ring 20 years later as pitching coach for Sparky Anderson’s Detroit Tigers.

The first pitching coach in the history of the expansion San Diego Padres, Craig also coached pitchers for the Houston Astros in addition to the Tigers.

By the time he got to Detroit, he was considered the father of the splitter even though he was not the founder of the off-speed, big-breaking pitch. Thanks in large part to Craig’s coaching of Morris and Dan Petry, the ‘84 Tigers rocketed to a 35-5 start and ran away with the AL pennant and World Series win over Craig’s former team, the Padres.

Craig also found success in San Francisco, where he turned the 1987 Giants into a playoff team two years after a 100-loss season. Two years later, it won the NL pennant for the first time since 1962.

Reacting to Craig’s demise over the weekend, Giants president and CEO Larry Baer issued a press release that read, “We have lost a legendary member of our Giants family. Roger was beloved by players, coaches, front office staff and fans. He was a father figure to many and his optimism and wisdom resulted in some of the most memorable seasons in our history.”