Today’s rabbit hole begins with a bummer—or at least I found it to be a bummer. Last Monday, Jack Suwinski did an amazing thing, something that only Barry Bonds has ever done before. The guy hit two— TWO—splash-ball home runs into McCovey Cove at Oracle Park.

Two splash-ball homers in the same game? Jack Suwinski? Awesome, right?

Well … sort of. The first one was awesome, for sure. Suwinski saw an 85-mph changeup from the Giants’ Anthony DeSclafani and pounded it 396 feet into the water. Great.

The second one, though … he hit it off a 59-mph “eephus” pitch thrown by rookie second baseman Brett Wisely. Ugh. These position players pitching have become a real scourge. Wisely threw six so-called “eephus” pitches (which are not actually eephus pitches, but we’ll get to that), and Pittsburgh’s utility infielder Chris Owings threw a bunch himself, and whatever fun that once came with seeing non-pitchers throw slop in blowout games is long gone, at least for me.

Lachlan Cunningham//Getty Images

Jack Suwinski of the Pittsburgh Pirates hits a ninth-inning home run against the San Francisco Giants off a 59-mph eephus pitch.

But my issue here is with the idea that these guys are throwing eephus pitches.

Let me tell you a little bit about the real Eephus pitch.

The eephus was invented by a character named Rip Sewell. Rip was probably more of a football prospect than baseball when he was young, but he grew up in a baseball family—three of his cousins played in the big leagues—and after he flunked out of college, he decided to give baseball a go.

For a time, it seemed like his career was dead on arrival because in 1934 he got into a fight with Hank Greenberg. Sewell admitted he made a crack about Greenberg’s Jewishness but insisted that Greenberg started it by insulting Sewell’s Southern background. Greenberg and others said that Sewell started it and wouldn’t shut up. Whatever, Greenberg pummeled Sewell and, shortly afterward, he was released.

“We’ve got 30 pitchers and only one first baseman,” Tigers manager Mickey Cochrane is said to have told Sewell. “What do you think I’m going to do?”

Sewell resurfaced with the Pirates a few years later and pitched pretty well—he went 16-5 with a 2.80 ERA in 1940 and even received a down-ballot MVP vote. He was always trying to get by on a slow slider, a subpar fastball and a lot of guile. In 1941 he led the league in losses with 17 and then went on the hunting trip that changed his life and gave us one of baseball’s most wonderful stories.

The eephus was a pitch with heavy backspin that he would throw as high as 25 feet off the ground.

The hunting trip story has been told several different ways*, but the one that seems closest to the truth is that Sewell was with some buddies in the bushes, waiting for some deer, when he stood up and made a bit too much noise. One of his friends thought it was a deer and opened fire. Sewell’s legs were hit with 14 pellets of buckshot. He lost the use of his big toe.

“My legs were so full of holes,” he would say, “they looked like a screen door.”

*The hunting accident actually happened on Dec. 7, 1941 … that date might look familiar. That’s the day that will live in infamy, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Sewell told reporters that very day that he wouldn’t be slowed down by the injury and, sure enough, he showed up to Pirates spring training on time, and he pitched 248 innings in 1942. But after the accident, he couldn’t really push off his legs the same way, so he had to develop a different way of pitching.

That is what led to his development of the eephus pitch in 1943—the eephus was a pitch with heavy backspin that he would throw as high as 25 feet off the ground. According to legend, he unleashed the first-ever eephus pitch on April 21, 1943, against the Chicago Cubs. The first batter to face it was Dom Dallessandro. who struck out by watching the floating pitch (which was called a “crawler” at that point) cross the plate for strike three.

“You $#^$&,” Dallessandro was said to have shouted after the whiff. “If I had a gun, I’d shoot you again.”*

*The actual first person to face the eephus might have been Detroit mega-prospect Dick Wakefield in a 1942 exhibition game, though I can’t find details.

Sewell had his best year in 1943, going 21-9 with a 2.54 ERA. True, this was against somewhat lesser competition, as most of the top players were already off fighting in the war. But Sewell was 36 years old, and he finished sixth in the MVP balloting. He won 21 games again in 1944.

It should be said here that Sewell was certainly not the first to throw a blooper pitch. John Thorn and John Holway discovered that Indianapolis’ Bill Phillips was throwing something like it as far back as the turn of the 20th century. But the eephus pitch was Sewell’s and Sewell’s alone. It was his teammate, Maurice Van Robays, who came up with the Dr. Seuss “eephus” name.

“An eephus ain’t nothing,” Van Robays said. “And that’s what that pitch is: nothing.”

Sewell would throw the eephus with regularity. In a nine-inning, one-run outing against Boston in 1943, for example, he threw 17 of them. That was pretty typical.

“It’s a hell of a pitch,” National League president Ford Frick said. “It’s good publicity.”

In 1946, Sewell was 39 years old and still trying to get by with his imagination and junk pitches. It was around that time that he started fooling around with an underhand knuckleball. He was not as effective as he had been, but the 1946 Pirates were pretty terrible and so Sewell was selected for the All-Star team (along with Pirates second baseman Frankie Gustine).

Now, I’m going to give you a little book spoiler … the following story did not make my upcoming book, WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL. It is one of dozens of stories that I absolutely love and began writing, only to realize that this book is not 800 pages long like The Baseball 100. (I am going to do something really fun with some of those cutting-room floor stories—I can’t give out all the details now, but I think it will be really fun for everybody who preorders the book.)

Joe Posnanski has been called "contemporary sports writing's biggest star." For more stories from Joe, subscribe to his Joe Blogs Substack newsletter at joeposnanski.com, where he writes about sports, pop culture, life, and all manner of nonsense.

OK, so here’s the story: Four days before the All-Star Game in Boston, Sewell threw a curveball and heard something in his elbow pop. He kept pitching because that’s what you did in 1946, but his elbow was super sore and he told reporters that he would probably miss a couple of starts and wouldn’t be able to pitch in the All-Star Game. Still, he went to Boston to take part in the festivities.

As the story goes, before the game, Sewell and Ted Williams were talking. The conversation might have gone something like this:

“You pitching or ain’t ya?” Williams asked.

“I might,” Sewell responded.

“You’re not gonna throw that pitch, are you?” Williams asked.

“Yeah, boy, I am,” Sewell said. “Get ready.”

Sewell entered the game in the bottom of the eighth with the National League already trailing 8-0. And he figured this was his last time around—he’d pitched in two All-Star Games and had not given up a hit—and so he decided to have some fun. He threw the eephus pitch at will.

“I introduced the blooper into the game because it had become just a drab, unfunny battering,” Sewell would say. “I decided to give the crowd a few laughs.”

The American Leaguers had never seen a pitch like the eephus before—“It was a really funny thing,” Boston’s Bobby Doerr would tell the San Francisco Chronicle many years later—but they unloaded on it anyway. Sewell gave up a couple of hits, and with two outs and Williams on deck, he threw an eephus to Vern Stephens with runners on base, something he almost never did because it would be so easy to steal on the pitch.

Stephens swung hard but managed only a bloop into rightfield. But it landed for a hit, bringing Williams to the plate.

Ted had a plan. Bill Dickey had told him that the only way to hit the ball out—nobody had ever homered off Sewell’s eephus—was, essentially, to hop up on the ball. You know. Get a running start. Stephens threw an eephus, Williams tried to run up to the ball but he mistimed his swing and fouled it into the stands. The next eephus pitch was outside for a ball.

And then came the moment: Sewell threw the eephus, Williams took two steps on it and unloaded the biggest swing he had in him. “It would have broken a window in the 10th floor of the Grant building,” the Pittsburgh Press would write of the height of Williams’ shot. But it just kept going and going (“The wind was blowing out that day,” Williams would say, “until it landed in the bullpen for a home run.”

“I didn’t believe that any batter could get enough power on a pitch of that sort to drive it nearly 400 feet,” Sewell would say. “Stan Musial once rapped my blooper for a triple, and I considered that phenomenal enough. But a homer—well, that kid is something of a hitter.”

After getting the third out of the inning, Sewell walked off the mound to a standing ovation at Fenway Park.

Herb Scharfman/Sports Imagery//Getty Images

New York Yankees pitcher Steve Hamilton sitting on the dugout steps before a World Series game in 1963. Hamilton threw a version of the eephus he called "The Folly Floater."

THAT is the Eephus pitch. There have been other famous bloop pitches. The Yankees had a 6-foot-7 relief pitcher and character named Steve Hamilton—he played for the Minneapolis Lakers with Elgin Baylor and Hot Rod Hundley back in the late 1950s—and late in his big-league career, he threw a bloop pitch he called “The Folly Floater.” He actually asked fans to come up with a better name for the pitch, but apparently none of them did.

The wonderful Bill Lee threw what he called the “Leephus pitch”—he threw some Leephus pitches just LAST YEAR for the Savannah Bananas at age 75.

Dave LaRoche, a childhood hero of mine, threw the “La Lob.” “I figured, in long relief, the fans are bored, and they’re looking for a little excitement,” LaRoche said. “Then when I started having success with it, I started working to perfect it.”

Point is, the eephus—and the true bloop pitches of baseball history—are real things. They are meant to create joy and laughter at the ballpark but also to actually get hitters out. Second basemen throwing 50-mph would-be-sliders that get smashed into the water in blowout games are not throwing eephus pitches. They’re throwing garbage. And that’s not nearly as much fun.

Joe Posnanski has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations, including the Sports Media Hall of Fame and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has also won two Sports Emmy Awards. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, and he co-hosts the PosCast with television writer and creator Michael Schur.  

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