Johnny Sain, RIP

Johnny Sain died Tuesday at the age of 89. He'd been sick for a long time. He will be missed.

Last year I spoke to some of Johnny's friends, pitchers, and proteges -- Jim Bouton, Hal Naragon (his bullpen coach in Minnesota and Detroit), Denny McClain, Mickey Lolich, and Leo Mazzone. I'd like to share what they said to me -- a tribute to Johnny Sain.

As a pitcher for the Boston Braves, Sain had been  famous as part of one of baseball's best rhymes, describing the state of the Braves starting rotation: "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain." Sain missed his prime years while serving in World War II, but after he returned to the mound in 1946 -- at age 28 -- he was one of the game's best pitchers, known for his great control and durability. He was a three-time All-Star, and was named the Sporting News pitcher of the year in 1948. During the five-year stretch between 1946 and 1950, he won 20 games four times, and compiled a 95-61 record.

He was traded to the Yankees in August 1951, and retired shortly after New York traded him to Kansas City in 1955.

Six years later, in 1961,  he began his second career, as a pitching coach.  In 17 seasons at the major league level, Sain coached 16 20-game winners,more than any other pitching coach in history.

JIM BOUTON

Jim Bouton was a young ace fireballer for the Yankees in the early 1960s. He later went on to write “Ball Four.”

I met John in 1961, after my second year in the minor leagues. I had played in Greensboro, North Carolina, Class B. I made the All-Star team that summer, and so I was rewarded with an invitation to spring training at Saint Petersburg, Florida. This was the Yankees’ last year in Saint Petersburg.  Stayed at the old Sereno Hotel.  The hotel that had the white players, and the black players had to stay across town in Saint Petersburg in 1961, if you can believe that.

I met John there. When they sent me back down to the minor league camp, after about two or three weeks, I went over to John and asked him about my pitching, and where he thought I needed to spend more time, which pitch. And he talked to me about my most important pitches. And the pitch that was at the bottom of the rankings was my knuckleball, and I would only use it about ten times a game, and I was spending eighty percent of my time on it because I wanted to get it up to the level of my other pitches. But it was taking away from my other pitches.

He would ask, “What do you think is your most important pitch? What’s your second most important pitch? What’s your third? How much time do you have to spend on keeping your pitches sharp?” With those questions you’d realize you’re spending seventy percent of your time on your least important pitch. It would just give you a different perspective about where you were spending your time, and why.

Johnny was a philosopher. He was interested in things beyond baseball. He cared about the players as people. He understood baseball politics. He wouldn’t tell you what to do. His genius was that he would make you think.

Pitchers loved Johnny. He was known as the pitchers’ pitching coach. He had more allegiance to the pitchers than he did to the managers.

He had this practice of not saying anything bad about a pitcher.  Even if you got bombed. You’d come in and throw your glove and get all upset. At some point after the game, or maybe the next day in the airplane he’d sit next  to you and he’d say, “You know, that was a hell of a curve ball you threw Norm Cash in that fourth inning there. Hell of a curve ball.”  He’d pick out some one thing that you did well, and get you thinking about that. 

And he always believed in a man’s dreams about himself. "Don’t be afraid to climb those golden stairs." I remember him saying that in 1963. That was just sort of his general philosophy. "Don’t be afraid to climb those golden stairs."

He was there when I won twenty-one games in ’63, my second year in the big leagues. I was really throwing the ball well, and about halfway through the season I sat down next to John. I said, “John, how come you don’t talk to me anymore? Because I see you spending time with the other pitchers.” And he said, “Well, how you doing?”  I said, “Well I’m having a pretty good year.” He says, “Well, when you’re struggling I’ll talk to you. I really can spend some time with some other guys.” And that was great. He was the opposite of a front runner.

After the ’63 season he was fired. That was when Yogi was made the manager and Ralph Houk became the general. Houk fired him. They never really had any arguments. But, Houk wanted to control things, and I think he saw Sain as having too much allegiance to the pitchers and not enough allegiance to the management. Especially now that Houk was the general manger, and there was Johnny Sain offering advice to players on how to negotiate their contracts. There were awful contracts in those days.

Whitey Ford was made the pitching coach in 1964. Whitey was not a pitching coach like Johnny Sain was.  I mean, Johnny Sain was a pitching coach. Whitey was a pitcher. In those days, pitching coaches weren’t considered valuable. They really weren’t. Except by the players.  Management thought pitching coaches are sort of interchangeable.

To me, Johnny Sain belongs in the Hall of Fame because of the combination of being such a great pitcher, and being to me the greatest pitching coach ever. How many people have excelled in two areas like that?  Those are completely different skills, pitching and pitching coach. You can look throughout history and most of the great players were notoriously bad coaches. They were great because they had natural ability, or they were instinctive athletes, and they never even thought much about what they did. They just did it.  You know, that’s why Yogi was a great hitter, not a great hitting coach. Some guys can do it, and some guys can coach it. John did both.

HAL NARAGON

Hal Naragon played 10 major league seasons as a catcher. After retiring in 1962, he became the Twins bullpen coach.

The first time I met John was when I was a coach with the Minnesota Twins. He came there in '65. I had heard about him, but I never met him. I hit against him once, in Kansas City.  John used to have a tongue-in-cheek saying about he only remembers fellows that got a hit off him -- not the ones he got out. So we have a baseball historian here in Barberton at the library. He looked up the record and found out I pinch hit against John and got a base hit. Of course, I never let John forget about it.

He was very serious about his job, very organized about his approach to his job. His idea was always, “What can I come up with that can help the pitcher to improve himself?” I was very impressed with that. "I" was not in John's vocabulary when it came to helping the pitchers.

I was the bullpen coach. When John arrived he made us a team. That's what he always said.  John and I formed a very strong relationship. I really liked it because he made me part of it. I remember him calling me up or sitting in my driveway in Minnesota. And he had an idea or something and we'd kick it around about a player -- what do you think about this suggestion? When do you think we should approach him? Just kicked ideas around. That's the way he was. He didn't really mingle off the field with the other coaches. We'd go to dinner and back to the motel most of the time.

John had a program, and you could see that he was really interested in helping the pitchers, not just the starters, but the relievers, or anyone that wanted to pitch. And I thought that was very different from just running the pitchers all the time. Coaches weren't looked at as instructors (at the time). Pitching coaches, back then, they'd run the pitchers. That was their big deal was keeping the pitchers in shape, just running. "Get your running in, get your running in." When I met John it was different. He wanted the pitchers out in the bullpen before the game, throwing.

He had a throwing program, and he would stick with it, he didn't force anyone to do it, but eventually they wanted to do it. One pitcher said, "You know, he told me something and it was maybe a month later, it was my idea, not his idea." I thought that was pretty good.

I worked with a lot of pitching coaches. If a pitcher would go maybe two or three innings, and get knocked out early in the game, they'd say, "Well, we've got to run him more, he's not in shape." John's idea was, "How much running do you have to do to pitch three innings?" So it wasn't that the pitcher wasn't in shape. His idea was, movement on the ball. And he could help the pitchers make the ball move.

John had a statement that he's never seen a pitcher that he didn't like. He should have said he's never seen a ballplayer he doesn't like, because John had a great relationship with everyone on the team. But John gave the pitchers a tremendous amount of confidence. He had great timing. If he had an idea for a pitcher, he probably wouldn't even mention it until he thought the pitcher was ready to listen to him. And then he would approach him. But he always showed great respect toward that pitcher, because he was a major league pitcher, regardless of how he was pitching that day or that year. He always thought, hey, if you're in the major leagues, you've got to be a good athlete. He respected the pitchers' knowledge. But if he saw something that could improve the pitcher, he would put it in the form of a suggestion. He may say, "Well, we had success with Whitey Ford on this idea.” He'd mention another pitcher.

In 1967, the Twins fired Sain. He was hired by the Tigers, and so was Hal Naragon.

There were some disagreements -- we had a great time at Minnesota -- but some people thought that John only got along with the pitchers, which was not true. John, in his career, he always seemed to have a kind of run in with the managers or different ideas than the managers. John was a great pitcher. Naturally, when he would go into, even Minnesota, he was well-known by the sportswriters, they wanted to talk to him. Sometimes I think that the management kind of resented that. John got a lot of attention in the papers. He didn't go out of the way to get the attention. Here's a great pitcher that pitched against great hitters in World Series', so they wanted to interview him. And then he had so much success with the pitchers. I think sometimes the managers -- probably not all managers, but some of them, resented that a little bit. The truth is, John is his own man. That's what made him successful.

About a year ago, Earl Wilson gave me a call. We got to talking about our 1968 ballclub and John Sain. Earl said, "You know, John knows all that stuff about how to make the ball curve and sink. But one thing he did, John could always find out something good to say about your performance."

This is John Sain's favorite story: I think it was after the '67 season, it might have been the start of '68, I'm not sure. We were in spring training, we're playing in Tampa, and we're playing the Cincinnati Reds. And Earl (Wilson) was starting the exhibition game. In the first inning he gave up three or four runs. And they hit the ball hard off of him. And Earl was really well-organized and kind of cool, in a way. But he came back and he was really upset that they hit him around like that.

John would not talk very much to the pitchers during the game, unless the pitchers wanted to talk to John. He figured the pitchers had a program, had a plan how he was going to pitch to the hitters, and he thought it wasn't that wise to talk to the pitchers during the game. So John just sat there and didn't say much. And Earl sat next to me in the dugout and threw his glove and was chattering, and John never said a word.

Earl goes out in the second inning and he gives up about five runs, including a couple of home runs. And after the inning, Earl came in and sat down beside John. John's from Arkansas, and he speaks kind of slow, and after a few minutes he said, "You know, Earl, that first inning wasn't so bad after all, was it?" And Earl Wilson busted out laughing. That's John's sense of humor.

There's other ways to do it besides John Sain's way. But his way has been very, very successful. John was always willing to learn. Once he told me, "I learn as much from my pitchers as they learn from me.” If he found a pitcher maybe making a movement with his arm to make the ball sink a little better, well John wanted to know about it right away. The pitchers really knew that John Sain was in their corner. They knew that regardless of how they pitched, he was going to be there for them.

We had Dick Radatz. He lived in Detroit at that time, and he was a free agent. He wanted to work out with the Tigers, and the front office said, "Take a look at him." That was fine with John. John's idea was, and we talked it over before Dick ever got to the ballpark, that we would work with him in the bullpen. Well, we got there, and sure enough when Radatz walked into the clubhouse Mayo Smith went to him and said, "Do you want to pitch batting practice?"

Dick said, "Sure, I'll be glad to pitch batting practice." When John came to the ballpark, he asked me, "Is Radatz here?" And I said, "He's here, but Mayo wants him to pitch batting practice." Well, John goes in and talks to Mayo, and Radatz wasn't going to pitch batting practice when John left that office. The reason was, John said, "We can't improve this guy if he's going to pitch batting practice. We're not going to make him a batting practice pitcher."

So we went down and John said, "Let Dick throw." And John made a few suggestions here and there, and got Dick really throwing the ball. All the reports at that time were that he would hit the backstop, that he couldn't throw the ball over the plate. He had a sore arm. Dick would throw a ball, and John would say, "That's good." And Dick would throw another, and John would say, "That's good."

John never talked about velocity to anyone, especially not to Dick Radatz. He wanted Dick to concentrate on moving the ball. And the more that Dick could see the ball was moving, his velocity improved.

I can remember when Dick started throwing consistent strikes over the plate, and the ball was moving a little bit, and John reached over and took the ball away from him, and said, "That's enough, Dick." And Dick said, "Wait, I want to throw some more." And John said, "No, we'll do it tomorrow." Because he wanted Dick to leave there with that positive thinking.

Dick wrote John  a letter -- John showed it to me -- thanking him for his help. Kept him in the big leagues for another year or two.

DENNY MCLAIN

Denny McLain won 31 games for the World Champion Detroit Tigers in 1968, the year after Sain became his pitching coach. In 1968 and 1969, he had a combined record of 55-12.

John passed on to me, in a very serious, professional way -- and I learned it very quickly after he came to Detroit -- the mechanics of pitching. It's great to have an arm ... but there are all kinds of examples of kids out there who just don't have the good mechanics.

He taught me a number of things. I was out of kilter a little bit when I would release the ball. He reduced the structure of my windup, and then he taught me the various spins on a ball. I'll take the mechanics to the grave with me. I remember to this day the things that finally got straight on. It has to do with the hip, it has to do with the legs, it has to do with the left shoulder. I mean, every day, I remember. 

John was always at school with his pitching. You could not sit in a hotel lobby and ask John, "Hey John, how you doing today?" John and I shared two interests that we talked about all the time: pitching and flying. But 90 percent of our conversation was overwhelmed by pitching. But it wasn't an intense conversation.

The day that he made me what he wanted me to be happened in Washington, D.C. We had had a rainout. I had pitched pretty badly the game before. Johnny's got this little thing that he always had called a slider, although it was more of a slurve, I think. For a year and a half I could not pick that pitch up. And that's the pitch I needed to complement what I was doing with my fastball, curveball, changeup.

Lo and behold, after an hour of intensity in the bullpen in Washington during this rainout, all the lights went on, the bells started ringing, and the slider was born. But it took me a year and a half to come up with the pitch. In '68 and obviously '69 I had two pretty good years. It was all because, all of the sudden I understood what the hell he was trying to tell me for a year and a half. And it wasn't that I was bullheaded, it was that I could not visualize it. I couldn't see it.

The only downside to Johnny Sain was that, although no one ever pushed me out there, John liked to see a pitcher, especially in the intensity of a race, to go out there with two days rest. And I did that a couple of times and it's probably the biggest reason I had all the arm trouble I had.

The bottom line was, it was still my ultimate decision. But how do you let 24 guys down? You don't. You're all there for a common purpose. We've got guys there playing 162 games a year. What am I going to say, "Hey, listen, you know, the hell with you guys, I'm taking an extra day off?" It just wasn't the way it was.

He's had some notorious moments with managers and management, and he certainly had that ongoing in Detroit. John wanted to be left alone. He wanted to be his own manager with his pitchers. But he was always a gentleman.

Those of us who played for him know what a deep deep deep interest and consideration he had with pitchers. But you had to play for him to understand it. You had to play for him to understand how much he really knew about pitching. Here's a guy that spent -- he and Hal Naragon -- spent most of their waking days talking about pitching, talking about individuals, talking about how one guy could get better if he could just do this. Let's not miss the point -- the better pitchers did for John, the better John became in everybody's mind.

John was the ultimate teacher of this game. He had the patience. He had the experience and the success in the major leagues and was able to pass that along to anybody who wanted to listen. It could be the guys from the other team standing there with you and he was sharing the information with them, too. I mean, we would say to John, "John, what the heck are you doing? John, c'mon, you're our guy." He’d say, "Well, you know me …" And that's what John did -- he shared with everybody. He just wanted to talk about pitching all the time.

He was great. He really knew his craft. If everybody knew their craft as well as Johnny Sain did, who knows where the game would be today.

MICKEY LOLICH

Mickey Lolich won 64 regular-season games between 1967 and 1970, when Sain was his pitching coach. In the 1968 World Series, he pitched three complete-game victories, allowing only five earned runs in 27 innings. He was named MVP of the series.

I met John in spring training of 1967, when he had been hired by the Tigers. He never made any changes, really -- that you knew about. He actually didn't do anything in '67  or '68 when he was first there. The number one thing he said to me, the first time he met me, he says, "There's not a thing I can  tell you about mechanics. You throw the ball twice as hard as I ever did, so you just keep doing what you're doing.” All John Sain did was develop your mind, to have confidence about what you could do out there. You had no fear throwing a breaking ball on two balls and no strikes, because he'd work with you in the bullpen.

At that time I was nothing but a fastball/curveball pitcher. He thought that I should have some type of a breaking power pitch. In 1969, he started trying to teach me how to throw a cut fastball. I just didn't catch on. I was a rockhead. He said, "You learn how to throw this, and it's really going to make a tremendous improvement in your ability to attack hitters."

I tried to do what he told me to do but I ended up turning the ball too much. The whole thing was very simple, you know -- turn and pull. It's basically just cocking the wrist just a little bit -- instead of coming straight down through a fastball you just cock the wrist just a little bit, which would be towards a right-handed hitter. And then just pull through the ball, just like you're throwing a fastball. Well, I kept rolling my wrist a little bit and the ball was breaking too much. He  kept talking to me about it and talking to me about it and every once in a while he'd ask me to throw it and I'd try it and it wouldn't work.

By 1971, John had left. He was off with the Chicago White Sox. I was going through my warmup routine, and I was getting to where I was supposed to be throwing the ball on the outside corner, and I just couldn't do it. It was just one of those days that the mechanics, something was wrong, and I was like, goddamn it, why can't I do this? I thought, why, I'll just take that ball and I'll just sort of give it a little spin and catch the outside corner.

And I threw it and the ball cut. As soon as the pitch cut and went on the outside corner, I sort of stood there, with my hands my hip, and says, "Well I'll be god dammed. That what he's been trying to teach me for a year and a half." And the first time I ever pitched against the White Sox, I was using it, and Sain saw me throwing it. And I looked over at the bench. And he was standing there and his head was bobbing up and down, just like a bobblehead doll. Then the next day, I was at batting practice or something, and he made his way over to talk to me, and he says, "Ah, you rockhead, you finally figured out how to do it, didn't you?"

Hitters were just totally baffled by it. It was a perfect pitch. I took that pitch and I went into the '71 season with that pitch, and I became a 25-game winner, with that pitch.

He had Hal Naragon as his bullpen coach, and both of those guys worked as a team. John would tell Hal what he wanted each pitcher to do and Hal knew what was going on. John was with his pitchers at all times. But if for some reason John was doing something else, Hal was right there. And if all the sudden you accomplished something or you weren't accomplishing something, Hal could tell you, "No, that's not right. That's not what John wants. John wants this. That's exactly what John wants."

John taught a unique way of warming up. The catcher would set about a foot off the plate. We started out by standing up and just playing long toss towards, and then as your velocity started picking up the catcher would finally squat down, but the target was at least 12 inches off the plate. And as your fastball started to improve speed and it started to tail a little bit Hal, if he was catching, would move over six inches. So now you were six inches off the plate. And then you'd move over right were he's sitting right on the outside corner of the plate. And what it was doing was slowly just tracking you in to the outside corner. And you could see the results as you were warming up.

John was a strong believer in positive thinking. He stressed it all the time. And when you were warming up you'd see your pitches slowly creeping toward the outside part of the plate and all of the sudden you were sitting right there on the black and that's when Hal would give you that thumbs up. And John would say -- this was his favorite saying --  "Freeze it, put it in your back pocket, and save it for a rainy day."

John would never throw batting practice. Every day he would wander the outfield and he would talk to every single one of his pitchers. Now, he didn't really talk a whole lot about pitching. He was just going out and conferring with them. And a little trick that Johnny Sain had was that he would find out the interest that each pitcher had. I'm not talking about throwing baseballs. For example, I like motorcycles. He found out about it, and he actually started reading magazines and studying things about motorcycles. And he could come around and talk to me about, "Hey, I just saw that Honda's coming out with a new four-cylinder four-stroke." He developed a very close personal friendship. It wasn't that he was like a "pitching coach," He wasn't front-office management. You became friends with him. You liked him so much that when he was trying to talk to you about  pitching, you didn't just walk away, like, "What the hell does he know?" Because you don't walk away from your friends, and you listen to your friends.

John had interesting theories on pitching. He'd run them by you. He never forced you to do anything. But he'd keep reminding you of little things. One time I was pitching against Baltimore, and in the first inning, I got my ass waxed. I gave up about four runs. And I think I got into the second inning and I was taken out, which was quite rare for me in my career. I was sitting up in my locker, upstairs in the clubhouse, and I was not a happy camper.  All of the sudden, somebody tapped me on the shoulder, because I was crying in my beer, looking into my locker, and I turned around, and there was Sain, standing there.

I said, "What the hell are you doing here?" "He said, "I wanted to ask you a question." I said, "Get away from me, I don't want to talk about it." He said, "That curveball you threw to Brooks Robinson. That one that just came right off the table. He swung and missed that sucker by two feet. Do you remember how you threw it?" And I said, "Ah, who gives a shit." He said, "No, no. That curveball. God damn. That was something else. That was a great pitch. Do you remember how you did it." And I said, "Ah, I don't know if I knew how to do it or not." "Ah, I'll tell you, that was a great curveball. Jesus. I hope you can remember how you did that." Okay. Then he walked away from me.

All of the sudden he has planted a thought in my mind, about this great curveball I threw. Well, two days later I'm down in the bullpen and I'm throwing, and I'm getting loose and everything. And he says, "Show me that curveball you threw to Brooks. Show it to me." So I threw a curveball, and it was  a good curveball. And he says, "Nah, that's not it. Hal, was that the right pitch to Brooks?" And Hal said, "No, that wasn't it."

And he says, “Now, c'mon, show me that curveball." And so I threw another one, and it was another fairly good curveball. And Hall was sitting down there shaking his head. "Nah, that ain't it." I cranked up on the next one and I really let that sucker fly and I must have done everything right and that sucker just came right off the table, and Hal jumped up and Sain was "Wow! There it is, there it is! He's got it!" Well, you know, you couldn't wait to go back out and pitch again. He took away that first inning that I had where I got my ass kicked, took all those thoughts away from me, and came down to one good pitch. 

I had a great year in '68, and then in '69 I won 19 games. But in 1970 I was struggling. And he left with about two months to go in the season. I guess he had a falling out with either the manager or the general manager. I never did find out what happened. And he just said, well, the hell with you, and he left. And my saying was, "You old son of a bitch, you left me when I needed you the most."

He never really said a whole lot. He was a very quiet guy, very soft-spoken. But he got things through to you. I think the world of him.

LEO MAZZONE

In 1979 Spring Training, Leo Mazzone, the Orioles pitching coach, started to spend time with Johnny Sain in West Palm Beach, Fla. Mazzone had just been hired by the Braves as a minor league pitching instructor.

He lived in a camper with an R.V. hook-up. I would go over there and we’d cook out, and drink a little vodka and orange juice – not a lot – but sip on some. And he started talking pitching. Johnny always wanted to hand his legacy on to someone.

Johnny was a little bit of a rebel with what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. I heard people downgrade him or belittle him. I just laughed inside, thinking, “You people must be idiots. If you don’t want to listen to the man who has the most 20-game winners in the history of baseball and all the great things that he accomplished …." It made no sense to me.

I was going to pick his brain and, and learn everything I could from him because he offered everything except the usual clichés. He said, "When you're good at your job, it hardly looks like you're working."

He said, “If you’re working with a pitcher you say ‘Do this or do that’, but then you have to explain to him and teach him how.”

He said, “When you’re dealing with a pitcher’s psyche, you go about it different ways depending on their personalities.” And he’d talk about dealing with different managers and front office. He covered the whole gamut. A lot of it was new. He was able to explain how you work with pitchers and how you teach, coach, support, instruct, mental, physical, dealing with managers, dealing with general managers..

He was looking for someone to hand down all his pitching knowledge to. There were a whole bunch of people that were fools for not taking advantage of his knowledge. They didn’t want to be open-minded about anything. At the beginning it puzzled me, but now that I've been in the game this long it doesn't. Johnny was a little bit of a rebel and there were people at the time that didn't particularly care for his methods.

He said, "When you're good at your job, it hardly looks like you're working." You see a lot of stuff going on -- a lot of coaches want to be loud, and holler and carry on, especially if they think somebody's watching, you know what I mean?

In the game of baseball, there’s a lot of people that would rather be right and lose.

I see John whenever I can. He’s sent me memorabilia of himself.  He sent an audio cassette tape to me of him beating Bob Feller one to nothing in the ’48 World Series.  And then he sent, you know, certain memorabilia that wanted me to have and, you know, and you treasure those sorts of things.

Comments

[Ken Bob]

I loved the interviews in this article. I grew up in Minneapolis and remember Sain as the Twin's pitching coach in the mid-sixties. I thought my Dad taught me that the Braves rotation was "Spahn and Sain and two days of rain" but my memory could be playing tricks and perhaps it is "pray for rain.".

[Bruce Baskin]

Johnny Sain was perhaps the best pitching coach ever. At least I'd vote for him as the first coach to make it to Cooperstown. When you think of the pitchers he helped develop over the years, it's staggering. Nobody has had more success in taking guys with some potential (or even limited potential) and turning them into winners. The proof is in the results.

My own hope is that, post mortem, Sain will climb those "golden stairs" into the Hall of Fame.

[WILLIAM DIEZ]

A FRIEND FROM IN THE SERVICE IN WW2--TERRY MOORE-ST. LOUIS CARDS RELATED THAT HE THOUGHT JOHNNY SAIN WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST. BUT THEN IN THOSE DAYS ALL PRO BALL PLAYERS WERE BETTER THAN MOST OF THE OVERPAID SO CALLED PROS OF TODAY.
A REAL LOSS TO BASEBALL.

[Steve]

What a wonderful tribute, I wish I had known him. As a boy I was a big fan of the '68 Tigers so it was interesting to read the comments from some of the great pitchers on that team. Great article, thanks for posting it!

[Matt Flynn]

My Dad was a very loyal & devoted Boston Braves fan for many years. Both of us had the priviledge of meeting John at many of the Braves reunions in Boston. He was a real gentleman. Johnny understood the most important quality a pitcher needs to have to survive in the majors....attitude. Based on these interviews, he succeeded. What a wonderful legacy & lasting influence he has left on the game. He had a Hall of Fame career & justifiably belongs there.

[joe richardson]

Johnny Sain, Tommy Holmes and Phil Masi were my three favorite players on the old Boston Braves, and when they teamed up to beat Bob Feller 1-0 in the first game of the 1948 World Series it was the high point of my life as a baseball fan. I was 13, and had become a died-in-the-wool Braves fan three years before, in the year Holmes burned up the league. When Sain came back from the war in 1946 and won 20 games, he became my #1 pitcher. Phil is gone now as well as Johnny. I think Tommy is still with us. I'd love to write to him if I had his address.

[Andy Goodman]

I met Johnny Sain in 1998. His grandson was one of my best friends. This article describes his demeanor quite well. He talked baseball the whole time, mainly because i was asking. I could tell he liked a soft ear. I remember him saying that the reason he wouldn't make it to the Hall was because he "was good at everything, but wasn't great at any of them". Obviously he was. He won 20+ games four times, pitched 28 complete games in one season, and even hit well throughout his career. Not to mention, he was the first pitcher to pitch to Jackie Robinson, and the last to pitch to Babe Ruth. Sain went on to be an even more successful pitching coach.