No Relief From Nastiness of His 100-M.P.H. Fastball

The first thing you notice about Rob Dibble when you approach him is, he doesn’t have fangs.

He doesn’t look as if he sleeps in a coffin, pulls wings off butterflies or hides out in the bushes at Central Park waiting for a guy with a gold wristwatch to come along.

Rob Dibble has a reputation somewhere this side of Jack the Ripper or Mack the Knife.

Rob Dibble with a baseball, they tell you, is Lizzie Borden with an ax, Hitler with an army. The Cincinnati Strangler. He’s not a relief pitcher, he’s a serial killer.

You get a load of his reputation and you scurry to the record book. You figure he has crippled half the National League with fastballs behind the ear or on the knees.

Rob Dibble even throws at spectators, they tell you.

Well, Rob Dibble, the Reds’ reliever, has hit exactly no batsmen this year in 19 games. He hit exactly one last year and three in 1989.

This wouldn’t even be a good inning for Don Drysdale in his prime.

There used to be this character in Al Capp’s “L’il Abner” cartoon called Filthy McNasty. If Capp were alive today, Rob Dibble probably would be the model. He can’t escape his reputation. The Cincinnati bullpen is known as “the Nasty Boys.” They would pitch inside to Mother Teresa and knock down Little Orphan Annie if she dug in.

Rob Dibble is the leader and the inspiration of this band of cutthroats who come into focus about as lovable as a pack of bike riders in steel helmets.

Rob Dibble throws a baseball 100 m.p.h. In his hands, that’s not a sporting good, that’s a weapon. You don’t want to face Rob Dibble when the sky is cloudy or the lights flickering. Ball in hand, he looks like something that could empty cities. He stands 6 feet 4 or so and weighs around 240. You should be able to bring a priest when you come up against Dibble with the game on the line and two out.

Naturally, this doesn’t displease Rob Dibble. Relief pitchers like guys coming up to bat tippy-toed. Lefty Gomez used to say of batters who came up with terrorizing pitchers on the mound that they didn’t come up with one foot in the bucket, they came up “with one foot in the American Association.”

Rob Dibble is of the old classic opinion that you don’t have to be crazy to be a relief pitcher. But it helps.

It sure does. Rob Dibble is perfectly happy to be a relief pitcher, even though--maybe, especially though--he pitches every night or every other night. He can’t stand to sit around waiting for his turn to come up every four days. “When I was a starter in high school, I used to play center field between starts.”

Admits Dibble: “I guess relief pitchers are flakier than other guys. Kind of like placekickers in football.”

He adds: “I’ve only got three pitches. The fastball, the hard slider and the slow slider. I’d need more to be a starter.”

He throws the fastball at 100 m.p.h.-plus. The hard slider comes in at 90 and looks like the fastball until the last second. The slow slider comes in when the batter is about in the state of a guy getting ready to jump out of a 20-story window in a fire.

Dibble’s contentment with being the short-term relief pitcher, the “closer” baseball calls his role, is interesting.

Rob Dibble strikes out people at the rate of nearly two an inning. He has 44 strikeouts in only 25 1/3 innings this season. He averaged 12.5 strikeouts per nine innings last season.

If he were to post those statistics as a starter over a season, he would be going down in baseball history with Walter Johnson, Sandy Koufax or Nolan Ryan. He would be going to Cooperstown on the first ballot unanimously.

Does he ever yearn to make the change--to move over and play the lead instead of being part of the supporting cast? Rob Dibble shakes his head and says: “Naw, I was born to be a relief pitcher. I love pressure. I love coming in when the game is on fire and you have to go with your best pitch.

“Starting pitchers begin to lose their velocity along about the seventh inning. I don’t have seventh innings. They’re only going to get one look at me a game.”

That’s all they want. Rob Dibble in the eighth or ninth inning is as terrible a sight as your new Rolls-Royce going over a cliff. It was the last thing the Oakland Athletics wanted to see in the World Series last year when they failed to score against Dibble. The game is as good as in the hangar when Rob Dibble comes in with a lead and only seven or eight batters to get out.

To say Rob Dibble has hit no one this season is a bit of a misstatement. Actually, he hit Meg Porter.

Porter is a non-roster player. In fact, she is a teacher.

Porter couldn’t handle Dibble’s fastball any better than the rest of the league. It caught her on the elbow.

She was in the center-field seats of Riverfront Stadium at the time, not a batters’ box. And the ball had traveled not the 60 feet from the mound to the plate, but about 400 feet from the mound to the upper deck.

History does not record whether Meg Porter made an honest effort to get out of the way of the pitch. You may recall the time umpire Harry Wendelstedt preserved Don Drysdale’s scoreless-inning streak when he ruled that batter Dick Dietz didn’t make a sincere effort to get out of the way of a pitch.

After 400 feet, it was probably not the hundred-miler, but it smarted, and Porter missed a few days of school.

Dibble was not trying to move her away from the plate. Dibble had saved a game for the Reds by getting the side out, and he was exuberant and turned and heaved the ball the way Arnold Palmer might throw a golf ball into the gallery after holing out to win the U.S. Open.

Dibble doesn’t have to hit anyone to command respect. When he comes in, he is like a guy who comes into a bar with a scar on his cheek, a ring in his ear, a patch on his eye, a parrot on his shoulder and three tattoos on his muscles. Batters get ready to run.

On the whole, they are happy Dibble is a relief pitcher, too. If they had to face him five times a game, they might soon have both feet in the American Assn.