Jane's Addiction – "Been Caught Stealing" (1990)

When I want something, man

I don’t wanna pay for it

Fifty years ago, legendary Baltimore Orioles skipper Earl Weaver became the first major-league baseball manager to use a radar gun.

But it was Danny Litwhiler, who played for four different National League teams between 1940 and 1951 and  later became a successful college baseball coach, who first had the idea of using a device designed to catch speeding drivers to measure how hard a pitcher threw.

A Danny Litwhiler baseball card

Litwhiler later told an interviewer the story:

One day in 1974 while I was the coach at Michigan State, I read an article in the student paper that said “Don’t Speed on Campus” and there was a photo of an MSU policeman who had just received a new radar gun.  That got me thinking – could we use it to check the velocity of [a pitched] baseball?  I found out that the cops’ radar guns were powered by the cigarette lighters in their police cars.  So we got an MSU police car to drive out on the field to time the pitches. 

Litwhiler then bought a used radar gun and had it modified to work on batteries.  He took it to spring training the next year and showed it to Weaver, who immediately saw the value of knowing exactly how fast his pitchers’ pitches travelled.  

The Orioles’ general manager was too cheap to purchase a radar gun for his team to use that season, but Weaver got his way in 1976.  Other teams quickly followed suit, and today radar guns are routinely used by baseball scouts and coaches.

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If you ask me, using a radar gun to measure the velocity of baseball pitches wasn’t Danny Litwhiler’s cleverest idea.

Litwhiler got to the major leagues because he was a very good hitter.  In 1941, his best season, he hit .305 with 18 homers.  Only two National Leaguers had more hits that year, and only three had more total bases.

But Litwhiler committed 15 errors that year, more than any other NL outfielder.  

The next year, he decided to connect the fingers of his glove with rawhide thongs – the first major leaguer to use such a glove.  Litwhiler’s innovation made a big difference – in 1942, he became the first player to play an entire season without making a single error, earning his newfangled glove a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

Litwhiler was later credited with dozens of other baseball-related inventions – including a special bat designed to help batters become better bunters, an unbreakable mirror that pitchers could use to watch their throwing motion, and a special clay compound that was used to quickly dry baseball infields and minimize the length of rain delays.   

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I know a lot about baseball history, but I had never heard of Danny Litwhiler until I read The Last Manager, John W. Miller’s new book about Earl Weaver.  

That’s not surprising because Litwhiler last played in the major leagues the year before I was born.  Also, he never played for the Yankees.  (I’m a lifelong Yankees fan, and I’ve read just about every book about the team – if Litwhiler had been a Yankee instead of spending his entire career in the National League, I’d probably have recognized his name.)

It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts is the title of Earl Weaver’s 1982 autobiography.  Sometimes I sound like I think I know it all, but I’m still learning – and I’m happy to have learned about Danny Litwhiler.

But learning about Danny Litwhiler also makes me sad because I know there are many, many other former baseball players out there who are just as interesting that I know nothing about – and never will know anything about.  

Not to mention all the great books I’ll never read, and all the great music I’ll never hear, and all the great movies and TV series I’ll never watch, and all the great bike trails I’ll never ride, and especially all the attractive . . . I think I’ll stop right there.  

Click here to learn more about Danny Litwhiler.

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“Been Caught Stealing” spent four weeks in the top spot of the Billboard  “Modern Rock” chart in 1990.

From Genius.com:

[Jane’s Addiction’s frontman] Perry Farrell has claimed this song is autobiographical, that he himself gets a thrill from stealing.

He’s also advocated unprotected sex, talked about enjoying hard drugs, and other taboo subjects.  But later he claimed he never intended people to take it seriously:

“I didn’t get into this to make sermons or set up structures for others to live by.  My intent has nothing to do with teaching. It’s to amuse myself on this completely boring planet.”

 

Click here to listen to “Been Caught Stealing,” which seems like a good record to feature in this post because Danny Litwhiler stole only 11 bases during his major-league career while being caught stealing 29 times.  

Click here to watch a detailed breakdown of that recording’s elements.

Click here to buy “Been Caught Stealing” from Amazon.