DRAWING PITCHERS.(baseball)

Michael Witte, an illustrator, enjoys his work but finds that the artist's life can be lonely. So, a few years ago, to relieve the monotony of his days, he installed a twenty-seven-inch television in his attic studio overlooking the Hudson River in Nyack. He liked playing tapes of old baseball games, and found himself frequently pausing to watch the windups of Hall of Fame pitchers, frame by frame. "One of the things I discovered is that the mechanics of the greatest pitchers are consistent throughout the history of the game," he said the other day. During the course of his procrastinations, Witte became convinced that he had divined a very important secret: how to safely and dependably throw a ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastball.

Witte, who is sixty-one years old, with wispy graying hair, grew up near St. Louis, rooting for his home-town team. As it happened, some boyhood friends of his bought a stake in the Cardinals in the mid-nineties. Witte began attending spring-training games with one of them, Andrew Baur, occasionally dropping hints that he had made a revolutionary discovery. At first, he was a timid Galileo. One afternoon, Baur invited him on the field to watch Rick Ankiel warm up. "Is that beautiful or what?" Baur said. Witte kept quiet. "I didn't want to be a nasty guest," he said. "But internally I said, 'Or what.' I just knew he was never going to fulfill his promise." A few years post hoc, Ankiel lost the ability to throw a baseball within the same county as home plate. He is now an outfielder.

Gradually, Witte grew more confident about his theories, to the dismay of his wife, a psychologist, and his three sons. "My dad will happily teach anyone how to throw a round ball with optimal efficiency," said his son Spencer, who played second base for Temple. "If you sound interested, you basically just volunteered for an hour lesson." Unbidden, Witte began faxing elaborate diagrams of pitching mechanics to his pals in St. Louis. Either they were just being polite or they saw something potentially ...