MLB: sharing the story of Steve Dalkowski and Nuke LaLoosh

Steve Dalkowski was more than just the inspiration for the movie character Nuke LaLoosh, he was a kindly old man who liked to tell stories.

They say former minor league pitcher Steve Dalkowski loved to tell stories. Stories so far-fetched who knew if they were really true or not. When Dalkowski succumbed to complications of coronavirus, we lost another man from a dying bread of baseball players.

The stories Dalkowski used to tell, were yarns spun so tightly, they themselves could have been wrapped around the 130 mph fastball he claimed to throw. If only there would have been a radar gun back then to track the speed of Dalkowski’s pitches, or a catcher who could catch them.

In 1957 at the age of 18, Dalkowski was signed to a contract to play with the Baltimore Orioles. In his second year of affiliated baseball, he threw 104 innings across three levels in the Orioles minor league system. He struck out 203 hitters. And walked 207. That meant on average every inning Dalkowski pitched he would walk two men and strikeout two men.

Dalkowski once recalled that his pitches were so wild he used to hit hot dog venders in the crowd, shatter umpire’s masks, and intentionally throw at hecklers in the stands. An Orioles scout caught wind of this and years later wrote the movie Bull Durham. He based the fictional character Nuke LaLoosh off of the theatrics of Dalkowski.

Dalkowski spent eight years pitching in the minors climbing as high as Triple-A before an arm injury derailed his career. Dalkowski lost more than he won. He walked almost as many as he struck out and a lot more than innings he pitched.

Baseball statistics aside, he played in a time where there were no radar guns, no Tommy John surgeries, where throwing a few bucks at a rural boy may pay dividends down the road. His stories whether true or not were baseball lore, a part of Americana.

I was friends with an 85 year-old farmer, whom we lost not too long ago. He told me a story of being a boy and riding a train to Iowa for church camp. He sat across from a New York Yankees scout and the two had a few discussions about baseball. That is all I needed to hear to let my imagination run rampant. Maybe said scout was returning from signing Mickey Mantle or coming from the coast where he’d seen Billy Martin play.

Storytellers like Dalkowski and my friend are few and far between and the current generation of kids is learning their baseball from Stat Cast, technology cheating scandals, and MLB the Show. I guarantee you if you’d have bat flipped on Steve Dalkowski, he’d have put one in your ribcage, or thrown eight pitches trying.

He’ll be missed greatly, and not just for inspiring the likes of Nuke LaLoosh.

For more information about COVID-19, visit the CDC’s website or the website for your state’s Department of Health.