"Scoop" Albright and the last of the windmill baseball pitchers
by Bryce Martin

Jim "Scoop" Albright, a righthanded junk ball pitcher for my hometown Galena Merchants was a hero of mine in my early years. I'd seen an old time pitcher on occasion employ the old double windmill windup to give a batter a little extra to see, but "Scoop" did it on every pitch.

To fully appreciate Albright's double windmill windup, one would have to understand the demise of the spitball pitchers. When the spitball was outlawed in professional baseball, great leeway was given to the handfull of pitchers who threw the pitch for their livelhood. They, and no others, were allowed to still throw the spitter the rest of their careers. The last one, Burleigh Grimes, earned the sobriquet, "Last of the Cuspidor Curvers." The double windmill, because it could not be employed without making a balking motion -- several in fact -- was declared an illegal motion by most leagues, minor and major, in the 1940s. Like the last spitballers, the last of the double windmillers were cut some slack, at least on the non-professional level. Albright did not have overpowering stuff. He did throw a heavy ball. He always pitched wearing large, floppy, white undersleeves, and sported a bulbous cheek full of tobacco. A batter faced this from Albright: a motion of counter-whirling arm spins, not knowing exactly where the pitch was coming from or when it was going to get there, and when it was released, was faced with the chore of trying to pick up the path of the white baseball against the backdrop of flopping white sleeves and a bulging white orb from the side of a face.

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