Master · 1959-1975 · right-handed
Bob Gibson
The most feared arm of his era, who pitched as though the plate were his to defend.
Signature pitchSlider
Gibson did not negotiate with hitters. He worked from a low three-quarter slot and an explosive fall toward first base, and he treated the strike zone as territory he owned. The slider was the put-away pitch, including a back-up version that started inside on a same-handed hitter and bent back over the plate, the opposite of what the eyes told the batter to expect.
His slider, thrown hard, was the strikeout pitch; the famous "back-up slider" started in on a same-handed hitter and swept back over the plate, breaking the wrong way on purpose. The final out of his record 17-strikeout 1968 World Series Game 1 was Willie Horton frozen on that pitch.
Described by CBS Sports from film of the back-up slider; the grip itself is not documented in a reachable source, so none is asserted.
The slider seam, our own schematic
He wanted to own the outside corner; the only reason to throw inside, he said, was to keep a hitter from leaning out over the plate. He framed his reputation as intensity rather than anger, and called pitching roughly ninety percent mental.
Paraphrased from the FanGraphs appreciation, which quotes Gibson on owning the outside half. The knockdown was part of the toolkit: he listed "knockdown, brushback, and hit-batsman" among his nine pitches.
“The part of pitching that separates the stars from everyone else is about 90 percent mental. That is why I considered it so important to mess with a batter’s head without letting him inside mine.”
The lowest live-ball-era ERA for a qualifier; it helped trigger the mound being lowered for 1969.
A single-game World Series record, vs. Detroit; the last strikeout came on the back-up slider.
A descriptive estimate from FanGraphs. No radar tracking existed in his era.
Filed the way every record here is: each figure season-stamped where it applies, confidence-labeled, and one click from its source. Where the reputation and the data disagree, the gap is shown, not smoothed over.