Dear TIME-Reader:

POSING long hours for Henry Koerner's TIME cover portrait was a completely new experience for Pitcher Robin Roberts.

Artist Koerner showed up early at the Phillies' training camp in Clearwater, Fla. To Koerner, reared in Vienna, baseball was an intriguing discovery, and pitchers strange new subjects. A pitcher, he soon learned, is the twitchiest of all athletes. He squirms, writhes, fusses and tugs at himself like a man with hives until he is ready to throw a baseball. Then, for a fleeting moment, he freezes and fixes the batter with a look of sheer disdain.

That was the moment and the look that Artist Koerner decided that he would try to catch for his portrait. Patiently, he persuaded Roberts to hold the pose hour after hour while he drew his wondrously exact pen sketches (see cut) and then put oil to canvas.

Weeks later, when Correspondent Serrell Hill man joined the Phillies on a Western swing, the big pitcher was still remembering the experience. "You ever pose for an artist?" he asked Hillman. ''Koerner had me holding still for two weeks. I came up with a sore back!" But he admitted that he and his Philly teammates finally became fascinated as his portrait emerged from the blobs of oil paint.

Before long Roberts had the same mixed feelings about Hillman's searching interviews. He kept telling teammates: "I'm tired of that guy following me around." But in the end, Roberts, a careful craftsman himself, loosened up and grew to admire Hillman's persistence. Even when Hillman confessed that he was a loyal Brooklyn rooter whose only son, Lemuel Serrell Hillman III, now nine, has been called "Dodger" since birth, stolid Robin Roberts merely shrugged.

During and after his Western tour with the Phillies, Reporter Hillman touched base with other present-day moundsmen and some famed oldtimers to supply Sport Editor Richard Seamon with material for his comparative study of pitching then and now in "The Whole Story of Pitching." Cordially yours,

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