Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (11 page)

Brown is the rare pitcher who can dominate hitters without a changeup. Everything he throws is hard, but his slider, cutter and sinker all have such movement that he doesn’t need much variation in pitch speeds. “There were maybe five times last year where I thought, This would be a good spot for Kevin to throw a changeup,” his coach Rothschild says. “That’s getting picky.” What makes Brown deceptive is that he throws his pitches anywhere from sidearm to overhand, which prevents hitters from quickly recognizing what’s coming. “I’ll throw from 10 arm angles,” he says.

Only three years ago, when he was still with the Rangers, Brown yielded the most hits in the majors and went 7–9. “I’d had a lot of pitching coaches over my career, and I worried so much about my mechanics that I forgot how to pitch,” he says. “The last couple of years I just said, The heck with it. I’m just going to go back to what’s comfortable.”

Brown begins his delivery with his left foot in front of his right, spins his back to the hitter without raising his arms over his head, then slings the ball while untwisting his body. “Kevin rotates his hips more than most anybody,” Rothschild says, “and he throws the ball as easily as anybody I’ve ever been around. You don’t see a lot of strain. A lot of that is just natural.”

Pitchers with Brown’s kind of stuff are increasingly rare in an occupation forced to lower its standards. Only 10 pitchers in the American League had ERAs of less than 4.00 last year. Heck, only 37 in the league—and just 82 among all 28 teams—pitched enough innings (162) to qualify for the ERA title. “I was nearly run out of baseball in 1986 for having a 4.50 ERA,” Eckersley says. “Now I see guys with a 5.00 ERA walking around with their heads held high, like they’re hot stuff.”

The pitching world is populated with hurlers like Wilson Alvarez of the White Sox, who says, “If I go seven innings every time I pitch, I did my job. I gave us a chance to win.” And he’s considered a pretty good pitcher by today’s standards. “People complain that nobody pitches nine innings anymore,” Duncan says. “Well, it’s really hard to go nine without having so many counts in the hitter’s favor. What the small strike zone does more than anything is change the count. Something needs to be done. The game is out of balance.”

Short of a telethon or action from the White House, the greatest benefit to needy pitchers would be a return to the strike zone as it’s defined in the rule book. However, that is the least likely form of aid because it is the most controversial. Umpires and hitters don’t want the grief involved in retooling their judgment of what is a ball and a strike. “The least controversial thing to do,” Cone says, “is to change the slope and height of the mound and see where that takes us. It’s the fairest change to make.”

Without a fundamental change, the downward spiral of pitching is likely to continue. Those who can do what Brown did last year will become all the more phenomenal. “What you’re going to see is relief pitchers getting more and more decisions,” Glavine says. “You’re going to see pitchers with ERAs under four considered to be having a great year. And because teams are so careful about protecting young pitchers as they come through the minors, you’re going to see pitchers who can’t work beyond 100 pitches in a game, which means they’ll be done after four or five innings. What happens then?”

The hiss of a nasty fastball blowing past the thick barrel of a weightlifter’s thin-handled bat grows fainter. Is anyone listening?

Postscript: I’ve always enjoyed talking with pitchers because they need to be more cerebral than hitters. Hitters react. Pitchers think. I once asked Mike Mussina, who is a very good athlete, why he was a pitcher. He said, “Because on that day he works, the pitcher can control the outcome more than anybody else.” And that was still true even when this story ran, during an era when it was obvious that virtually every change in the game favored the hitter.

MARCH 23, 1998

You want finesse, join a bridge club. The Boys of Summer are now beefy,
pumped-up maulers ready to tear down the fences.
Welcome to Extreme Baseball, where too much is never enough

E
VERY DAY THIS SPRING A BATTALION OF PROTEIN
drinks spiked with the muscle-enhancing supplement creatine awaited the New York Yankees after they ended their workouts in Tampa. The white Styrofoam cups with red straws poking through the lids were lined up on a table in the clubhouse like soldiers awaiting inspection. One afternoon, as his players snatched up all the cups, the most powerful of Yankees sucked on his shake while admonishing a clubhouse attendant. “Next time make sure you have a few more made up,” said owner George Steinbrenner, dressed in his own uniform of blue blazer and white turtleneck. “Better to have too much than not enough.”

So there you have it. The perfect metaphor (albeit a mixed one) for what has happened to baseball near the end of this millennium: The owner of the game’s richest team is downing souped-up shakes that promise to make him even bigger. Steinbrenner knows that baseball has become a big man’s game—as surely as it belongs to men named Piazza (240 pounds), McGwire (250 pounds), Bichette (260 pounds) and Thomas (270 pounds), it belongs to men named Jacobs ($62 million payroll), Turner ($65 million), Angelos ($67 million) and, yes, Steinbrenner (more than $70 million). Like never before, baseball is about being buff. Anybody hoping to get to the World Series had better come to play with plenty of muscle and plenty of money. Better to have too much than not enough.

Dodgers catcher Mike Piazza gained 20 pounds over the winter lifting weights at a gym in Venice Beach, Calif. Orioles DH Harold Baines added creatine to his diet as well as a supplement containing fish oil to lubricate his creaking 39-year-old knees. Tampa Bay Devil Rays third baseman Wade Boggs, a slap hitter who turns 40 in June, took creatine while bulking up with heavy weights for the first time in his career.

This is an awful time for a team to be short on pitching. We are in the greatest home run era in history—each of the last four years is among the top five seasons for home runs per game. (The other, second on the list, was the freakish ’87 season.) This year holds the promise of breaking more records than were shattered on Bill Veeck’s Disco Demolition Night, because it’s also an expansion year, and the arrival of the Devil Rays and the Diamondbacks has forced into service 22 pitchers who should be either retired or in the minors.

The impact is predictable. In each of the past five expansion years, there were nearly uniform increases in home runs, batting average, walks and ERA, with dingers going up the most on average. The results will be even more dramatic this season, not only because this is the second expansion within six years but also because hitters have never been stronger or more power-conscious. Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez, who slugged 44 home runs last year, spent November chugging creatine and lifting weights. He added 12 pounds in a month and now looks more like a blacksmith than a baseball player.

The season’s defining moment will take place in Denver on July 6, when the home run hitting contest will be held in conjunction with the All-Star Game at Coors Field, the most homer-happy park in baseball. Unless the rules are changed—say, the ball must land in the upper deck to be counted as a home run—that baseball show might drag on longer than
Titanic
.

Coors Field is the perfect backdrop for such excess, because a select group of high-revenue-producing stadiums like it have stratified baseball like never before. What division you’re in doesn’t matter much anymore, not with wild cards creating open competition for playoff spots and three rounds of postseason play guaranteeing the occasional Cinderella team a date with a big, ugly large-revenue club. All that matters is a team’s willingness to spend money, which is what really separates the contenders from the rest of the pack. Talk about radical realignment: Forget about East, Central and West, and check out the payrolls instead.

The five biggest spenders last year all made the postseason, leaving just three playoff spots for the remaining 23 teams. The three clubs who got those spots each spent at least $33 million—and each was gone from the postseason quicker than footprints in the sand at high tide. The exemplar of this trend is Wayne Huizenga, the owner of the Florida Marlins, who bought himself a world championship last year and then decided that he’d paid too high a price.

“It may not seem that long ago that Oakland, Minnesota and Kansas City were World Series teams,” says Athletics president Sandy Alderson. “But that’s ancient history. The dynamics of the game are drastically different from what they were 10 years ago—even five years ago. The change is easily explained: It was the construction of stadiums with public money coupled with the drop in TV money.” Almost overnight, the poor got poorer, and the rich got a lot richer.

As the gap between the haves and have-nots widens, those clubs in between are the most foolhardy. They are the ones spending enough money to dream of a pennant but not enough to compete with the big-revenue clubs. They might as well drop the money on lottery tickets. “If you’re not spending $50 million, then you probably ought to cut way back,” says Expos general manager Jim Beattie. “That middle ground is quicksand. I’m not sure why anyone would want to be there.”

Over the past decade Major League Baseball has tried to prop up its low-revenue franchises with innovations such as the luxury tax, interleague play and the wild-card spots, but these changes haven’t been nearly enough to compensate for the unprecedented revenue of the elite clubs. A radical realignment along geographical lines will almost certainly be the next bold effort to bolster the small-market teams. One American League general manager says the next logical move will be to split the season into halves. “The small-revenue clubs stand a better chance of hanging in” for 81 games than for 162, he explains.

In that scheme, statistics would still be tabulated over the entire season (and even baseball owners understand the historical importance of those numbers). To say only “61” or “.400” is to be nearly poetic—and to anticipate what this season holds in store. Expansion is the El Nino of baseball. It causes extreme conditions.

The 61 came in ’61, an expansion year. Not only did Roger Maris hit a major league record number of home runs that season, but Norm Cash of the Tigers also had one of the most anomalous batting averages in history, .361—78 points higher than any other season in which he batted 400 times. In ’62, another expansion year, Tommy Davis of the Dodgers drove in 153 runs, 64 more than in his next-best season.

Maris’s mark is more likely than ever to fall this season. Before 1990 only 10 players had hit 50 home runs in a season; five players reached that plateau in the past eight years. “I think 61 is the one record that is almost certainly going to go,” says Padres 16-year-veteran Tony Gwynn, who has won the last four National League batting titles and eight in his 16-year career. “I used to think no one would ever come close, but the way guys are today it seems like it’s going to go. Last year you had 12 guys hit 40 or more home runs. It’s not just one or two guys who could do it. There are five to eight guys capable of hitting 61.

“Expansion definitely helps. By the time you get to the third or fourth game of a series, you’ll be facing a pitcher who doesn’t have a lot of experience and doesn’t have real good command, and you know you’re going to get pitches to hit.”

Among the many players with a shot at surpassing 61, three stand out as most likely to succeed: in order, the Mariners’ Ken Griffey Jr., who hit 56 last season and only now, at 28, is hitting his power prime; the Cardinals’ Mark McGwire, who slugged 58 last year despite having one horrible month; and the Rangers’ Juan Gonzalez, who has four 40-home-run seasons even though he has played in as many as 150 games only once.

“I like Junior’s chances as much as anybody’s,” says his manager, Lou Piniella. “I’ve watched him get much stronger the last couple of years. He’s not a line drive hitter anymore, even though he likes to say he is. He’s a home run hitter, and if only he could be a
little
more selective…. Well, I won’t even finish that thought.”