Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (12 page)

Expansion during a power hitter’s era makes it possible for baseball fans to imagine—perhaps to even expect—feats that were once considered unthinkable. Among them:

•
.400 Batting Average
In expansion years Rod Carew of the Minnesota Twins (1977) and Andres Galarraga of the Rockies (’93) made lengthy runs at .400, which hasn’t been reached since Ted Williams did it in ’41. Says Gwynn, who hit .372 last year, “I still think it’s possible. What helps me is I think pitchers now see so many guys who can hit the ball out that with a guy like me they figure, ‘If I make a mistake, it’s only a single. I can live with that.’ I’m a throwback. There aren’t too many guys left like me.”

•
67 Doubles
This is the 67th year since Earl Webb of the Red Sox had 67 two-baggers. The Expos’ Mark Grudzielanek and Edgar Martinez and Alex Rodriguez of the Mariners are only a magic carpet ride away. “It can be broken,” says Rodriguez, who bashed 54 doubles in ’96, “but it’s going to take a guy who plays home games on artificial turf.”

•
189 Strikeouts
The love affair with power has a downside. The Mariners’ Jay Buhner, the Reds’ Melvin Nieves and the Cubs’ Henry Rodriguez and Sammy Sosa figure to be within whiffing distance of the Giants’ Bobby Bonds’s 1970 mark.

•
5.04 League ERA
The worst earned run average for a season was the American League’s in 1936. That could easily be outdone, considering that league’s pitchers ballooned to 4.99 two years ago. The Devil Rays are sure to play a huge role in any run at this record.

“AS A PITCHER, what can you do?” says Yankees righthander David Cone. “You can make your legs stronger, create better balance and make yourself less likely to break down. But lifting weights is not going to translate into having better stuff, not the way getting stronger can make someone a better hitter.”

In 1994 the career of shortstop Kevin Elster was in decline when Yankees general manager Gene Michael told him, “You’re too soft. You can’t play with that body. You’ve got to get a new body.” Shortstops—like Michael himself—regularly hung 15-year careers on thin frames. Not anymore. Elster began a weight-training program. In ’96 he cranked 24 homers and drove in 99 runs for the Rangers.

The effect of size on baseball is profound—what was big is now small. The cleanup-hitting outfielder is now a middle infielder. The Braves’ Tony Graffanino (6′1″, 195 pounds) is the same height and is 12 pounds heavier than the weight at which Frank Robinson played. The Royals’ Jose Offerman (six feet, 190) is just a bit bigger than Stan Musial was in 1948, the year he led the National League in batting (.376) and RBIs (131). Dale Sveum (6′2″, 212) of the Yankees is almost as big as Johnny (Big Cat) Mize, and McGwire (6′5″, 250) is as big as NFL defensive star Bryce Paup.

At 35, Mickey Mantle was virtually finished. At 35, Duke Snider was a part-time player, and Ralph Kiner was in his third year of retirement. At 35, Paul O’Neill of the Yankees is coming off a career year (.324, 21 homers, 117 RBIs) and is more fit than ever, his 6′4″, 215-pound frame chiseled by weights and creatine.

In the clubhouse of the Mariners, who last year hit more home runs than any club in history (264), fat canisters of creatine are piled above lockers like cords of wood. Creatine monohydrate is a naturally occurring compound consisting of three amino acids. In nontechnical terms, it’s fuel for muscles. A study by Penn State’s Center for Sports Medicine found that members of a control group taking creatine grew stronger after just seven days.

“Three or four years ago, the nutritional supplement market for baseball players didn’t even exist,” says Dave Rose, a manager with Champion Nutrition of Concord, Calif., which supplies several major league teams with a variety of nutritional additives. “Now it’s gone crazy. The market for baseball is bigger than for football or basketball.”

“Let’s face it, guys get paid for home runs,” Piazza says. “If you hit 30 home runs, nobody cares if you hit .250 doing it. That extra strength may be the difference of five to 10 feet—the difference between a ball being caught or going over the wall. Why wouldn’t you lift and take supplements? You’ve got one time in your life to get it right. I want to get it right.”

Piazza is the prototypical player of this new power generation. He was born 10 days before Denny McLain won his 30th game in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher. Only three major league players drove in 100 runs that season; in ’97, Piazza was one of 35 players with at least 100 RBIs. No catcher has ever caught as many games (139) and batted higher than Piazza did last year, when he hit .362 (along with 40 home runs). Then he spent the off-season lifting weights with bronzed bodybuilders while his personal shopper-chef-nutritionist whipped up six meals a day for him: omelettes, pancakes, tuna, chicken, steak and, daily, a creatine shake. He reported to camp at 240 pounds, expecting the rigors of catching to wear him down to 225 by the end of the season. He says, “I want to go out and top last season.”

Piazza is also a potential free agent seeking the richest contract in baseball history. Meanwhile, the Dodgers are expected to be sold by their longtime family proprietors, the O’Malleys, to a new owner, global media baron Rupert Murdoch. Just another sign of the times. So gather up your fish oil and your amino acids, and fire up your blender. The stakes have never been higher for hitting it big.

Postscript: As predicted, Roger Maris’s record of 61 home runs was indeed broken in 1998—twice—by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Expansion had less to do with the barrage of homers than what had become the accepted culture of getting big, often by any means necessary.

MARCH 29, 1999

That’s what made Kevin Brown worth $105 million to the Dodgers. His nasty
disposition was thrown in for free

W
ITH HIS SEVENTH PITCH OF THIS SEASON
Kevin Brown will have earned more than the median household income of the 10,797 folks of Wilkinson County, Ga. The first of Brown’s twice-monthly paychecks will bring him $1.25 million, as much as a median wage earner in Wilkinson County makes in 46 years, a lifetime of work. Still, while Brown may rest his head at night in a Beverly Hills mansion after earning about four grand per pitch from the Dodgers, he is never far from Wilkinson County. “I’m afraid we’ll be the Beverly Hillbillies,” says his wife, Candace, laughing. “‘Here come the Clampetts’” Candace was 13 when she met Kevin, who is three years older, and 19 when they were married.

Wilkinson County is smack in the center of Georgia. The middle of nowhere. There, in the town of McIntyre (pop. 552), Kevin Brown grew up. The county, which begins about 20 miles east of Macon, is a haunting sepia photograph come to life, though barely. A somber stain of umber blots the landscape, as if reddish-brown ink had spilled from the sky. Rusted metal roofs hang heavily over the dark wood planks of tottering houses, and long-dead autos lie like toppled gravestones in dirt the color of a fresh scab. This is a place where collarless dogs chase cars down country roads, where one out of every eight families lives below the poverty level, where there is no obvious sign of the 30 households that, according to the last census, earn $100,000 or more per year, and where there are some 38 churches to offer reminders that everyone is destined for a better place.

“Got a cellphone with you?” Kevin’s mother, Carolyn, asks a visitor who is about to drive from Macon to McIntyre. “That’s the
country
country over there, you know.”

BUSINESS DISTRICT reads the green sign with the white arrow pointing to Main Street in McIntyre, a single block that begins at a salvage yard and ends at a filling station, with a hardware store, a police station and an unmarked convenience store in between. At 5 p.m. on a weekday in February you could play a chess match in the middle of Main Street without vehicular interruption. The police station is locked shut. No one is inside.

An old-timer remembers having no indoor plumbing or electricity in his home in McIntyre as recently as 1948, when he was 19 years old. He remembers the gaps in the floorboards of his old house, through which you could see the earth; the three meals of cornmeal each day; the patched pants he wore to school, which so embarrassed him that many times he just wouldn’t go; and the 60 cents per hour he made as a teenager mining kaolin, the fine white clay that is the only reason McIntyre is inhabited at all.

That old-timer is Gerald Brown, who by the grace of his son Kevin’s freakish right arm is sipping coffee in a leather chair in a spacious four-bedroom brick house in Macon—out of Wilkinson County. From his front steps Gerald can see the 15,000-square-foot mansion Kevin is building, the brick fortress that sits on 70-plus acres of land and makes Gerald and Carolyn’s spread look like one of those plastic Monopoly houses. Kevin grew up in a family of five in a 1,300-square-foot house with one bathroom, where no one knew the luxury of a long shower. His new estate will be flush with 10 bathrooms.

In the reddish-brown dirt of McIntyre and especially in the creases of Gerald’s square face are clues as to why Kevin throws a baseball with a fury like that of no other man alive. In those same places are also clues as to why, unless you saw Kevin playing with his own two sons or flying one of his remote-control airplanes or watching one of the 89 episodes of
Star Trek
and
Star Trek: The Next Generation
he keeps in his video library, you might never have seen him smile.

“There were teammates who hated his guts,” says Tom House, Brown’s pitching coach during his first six major league seasons, with the Rangers. “People who have Kevin’s makeup are pretty much oblivious to other people’s feelings. There’s not a lot of empathy in Kevin. Like a lot of athletes, he is a narcissistic individual who’s paid a lot of money to be that way. He’s a hard-ass, all right. But I’d like to think that, at heart, he’s a great kid.”

“I guess that comes naturally,” Gerald says of his son’s brutish single-mindedness. “I was the same way. I thought I had to be perfect in everything I did.” Gerald is a short, stocky man who even in winter wears short-sleeved shirts, which bare his muscular tattooed arms. He has a twinkle in his eyes of the Jimmy Cagney tough-guy sort. Carolyn says that if he were a ballplayer—both she and Gerald played softball—he would be Chuck Knoblauch, the Yankees’ hard-nosed second baseman.

“I always worked as hard as I could,” Gerald says. “For someone with a seventh-grade education to become the foreman for heavy equipment [for a company that mines kaolin], I did all right by myself. With Kevin, I told him if he wanted to do something, the only way was to do it to the best of his ability. I remember one time before a game he got into a scrap with another boy and he said, ‘I ain’t goin’ to play.’ I said, ‘Boy, you go get your butt on that dadgum field.’ If you want to do something, do it right or quit.”

Gerald takes a sip of coffee. On the mug is a picture of Kevin in the uniform of the Padres, for whom he played last year. Carolyn spotted a stack of the mugs in an airport shop in San Diego and bought out the supply. Of course her son is not smiling on the ceramic; he’s giving his usual chilly, do-not-disturb look.

ONE DAY in 1997, when Kevin Brown was playing for the Marlins, a radio reporter asked him for a sound bite. It was one of the first days of spring training, when baseball players are usually in a good mood. “One usable sound bite, huh?” Brown replied. “It would probably be, ‘Bite me.’” Later in the season, when another reporter asked him about the possible sale of the Marlins, Brown said, “I’m ignoring the issue, just like I’m ignoring you.” And that fall he welcomed the national media into the Marlins’ clubhouse on the eve of the franchise’s first World Series appearance by shouting, “Get these f---s out of here. We can’t get any work done.” On occasion he has telephoned the press box while watching a game on the clubhouse TV to ream out his team’s broadcaster for a mistake—such as misidentifying a pitch that was just thrown.

When Brown was with Texas in ’94, he and the other Rangers were obliged to wear baggy, old-fashioned uniforms one night as part of a promotion. Brown saw Rangers president Tom Schieffer and another team executive on the field before the game and spat out, “You’re the f---s who make us wear these things.”