Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (14 page)

About a quarter mile down the road, behind the elementary school, the Wilkinson County High baseball team is practicing on the current varsity diamond. “Kevin Brown?” says one of the players. “Don’t mention that name around here. He’s a jerk. The guy gives $1 million to Los Angeles high schools [actually, an inner-city baseball program], and we have to buy our own uniforms. He doesn’t even care about his own school.”

Told of this, Brown says, “I have given money to the school in the past, and I may in the future.”

People in McIntyre are also mad at Brown “because he doesn’t say he’s from McIntyre,” says the father of one player. “He gets to the World Series, and all of a sudden he’s from Macon.”

In Macon, a Kevin Brown that hitters will never see is laughing as he chases his four-year-old son, Grayson, around the modest house he has lived in for the past nine years. His family is so important to him that he persuaded the Dodgers to give him 12 round-trips a year between Macon and Los Angeles on a private jet, which will cost the team about $480,000 annually. Brown splurged on a two-acre Beverly Hills lot because he wanted Grayson and his eight-year-old brother, Ridge, to have a backyard in which to play. “He’s like his father, a country boy who likes to have space around him,” Carolyn says. And, yes, she adds, “Kevin smiles a lot. He’s really still a kid. I tell Candace all the time, ‘You don’t have two boys. You have three of them.’”

“I know his reputation, and that’s not the Kevin Brown I know,” says Sandy Johnson, the Rangers scouting director who signed him and is now an assistant general manager for the Diamondbacks. “He’s always been very cordial, a real Southern gentleman. I like him. And with the way he takes care of himself and the arm he has, he can probably pitch into his 40s, like Nolan.”

Brown played five seasons with Nolan Ryan in Texas without getting close to him. He did not seek Ryan’s counsel. He is blunt about identifying his mentor: “No one.”

“Kevin is a product of a very conditional environment,” House says. “He had extraordinary expectations placed on him and had to meet those conditions to get acceptance. Lots of athletes grow up with that conditional acceptance. The makeups of Nolan Ryan and Kevin are very similar. The difference is, Nolan was more adept at communicating. I think now you’ll see Kevin begin to blossom. There is affirmation that he is among the elite pitchers in the game. By the time he’s done, he’s going to be revered by everyone. I’m not saying he’s going to be as revered as Nolan Ryan or Tom Seaver. But it’ll be close.”

Gerald used to go to almost all of Kevin’s high school games and even most of his practices. He and Carolyn saw all of Kevin’s college games that were within a day’s drive of McIntyre. Carolyn still enjoys traveling to watch her son, though Gerald, who had a heart attack in 1994, now prefers sitting at home in front of the TV.

In the winter days without baseball, Carolyn and Gerald pass the time watching tapes of Kevin’s games. One day they choose a game from May 11, 1998, because it is a duel against Leiter, Kevin’s friend. The camera keeps zooming in on the face of the baddest dude in baseball. It is contorted by the maximum effort Kevin’s father demanded—the flared nostrils, the deeply furrowed brow, the quivering lower lip thrust forward and the huffing and puffing behind a three-day beard, and at times it appears as if Brown can blow a baseball past a hitter on sheer will.

Postscript: For his $105 million from the Dodgers and Yankees, Brown averaged 10 wins per season and went on the disabled list 10 times, once after punching a clubhouse wall in a fit of anger. His horrible start in Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS against Boston, when he was charged with five runs while getting only four outs, is the enduring memory of his years in New York.

MARCH 29, 1999

Baseball’s most precious commodity is the true No. 1 starter, the rare pitcher
who can elevate a team single-handedly

B
EFORE EACH GAME EARLY IN THE 1997 SEASON THE
bearer of the opposing team’s lineup card would also deliver condolences to Terry Francona, the Phillies’ manager. “Hang in there” or “It’ll get better,” the rival would say in a solemn bedside manner, as if the team’s stumbling start was some sort of illness. But once every five days Francona could fix his counterpart with a devilish look, like a schoolboy with a laser pointer in his pocket, and say, “Don’t feel sorry for me tonight.”

Every fifth day the Phillies were as good as any team in baseball. Every fifth day they wielded one of the rarest and most potent weapons in the sport. Every fifth day they featured an honest-to-goodness, certified No. 1 starting pitcher. They had righthander Curt Schilling. The real deal. “One night we could be losing 6–0 and look just terrible,” Francona says. “Then the next night maybe we still hadn’t scored—it’s 0–0 or 1–0 in the seventh inning—but we’ve got Schill out there, and we look sharp. Every fifth day, it doesn’t matter who we play or who he’s matched up against, we feel like we’re going to win. So can you imagine how the Braves feel? They get that feeling almost every night of the week.”

With the possible exception of a hot goaltender in hockey, no position in team sports controls the tempo, tenor and outcome of a game as thoroughly as a premier starting pitcher. He is the sun of the baseball universe; the game revolves around him.

Come Opening Day, every team will have a so-called No. 1 starter. After all,
somebody
has to take the ball first—and increasingly, that’s all he is: somebody. But we speak here not of the Scott Karls of the world. Rather, we pay tribute to the few virtuosos who can make opposing hitters rest uneasy the night before a game they pitch; the ones who eliminate the need for middle relievers, the weakest link in just about any staff; the ones who take pressure off their rotation mates. Like jazz to Miles Davis or pornography to Justice Potter Stewart, true No. 1’s are so obvious that they need no definition.

“To me, naming the Number 1’s is like naming the days of the week,” Schilling says. “Everybody knows who they are. If you have to stop and think if somebody is a Number 1, he’s not.”

Here is the A list: Schilling; Kevin Brown of the Dodgers; Roger Clemens of the Yankees; Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz of the Braves; Randy Johnson of the Diamondbacks; Pedro Martinez of the Red Sox; and Mike Mussina of the Orioles. That’s it. Our Starting Nine. End of discussion. That means 23 of the 30 teams in baseball, by our reckoning, don’t have a No. 1 pitcher.

David Wells of the Blue Jays, 18–4 in ’98, including a perfect game? Three words: Do it again. The Yankees’ David Cone? These days the 36-year-old righthander frightens HMOs as much as he does hitters. Even Mussina’s inclusion in the club is an indication of how elite pitching standards have declined in this age of powerball and bullpen specialists. Mussina has never won 20 games or pitched 250 innings, the latter being a plateau even journeymen such as Rick Mahler used to reach as recently as the ’80s. Over the past two seasons the Orioles righthander has won four fewer games and thrown only eight more innings than peripatetic Mariners lefty Jamie Moyer. Mussina, though, gets the nod here because his ordinary 13–10 season last year was marred by freak injuries (a wart on his pitching hand and a line drive off his face), because he has consistently proved that he can dominate a game (especially in the postseason) and because he has the best winning percentage (.667, 118–59) of any active pitcher with at least 25 victories.

Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz also deserve the smallest of asterisks because each has the insulation of the other two. Each would be a No. 1 on virtually any team in baseball. With Atlanta, though, the pressure to stop losing streaks is both rare and shared. It’s self-evident that two of them don’t have to face the other team’s best pitcher in any given series. For example, Maddux had a loss and a no-decision against Schilling in the first 11 days of last season. The Philadelphia pitcher that Glavine faced was Garrett Stephenson, who finished the season 0–2 with a 9.00 ERA.

“There are two things that make a pitcher a Number 1,” Cardinals manager Tony La Russa says. “When it’s his turn to pitch, you can see guys on the team get excited because they know they have a real good chance to win. The other thing is, he takes the ball knowing his day to pitch affects the other four days. That guy knows that if we lose tonight, the club is not going to be as confident the next four nights. He allows the bullpen to rest, and he allows all the other starters to fit in slots behind him. They know they don’t have to win 18 to 20 games.”

Winning 18 games now has roughly the same degree of difficulty as slamming 40 home runs, except it carries greater value. Thirteen players hit at least 40 dingers last year, two more than won at least 18 games. Only six of those power hitters did so for a playoff team; all but one of the 18-game winners—Clemens, the American League Cy Young Award winner then with the Blue Jays—pitched for a team that made the postseason.

BASEBALL LEGEND credits Asa Brainard with being the George Washington of No. 1’s. Brainard won 56 of the Cincinnati Red Stockings’ 57 games in 1869, thereby eliminating the pressure on—in fact, the relevance of—the rest of the staff. According to baseball folklore, people later began calling great starting pitchers “ace” in honor of Asa, though
The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary
dates the first reference of the term to 1902, and the importance of the ace in many card games would seem a logical part of the etymology.

Ace. Stud. No. 1. The Big Guy. The Big Kahuna. The Big Unit. Whatever you call him, his importance is approaching an alltime high. “That’s because expansion has diluted pitching in general, so these guys really stand out and become more valuable,” says Dodgers general manager Kevin Malone, who in the off-season put his money where his mouth was, making the winning seven-year, $105 million bid for free-agent Brown.

As recently as 1996 no starting pitcher ranked among the eight highest-paid players in the game. Maddux, who was ninth, was the only one among the top 11. Now four of them rank in the top eight: Brown (first, at $15 million a year), Johnson (third, $13.1 million), Martinez (sixth, $12.5 million) and Maddux (eighth, 11.5 million).

Four members of our Starting Nine have switched teams in the past 18 months. You won’t find such frenzied shopping anywhere else this side of eBay. Martinez, who was traded from the Expos to Boston after the ’97 season, and Brown, who spent last season with San Diego after helping the Marlins win the ’97 World Series, immediately turned awful teams into playoff clubs with no other significant changes to their casts. This winter second-year franchise Arizona signed Johnson, a free-agent lefthander who split last season with the Mariners and the Astros, in hopes of playing into October. The Yankees, who were 125–50, added Clemens in a trade.

No wonder Phillies general manager Ed Wade, whose team is the only noncontender in possession of a stud starter, is at the top of many general managers’ speed-dial lists. The drooling over Schilling in the front offices of the Cardinals, Angels, Indians and Rangers is almost embarrassing to watch. “Oh, they
will
trade him,” says one National League general manager.

“They’d be crazy not to trade him,” says another. “They’re not going to win with him, so they might as well not win without him and get some good players to build with.”

THE PHILLIES say they need Schilling because they don’t even have a bona fide No. 2 starter. (The designee, by default, is righthander Chad Ogea, who was not even a No. 5 in Cleveland last year.) Schilling’s impact on the Phillies is so great that their chances of winning improve by 30% whenever he figures in a decision: He is 32–25 (.561) over the past two seasons, and Philadelphia is 111–156 (.432) in all other games in that span. Moreover, he is a throwback to the days when pitchers didn’t punch out of games after six innings and boast, “I did my job”—you know, way back when, in the old days of 1988. Schilling threw the most pitches in baseball last year (4,213), went into the eighth inning more than anyone else (30 times in 35 starts), threw the most innings (268
²
/
₃
) and completed the most games (15).