Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (15 page)

Eleven years ago, with four fewer clubs in the majors, 10 pitchers threw at least 250 innings. Last year only four did so, with Brown, Maddux and Baltimore’s Scott Erickson joining Schilling. Erickson led the American League with 251
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innings. Also in ’88, major league pitchers averaged a complete game once every seven starts. Last year the frequency dropped to once every 16 starts. Managers have become slaves to the specialized bullpen, mimicking La Russa’s model with the Athletics of the late ’80s, and to pitch counts, too. Virtually every dugout now has a coach with a handheld clicker, which too often serves the same purpose as an egg timer. Hit the arbitrary pitch-count number, and time’s up. You’re cooked.

“Pitchers are like rottweilers,” Schilling says. “Everyone thinks they’re mean dogs. Well, they’ll be whatever you train them to be. It’s the same with pitchers. Look at [the Cubs’ phenom] Kerry Wood. They kept him on a 100-pitch leash in the minors, and then he gets to the majors and he throws more pitches and more innings than he ever has before, and he gets hurt. It’s crazy.” (Last week Wood was declared out for the season—and maybe beyond—after suffering damage to his right ulnar collateral ligament during a spring training game.)

“The only way you get to be a Number 1 is to earn it,” Cubs general manager Ed Lynch says. “Consistency and durability are the most important ingredients. I’d say you’d have to be effective and stay off the disabled list at least two or three years in a row.”

The making of a No. 1 starter cannot be rushed. Martinez, 27, is the only member of our Starting Nine younger than 30. Even before the Cardinals’ best pitcher, 24-year-old righthander Matt Morris, suffered an elbow sprain last week, La Russa had decided against giving him the Opening Day assignment. “It’s only his third year,” La Russa says. “For someone to say, ‘You’re the Number 1 guy, pitch your day and affect the other ones,’ that’s not fair.”

While the Cardinals wait to see what becomes of Schilling, St. Louis general manager Walt Jocketty says his team is sitting on three potential No. 1’s: Morris and prospects Rick Ankiel, 19, and Chad Hutchinson, 22, to whom the Cardinals gave a combined $5.8 million in signing bonuses. “To me it makes more sense to spend money like that on young guys with a big upside than a middling veteran, who is going to cost you $8 million, and you only have him for two years,” says Jocketty. “Sometimes you have to take the risk.”

Ankiel, a lefthander, is considered the best pitching prospect in baseball. He was not selected out of high school until the 72nd pick of the 1997 draft because clubs feared the asking price of his agent, Scott Boras. Ankiel received a $2.5 million signing bonus. “I expect to see Ankiel and [Jose] Jimenez by August,” says Reds general manager Jim Bowden, referring to another St. Louis prospect. “And that could have a big impact on our division. Ankiel is that good.”

If he is, Ankiel could make the other Cardinals pitchers good, too. Martinez, for instance, helped the Red Sox improve by 14 games last year not only by winning 19 games but also by lightening the load on the rest of the rotation. Bret Saberhagen, for example, won 15 games while averaging only 88 pitches a start, the lowest output of any American League pitcher who made at least 30 starts. “My nine innings are seven now,” says the 34-year-old righthander, who has come back from major rotator-cuff surgery. His job was made easier because Martinez usually matched up with the best starting pitchers from other teams and because the bullpen was sharper thanks to Martinez’s throwing at least seven innings in 23 of his 33 starts. “It’s simple,” Martinez says. “You take a bat up there, you’re my enemy. I will try to beat you.”

That kind of attitude is infectious. Similarly, the Dodgers are hoping the hardworking Brown lifts the rest of their rotation—Chan Ho Park, Ismael Valdes, Carlos Perez and Darren Dreifort—a group with extraordinary stuff that hasn’t lived up to expectations. New manager Davey Johnson assigned those pitchers to the same spring workout groups as Brown so they’d learn from his work habits. In past Dodgers camps the starting pitchers completed drills in different groups on different fields.

Yankees pitchers are getting the same drafting effect from being slotted behind Clemens. Manager Joe Torre says Cone will be the most obvious beneficiary. “Now if he needs to take an extra day or two because he’s not feeling right, he can do it,” Torre explains. Moreover, New York hopes Clemens’s portly next-door-locker mate, righthander Hideki Irabu, whose effectiveness waned in the second half last season, will emulate his new teammate. In spring training Clemens often was the first Yankee to arrive and had completed a long session of running before Irabu rolled in rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Clemens always kept watch on Irabu when pitchers ran during workouts, doubling back “just like a dog herding sheep” to get Irabu to pick up his pace, Cone says.

Whither the 23 teams without such a stud at the top of the rotation? Is it worth it to sell the farm to get Schilling from Philadelphia? “I’d say it’s a lot harder without one, especially in the postseason,” Davey Johnson says. “When you’ve got that one guy who can dominate two or three games in a short series, you have a huge advantage.”

The data on studs in October, though, are inconclusive. On one hand, only one of the past 15 world champions lacked a true No. 1: the 1993 Blue Jays, a tremendous offensive club with no pitcher among the top 10 in the American League in innings or ERA. More recently Cleveland has underscored the value of an ace by trying to get by without one. The Indians have lost Game 1 of eight straight postseason series while giving the ball to five starters in those openers. As a group Cleveland’s starters are 15–14 in the past four postseasons, none of which have ended with a world championship. The franchise hasn’t had an ace in his prime since Gaylord Perry in ’74.

Then again, the impact of No. 1’s often is less in October than it is during the regular season. Our nine current No. 1’s are a modest 40–35 in 104 combined postseason games, including a 9–10 mark in 26 World Series starts. Randy Johnson has lost five straight postseason games, contributing to his team’s defeat in its past three postseason series. Brown hasn’t won any of his four World Series starts, the most recent being the pivotal Game 1 last year when he left with two runners on in the seventh and San Diego leading the Yankees 5–2.

Still, most managers would gladly take the security of giving the ball to that special breed of starter who can exert more influence on a game than anyone else on the field. No better example exists than what righthander Jack Morris did for the Twins in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. Morris threw 10 shutout innings in the 1–0 win, all the while giving the impression that he would still be out there chucking today if the game were still tied. Morris’s singular performance actually began with his appearance at a postgame news conference the previous night, following Game 6. Asked if he was ready for his start, Morris leaned into a microphone and announced with the strongest possible timbre, “In the words of the late, great Marvin Gaye, ‘Let’s get it on!’” In those two nights Morris came as close to a definition of a No. 1 starter as you’ll ever see.

Postscript: In 2000 the Phillies traded Curt Schilling to the Diamondbacks, who won the world championship in his first full season there; Arizona then traded him to the Red Sox, who won the world championship in his first season in Boston. The fate of would-be ace Rick Ankiel only underscored the precariousness of that rare commodity; incurable wildness forced him to abandon his pitching aspirations and try to make it as an outfielder.

JULY 12, 1999

He was a consummate artist on the mound, the most dominant
player of his time, yet he shunned fame and always put team above self.
On the field or off, Sandy Koufax was pitcher perfect

H
E SAT IN THE SAME BOOTH EVERY TIME. IT WAS
always the one in back, farthest from the door. The trim, darkly handsome man would come alone, without his wife, nearly every morning at six o’clock for breakfast at Dick’s Diner in Ellsworth, Maine, about 14 miles from their home. He often wore one of those red-and-black-checkered shirts you expect to see in Maine, though he wasn’t a hunter. He might not have shaved that morning. He would walk past the long counter up front, the one with the swivel stools that, good Lord, gave complete strangers license to strike up a conversation. He preferred the clearly delineated no-trespassing zone of a booth. He would rest those famously large hands on the Formica tabletop, one of those mini-jukeboxes to his left and give his order to Annette, the waitress, in a voice as soft and smooth as honey.

He came so often that the family who ran the diner quickly stopped thinking of him as Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest pitchers who ever lived. They thought of him the way Koufax strived all his life to be thought of, as something better even than a famous athlete: He was a regular.

Dick Anderson and his son Richard, better known as Bub, might glance up from their chores when Koufax walked in, but that was usually all. One time Bub got him to autograph a napkin but never talked baseball with him. Annette, Bub’s sister, always worked the section with that back booth. For three years Koufax came to the diner and not once did he volunteer information to her about his life or his career. It was always polite small talk. Neighborly. Regular.

Koufax was 35, five years since his last pitch, in 1966, when he came eagerly, even dreamily, to Maine, the back booth of America. He had seen a photo spread in
Look
about the Down East country homestead of a man named Blakely Babcock, a 350-pound Burpee Seed salesman, gentleman farmer and gadfly whom everybody called Tiny. Tiny would invite neighbors and friends over for cookouts and dinner parties, during which he liked to consume great quantities of food and then, laughing, rub his huge belly and bellow to his wife, “So, what’s for dinner, Alberta?” Tiny’s North Ellsworth farmhouse caught Koufax’s fancy at just about the same time one of his wife’s friends was renovating her farmhouse in Maine. Wouldn’t it be perfect, Koufax thought, to live quietly, almost anonymously, in an old farmhouse just like Tiny’s?

Alberta Babcock was pulling a hot tin of sweet-smelling blueberry muffins from the oven when Koufax first saw the place in person, and the old Cape-style house was filled with so many flowers that it looked like a watercolor come to life. Koufax was sold, and on Oct. 4, 1971, Sanford and Anne Koufax of Los Angeles (as they signed the deed), took out a 15-year, $15,000 mortgage from Penobscot Savings Bank and bought what was known as Winkumpaugh Farm from Blakely and Alberta Babcock for about $30,000. A cord was cut. The rest of Sandy Koufax’s life had begun.

The Babcocks had lived in the farmhouse since 1962, but no one was exactly sure how old the place was. Property records were lost to a fire at Ellsworth City Hall in 1933, and records from 1944 list the farmhouse’s age even then only as “old.” Nestled on the side of a small mountain off a dusty dirt road called Happytown Road and around the corner from another called Winkumpaugh Road, the farmhouse was the perfect setting for a man hoping to drop out of sight, even if that man was a beloved American icon who had mastered the art of pitching as well as anyone who ever threw a baseball. A man so fiercely modest and private that while at the University of Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship, he didn’t tell his parents back in Brooklyn that he was also on the baseball team. The man whose mother requested one of the first copies of his 1966 autobiography,
Koufax
, so she could find out something about her son. (“You never told me anything,” she said to him.) The man who in 1968, two years after retiring with three Cy Young Awards, four no-hitters and five ERA titles, mentioned nothing of his baseball career upon meeting a pretty young woman named Anne who was redecorating her parents’ Malibu beach house. Koufax did offer to help her paint, though. It wasn’t until several days later that she learned his identity—and he learned hers: She was the daughter of actor Richard Widmark. They were married six months later, in front of about a dozen people, in her father’s West Los Angeles home.