Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (21 page)

Nineteen ninety-nine, the year Martinez owned baseball, ended for him under a yellow-and-white striped party tent behind a two-story concrete building on Avenida George Washington. The tent serves as a church for a Catholic orphanage. Martinez had heard about the orphanage from a friend, watched a video about its mission and was moved to help with more than just pesos. He decided to welcome the millennium in this makeshift church, at a New Year’s Eve service with one hundred or so orphaned children. Most had been rescued off the street, including one infant girl who had been plucked from a trash can. Many wore the nice new dress clothes he had bought them for Christmas.

It had been a year worthy of its own time capsule: Martinez had won the All-Star MVP award, smothered the Yankees with the one-hitter, beaten Cleveland with his head and his heart, whipped New York in the League Championship Series and won the Cy Young. Time after time home plate had looked ridiculously close to him.

Those moments, though, were no more meaningful than when the last seconds of the year fell away. At the stroke of midnight, surrounded by children who felt like his own flesh and blood, he prayed. He prayed for peace, he prayed for his family, he prayed for his health, and he prayed for the children. He knew right then that this was one of the best moments of his life. El Duro felt sure about that, as sure as he could feel the tears falling down his face.

Postscript: The night I arrived in the Dominican Republic, Pedro said he’d pick me up at my hotel at six for dinner. Sometime near 11 p.m., after I had eaten room service and gone to sleep with no word from him, I was awakened by the telephone. “Ready to go?” It was Pedro, and the first sign that this would be a most interesting week. I worked out with him, toured some of the country with him and, under a beautiful starry sky and amid the fragrance of flowers, shared a homemade meal under the mango tree that was his refuge as a boy. With that kind of time and access, a writer stands a pretty good chance of understanding his subject.

JUNE 18, 2001

There’s no safety net for major league closers, who put it all on the line each time
they work, saving the day … or squandering their teams’ best efforts

A
IRPLANE PILOT, TIGHTROPE WALKER, SWORD
swallower, bomb-squad member, skydiver, closer. Success or failure in these jobs is absolute: You either do the job or you don’t. The closer’s job is the most clearly delineated one in sports. Most times he either gets a
save
—you need not dig too deep to hit the religious or heroic bedrock of the word—or a
blown save
, the cruelest, most negative stat ever invented. There is no middle ground. No safety net. Closers are the Flying Wallendas of baseball.

Trevor Hoffman fell off the high wire on May 27. Hoffman, 33, is the Padres’ closer. He is the only active pitcher to have saved 30 games in each of the past six years. That afternoon the Padres gave the righthander a 4–2 lead to protect in the ninth inning against a division rival, the Diamondbacks. The game took a total of two hours and 47 minutes, but Hoffman lost it in an eye blink: single, home run, fly-out, single, home run. Good night. Drive home safely.

What Hoffman did in the wake of that defeat, when utter failure is a virus that attacks the immune system of confidence, would reveal more about his staying power than his National League-record-tying 53 saves in 1998. “To last in this job,” Hoffman says, “you have to learn to take the good and the bad equally.”

The results are brutally self-evident: You do or you don’t. Many closers do (44 pitchers saved at least 30 games in a season over the past five years), but most don’t for long. (Four current closers have saved 30 or more in each of the past three years.) Just about any pitcher with good stuff, given the liberal nature of the save rule and the programmed use of closers by robotic managers, can save 30 games once. Mel Rojas, Heathcliff Slocumb and Billy Taylor proved as much in recent years—before they disappeared as quickly as they’d arrived among the brethren of closers.

Hoffman, one of the rare closers who endures, fought the virus after the Arizona defeat. He has developed an emergency routine for such cases. First, while sitting alone in the dugout, he reflects on what just happened; then, even after his worst outings, he goes to the clubhouse and fields questions from the media. “The people asking the questions are not responsible for the ball flying out of the park,” he explains. Finally, alone, he finds something positive amid the despair. He won’t leave the stadium until he is sure the virus is under control. This time Hoffman began the cleansing process at about 4:50 in the afternoon. He did not leave until nine o’clock that night.

“That’s not normal, believe me—not that long,” Hoffman says. “There were a lot of issues with that one. Some games have a lasting impact, and that was one of them. I didn’t do a whole lot, just kind of sat around, watched the Coca-Cola 600, drank Coca-Colas. The first home run ran through my mind. A 2-and-2 pitch. I threw a fastball. When I get to two strikes in that situation, it’s easy to think, I ought to have thrown a changeup. But if he pops up a fastball to leftfield, you don’t think twice.

“Confidence is everything,” Hoffman adds. “If you start second-guessing yourself, you’re bound to run into more bad [outings]. It took a while, but I got through it. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: It’s better to have competed and lost than not to have competed at all. That’s what I told myself. I battled. And I knew I’d be out there again.”

ARMANDO BENITEZ fell off the high wire on May 11. Benitez, 28, is the Mets’ closer. He is, with only one 30-save season on his resume, a work in progress. Whether he turns out to be a Trevor Hoffman or a Mel Rojas will depend on nights like this, when he surrendered the game-winning hit to the Giants. The righthander’s response, with the help of at least one other Met, was to demolish parts of the visiting dugout and clubhouse at Pacific Bell Park. The Giants sent the Mets a bill for $4,000 to cover repairs.

What was it that Hoffman said? Treat the good and the bad equally? How can any closer do that when, as Cardinals manager Tony La Russa put it, he has to endure “a maximum amount of pressure in a minimum amount of time”? How can he do it when success is so intoxicating and failure so debilitating?

Stacey O’Neill heard about Benitez’s rage in San Francisco and winced. Three months earlier O’Neill, Benitez’s former girlfriend, had dropped domestic-abuse charges against the reliever only after he agreed to seek anger-management counseling. She had recognized a pattern of postgame behavior by Benitez that was linked to success or failure on the mound. “He either didn’t get counseling or he ignored it,” O’Neill says of the Pac Bell Park incident. “[If he did get therapy,] it obviously didn’t do him any good. I guess what I’m worried about is whether the Mets really want him to be able to manage his anger. I think they encourage that in him. He was supposed to be intimidating on the mound, so I would think they wouldn’t want his mentality to change. The other team is supposed to fear him. That’s what a closer is about. He told me he was supposed to scare people. I told him not to scare me. Be intimidating at work but not at home. Be like an actor and leave it behind. He couldn’t do that. He was Armando the Intimidator all the time. That’s part of what he said made him successful.”

When asked about O’Neill’s description of his difficulty accepting failure, Benitez cuts off the question with a wave of his hand and says, “I don’t want to say anything bad about the woman. I wish her well. My mind is clear, and I am happy. All my troubles are gone.”

Benitez does say he appreciates the support of his teammates, especially that of bullpen mate John Franco, manager Bobby Valentine and equipment manager Charlie Samuels. With their assistance, he says, he is learning to recover quickly from defeat. “It’s tough because nobody likes to lose,” he says. “But the important thing is to forget about it and come back tomorrow.”

When asked how he puts bad games behind him now, Benitez says, “I sit around and watch cartoons to relax.”

Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ vice president of media relations, says O’Neill’s concern that the club facilitated Benitez’s anger “couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re concerned about Armando as a person first and as a ballplayer second. We don’t encourage being ‘on edge.’”

Benitez is 6′4″ and listed at 229 pounds. He is a large man with the shoulders of a linebacker and the scowl of a prison guard way too long on the job. He throws 96 mph worth of wicked fury on a pitching mound. The sensation of burying his heater past the best hitters in baseball to lock down a victory for New York—the fans standing, cheering and pleading, with the knowledge that he alone, not some scoreboard clock clicking off seconds, has the power to suck the last breath of life out of the opposition—that sensation has been known to make this bear of a man dance with joy like a pixie. He might quickly lift one knee, as if he had stepped barefoot on a hot sidewalk, or give a dismissive wave with his right hand. He knows that Franco, his mentor, hates it when he reacts like that (“Never give the other guy extra incentive to beat your ass,” Franco likes to tell him), but such is the overwhelming power of the moment.

After those triumphs O’Neill knew exactly what Benitez wanted to do first when he returned home in Queens, N.Y. Armando Benitez would click on the TV to surf for highlights, so he could watch Armando Benitez close the game all over again. “Almost like he had to see it again to believe it,” O’Neill says.

On the bad nights, when the crowd did not cheer and the bear did not dance, the television stayed off. O’Neill says that Benitez might pour himself a glass of Grand Marnier and retreat to another room in the apartment, his only companions the drink and a poisonous feeling he wanted to be rid of. Says O’Neill, whose three-year relationship with Benitez ended last November, “I feared for myself after a loss, because stupid things could send him over the edge.” After a succession of poor outings, O’Neill adds, Benitez might perform a Santerian ritual in which he would bathe by candlelight in a mixture of water, milk, alcohol, herbs and flowers to rid himself of bad luck.

Benitez did convert all nine of his save chances through the first 10 weeks of this season. But he has run into trouble in other situations, such as the one on May 28 when he yielded a home run to the Phillies’ Pat Burrell that broke a tie. Benitez refused to speak with the media after that game. Is he Hoffman or Rojas? It is too soon to know. This much is certain: There is only one active closer who saved even one game before 1991, the Cubs’ Tom Gordon.

“Closers have a short shelf life because it takes an awful lot out of you,” says Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti, who saved 252 games. “It’s the only job where you’re not allowed to go into a slump. Some guys can’t get over the bad games, and that’s why they don’t become full-time closers. Some guys put up a facade to protect themselves from the demons, but that usually doesn’t last long. If you don’t have the stomach for it, you’ll be discovered before too long. You just have to be mentally tough and shrug it off no matter how much it hurts.”

ONE NIGHT in 1978 Yankees catcher Thurman Munson waited for Rich Gossage on the mound at Yankee Stadium. Gossage had been summoned from the bullpen to save a game. He was in a terrible slump. This was his first season with New York after the club had signed him as a free agent, displacing the reigning Cy Young Award winner, Sparky Lyle, as the team’s closer. Yankees fans booed him. Things were going so badly for Gossage that when he reached the mound Munson said, “So, how are you going to blow this one?”

“I don’t know,” Gossage barked back. “Get your ass behind the plate, and we’ll find out.”

Gossage lasted 22 seasons in the big leagues, most of them as a closer, and rang up 310 saves. The closer “is only one pitch from disaster all the time,” he says. Like Benitez, he forged a gunslinger’s reputation with an imposing physical bearing and a fastball that looked as angry as he did.