Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (31 page)

Slumps can be all-consuming, affecting a hitter’s mood, appetite and behavior. Former Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill says that when he was in a slump, it “never really left me. It was what I thought about as I went to bed and the first thing when I got up in the morning.”

Says Devil Rays manager Lou Piniella, a former player notorious for his intensity, “When you’re in a slump, thank God for the invention of the watercooler.”

Slumps would awaken Piniella, a lifetime .291 hitter, in the middle of the night and, eventually, would rouse his wife too. Anita Piniella would hear yelling coming from downstairs and fear a burglar had entered the house. Instead she would find her frustrated husband swinging a bat in front of a mirror, talking to himself.

Hitting is an art with karmic overtones. Cold streaks are charged by the static of many disjointed thoughts. Hot streaks are marked by the absence of thought, or as the great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “How the hell are you going to think and hit at the same time?”

Like an artist visited by a muse, the hitter has an elusive relationship with the baseball goddess known as
Feel
. Explains Yankees centerfielder Bernie Williams, “You get the feeling that they can’t get you out. It’s something that seems to come from your inner being. You can’t wait for your next at bat. It’s like riding a wave, being right in the middle of a 50-foot swell and riding it all the way in to shore, and then you paddle back out and do it as long as you can. And then [the feeling’s] gone.”

The loss of that feeling, however, can have practical explanations. As Jones says, “When I’m not hitting, 95 percent of the time it’s something mechanical. So the key is to figure out what the mechanical flaw is. You get in the cage and try to work yourself out of it. The other five percent of the time, it’s mental. Every time you go to the plate, you feel like they’ve got 12 people out on the field, there are no holes, and you’re not going to get any hits.”

Jeter’s slump had mental
and
physical origins. As he pressed to get off to a good start, Jeter admits, his anxiety had him “jumping at the ball.” Rather than waiting for a pitch to get to him, especially an outside pitch, Jeter would lean forward in his haste to hit it, jerking his head instead of keeping it steady. He was particularly hard-pressed to hit fastballs, which he previously had feasted on. Last year, for instance, he batted .330 against fastballs from righthanders on the outer third of the plate, according to the scouting service Inside Edge. In his first 43 games this year, however, Jeter was hitless in 16 at bats decided by those same pitches. He struggled when hitting with two strikes (.127, versus .235 in 2003) even when he was ahead in the count (.250, versus .459). Furthermore, his “well-hit average”—Inside Edge’s category for hard-hit balls, regardless of whether they end up as base hits—dropped from .316 to .245.

“You’re trying so hard to get hits instead of just hitting the ball,” Jeter says. “But you can’t guide the ball. Your eyes are the key. When your head moves, your eyes move, and you don’t see the pitch as long. That’s why when you’re going good, the ball looks slower. You see it longer. Now I’m staying back, letting the ball get to me instead of trying to go out and get the ball.”

Moreover, Jeter sometimes caught himself guessing the type and location of the next pitch. “I’m no good when I look for pitches,” he says, “because if I look for something [and it comes close to that location], I’ll swing no matter what. Like if I’m looking inside, the pitch could be about to hit me and I’ll still swing at it.”

Before his 0-for-32 slide, Jeter had never gone more than 18 at bats without a hit. When he finally ended the drought with a leadoff home run against Barry Zito of the A’s on April 29, he said after the game, “It’s like a bad dream is over.” He added, “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.” Not long thereafter, he fell into a 1-for-26 funk.

“[It] never really changed much,” Giambi said about Jeter’s demeanor, “and that’s hard to do when it seems like nothing is going right. I remember in Boston he hit a couple of line drives to rightfield that would have been hits except Kevin Millar was playing a Little League rightfield. When you’re going bad, guys make plays on you that they’re not supposed to make.”

Says Jeter, “I never lose my confidence. It doesn’t mean I’m going to get hits, but I have my confidence all the time.”

According to New York manager Joe Torre, two of Jeter’s three hits—flared doubles—in his breakout game against Baltimore were typical slump breakers. “All of a sudden you realize you don’t have to hit it on the screws to get a hit,” says Torre, a lifetime .297 hitter. Jeter added three hits in each of the next two games, after which Torre observed, “He looks very confident up there now, and he’s got an edge to him. His body language says, ‘I know you’re going to challenge me,’ and he’s up for it.”

Says Piniella, who watched the Yankees shortstop go 5 for 15 last weekend against his Devil Rays, “Jeter can run, he hits the ball to all fields, and he can even bunt, so for a player like him to be in a prolonged slump is hard to imagine. But [it happens, and] it’s humbling because you can’t get away from it. It’s on the talk shows, it’s in the newspapers, it’s on TV, and pretty soon it’s larger than life. That’s when I tell my guys, ‘Look, your wife is still going to be there when you get home, your dog will still like you, and you’ll still drive the same car. Just relax and hit the ball.’”

One AL scout says, “Slumps become worse when guys try to do too much. Boone is an example. He’s trying to carry the club, and he’s expanding his strike zone. He’s swinging harder than I’ve ever seen him. He’s not recognizing sliders away—he’s just hacking up there. He’s lost at the plate right now.”

Stars such as Jeter, Delgado, Jones, Vidro, Boone and Green still have more than two thirds of the season left to approach their typical numbers. In 1941, for instance, Joe DiMaggio had been mired in one of the worst slumps of his career—a 20-game stretch over April and May in which he hit .184—when on May 15 he singled off White Sox lefthander Eddie Smith in the first inning. It was the start of his 56-game hitting streak, and he finished the year batting .357.

“People kept asking me if I was worried about Derek,” Yankees G.M. Brian Cashman says. “My answer was always the same: No. Because if you look at late May every year, there are a couple of stars struggling to get out of the gate. And by the end of the year their numbers are there regardless. They’ve proven themselves over time, so you don’t worry. It just happened to be Derek’s turn this year. Next year? It’ll be somebody else’s turn.”

Postscript: Jeter started crushing the baseball as soon as I began reporting this story. Most players suffer through painful stretches during which their confidence is shaken, but Jeter is one of the rare players I’ve met—Roger Clemens is another—who never succumbs to such doubts. Jeter finished that 2004 season with a .292 batting average.

AUGUST 8, 2004

As remarkable as it is to win 300 games, Greg Maddux’s real feat
has been to thrive as a finesse pitcher in a power era

T
HE MASTER LEARNED TO PITCH WITH A VOICE IN HIS EAR
. It was the voice of a man who would be dead inside of two years. That would be enough time though—this brief convergence of skinny kid and wise old muse—to engender what may be the most sophisticated evolution of the art of pitching ever witnessed.

“First pitch, fastball in,” the voice said.

Greg Maddux was 15 years old when he heard that. The batter was Marty Barrett, a 23-year-old minor leaguer headed for a 10-year career in the bigs. The voice belonged to Ralph Medar, a former scout who assembled pickup baseball games every Sunday at nine in the morning in Maddux’s hometown of Las Vegas. The good ballplayers somehow always knew about the games, the same way basketball players know when and on which court to find the best neighborhood run. See you at Medar’s, they’d say. Medar would stand behind the pitchers and give instruction. Maddux listened to the voice. The kid threw a fastball in. Barrett pounced on it, sending a double screaming out to leftfield.

The next inning Barrett stepped in again. (The games almost never drew enough players for nine to a side.)

“First pitch, breaking ball,” came the voice.

The kid broke a decent curve over the plate. The pro took it for a strike.

“O.K. Now, fastball in.”

Maddux threw it. This time the barrel of Barrett’s bat was not so quick. He connected, only not as solidly. The same pitch, but this time cleverly set up by slow stuff, produced a lazy fly ball to centerfield.

Oh, O.K., the kid said to himself. Now I get it.

VAN GOGH had the south of France, Hemingway the battlefields and bullrings of Europe. Maddux had Medar’s. The genius of the 22nd, and perhaps last, 300-game winner in the major leagues was inspired by the old man’s voice. “Kid,” the sage said, “you throw hard enough to get drafted. But movement is more important than velocity.”

“I believed it,” says Maddux, now 38 years old and in his 19th big league season. “I don’t know why. I just did.”

How do you explain it? The kid heard it, and he believed it, the way a seminarian hears with clarity the call of God in a noisy, profane world. He was born to this calling. The other kids, muscles growing and hormones flowing, wanted to throw baseballs through brick walls, and the other coaches kept imploring them, “Throw strikes!” But the old man would say, “Bounce a curveball in the dirt here,” and the kid would understand the intended subterfuge. It didn’t hurt, either, that when the kid threw a baseball with his right index and middle fingers atop the seams, the ball darted and sank with preternatural movement.

“God gave it to him, I guess,” says Cubs bench coach Dick Pole, who worked with Maddux as far back as 1987, when the Cubs righthander was in his first stint with the team. “It’s always moved like that.”

Maddux is sitting in the visitors’ dugout at Miller Park in Milwaukee the day after career victory 299, a 7–1 win over the Brewers in which he’d given up four hits and one run in six innings. Only three 300-game winners have ever had better control, as measured by walks per nine innings, than Maddux (1.90): Cy Young (1.49), Christy Mathewson (1.59) and Grover Cleveland Alexander (1.65). All of them were done by 1930. Only two pitchers, Lefty Grove and Walter Johnson, ever won this many games with a relative ERA (that is, ERA measured against his contemporaries’) better than Maddux’s 28.2% differential. Grove’s ERA was 33.2% better than his peers’, and Johnson’s was 30.8% better. Both of those pitchers were finished by 1941. Maddux is, to most of us, unlike anyone else we’ve ever seen.

Once Maddux nails down number 300, only he and Roger Clemens will have survived maple bats, billiard-hard baseballs, steroid-juiced lineups, a construction boom of hitter-friendly ballparks and a laser-guided tightening of the strike zone—in short, the greatest extended run of slugging the game has known—to reach that milestone. Clemens did so with the sledgehammer of a mid-to upper-90s fastball. Maddux has needed stealth and intellect. A beautiful mind, but with a killer changeup.

So expertly has Maddux mastered the subtleties of pitching that he has become an iconic presence. What Ripken is to durability and Ruth is to power, Maddux is to finesse, forever the measuring stick for the few who might follow in his path. “It’s amazing,” Pole says of the Maddux-Medar relationship, “to think what came about when those two people collided. Right time, right place.”

Maddux still hears the voice of the old man when he pitches, only the voice long ago became so familiar that it now sounds the same as his own. These are the commandments of pitching that he hears:

1) Make the balls look like strikes and the strikes look like balls.

2) Movement and location trump velocity every time.

3) When you’re in trouble, think softer. Don’t throw harder; locate better.

4) Have fun.

His physical gifts fading, Maddux must work harder than ever to obey those commandments. All except the last one, anyway.