The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (124 page)

“Relief pitchers like to pitch—that’s what we all have in common. We’re banded together in that small environment, and then the call comes and we’re catapulted out into the screaming masses. It feels good to start thinking and getting ready to pitch. Then you run in—past the umpires and the in-fielders. That’s when I feel absolutely the best—the moment when I’m back in there, into things, in a close game. Until that happens, you’re not really part of the game. You’re not part of anything.”

Dan Quisenberry and I were sitting in the March sunshine at Terry Park, the Royals’ spring-training camp, in Fort Myers, Florida. It was early in the day, before the morning calisthenics and the first batting-practice pitches, and there was an easy, beginning-of-things taste to the place and the time of day and the part of the year we were in. This was the first of several meetings I had with him during this baseball year—one-inning or two-inning talks, so to speak, almost like his own forays into the game—during which I hoped to get a clearer idea of his difficult profession. It was pleasant work, it turned out. Quisenberry’s face is open and untroubled, and he speaks in a cheerful, self-deprecating fashion that seems to preclude silences or hesitancies on either side of a conversation. On this day, he was wearing his white, home-uniform pants, royal-blue spikes, and a pale-blue T-shirt. Up close, he seemed bigger than I had expected (he is six feet two and weighs a hundred and eighty pounds). He was thin but not frail, and although he is thirty-two his upper body somehow looked as if it might have grown an inch or two overnight, like a teen-ager’s. It was late in the spring preseason, but his naturally pale skin didn’t show much of a tan; it was more like a glow, and the hairs on his forearms were an odd, yellow-gold color. There was a dab of chewing tobacco tucked in the middle of his lower lip.

“Most relief pitchers are pretty aggressive,” Quis said a bit later. “They want to get a lot of attention, and you can see some of them getting psyched up out there on the mound. Gossage gets psyched. Al Holland gets psyched. There are guys who—you know, jump around and raise their fists and all. But there’s such a thing as a casual aggressiveness, too. Sutter and Rollie Fingers are more calm. They’re cool under pressure, and you can see them figuring things out out there.”

I asked him if he thought Sutter and Fingers were better at their profession than he was, and he said, “Yes, they’re the best. They’ve done it longer. It’s nice to have a couple of good years and good stats and all, but the great ones are the ones who get it up year after year after year. But sometimes I see them getting roughed up, too, and suddenly giving up three or four runs in a game, and I think, Boy,
they
can do that, too—it can happen to them, just like it happens to me! Being a relief pitcher is such a roller-coaster sort of thing. You’re either a hero or the exact opposite, depending on what just happened. Everybody’s coming down on your head, or else you’re almost a religious icon if you’ve won. Neither reaction is totally accurate. If things go wrong, I think you always feel bad. You’ve failed the starting pitcher and let down your teammates, who have played two hours to get that lead, not to speak of your family and the fans who live and die with you every day. But somehow we can deal with that—which isn’t to say there isn’t a kind of a stab about taking a loss. I think short-relief people are always anxious for the next thing. We know we’re always about to get another chance. We’ll be back out there the very next day, most times, while the starting pitcher has to wait four or five days before he gets back in there, and the long reliever or fifth starter might have to wait
ten
days. There are different kinds of strain. The starting pitcher has to get the same guys out there or four times in a night, which I don’t, but then he doesn’t need any mental toughness for the next four days. I think I’d hate that.”

I asked him if he ever felt overmatched in a game, or oppressed by the fact that he always had to work in difficulties, a perpetual underdog.

“Well, I was a fan of the Braves and the Orioles when I was growing up, in the early sixties, and after that, of course, I was for the early Mets, like everyone else,” he said. “I always liked Tony Cloninger, who wasn’t all that good a pitcher. So I guess I identified with underdogs. I still prefer the underdog position, but with my numbers it’s harder and harder for me to feel that way. Sometimes I think I
should
be the underdog, because I’m a major-league pitcher with very few resources. I just don’t match up physically with the real athletes in the league. I can know these things, but when I’m on the mound I forget all that, and there are some days when I know I’m being effective. Now it’s more like playing King of the Hill. I’m not supposed to lose in a save situation,
ever,
and there’s a weight that comes with that, with trying to be the best. But there gets to be a kind of an appetite about getting saves. It almost can’t be fulfilled—you want that ‘S’ after your name, you want to maintain that level.”

Some short-relief specialists prefer to come into a game at the beginning of the eighth or ninth inning, instead of a bit later, when there are men on base and more trouble at hand; Goose Gossage, for instance, always liked the full-inning option when he was with the Yankees, and fretted because his last Yankee manager, Billy Martin, did not often oblige him. I asked Quisenberry how he felt about this, and he told me that he had no preference at all. He said it in such an uncharacteristically vehement way that I thought at first I had misunderstood him. There was a gang mower working up and down the outfield lawn near us at that moment, and I repeated the question in a louder voice; just then the machine cut off suddenly and my words came out in a shout, and we laughed together.

“I have no preference,” Quis went on, more peaceably. “I think I’m going to pitch every night, and I like the uncertainty of that. It doesn’t matter to me if I come in to start an inning or with the bases loaded, and it doesn’t matter to me who’s up at bat. I don’t have any choice, so it doesn’t matter. If I had a choice, I’d say bring up your Class A team and I’ll pitch to
them.
I also don’t like it if my manager or my pitching coach asks me if I want an inning tonight, just to get my work in, or asks me if I’m tired after a lot of appearances in a row and might want the night off. My answer is that I want to be told what to do. I want to pitch when you need me.”

It took me a while before I quite saw the elegance and usefulness of this attitude. Relief pitchers, of course, deal almost exclusively with dire straits: it comes with the country. If they start to worry about this, if they think about worst-case or best-case situations or which hitters they’d rather not pitch to in a jam, they have made matters infinitely harder for themselves. Quis had simply turned off that kind of anxiety; it had ceased to exist for him. He is good at this—it is almost as much a part of his repertoire as his sinkerball. “When I’m away from the park or at home, I try not to think about my work at all,” he told me on another occasion. “This job would be a killer if you couldn’t do that. There’s plenty of time for me to worry from the sixth inning on.”

One finger down, by ancient tradition, is the catcher’s signal for a fastball, but whoever is catching Dan Quisenberry knows that one finger means the sinker. Quis doesn’t
have
a fastball. For the sinker, he holds the ball with the seams and tries to throw without undue stress or snap; it arrives at about seventy-eight or eighty m.p.h. and, ideally, executes a small hip swerve as it crosses the plate. Quisenberry likes to give the impression that he has nothing much to do with the action of the pitch or its results. “I’ve always felt that when I throw it something wonderful is going to happen—something good for us,” he said to me once. On another day, he suddenly asked, “Have I ever told you about my agreement with the ball?” I said no, and he said, “Well, our deal is that I’m not going to throw you very hard as long as you promise to move around when you get near the plate, because
I want you back.
So if you do your part we’ll get to play some more.” He watched my reaction to this with considerable relish, and then elaborated in less Oz-like fashion. “I’ve got good control and some movement, but there are guys around with better sinkers than mine. Greg Minton is one. Jim Acker, who’s with Toronto. Bob Stanley. Mine is generally around the plate and low. You can’t start it out at the batter’s knees, because if you do it’s a ball. If you want it inside on a right-hander, you kind of throw it over the middle a little and let it run in—hopefully
down
and in. If it’s going to be outside to a left-hander, you’re throwing it to the outer half—the outer half of the plate to him, that is—and it’s supposed to go down and away. If you want it inside to him, you throw it off the plate, and it’s meant to run back over. But of course if the ball doesn’t do its job, if it starts dancing all over the place-well, then it’s going to get hurt.”

Even when it is doing its job, the Quisenberry sinker is apt to have adventures. He gives up something on the order of one hit per inning, and a lot of his outs come on hard-hit balls that seem to be hit right at one of his infielders. “Magical things keep happening behind me,” Quis often says, and he points out that the Kansas City second baseman, Frank White, has extraordinary range and hands, and that White’s two partners at shortstop in recent years—first U.L. Washington and now Onix Concepcion—are scarcely less talented. The infield at Royals Stadium is AstroTurf, which should be a considerable handicap for a man who throws so many ground balls, but his defense makes up for that, it seems. George Brett, the Royals third baseman, told me that when the team won a pennant in 1980 Quisenberry’s infielders ragged him with references to his “30–30–30 Club”—thirty saves, thirty strikeouts, and thirty great plays made behind him. “He’s a comfortable guy to bat against,” Brett said. “Guys go up there looking to hit the ball. He’s like Scott McGregor, of the Orioles. You feel good batting against him, every time, and at the end of the game you realize you’ve gone oh-for-four—a
comfortable
oh-for-four.”

Quisenberry, in any case, has some other pitches, and he has worked incessantly to widen his repertoire. It took him until 1982 to develop an effective breaking ball, and last year he came up with a changeup that he at last felt confident about. He tinkered with a forkball for a time but had to junk it. When the Royals made a barnstorming visit to Japan at the end of the 1981 season, Quisenberry mastered the knuckleball—a nasty shock for American League batters the following summer. But the knuckler doesn’t quite work for him anymore, for some reason. “If the knuckleball was my wife, I’d divorce her,” Quis said. “She’s not consistent, she’s not reliable—I just can’t depend on her at all. I can throw it great in warmups or playing catch, but in a game now I just use it to show the batters that it’s there. If it’s done right, it’s the most fun pitch to throw in the world. The good knuckleball pitchers throw it just about all the time. With them, it’s a stronger relationship. I think I’m just about out of new pitches. I can work on locations and different speeds, but there isn’t much more I can think of. I wish I could throw the overhand curveball. Wouldn’t
that
be a surprise!”

Back at Terry Park, Quisenberry had told me about his conversion into a submariner, which came about on that very field in the spring of 1980. He had been called up from Omaha in the middle of the previous season, at a time when the Royals were desperate for any kind of a middle-innings relief man who could get people out; he was far from their first choice for the job, but he stuck on, and even accounted for five saves; mostly, he was the setup man for Al Hrabosky, who was then the club’s short-relief honcho. Quisenberry was a standup sidearm pitcher then, with virtually no breaking ball. Jim Frey succeeded Whitey Herzog as the Kansas City skipper the next spring, and early in the training schedule Quisenberry had a very bad outing against the Pirates. After the game, Frey asked him to throw for him on the sidelines, to see what he had. After about fifteen pitches, Frey began saying things like “Are you throwing as hard as you can?” and “Is
that
the way you throw your breaking ball?” and Quis concluded that there might be a quick turnaround just ahead in his career. A day or two later, Frey told him that he’d set up a sidelines appointment for him with Kent Tekulve, the great Pittsburgh submariner, when the Pirates next came down from Bradenton to play.

“I thought he was just going to give me a few pointers,” Quisenberry said, “but when the day came Jim said to Tekulve, ‘We want this guy to be like you. He throws a little like you already, but basically he doesn’t have shit.’ So it was a total makeover. Tekulve showed me there were three basics to the motion, which were: sit on your back leg, bend at the waist, and, most important, extend the left leg—my front leg—way beyond the normal point out ahead. He told me to open up about six or eight inches beyond what’s normal, coming right at the plate with the leg, and not to put that foot out heel-down at first, which is your natural instinct. This opens your body up a whole lot more, and it lets you stay low and keeps your arm low. If I don’t get way out there and do that, I land
here”—
Quis was on his feet now—“with this front leg locked, and I start and end standing up, throwing the old sidearm way. I’ve always got to fight that. It’s a battle for me, in spring training and all through the season, because when the ball comes up, the way it wants to, I’ve got nothing. Staying down like that is a strange feeling when you first try it, because you’re totally off balance and you keep thinking you’re going to fall over sideways. If I don’t make this little hop at the end of the motion, I
do
fall over.

“Well, I didn’t like this at all. Frey and a lot of our coaches were watching, and I was throwing all over the place and bouncing the ball before it got to the plate. Teke kept saying, ‘Hey, that’s a good pitch, that’s the way to throw,’ and I’m thinkin’, I have no
idea
what I’m doing. But Jim liked it, and two days later he put me in another game—it was against the Pirates again, but Tekulve wasn’t here—and I did real well. I was on my way.”