The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (153 page)

Niekro got up and pulled off his sweatshirt. He is trim and narrow, and his body doesn’t show his years. He is famous for never doing conditioning sprints, never running at all, and when I mentioned this he smiled and said, “I’ve never run the ball across the plate yet.” An old joke. “I stretch and I do just about ever’thing else,” he said, “but I don’t do weights. It’s just that much more muscle to tighten up when you’ve finished for the day. Maybe those big boys can throw the ball harder, but when the game’s over you see them iced down from their wrists to their hips. I never ice. Well, maybe I did about four times in my career, but I can’t exactly remember the last time. Maybe I’m getting old.”

Grumpy: Some of us were eating our cold-cuts lunch off paper plates in the Cardinals’ pressroom before a Cards-Blue Jays game in Al Lang Stadium, when I noticed that the small, snub-nosed man sitting next to me was Birdie Tebbetts, the old-time Tiger catcher; he also managed the Reds, the Braves, and the Indians. Tebbetts is seventy-four years old, and scouts for the Indians. He listened to our conversation about pitches and pitchers, and muttered, “Sometimes I watch one of these young pitchers we’ve got, and I tell my club, “This man needs another pitch. By which I mean a strike.’”

There is a lot to this game. as my trip began to run out, I realized how many aspects of pitching I hadn’t gone into yet, or hadn’t asked enough about—what it takes to break in as a major-league pitcher, and how great a part luck plays in the kind of pitching roster and the kind of club a rookie is headed for, for instance. Pete Rose said that it was often easier for a youngster to make it up to the majors in the middle of a season, if the chance came, because his control would be better than it was in the spring. What about bum steers—poor advice from a pitching coach, or the wrong advice for that particular pitcher? Charlie Leibrandt, a first-rate left-hander with the Royals, told me that the Cincinnati coaches had insisted that he was a power pitcher, a fastballer, when he tried to catch on with the Reds some years ago, because they were a team that specialized in big hard throwers. He had four scattered, so-so seasons with the team, then went back down to the minors, and when he came back, with the Royals, it was as a breaking-ball, control sort of pitcher, and he felt at home at last. “I remember being on the mound at Riverfront Stadium and hearing the ball popping over the sidelines while the relief pitchers warmed up to come in for me,” he said cheerfully. “I was about to be gone again, and somebody in the dugout would be yelling ‘Throw strikes!’ and I’d think, Oh,
strikes—so that’s
what you want! Why didn’t you say so?” I also wanted to talk with the Mets about how they bring along
their
young pitchers, because they seem to be so good at it. And someday I want to sit down with a first-class control pitcher and go over a video of a game he has just pitched, and make him tell me why he chose each pitch to each batter, in every situation, and how it related to what patterns he had thrown before that.

The business of strength came up a lot in my conversations, I noticed—which pitchers lasted, and why, and whether young pitchers today were in better shape than their predecessors twenty or thirty years ago. Almost everybody said yes, they
were
in better shape today, and probably stronger, too. Aerobics and weight work and a much better understanding of nutrition came into that, of course, and so did plain genetics; ballplayers are all noticeably bigger and taller than they used to be—you can see it. But I heard some interesting opinions to the contrary.

Jim Kaat, the deep-chested left-hander who pitched twenty-five years in the majors (he is one of the few players at any position who have performed in the big leagues in four calendar decades), told me that he’d been wondering about the decline of the fastball pitchers—the burners—and about why so many pitchers of his generation, like Gaylord Perry, Nolan Ryan, and Phil Niekro, had lasted so long. “One of my theories is that we did a lot of work by hand when we were kids,” he said. “Mowed the lawn, washed the car, shovelled snow, and walked. I used to walk everywhere.” (Kaat grew up in Zeeland, Michigan, on the western edge of the Michigan peninsula.) “Now you see kids who haven’t logged as many sandlot innings as I did, and when they come into baseball you don’t know how big they’re going to be. When I was eighteen, my body was developed.”

Mel Stottlemyre, the old Yankee wizard who is now the pitching coach for the Mets, said, “There’s no doubt that there are fewer good arms than there used to be. For one thing, a lot of young pitchers start throwing breaking balls when they’re too young, and they don’t develop their bodies the way they could have. That’s going to take a toll. I think there’s less plain throwing than there used to be—just throwing the ball back and forth with your neighbor or your brother. There are more things for kids to do now, so they end up not playing catch. You see kids in Little League who aren’t strong enough to pitch at all, hardly, and there they are, throwing breaking balls. There’s nothing I hate worse than to see a Little Leaguer with his arm in ice—but I’ve seen that a lot.” (Mel Stottlemyre’s twenty-one-year-old son Todd, by the way—or perhaps
not
by the way—is a pitcher with the Toronto organization; he is still a year or two away from the majors but is considered one of the great young prospects in the country.)

Other pitching people I talked to did not quite agree. Dave Duncan, the pitching coach for the Athletics, said, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t go along with that idea about the old days. Oh, young players and pitchers may have lost some of that sandlot toughness, but baseball is taught so much better now, with all that work on body strengthening and conditioning, that I think skill and muscular development are way ahead of what they were when I first came along.”

I put this question to Tex Hughson, the commanding old Red Sox righty of the nineteen-forties—he is seventy-one now, but still long and cowboy-lean; he used to raise quarter horses near San Marcos, Texas—and at first he went along with Duncan and that group. He was sure that young players at the college and minor-league levels were far stronger and better developed than they had been in his time. But then I mentioned what Jim Kaat had said—what I think of as the Walk-to-School Factor—and he did a turnabout. “Why, that’s so,” he said cheerfully. “Course it is. I walked to school every day—three miles on a gravel road in Kyle, Texas, throwin’ rocks the whole way. Maybe I picked up some control that way, and developed my arm. Chunked at everything. But if it was bad weather my mother would drive us in our old Model A Ford.” And I’d heard somewhere that Roger Clemens also walked three miles to school—it’s always three miles, never two or three and a half—when he was a kid.

I didn’t know what to think, but in time it came to me that, of course, it is mental toughness that matters most of all to a pitcher: nobody would disagree about that. I was strengthened in this conviction by a talk I had with Bob Ojeda, the left-hander picked up by the Mets in a trade with the Red Sox, who played such a sizable part in his team’s triumphs last summer and last fall. Ojeda is midsize and tightly put together. His uniform fits him perfectly—not a rumple or a wrinkle on the man or his clothes. He looks dry-cleaned.

When I asked how he would describe himself, he said that he was a man who had to work at his work—think ahead of the hitters, concentrate on control, and come inside on the batters. This last can be a long lesson for lefties at Fenway Park, where Ojeda first came to full command, because of its horribly proximate left-field wall. He told me that he had talked to Roger Craig over the winter (not about the split-finger, for Ojeda already possessed a peerless changeup, which he throws by choking the ball back in his hand), and Craig had said to him at one point, “You’re a
pitcher.”

“That meant a lot to me,” Bobby O. said. “If I hadn’t learned some things over the years, I wouldn’t be here. When I say I’m a pitcher, I’m thinking of guys like Mike Flanagan and Scott McGregor, of the Orioles. I always tried to watch how they worked, how they set up the hitters. Or Steve Carlton, if he was on TV. I remembered how they pitched in certain situations, how they changed from what they’d done before, because of what the game situation was—man on first, men on first and second, and the rest. To me, it doesn’t matter if you strike out ten guys in a game. But if you’ve got the bases loaded and nobody out, and then you get your first strikeout and then a ground ball, how big was that strikeout? That’s the kind of stat players notice. Tommy John sometimes gives up six, seven, eight hits in a game, but only one run, and that is the number that counts.”

I told Ojeda that his victory over the Astros in the second game of the playoffs had been the sort of game I enjoy most—a first-class ten-hitter—and he grinned. “That’s right—it was,” he said. “There are always days when every ground ball is going to find a hole. Days when you have to reach back a little. It all comes down to how many runs you give up. I look at the runs—not whether they’re earned or not. You look in the paper, and if you’ve lost it’ll say ‘Larry Ojeda.’” (“Larry” for “loser,” as in a line score or box score: “L: Ojeda.”) “A run is a run, and you try to prevent those. There’s
so
much strategy that goes into that. Each day is different. Each day, you’re a different pitcher. Consistency is the thing, even if it’s one of those scuffle days. When I’ve started, I’ve been very consistent, and that’s something I’m proud of. I led the league in quality starts last year—you know, pitching into the seventh inning while giving up three runs or less. That means something to me.”

He said that breaking into a new league, with unknown batters, hadn’t been especially difficult for him. “I was as new to them as they were to me,” he said. He doesn’t believe in extended studies of the opposing team’s batters before the game. “I see them up at bat—where they are in the box, how they stand—and it clicks into place: Oh, yeah—you’re
that
one. It’s the situation that matters more than the batter—there’s always the situation. Maybe this particular batter doesn’t like to pop people in—maybe he bats .300 but only has fifty runs batted in. Then, there are the guys who bat .260 unless there are men on base. Then they’re much, much tougher up at the plate. Those are the guys I respect.”

Like who, I asked, and Ojeda said, “I don’t want to name them—I don’t want to
think
about them—but I know who they are, and they know who they are. No, there really are some great, famous hitters that I don’t mind seeing up at bat in certain situations, because I know those are the situations they don’t like.”

Ojeda relishes being on a World Champion team. “I can’t get over what we did last fall,” he said seriously. “When you grow up in this sport, all you hear is people talking about what they’re going to do if they ever get into a World Series. But that’s just talk—we went out and did it. I like the chance to do things. It’s ‘This
happened,’
and then there’s no more talk. Back when I was a kid, I had those dreams of playing in a World Series someday, but so what? Every player in this clubhouse and every player in all the twenty-five other camps right now had those same dreams. But those other guys don’t know how they’d do, and we know. To get there
and then win it—
that’s the thing. Because who knows if you’ll ever have another shot? If I’d still been with the Red Sox—If you’d gotten there and then you didn’t win it, if you’d made some bad mistakes like some of their guys did—
major mistakes!
—and then you began to think you’d never get that chance back, because you’d never be there again…I don’t think I could stand that.”

Two days after this, I found myself in the visiting-team dugout at Al Lang Stadium, in St. Pete, where, surrounded by Pirates, I watched a steady downpour of rain and waited for the game to be called, as, indeed, it shortly was. I didn’t care, I decided. My trip was almost over and I was feeling a little baseballed out, and I was pretty sure there wasn’t much more about pitching that I could pick up on this particular afternoon. Sitting on the bench just to my left was Syd Thrift, the Pittsburgh general manager, and after a few moments’ conversation we simultaneously recalled that we had both been at Ypsilanti, Michigan, for a college doubleheader on an afternoon in May, 1976, and had watched Bob Owchinko pitch the first game for Eastern Michigan University, and Bob Welch, then a college junior, pitch the second. I had gone there in the company of a scout named Ray Scarborough, whom I was preparing to write an article about, and Thrift, a friend of Scarborough’s, was there scouting for the A’s.
“That
was a day!” Thrift said now, for both Owchinko and Welch, of course, had later matriculated as long-term major-league pitchers.

Thrift and I chatted about the Pirates a little, and then (he had been holding a baseball in his hands and turning it slowly this way and that) he said, “How many times do you think a ball rotates between the time it leaves a pitcher’s hand and the time it crosses the plate? A fastball, let’s say.”

I was startled, for Thrift could not have known that I had been thinking about pitches and pitchers all month.

“I have no idea,” I said. “A lot, I guess. Fifty rotations?”

“That’s what everybody thinks,” Thrift said with relish. “Everybody is way too high. It turns over only fourteen to sixteen times in that space, which is amazing, because your eyes tell you something quite different. We had no notion until we did those measurements back at the academy in about 1970. We had cameras set up, and on a background screen we marked off the distance from the mound to the plate into four fifteen-foot segments, but even then we couldn’t figure out those rotations until somebody came up with the idea of painting half the ball black. Then we could see it.”

I remembered now that Syd Thrift had been the founding director of the Kansas City Royals’ Baseball Academy, in Sarasota—a long-since-defunct institution where rookies could be trained in fundamentals, away from the pressure of making a particular team, and where the first time-motion studies of the sport were essayed. One of the academy’s significant experiments had been to make a precise definition of the proper lead off first for a good base-stealer, and to take stopwatch measurements of the time it took for him to make it down to second, in comparison with the optimum elapsed time between a pitcher’s release, the catcher’s reception of the pitch, and his best peg down to second base. These conclusions correctly predicted the arrival into the game of the ninety-to-a-hundred-stolen-base specialists—the Rickey Henderson-Tim Raines fliers of the nineteen-eighties.