The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (68 page)

On September 6, the Pirate front office announced that Danny Murtaugh, who had served two previous terms as the Pirates’ manager, was replacing Bill Virdon at the helm; the Pirates were caught up in a close, four-team division race, and it was felt that Murtaugh’s experience might bring them home. One of Murtaugh’s first acts was to announce that Steve Blass would be given a start. The game he picked was against the Cubs, in Chicago, on September 11. Blass, who had not pitched in six weeks, was extremely anxious about this test; he walked the streets of Chicago on the night before the game, and could not get to sleep until after five in the morning. The game went well for him. The Cubs won, 2–0, but Steve gave up only two hits and one earned run in the five innings he worked. He pitched with extreme care, throwing mostly sliders. He had another pretty good outing against the Cardinals, for no decision, and then started against the Mets, in New York, on September 21, but got only two men out, giving up four instant runs on a walk and four hits. The Mets won, 10–2, dropping the Pirates out of first place, but Blass, although unhappy about his showing, found some hope in the fact that he had at least been able to get the ball over the plate. “At that point,” he said, “I was looking for even a little bit of success—one good inning, a few real fastballs, anything to hold on to that might halt my negative momentum. I wanted to feel I had at least got things turned around and facing in the right direction.”

The Mets game was his last of the year. His statistics for the 1973 season were three wins and nine defeats, and an earned-run average of 9.81. That figure and his record of eighty-four walks in eighty-nine innings pitched were the worst in the National League.

I went to another ball game with Steve Blass on the night after the Little League affair—this time at Three Rivers Stadium, where the Pirates were meeting the Cardinals. We sat behind home plate, down near the screen, and during the first few innings a lot of young fans came clustering down the aisle to get Steve’s autograph. People in the sections near us kept calling and waving to him. “Everybody has been great to me, all through this thing,” Blass said. “I don’t think there are too many here who are thinking, ‘Look, there’s the wild man.’ I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of letters—I don’t know how many—and not one of them was down on me.”

In the game, Bob Gibson pitched against the Pirates’ Jerry Reuss. When Ted Simmons stood in for the visitors, Blass said, “He’s always hit me pretty good. He’s really developed as a hitter.” Then there was an error by Richie Hebner, at third, on a grounder hit by Ken Reitz, and Blass said, “Did you notice the batter take that big swing and then hit it off his hands? It was the swing that put Richie back on his heels like that.” Later on, Richie Zisk hit a homer off Gibson, on a three-and-two count, and Blass murmured, “The high slider is one of
the
hittable pitches when it isn’t just right. I should know.”

The game rushed along, as games always do when Gibson is pitching. “You know,” Blass said, “before we faced him we’d always have a team meeting and we’d say, ‘Stay out of the batter’s box, clean your spikes—anything to make him slow up.’ But it never lasted more than an inning or two. He makes you play his game.”

A little later, however, Willie Stargell hit a homer, and then Manny Sanguillen drove in another run with a double off the left-field wall (
“Get
out of here!” Steve said while the ball was in flight), and it was clear that this was not to be a Gibson night. Blass was enjoying himself, and it seemed to me that the familiarities and surprises of the game had restored something in him. At one point, he leaned forward a little and peered into the Pirate dugout and murmured, “Is Dock Ellis over in his regular corner there?” but for the most part he kept his eyes on the field. I tried to imagine what it felt like for him not to be down in the dugout.

I had talked that day to a number of Blass’s old teammates, and all of them had mentioned his cheerfulness and his jokes, and what they had meant to the team over the years. “Steve’s humor in the clubhouse was unmatched,” relief pitcher Dave Giusti said. “He was a terrific mimic. Perfect. He could do Robert Kennedy. He could do Manny Sanguillen. He could do Roberto Clemente—not just the way he moved but the way he talked. Clemente loved it. He could do rat sounds—the noise a rat makes running. Lots of other stuff. It all made for looseness and togetherness. Because of Steve, the clubhouse was never completely silent, even after a loss.” Another Pirate said, “Steve was about ninety percent of the good feeling on this club. He was always up, always agitating. If a player made a mistake, Steve knew how to say something about it that would let the guy know it was OK. Especially the young guys—he really understood them, and they put their confidence in him because of that. He picked us all up. Of course, there was a hell of a lot less of that from him in the last couple of years. We sure missed it.”

For the final three innings of the game, Blass and I moved upstairs to general manager Joe Brown’s box. Steve was startled by the unfamiliar view. “Hey, you can really see how it works from here, can’t you?” he said. “Down there, you’ve got to look at it all in pieces. No wonder it’s so hard to play this game right.”

In the Pirates’ seventh, Bill Robinson pinch-hit for Ed Kirkpatrick, and Blass said, “Well,
that
still makes me wince a little.” It was a moment or two before I realized that Robinson was wearing Blass’s old uniform number. Robinson fanned, and Blass said, “Same old twenty-eight.”

The Pirates won easily, 5–0, with Jerry Reuss going all the way for the shutout, and just before the end Steve said, “I always had trouble sleeping after pitching a real good game. And if we were home, I’d get up about seven in the morning, before anybody else was up, and go downstairs and make myself a cup of coffee, and then I’d get the newspaper and open it to the sports section and just—just soak it all in.”

We thanked Joe Brown and said good night, and as we went down in the elevator I asked Steve Blass if he wanted to stop off in the clubhouse for a minute and see his old friends. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, I couldn’t do that.”

After the end of the 1973 season, Blass joined the Pirates’ team in the Florida Instructional League (an autumn institution that exists mostly to permit the clubs to look over their prime minor-league prospects), where he worked intensively with a longtime pitching coach, Don Osborn, and appeared in three games. He came home feeling a little hopeful (he was almost living on such minimal nourishments), but when he forced himself to think about it he had to admit that he had been too tense to throw the fastball much, even against rookies. Then, in late February, 1974, Blass reported to Bradenton with the other Pirate pitchers and catchers. “We have a custom in the early spring that calls for all the pitchers to throw five minutes of batting practice every day,” he told me. “This is before the rest of the squad arrives, you understand, so you’re just pitching to the other pitchers. Well, the day before that first workout I woke up at four-thirty in the morning. I was so worried that I couldn’t get back to sleep—and all this was just over going out and throwing to
pitchers.
I don’t remember what happened that first day, but I went out there very tense and anxious every time. As you can imagine, there’s very little good work or improvement you can do under those circumstances.”

The training period made it clear that nothing had altered with him (he walked twenty-five men in fourteen innings in exhibition play), and when the club went north he was left in Bradenton for further work. He joined the team in Chicago on April 16, and entered a game against the Cubs the next afternoon, taking over in the fourth inning, with the Pirates down by 10–4. He pitched five innings, and gave up eight runs (three of them unearned), five hits, and seven bases on balls. The Cubs batted around against him in the first inning he pitched, and in the sixth he gave up back-to-back home runs. His statistics for the game, including an ERA of 9.00, were also his major-league figures for the year, because late in April the Pirates sent him down to the Charleston (West Virginia) Charlies, their farm team in the Class AAA International League. Blass did not argue about the decision; in fact, as a veteran with more than eight years’ service in the majors, he had to agree to the demotion before the parent club could send him down. He felt that the Pirates and Joe Brown had been extraordinarily patient and sympathetic in dealing with a baffling and apparently irremediable problem. They had also been generous, refusing to cut his salary by the full twenty percent permissible in extending a major-league contract. (His pay, which had been ninety thousand dollars in 1973, was cut to seventy-five thousand for the next season, and then to sixty-three thousand this spring.) In any case, Blass wanted to go. He needed continuous game experience if he was ever to break out of it, and he knew he no longer belonged with a big-league club.

The distance between the minors and the majors, always measurable in light-years, is probably greater today than ever before, and for a man making the leap in the wrong direction the feeling must be sickening. Blass tries to pass off the experience lightly (he is apparently incapable of self-pity), but one can guess what must have been required of him to summon up even a scrap of the kind of hope and aggressive self-confidence that are prerequisites, at every level, of a successful athletic performance. He and Karen rented an apartment in Charleston, and the whole family moved down when the school year ended; David and Chris enjoyed the informal atmosphere around the ball park, where they were permitted to shag flies in batting practice. “It wasn’t so bad,” Blass told me.

But it was. The manager of the Charlies, Steve Demeter, put Blass in the regular starting rotation, but he fared no better against minor-leaguers than he had in the big time. In a very brief time, his earned-run average and his bases-on-balls record were the worst in the league. Blass got along well with his teammates, but there were other problems. The mystery of Steve Blass’s decline was old stuff by now in most big-league-city newspapers, but as soon as he was sent down, there was a fresh wave of attention from the national press and the networks; and sportswriters for newspapers in Memphis and Rochester and Richmond and the other International League cities looked on his arrival in town as a God-given feature story. Invariably, they asked him how much money he was earning as a player; then they asked if he thought he was worth it.

The Charlies did a lot of traveling by bus. One day, the team made an eight-hour trip from Charleston to Toledo, where they played a night game. At eleven that same night, they reboarded the bus and drove to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for their next date, arriving at about nine in the morning. Blass had started the game in Toledo, and he was so disgusted with his performance that he got back on the bus without having showered or taken off his uniform. “We’d stop at an all-night restaurant every now and then, and I’d walk in with a two-day beard and my old Charleston Charlies uniform on, looking like go-to-hell,” Blass said. “It was pretty funny to see people looking at me. I had some books along, and we had plenty of wine and beer on the bus, so the time went by somehow.” He paused and then shook his head.
“God,
that was an awful trip,” he said.

By early August, Blass’s record with Charleston was two and nine, and 9.74. He had had enough. With Joe Brown’s permission, he left the Charlies and flew West to consult Dr. Bill Harrison, of Davis, California. Dr. Harrison is an optometrist who has helped develop a system of “optome-therapy,” designed to encourage athletes to concentrate on the immediate physical task at hand—hitting a ball, throwing a strike—by visualizing the act in advance; his firm was once retained by the Kansas City Royals baseball team, and his patients have included a number of professional golfers and football players. Blass spent four days with him, and then rejoined the Pirates, this time as a batting-practice pitcher. He says now that he was very interested in Dr. Harrison’s theories but that they just didn’t seem to help him much.

In truth, nothing helped. Blass knew that his case was desperate. He was almost alone now with his problem—a baseball castaway—and he had reached the point where he was willing to try practically anything. Under the guidance of pitching coach Don Osborn, he attempted some unusual experiments. He tried pitching from the outfield, with the sweeping motion of a fielder making a long peg. He tried pitching while kneeling on the mound. He tried pitching with his left foot tucked up behind his right knee until the last possible second of his delivery. Slow-motion films of his delivery were studied and compared with films taken during some of his best games of the past; much of his motion, it was noticed, seemed extraneous, but he had thrown exactly the same way at his peak. Blass went back and corrected minute details, to no avail.

The frustrating, bewildering part of it all was that while working alone with a catcher Blass continued to throw as well as he ever had; his fastball was alive, and his slider and curve shaved the corners of the plate. But the moment a batter stood in against him he became a different pitcher, especially when throwing a fastball—a pitcher apparently afraid of seriously injuring somebody. As a result, he was of very little use to the Pirates even in batting practice.

Don Osborn, a gentle man in his mid-sixties, says, “Steve’s problem was mental. He had mechanical difficulties, with some underlying mental cause. I don’t think anybody will ever understand his decline. We tried everything—I didn’t know anything else to do. I feel real bad about it. Steve had a lot of guts to stay out there as long as he did. You know, old men don’t dream much, but just the other night I had this dream that Steve Blass was all over his troubles and could pitch again. I said, ‘He’s ready, we can use him!’ Funny …”

It was probably at this time that Blass consulted a psychiatrist. He does not talk about it—in part out of a natural reticence but also because the Pirate front office, in an effort to protect his privacy, turned away inquiries into this area by Pittsburgh writers and persistently refused to comment on whether any such therapy was undertaken. It is clear, however, that Blass does not believe he gained any profound insights into possible unconscious causes of his difficulties. Earlier in the same summer, he also experimented briefly with transcendental meditation. He entered the program at the suggestion of Joe Brown, who also enrolled Dave Giusti, Willie Stargell, pitcher Bruce Kison, and himself in the group. Blass repeated mantras and meditated twice a day for about two months; he found that it relaxed him, but it did not seem to have much application to his pitching. Innumerable other remedies were proposed by friends and strangers. Like anyone in hard straits, he was deluged with unsolicited therapies, overnight cures, naturopathies, exorcisms, theologies, and amulets, many of which arrived by mail. Blass refuses to make jokes about these nostrums. “Anyone who takes the trouble to write a man who is suffering deserves to be thanked,” he told me.