by Roger Angell
“I know,” I said.
“Keep watching,” he said.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Making the Blue Jays took a little longer than Cerutti had expected, but when he was called up from Syracuse in the spring of 1986, it was noticed that he had his stuff together at last; he went 9–4 for the season, with a shutout along the way, and took up his place in the Toronto starting rotation. I was happy about the promotion (I had renewed acquaintance with him briefly a couple of times in the interim, mostly in Florida), and in June this summer I watched him work a game against the Yankees in New York one evening—watched him over the tube, I mean. It was a significant game for both clubs, since the Blue Jays were a half game up on the Yankees at the top of the American League East. There I was, with my dinner and a drink before me and with John Cerutti, big as life, up there on the screen, when several rusty synapses clicked on at last. “My God!” I cried. “It’s Guidry, too. It’s happened.”
I had blown our date, but Cerutti kept his, all right, beating the Yankees by 7–2, it turned out, to solidify his teams’s hold on first place. Not Cerutti’s plan exactly, but close enough. I considered rushing up to the stadium to catch the later innings, but I didn’t. I got there early the next evening, however, and at batting practice a couple of writer friends said, “You see John Cerutti? He was looking for you last night.”
He came in from the field at last—he had been doing his sprints out there—and found me in the dugout. “Hey,” he said cheerfully. “Where were you?”
“I blew it,” I said. “I’m sorry, John—I stood you up. I feel bad about it. Only you said it would be a Saturday.”
“Well, I looked for you,” he said. “Everyone else was here. I heard a couple of days ago that it might be me and the Gator, so I called my mom and she came down for it. In the end, I had to leave sixteen tickets for people from home. They knew how long I’d been waiting. It was all just the way I’d dreamed about it. In the first couple of innings, I kept thinking, Here I am, with my spikes on the same pitching rubber where Ron Guidry’s spikes were a minute ago. It was a thrill.”
“I know—I saw it at home,” I said miserably. “There’s no excuse, only well, you know…I didn’t believe it. Life isn’t like this.”
“I know,” he said. “But this is different.”
“This is baseball, you mean.”
“That’s right,” he said. “In baseball—well, stuff can happen.
*Quite right, and the job, it turned out, was managing the Orioles. Earl took up the reins again in midseason of 1985, and helped steer his old club to a second-place finish. The next year, however, everything went sour—most of all, the pitching—as the team slipped into the cellar of the American League East, and when it was over Earl stepped down for good. In retrospect, I think I should have known that the first retirement wouldn’t work. Earlier in 1982, I recall, I asked him in a casual sort of way if he was truly ready to leave—and in particular if he’d be able to stick to his promise to stay out of baseball altogether. Wasn’t it possible that he’d end up coaching a college team or even a high-school team somewhere, the way so many other retired skippers had done? “I hate kids and I hate fucking kid baseball!” he barked, startling us both into laughter. He wanted the real thing, nothing less.
In the Fire
— Winter 1984
CONSIDER THE CATCHER. BULKY, thought-burdened, unclean, he retrieves his cap and mask from the ground (where he has flung them, moments ago, in mid-crisis) and moves slowly again to his workplace. He whacks the cap against his leg, producing a puff of dust, and settles it in place, its bill astern, with an oddly feminine gesture and then, reversing the movement, pulls on the mask and firms it with a soldierly downward tug. Armored, he sinks into his squat, punches his mitt, and becomes wary, balanced, and ominous; his bare right hand rests casually on his thigh while he regards, through the portcullis, the field and deployed fielders, the batter, the base runner, his pitcher, and the state of the world, which he now, for a waiting instant, holds in sway. The hand dips between his thighs, semaphoring a plan, and all of us—players and umpires and we in the stands—lean imperceptibly closer, zoom-lensing to a focus, as the pitcher begins his motion and the catcher half rises and puts up his thick little target, tensing himself to deal with whatever comes next, to end what he has begun. These motions—or most of them, anyway—are repeated a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty times by each of the catchers in the course of a single game, and are the most familiar and the least noticed gestures in the myriad patterns of baseball. The catcher has more equipment and more attributes than players at the other positions. He must be large, brave, intelligent, alert, stolid, foresighted, resilient, fatherly, quick, efficient, intuitive, and impregnable. These scoutmaster traits are counterbalanced, however, by one additional entry—catching’s bottom line. Most of all, the catcher is invisible. He does more things and (except for the batter) more difficult things than anyone else on the field, yet our eyes and our full attention rest upon him only at the moment when he must stand alone, upright and unmoving, on the third-base side of home and prepare to deal simultaneously with the urgently flung or relayed incoming peg and the onthundering base runner—to handle the one with delicate precision and then, at once, the other violently and stubbornly, at whatever risk to himself. But that big play at home is relatively rare. Sometimes three or four games go by without its ever coming up, or coming to completion: the whole thing, the street accident—the slide and the catch, the crash and the tag and the flying bodies, with the peering ump holding back his signal until he determines that the ball has been held or knocked loose there in the dust, and then the wordless exchanged glances (“That all you got?”…“You think that hurt, man?”) between the slowly arising survivors. Even when the catcher has a play on the foul fly—whipping around from the plate and staring up until he locates the ball and then, with the mask flipped carefully behind him, out of harm’s way, following its ampersand rise and fall and poising himself for that crazy last little swerve—our eyes inevitably go to the ball at the final instant and thus mostly miss catch and catcher.
But this slight is as nothing compared to the anonymity we have carelessly given to our receiver in the other, and far more lengthy, interludes of the game. Because he faces outward—I think: none of this seems certain—and because all our anticipation of the events to come (in this most anticipatory of sports) centers on the wide green-sward before us and on its swift, distant defenders, our awareness of the catcher is glancing and distracted; it is as if he were another spectator, bent low in order not to spoil our view, and although at times he, too, must cover ground quickly, he is more often waiting and seemingly out of it, like the rest of us. We fear or dote upon the batter, depending on which side is up; we laugh at pitchers a little, because of their contortions, but gasp at their speed and stuff; we think of infielders as kids or terriers, and outfielders are gazelles or bombardiers or demigods; but catchers are not so easy to place in our imagination. Without quite intending it, we have probably always patronized them a little. How many of us, I wonder, have entirely forgotten “the tools of ignorance,” that old sports-page epithet for the catcher’s impedimenta (it was coined in the nineteen-twenties by Muddy Ruel, a catcher with the Senators, who practiced law in the off-season). And think for a moment of the way the umpire watches the catcher as he goes about his housekeeping there behind the plate. Sometimes the arbiter has actually picked up the man’s cap and mask from the ground during the play just previous, and now he hands them over with an odd, uncharacteristic touch of politeness. Both of these men wear shin guards and chest protectors and masks, and although theirs is mostly an adversary relationship, they crouch in identical postures, inches apart (some umpires actually rest one hand on the catcher’s back or shoulder as the pitch is delivered), and together engage in the dusty and exhausting business down behind the batter, living and scrounging on the hard corners of the sport. For one game, that
is. Tomorrow, the umpiring crew will rotate, as it does for each game, and the ump working behind home will be stationed out at third base—almost a day off for him—so that he can recover from such labors, but the same catcher most likely will still be down there bent double behind the batters. Here y’are, the ump’s courtly little gesture seems to say. You poor bastard.
I thought a lot about catchers during the long winter off-season that is just now drawing to a close, and found for the first time that I was able to envision a couple of them at work at their trade, in the same way that, like most fans, I can easily bring back the mannerisms of a favorite batter—George Brett, Lou Piniella, Mike Schmidt—as he steps into the box and prepares for the pitch, or the unique pause and stare and windup motion of some pitcher—Steve Carlton, Rick Sutcliffe, Fernando Valenzuela—whose work I know by heart. Suddenly, this winter, I could envision Rick Dempsey, the dandy midsize Oriole receiver, coming up onto the balls of his feet in the crouch after delivering a sign, with his orange-daubed glove inviting an out-side-corner pitch to the batter. A base runner flies away from first with the pitcher’s first move, and the delivery is low and away, a very tough chance, but Dempsey is already in motion, to his right and forward—“cheating,” in catchers’ parlance—and he seizes the pitch with the back of the mitt nearly touching the dirt and his bare right hand almost simultaneously plucking the ball from the pocket. The catch drives the glove backward, but because Dempsey has anticipated so well, the force and direction of the pitch are simply translated into the beginnings of his rising pivot and the upcocking of his arm for the peg—a line has become an upswooping circle—and he steps eagerly but unhurriedly across the plate to start the throw to second.
Finding Dempsey in my mind’s eye in January was not quite startling, since he played so well in the course of the Orioles’ five-game victory over the Phillies in the World Series last fall (he won the Most Valuable Player award for the classic, in which he batted .385, with five extra-base hits, and, even more important, was the prime receiver during the Baltimore pitching staffs 1.60-ERA stifling of the National League champs), but some other catchers turned up in my hot-stove reveries as well. Bob Boone, for instance. Boone, who is thirty-six, now catches for the Angels, after a decade of notable defensive work with the Phillies. He is six feet two—a large man, although there is nothing hulking or overmuscled about him—but his movements behind the plate are gliding and water-smooth. He sets up with his left foot flat and the right foot back an inch or two, with its heel up, and once the sign is delivered he tucks his right hand behind his thigh—almost standard stuff, but if you keep your eyes on him you begin to pick up the easy body movement that slips him imperceptibly into place behind each arriving pitch and the silky way the ball is taken into the glove, without haste or grabbing. If something goes wrong—a pitch bounced into the dirt off to his right, say—his motion toward the ball is quickly extended, with the whole body swinging in the same arc as the pitch: the right knee goes into the dirt, with the leg tucked along the ground, while the glove is dropped straight down to dam off the opening below the crotch. No attempt is made to catch the pitch—catchers are endlessly trained in this, since it contravenes all baseball instinct—and the ball is simply allowed to bounce off his body. Boone locates it on the ground (his mask has flown off, spun away by an upward flick of his hand) and only then looks up to check the base runner; if he’s going, the play is in front of him. It’s an anxious, scattery set of moves, or should be by rights, but Boone makes them seem controlled and confident, as if the mistake had been reversed and turned into something risky for the other team. Nothing in these classic maneuvers is unique to Boone, except for the thoughtful elegance of their execution; he helps you appreciate the work.
Talking to catchers is even more fun than watching them, as I discovered last season, when I began to sense how little I knew about their dusty trade and sought out a few of them for enlightenment. They were surprised to be asked, it turned out, and then they seemed eager to dispel some of the peculiar anonymity that has surrounded such a public occupation: if you want an earful, go to a man in a highly technical profession who feels he is unappreciated. My instructors—almost a dozen of them in the end—came in different sizes and ages and uniforms and degrees of experience, and they were almost a random sample. Inevitably, I missed some of the best-known practitioners (including the celebrated Johnny Bench, who retired after the 1983 season; Montreal’s Gary Carter, who is paid well over a million dollars per annum for his work and is perhaps the leading candidate to succeed Bench as the No. 1 catcher; Lance Parrish, of the Tigers; Jim Sundberg, late of the Texas Rangers and now of the Brewers; and the testy Jerry Grote, who is out of baseball and living in Texas, after winding up an extended career with the Mets and three other clubs, during which he was thought of as perhaps the best handler of pitchers around), but the catchers I did talk to were so voluble and expressive in their responses that I did not come away with the feeling that any major theorems of their profession were closed to me. Indeed, their replies were so long and meaty that I realized along the way that I simply wouldn’t have time to take up every aspect of catching with them—blocking the plate, for instance, or the nasty little problem of catching and holding the knuckleball and the spitter, or the business of learning an extraordinary physical stoicism that allows the man behind the plate to disregard or play through the daily bruises and batterings that come with the job (most regular catchers experience pain of one form or another, and in one or several places on their bodies, right through the season), or the relative importance of the pre-game strategic review of the other team’s hitters, or the business of veiling your signals from enemy base runners, or the prevalence of low tricks like surreptitiously nicking or scuffing the ball in aid of your pitcher, and more. These themes would have to wait for remedial sessions. Bob Boone told me at one point that he thought it took about three hundred major-league games for a catcher to feel comfortable back there, and I realized that the best I could hope for as an outsider was a glimpse at such a body of skills.
I talked to my informants separately, beginning with extended colloquies around battings cages and in dugouts and clubhouses during the leisurely 1983 spring term in Arizona and Florida, and then coming back for some short refreshers whenever I ran into one of them during the regular season. In time, these interviews ran together in my mind and seemed to turn into one extended, almost non-stop conversation about catching, with the tanned, knotty-armed participants together in the same room, or perhaps ranged comfortably about on the airy porch of some ancient summer hotel, interrupting each other, nodding in recollection, doubling back to some previous tip or topic, laughing together, or shouting in sudden dissent. But they grew more serious as they went along. One of the surprising things about the catchers’ catcher-talk, I realized after a while, was how abstract it often was. Old names and games, famous innings and one-liners and celebrated goofs seemed to drop out of their conversation as they got deeper into it, as if the burden of anecdote might distract them (and me) from a proper appraisal of then-hard calling. Everything about catching, I decided somewhere along the way, is harder than it looks.
Terry Kennedy, the twenty-seven-year-old receiver for the San Diego Padres, is six feet four and weighs two hundred and twenty pounds—almost too big for a catcher. He is prized for his bat and his durability—in the past two seasons he played in a hundred and fifty-three and a hundred and forty-nine games (very high figures for a catcher) and batted in ninety-seven and ninety-eight runs. At one time, there was some thought of moving him out to play first base, until a year ago, when the Padres acquired a fellow named Steve Garvey in the free-agent market. Now Kennedy must stay behind the plate and work on his quickness—work to become smaller, almost.
“Throwing is where mobility matters,” he told me in Phoenix one afternoon. “I’m learning to cheat a little back there, with men on base. Once I determine where the pitch is, I’m starting up. You have to do that, wi
th all the fast runners we’re seeing on the base paths. Coming up right is what throwing is all about. There’s a two-step or a one-step release. I start with a little jab-step with my right foot and go right forward. The important thing is to be true with that throw, so you try to keep your fingers on top of the ball. If they’re off to one side, the ball will banana on you”—sail or curve, that is—“as it goes out there. You can even throw a little from the side, as long as your fingers are on top.”
Kennedy’s home pro is Norm Sherry, the Padres’ pitching coach, who put in four years as a backup catcher with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Mets, sandwiched in the middle of sixteen seasons in the minors; he has managed at both levels (he was the Angels’ skipper for a term), but, with his dark glasses, his seamed and mahogany-tanned face, and his quick, thrusting way of talking, he suggests the quintessential infantry sergeant.
“Terry’s coming on and coming on,” Sherry told me. “It takes a long time to learn to call a game, but Terry was much more of a catcher in the second half of the season last year. He understood situations better. You can’t work on that kind of stuff in the spring, but I been pitching forty or fifty pitches to him every day—curves and fastballs and in the dirt—and he has to come up throwing. Young catchers today don’t have such good mechanics, because they all rely on this one-handed glove. If you take the pitch with one hand, you don’t have your throwin’ hand on the ball in good position when you start back. They look up and see the guy running and make any old kind of grab at the ball, and that’s where you get those errors. I try to get them to take the ball two-handed, and that also closes up the front shoulder, the way it should be to start your throw. So many of them are in a panic when they see somebody movin’ and they lose control of everything. Sometimes you see a man even knock his mask so it sort of half slides across his face. Then he can’t see anything, because he was in such a hurry. But if you just take that little half step in advance, you’ve done all the hurrying you need to do. You just have to stand up and take a good stride and throw it.