by Roger Angell
Quisenberry pitched in two of the three games I saw the Royals play against the Angels out in Kansas City, and picked up a win and a save in the process. In the Friday-night game, an almost interminable fourteen-inning affair, he came on in the twelfth, with the score tied at 3–3, and retired the side without incident. Doug DeCinces led off the top of the thirteenth for the Angels with a slick bunt—a base hit—and moved along to second on Daryl Sconiers’ dunked, wrongfield base hit. Ruppert Jones hit a low liner to Frank White, which was almost turned into a double play, but DeCinces came around to score on Bobby Grich’s clean single to right center. Then Gary Pettis was safe at first on another half-nubbed infield hopper—the fourth hit of the inning. The bases were loaded and Quisenberry looked to be in the soup, but Dick Schofield, pinch-hitting, rapped a bouncer to White, who threw home to start a second-to-catcher-to-first double play that retired the side. Even in an overeventful, unsuccessful inning like this, I noticed, Quisenberry’s work seemed brusque and businesslike. Barely pausing between pitches, he leaned, sank, bobbled, threw, hopped sidewise, got the ball back, and did it all over again. His work was funny-looking and profoundly undramatic, and he went about it like a man sweeping out a kitchen.
The Royals got the run back in their half in thrilling fashion, when Lonnie Smith tripled over the center fielder’s head with two out, scoring Jim Sundberg from second base. Reprieved, Quis returned to his kitchen—and instantly gave up a leadoff single to Bob Boone. A sacrifice moved Boone to second, and Quis walked the next man intentionally, thus setting up a double play on an infield grounder by DeCinces, which ended the inning; Quisenberry’s last pitch, a sinker, splintered DeCinces’ bat. The Royals won the game in the bottom of the fourteenth (a walk, an infield out, and Greg Pryor’s pinch-hit single to left), and Quis, a winner in spite of himself, faced the deadline-hungry writers in the clubhouse in characteristic style: “My first inning was smooth, my second was stinky, my third—well, I wanted to make myself sick and throw up out there, but we got out of it somehow. I can’t complain about those dink hits in the thirteenth, because I made a real bad pitch to Grich and he hit it for the run. I was lucky. Morale would have hit bottom on this club if we’d lost.”
Two days later, before a big Sunday crowd, Quis came in in the top of the ninth to defend Mark Gubicza’s 3–0 lead and gave up a leadoff home run to the Angels’ Ruppert Jones—a long fly ball that just slipped over the fence in left. Then he retired the side—infield out, fly-ball out, strikeout. The Royals, having taken two out of three games in the set, stepped into third place, only three and a half games behind the Angels, and Quisenberry had his fourteenth save.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Quisenberry clearly wasn’t pitching very well, but the club was succeeding with him in the crucial short-man role, and no one—Quisenberry least of all—looked concerned, at least in public, about the slovenly, non-imperious nature of his recent work. The season still had a long way to go, to be sure, but something else was happening here, too—happening to me, I mean. Because I had come to know him better and had been so taken with his disarming and sometimes boyish ways—his jokes and his dogged modesty and youthful deep seriousness—he had become an amateur to me: a human, life-size figure in a business full of demi-gods, inhumanly talented athletes, and egocentric, self-fabricated public personalities. He was clearly at home in this world, yet he also seemed out of place in it, and I had begun to wonder how such a fellow could succeed in a business where failure is so quickly sought out and resolutely punished. How good a pitcher was he, anyway? It was time to go to some others and ask.
Dic Howser (he is a calm, laid-back manager, with a light voice and reassuring, small-town-bank-president look to him): Yes, I’m concerned about him this year, but I’m also concerned when Brett doesn’t hit or when Willie Wilson doesn’t get on base for us. But I’m not concerned in a big way. I look around the leagues and I see a lot of the top relief pitchers have problems from time to time. You can almost expect it. I still think he’s outstanding and he’s going to have a good year. With his control—well, you’d better go up there hackin’! I think he knows he has to have a good year in order for us to have a good year. His temperament is deceiving. I think he’s been more concerned by these off spells than I’ve been. I know how intense he is, how competitive. But even if he goes through three or four more bad stretches in a row I’m not going to get fancy and move him into the middle and put somebody else out there to finish up. I’ve got some confidence in the man. People asked me in the spring if I looked forward to forty or forty-five saves from him again, but that’s asking too much. A lot of guys would have a great year with twenty-five saves. We expect Quisenberrry to do better than that, but we don’t expect forty-five. We’re not that crazy.
Bob Boone (he has been catching in the majors for fourteen years and, at thirty-seven—he will be thirty-eight in November—is among the oldest day-to-day regulars in the game today; he is articulate and intelligent, and still an artist behind the plate): Watching Quisenberry over the years, I’ve come to think his greatest attribute is his control. If you’re batting against a guy with a super-sinker like that, you think about trying to get ahead in the count, so you can just take that pitch. But all the experienced hitters know by now that you really can’t do that—he won’t let you—so you say to yourself, “Well, I’m not going to let him get ahead of me,” and you start out swinging at something that’s his pitch. He’s tough. It’s a tough pitch to do much with, and the motion is different. It isn’t that you try to hit his pitches harder—that happens against a knuckleballer, like Phil Niekro: you’re always trying to hit him a mile, which doesn’t help. But it’s always hard to put the middle of your bat on Quisenberry’s sinker, even though you know about where it’s going to be. You’re likely to hit it foul, so there may be a tendency on the part of some hitters to try to hit it fair, and that takes them out of their normal swing. All this and he’s so durable that he can come at you almost every day. You have to have an amazing arm to be able to do that. The only way to handle him is to get ahead in the game, so you never get to see him.
Gary Blaylock (at fifty-three, he is in his thirty-fifth year of baseball; he pitched for thirteen seasons in the minors and one in the majors—for the Cardinals and the Yankees in 1959; he became the Royals pitching coach last year, after nine years as a minor-league manager and eleven years as a scout): With that delivery, he has less strain on his arm than most pitchers, because that underneath way is a natural movement for the arm. Anything overhead—what we think of as the natural way to pitch—is unnatural and puts a strain on the arm, so you get injuries. When you get in trouble pitching, the tendency is always to try to throw harder, and that’s when you begin to break down mechanically. That happened a little to him, earlier on. But he has the greatest temperament for this game I’ve ever seen, bar none. I’d heard about it before I came here, and it’s true. A relief man can stay sharper than most, because he’s out there so much, but it’s hard to stay tuned to that game situation through a whole season. Maybe it’s impossible.
John Wathan (he has been catching for the Royals for ten years; now he sees spot duty—he loves to catch Sunday games—and pinch-hits; he has a strong chin and dark, curly hair, and an air of cheerful aggressiveness, the catcher’s look): He’ll never get the Cy Young, because he doesn’t throw smoke and because of how he talks to people. He talks about his Peggy Lee fastball—you know that song of hers “Is That All There Is?”—and it sticks in people’s minds. What’s amazing is that he’s done what he’s done so often—about ninety percent of the time. Now people come and say, “Hey, What happened?”—as if anybody in this business could do it a hundred percent of the time. He’s a steady friend. I love his attitude. He’s like the kind of infielder in a game who thinks, Come on, hit the ball to me, when the going is tough out there. That’s the guy you want on your side. Plus he’s quick-witted. He never has a pat answer. I’ve heard him asked the same question a hundr
ed times by different writers, and he never answers it twice the same way. You’ve heard all those quotes of his—the best ones are the ones he steals from me in the bullpen.
George Brett (one of the great hitters of our time; he has been enjoying his best season in many years; he has clear blue eyes, and talks smoothly and without a hitch—just the way he hits): I don’t think anybody in the league thinks he’s easy anymore. At first, he looked like a novelty and people were anxious to go up and get to swing at him. But a man like that, for right-handed hitters—well, I’m a left-handed batter and I’ve never swung against a left-handed pitcher like that in my life. So many guys have had problems with him that now they’re trying to go to right field against him, or whatever. You see power hitters trying to slash the ball to right. They’re going against their own programs. You saw what happened the other night—all those nubbers, and the hardest-hit ball is right at Frank White. That always happens—it’s weird. He does have a way of making things interesting out there. We’ll have a two-run lead and suddenly they’ve scored and they’re first-and-third, and then he’ll strike somebody out or get a lucky line drive to end it, and he’ll look at you like he’s saying, “Hey, I was just kidding.”
Earl Weaver (he came back to manage the Orioles again this summer—his sixteenth year on the job; his winning percentage of .596 is the fifth-best among all managers ever): He doesn’t get the ballots because he ain’t overpowering. And I guess a lot of people figure that left-handed hitters are going to get to him sooner or later—only they don’t. Like any real good pitcher, he messes with the batters’ heads. He’s got that knowledge-watching where the bat is on that hitter, taking a little more or a little less off the next pitch. He’s always had a good infield to play behind him, but I think he controls those ground balls a little, too. If he throws that sinker to a left-handed hitter, it may be out of the strike zone. Quis [he pronounced it “Queeze”] don’t try to go by too many people, up. A good low-ball hitter like Brunansky, say, he still pitches him low—a little below low. That was always the theory—pitch the good low-ball hitter below low and the good high-ball hitter above high, and you’ll have success. And he’s had success. Good attitude and a real good arm.
The Royals struggled through the early weeks of July, at one point falling to fifth place and at another finding themselves seven and a half games behind the division-leading Angels. Then the combination of George Bretts’ hitting (he batted .538 for one July week, with eleven runs batted in), the team’s always exemplary defense, and some stout work by the Kansas City starting pitchers (the team’s set rotation of Bret Saberhagen, Charlie Leibrandt, Mark Gubicz, Bud Black, and Danny Jackson is the youngest and probably the best in the American League) began to make itself felt, and by early August the team had taken a secure hold on second place. In later weeks, the Angels and the Royals looked like a pair of championship stock cars leading the pack in the final laps of a big race, with the second-place Royals machine drafting comfortably in the lead car, inches behind the Angels, and seemingly in a position to pick the part of the track where it would slingshot its way to the fore; this happened, in fact, on Friday, September 6th, when the Royals won a doubleheader from the Brewers and took over first place at last. At this writing, they lead the Angels by two full games. Quisenberry did better and better as the summer went along, stacking up saves in little bunches and whittling away at his earned-run average. By the end of the second week in September, he had thirty-four saves—more than anyone else in his league—and his ERA of 2.24 was fifth-best (among all pitchers) in the A.L. Only his won-lost record of 7–8 (he had made the Sunday stats) gave some suggestions of his earlier struggles this year. As usual, he had appeared in more games than any other pitcher, in either league: seventy-five. He had righted himself, after all.*
Needless to say, I was delighted by the reversal of Quisenberry’s fortunes. I caught up with him by telephone several times in midsummer, and when we last talked, early this month, he sounded euphoric. “It’s been kind of fun, the way it should be,” he said. “I don’t have to be so cerebral out there now.” He said that he had briefly resumed his romance with the knuckleball, but when Oddibe McDowell, of the Rangers, took him deep on a knuckler, late in August (a home run that cost the Royals a game), he broke off the shady relationship, at least for the present. Earlier in the campaign, he had experienced some other nasty shocks. Perhaps the most painful of all was on July 1st, when Quis came into a game at Royals Stadium against the A’s in the middle of the ninth, at a point when the visitors, down by 3–1, had put a pair of men on base with none out, and gave up an enormous three-run, game-winning homer to Dusty Baker—a cannon shot into the A’s bullpen—and heard boos from the home fans as he came off the field. (“They ought to trade me for the seven hostages left in Lebanon,” Quis said to the writers afterward. “I deserve to be locked up and they don’t.”) This occasional total public humiliation of a relief pitcher is an established occupational hazard, like the bends, and cannot be wholly avoided, but all through July it was clear to Quisenberry that he was pitching a mite higher than usual, for some reason, and was suffering in consequence. He determined to eliminate any pitch in his repertoire that crossed the plate above the batter’s knees, and worked conscientiously at that task for several games; it was the first time he could remember in his career that he had been forced to curb his sinker in this artificial, premeditated fashion. By September, though, all such strictures seemed far behind. “I’m not even thinking about throwing the ball up or down,” Quis told me. “I’m taking it for granted everything will be down. There was no particular game when this began to happen—it just came along. Now I can be an airhead again out there.”
He was joking, as usual—and was talking again, in any case, about the “dinosaur brain” condition that he hopes for when he is actually at work in a game, out there once more in the midst of hideous difficulties—but, because I knew him a little by now, I tried to resist his appealing and carefree portrait of himself. I prefer to think back to the last extended visit I had with Quisenberry, which was in Baltimore in mid-July, a few days after the All-Star Game break. The Royals were just beginning a month-long schedule of games, on the road and at home, against the dangerous American League East clubs, which would go a long way toward determining the kind of season 1985 would turn out to be for them. Nobody knew yet whether their young pitching would jell, as expected, and whether the recent wild outburst of hitting by George Brett would be sustained and could be converted into a steadier offense by the whole team, and whether the permanent installation of Hal McRae in the designated-hitter slot would solidify the Kansas City attack, and so forth. Most of all, of course, the Royals wondered about Quisenberry. He had come out of two bad patches, as we have seen, but the midseason stats (the All-Star Game is the traditional halfway point in the long season) showed that he was ten saves short of his 1984 total at the same juncture, with an earned-run average of 2.79—up from his 2.08 of mid-1984. Some other figures, put together by Kansas City Star reporter Tracy Ringolsby that week, were more disturbing. These were more subtle indicators, but by each set of measurements Quisenberry was well off his lifetime averages. Over the years, left-handed batters had averaged .275 batting against him, but so far this year they were hitting .335; right-handers were hitting .236 instead of their habitual .226. Since he came up, in 1979, Quisenberry had only twice seen his hits-per-innings-pitched ratio exceed one hit per inning: it was 1.05 in 1979 and 1.01 the following year. His lifetime H/IP ratio was an elegant 0.94, but so far in 1985 it stood at 1.2 hits per inning. In professional terms, he’d been running a fever, and no one was quite certain when, or if, he would ever get well.
In Baltimore, I asked Paul Splittorff how he assessed his friend’s season so far. Splittorff is pale and lean and dapper, with rimless spectacles; at thirty-eight, he looks exactly the same as he did throughout his fifteen-year career as the Royals’ prime left-handed starting pitcher.
“With Quis, t
here are so many little pieces that add up to such a big whole that you’re surprised something hasn’t gone wrong before this,” he said. “It’s not just his delivery but the whole thing—the complete man. But he’s got it all figured out—I really think he does. The pressures on him are so tough—you have no idea, because he doesn’t let it show. His job is the toughest on the roster, because this club is going to sink or swim with him. But he never lets that show. I’ve seen him very down after a game—there’s almost a point where you want to go and cry for him—but he doesn’t show it and he never hides. He’s superb that way. He knows he’s got to be in there the next day, and be ready for that, no matter what just happened.”