Three Nights in August

by Buzz Bissinger

  Izzy opens and closes his glove in a little jawlike snap, his own private victory salute. He steps off the mound and is immediately swarmed by acolytes. High-fives are tossed about like prom-night bouquets as Cardinals players blanket the infield. The Cubs walk the line of the dugout into the tunnel with the joy of prisoners being led back into the dim-bulb fortress after recreation. Their bench empties out quickly, except for Remlinger, who lingers there after everyone else has left. He's staring glassy-eyed at the field, no doubt wondering what everybody else on the Cubs is wondering, with no sensible answer except that it is, after all, the Cubs: What just happened?

  GAME THREE

  12. D.K.

  I

  THE LOWEST MOMENT of the season for La Russa came eleven days before the Cubs series started, in the androgyny of a Hertz rental car heading south on Broad Street in Philadelphia. He was on his way to the closest thing in baseball to a rat-infested sewer-spewing urine-stinking public-housing high-rise, when he got a call from Barry Weinberg, the trainer. It was bad enough going to the Vet, where the pipes routinely leaked and the clubhouse carpet was a deep purple momentarily popular during the tie-dye heyday of the 1960s, when LSD was considered a dietary supplement. But a call from Weinberg at eleven in the morning?

  Weinberg was the ultimate grim reaper when it came to unexpected phone calls. He was Rasputin in red Banlon, the angel of death in a Polo shirt with little red birds on the front. Nothing was worse in a rental car on the way to the ballpark than a call from Weinberg. It meant that whatever Weinberg had to tell him couldn't wait for the clubhouse, just like the time Weinberg had called him to tell him in 2000 that Mike Matheny had cut his hand and wouldn't be able to catch in the playoffs.

  "Morris turned his ankle. I'm taking him for an x-ray."

  "How serious is it?"

  "It's got a chance to be a problem."

  La Russa hung up. He continued driving in his soundproof silence. By the time he got to the visiting clubhouse of the Vet, his mood was even more foul, disappointment mixed with disbelief. Because there went the Thing of Beauty that he and Dave Duncan had worked so hard on just the night before. Forget the three-game series against the Cubs, with Matt Morris scheduled for the third game, the perfect coda. For that matter, forget the season if the ankle was as serious as Weinberg was indicating it might be by trying not to indicate anything.

  Morris had come into this year as the deserved ace of the pitching staff. In the previous two years, he had put together numbers as good as anyone in baseball, not only wins and losses but also innings pitched, a two-hundred-plus inning workhorse:

  But this season had been star-crossed, almost freakish. It had started out brilliantly, peaking in two back-to-back complete-game shutouts in the middle of May: the first against the Cubs, and the next against Pittsburgh. The one against the Cubs was achingly beautiful: first-pitch strikes to twenty-three of thirty batters, fourteen groundball outs, a fastball combination of straight four-seamer and sinker, a wicked 12-to-6 curve he had such confidence in he threw it on 2–0 counts, eighty-two strikes out of 117 pitches.

  If there was anything that marred the performance against the Cubs, it was that last number, the ball and chain of pitch count, not because of anything Morris had done wrong but because of a disturbing trend. La Russa kept track of pitching performances as he kept track of everything, with pencil and ruler and lined legal-size paper that went wherever he went. In the case of Morris, the series of numbers looked like this:

  7/8/5/106 8/3/0/103 8.2/6/3/122 6/5/0/104 7/5/2/73 6/5/2/115

  9/6/2/124 8/10/3/111 6/5/4/77 9/4/0/117 9/9/0/123 7.1/6/3/107

  La Russa wasn't adverse to computers, although he has never used one for baseball. He knew that he could rely on Duncan— who in another life would have made a fine hacker, given his ability to tunnel inside without leaving a trace—and was up-to-date on all the latest technology trying to predict player trend lines. La Russa appreciated the information generated by computers. He studied the rows and columns. But he also knew they could take you only so far in baseball, maybe even confuse you with a fog of overanaly-sis. As far as he knew, there was no way to quantify desire. And those numbers told him exactly what he needed to know when added to twenty-four years of managing experience. Each line was a concise history of Morris's twelve outings through the end of May, and the numbers within each line reflected the following: innings pitched, hits allowed, runs given up, and pitches thrown. They told La Russa a story just like his matchups did, and this particular one contained dark foreshadowing.

  They showed that, out of Morris's twelve starts through the end of May, he'd exceeded the 100-pitch threshold ten times, including three games in which he had thrown more than 120. It was a lot of pitches early in the season. Woody Williams's numbers were similar, but there was little La Russa could do about it, given the bullpen's nightmarish performance without Jason Isringhausen. Pushing them was the only way to stay alive, just as figuring out a solution to Pujols's elbow had been the only way to stay alive. He worried that if they both kept it up at this pace, it was only a matter of time before they would get physically drained. But the alternative to not taking his two primary starters deep was no alternative if the Cards wanted to stay up with the Astros and the Cubs. The team had to win games somewhere.

  In June, Morris developed some crankiness in his arm because of a knot behind his right shoulder. It wasn't enough to put him on the disabled list, but it forced him to alter his mechanics, which can be beneficial as well as risky, as so much of pitching, like love, is about feel and therefore as elusive as it is beautiful. It was also enough for La Russa to start juggling the rotation to give Morris more rest in between starts. Because the rotation is scheduled out roughly six weeks ahead, with a key pitcher, such as Morris, placed into as many key games as possible, La Russa's pencil and eraser took a beating as he swapped starts and reslotted. In July against the Dodgers, Morris wobbled through five innings. He did some things well, but he threw nothing fastballs to several hitters and the result was a five-run inning. His fastball velocity was down into the high eighties, and he was suffering the worst slump of his five-year career, with thirty-four earned runs given up in thirty-three and two-thirds innings. An MRI on his shoulder failed to reveal any structural problems.

  But something was wrong, a loss of concentration that could be fatal to the team if it kept up and something that, as a manager, La Russa had to figure out how to pinpoint and handle. Of course, the early rigors of the season had taken a physical and mental toll on Morris, but La Russa suspected that more fundamental aspects of human nature had greater influence. Morris's record stood at 8–6 heading into the All-Star break: not terrible but not great. His ERA had ballooned from 2.37 at the end of May to 4.19, a numerical indicator of mental health for a pitcher as good as Morris. In his multiple roles of Doctor Phil, Doctor Ruth, and Doctor Seuss, La Russa wondered whether what Morris felt was pretty simple.

  The season had just gotten messed up, 8 and 6 exactly what it sounded like—barely above mediocre—when with any help from the bullpen, it could have been 11 and 3 and on the way to the twenty-win grail. He privately acknowledged to Morris the tragedy of the bullpen early in the season and how it had screwed the starter. He emphasized his crucial place in the rotation, that he still had an easy shot at fifteen wins. He pointed out that if the team made it into the playoffs, Morris would have another opportunity, as in the previous two seasons when the team had gotten there, to show millions that he was in the highest echelon of pitchers. It all sounded good, but La Russa backed up his pep talk with pragmatism, giving Morris a full ten days off, including the All-Star break, before his next start, against San Diego.

  But maybe something else altogether was wrong, an absence as literal as it was emotional—a permanent vacancy at the locker two down from Morris's. It was empty except for the uniform shirt of the player who had once worn it, a shirt of deep Cardinals red hung on a white plastic hanger, the name across the bac
k in proud capital-letter symmetry like a highway sign announcing the next town. It was unaffected by its surroundings and would forever be unaffected, and there was terrible cruelty in that. And Morris still felt it, not as much, maybe, as at the beginning. But something like that didn't simply tick away. The player who had once worn that shirt had been a mentor to him, helped teach him not only the rigors of pitching but also the rigors of the baseball life: the road trips, how much to tip the clubhouse attendant, the pacing, the mental art that must go in lockstep with the mechanics.

  D.K. It's what his teammates called him.

  II

  SOMETHING had been bothering Darryl Kile in June 2002. He was off his stride, and La Russa knew that he was off his stride, the psychological challenges of pitching impacting the mechanics and the mechanics impacting the psychological challenges. He was working his ass off. He always worked his ass off. But he was languishing at the .500 mark, the last two seasons when he had gone a combined 36 and 20 feeling more and more like a lost horizon. Something was up, and La Russa felt that he had to take it on, fathom the inside of Darryl's head a little bit.

  Darryl wanted to win as much as ever, hated it when he had taken back-to-back no-decisions against the Astros, even though he had pitched well and deep—a no-decision, as if you hadn't even been there. But Darryl was distracted, preoccupied in a way La Russa hadn't seen before, and it worried him. A pitcher's head is far more precious than his arm and far more inscrutable. An arm could show you it was tired. It could exhibit shoulder crankiness or elbow crankiness. It could be balmed, rubbed, bandaged, iced. It could demand rest or even surgery: Stop treating me like this. But a pitcher's head wasn't always so clear. And during the two and a half years that Kile had been with the Cardinals, his head had been so focused, so absent the clouds that can cause temporary insanity in any pitcher at any time. His performance reflected it—the ace of the staff—so what was happening now was more than simply a blip.

  He had been something of an enigma when he came over to the Cardinals in 2000 in an off-season trade with the Rockies. He had put together one spectacular year with the Astros in 1997, going 19 and 7. But then the Astros didn't want to pay him. So he signed with the Rockies, willing to endure the Bataan Death March of Coors Field, so littered with the skeletal psyches of pitchers who started the first and got to the fourth with the score 8–7 and men on second and third and no outs and the ball frolicking in its freedom. Because the ball carried like a space capsule in the thin air, outfielders tended to play deep, meaning that bloopers blooped. The thin air also took some of the snap out of your curve ball, a killer 12 to 6 morphing into a very mortal 12 to 3. Sinker ballers did okay there. So did guys who weren't afraid to live with their changeups. But Kile had a good fastball and a curve that did go 12 to 6 when it was snapping right, and this wasn't the right place for him.

  He went 8 and 13 with an ERA of 6.61, four runs more than the 2.57 he had put up during that sensational year with the Astros. The Cards ended up getting him after the season, La Russa and Duncan wondering whether that 19-and-7 season in Houston had merely been some first act with no second one but believing that there were grounds for replication.

  Spring training is valuable for La Russa in assessing new pitchers; he closely observes how they respond to the absolute pull-your-hair-out tedium of it. Before the start of exhibition games, they throw only every other day, so there isn't much to do other than the same drills over and over, pick-off drills, fielding-bunt drills, hitting drills in the cage. How a new guy reacts to it—gets after it or sloughs through it—tells La Russa a great deal. He keenly watched Kile, trying to gauge that elusive quality called professionalism. He watched one day. He watched another. He got reports from the other coaches handling the drills, including Duncan, of course. And what he said to Duncan about Kile was crisp and pointed because he almost couldn't believe how serious Kile was about everything:

  "I hope this is not a façade. I hope he's not fooling us."

  Kile went 20 and 9 for the Cardinals in 2000. Along the way, working with Duncan, he developed a forkball. The more he used it, the more he seemed to like it, with its wicked downward tumble. On many days, it became an equally effective out pitch for him as his fastball and curve. In 2001, he went 16 and 11, polishing his reputation as a bulldog worker, maybe the toughest in the National League. It marked the fourth season out of five in which he had been in the top ten in the league in innings pitched, games started, and batters faced. In fact, Kile took great pride in never having been on the disabled list, never, a truly Herculean feat for a starting pitcher.

  Kile had other qualities that marked him as far more than a power pitcher who had thrown 232⅓ innings in 2000 and 227⅓innings in 2001 and seemed destined to do the same in 2002. He was a wonderful husband to his wife, Flynn, and she was a wonderful wife to him. They had three children together: the twins, Kannon and Sierra, who had turned five in January, and the little son, Ryker, who was less than a year old. They were a gorgeous American family, blond and floppy-haired. You looked at them and wished that everybody in the entire world, including your own family, looked that way. They stood together during picture day at Busch in a tight little rainbow, everybody holding on to one another.

  There was also Kile the teammate. Teammate is a hackneyed term like so many terms, overused and overwrought. But it still can be beautiful, two powerful words that under the right conditions can take on even more powerful significance when merged together. A ballclub is a family, the most forced and unnatural family imaginable—players passing through like container cargo in the continual money juggle of baseball. How it comes together or splits up, takes in its newest members or spits them out, struggles through hard times or splinters apart, is a crucial element of its success. To be successful, it must have steadying influences, particularly in the emotional trough of late June and early July, when you look around the clubhouse and see faces that maybe you already wish you didn't ever have to see again. Nerves get frayed. Egos become hypersensitive: a pitcher pissed off because he got an early hook, a batter plotting insurrection because he got pinch-hit for. Even the question of what video to slip in the clubhouse VCR in the slow hours before a game can produce a shouting match, comedy versus drama. Cliques form. An ever-widening language gap separates the Latino players, who speak mostly Spanish, and American-born players, who speak English, and the lone Japanese player, who doesn't speak either.

  Kile was a great teammate, the ultimate bonding agent. He was a mentor to Rick Ankiel and Morris as they rose and struggled and struggled and rose. He gave Matheny, who caught him, a Rolex watch after he won his twentieth. He put his arm around Jason Simontacchi when he was a rookie pitcher, still dazzled by the intimidating wonder of it all, and took him out for dinner. He was always digging into his pocket and paying for meals, although just about everybody at the table made at least a million or two or three or four. Then there were the little things he did in the clubhouse, the rituals that made everyone laugh: announcing like a lighthouse foghorn three hours before game time that there were three hours to game time, singing in the summer heat that ridiculous little song about "let it snow, let it snow, let it snow."

  Kile was about more than comic relief, though. La Russa knew that the best clubhouses don't have a single team leader; they have a small cadre of guys you can count on to cosign what you say and convince their teammates to accept what you say, assuming, of course, that what you have said makes sense. You could not function without their support; they could empower a manager, or they could sink him by letting the inevitable disgruntlements elevate into mutinies.

  Kile belonged to that cadre, a key component. It was essential for Kile to buy into what La Russa said. It was essential because of the impact that Kile had in the clubhouse, not just the presence of personality that players felt comfortable with but a competitiveness that they admired and rubbed off on them. He considered nothing in life more insulting than the intentional walk, went toe-to-toe with La
Russa on several occasions because of his recalcitrance to throw one. La Russa worried that other pitchers, wanting to emulate their leader, would kick up their heels as well when the order came from the foxhole to put pride aside and simply put the damn guy on first. But La Russa had trouble getting too terribly upset with Kile, because as much as he loved talent in a player, it was the add-on of competitiveness that created the possibility of the spectacular.

  Kile's influence stretched past the players to the entire extended family that also make a clubhouse different from any place on earth: the equipment managers, the attendants, the guys running the video, those who ensure order but toil in obscurity underneath the surface glamour of working for a big-league ball club. It was easy to condescend—the upstairs-downstairs mentality, those who play and those who never will. But Kile made sure that the guys coming up never took them for granted, never acted with entitlement when their own presence here was just a matter of genes and the blessings of fortune that came and went. Because who knew what could happen? Who really knew...?

  III

  LA RUSSA SIMPLY liked talking to Kile as he made his floating rounds during spring training. He liked probing him about the Astros, because, ever since coming over to the National League in 1996, La Russa had admired how the Astros had played. He wanted to know what made their clubhouse tick, and Kile told him about the influence of Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, the steady tone they set and how their steadiness spilled over onto the field. Then one day, Kile asked La Russa to name the ten people in his life who had truly put it all together: the blend of talent and heart and work ethic. The question came up in the context of an article in which La Russa had been quoted in Time on the greatness of Michael Jordan. It was a deep question, almost philosophical, a player probing beyond mechanics and the downward tumble of a forkball into something perhaps unfathomable. La Russa appreciated the depth of it. He told Kile that a question as serious as that deserved an equally serious answer, which meant that La Russa would take it and play with it in the quiet hours when men who should be sleeping are sleepless. As he mused on the question, he was struck by what it suggested about Kile, a player who knew he was on the cusp of greatness and wanted to map out the final steps.