by Ron Darling
My teammates up until this point had always been about the same age as me, each of us on the upward arcs of our young careers, each of us hoping to help our team to a championship season. With the exception of the short season of Double-A ball I’d played the half-summer before for the Tulsa Drillers, in the Texas Rangers organization, my teammates had almost always come from similar backgrounds, from the same parts of the country, and most of us were hoping to get the same things out of our experience. Even at Yale, most of the guys on the team were two-sport athletes from hardworking New England families like my own, looking to parlay our Ivy League educations into advantages our parents could never have imagined for themselves.
However, there was no such thing as a shared agenda in our Tidewater clubhouse, I was quickly made to realize. There was more of an every-man-for-himself sort of vibe than there was the sense that we were all in this thing together. We played to win, yes, but we also played to showcase our abilities—each of us in our own ways. At times, it felt to me like we were at cross-purposes. One player’s success typically meant another player’s failure; for every promotion there was a demotion; for every increase in somebody’s playing time, there was another somebody riding the bench. There were players five and ten years older than me, hoping against hope that their long-held dream of a major league career might still come to pass, and others who were still hanging on and hanging in there knowing full well that those hopes had passed them by. There were young men with families to support, and not-so-young men who’d given up on the idea of starting a family until they got baseball out of their system.
At bottom, we were all “good enough to dream,” to borrow a phrase from the baseball journalist Roger Kahn—meaning, we weren’t deluding ourselves entirely with the thought that we could hit or pitch at the major league level—it’s just that our dreams were of varying shapes and sizes, and there was no way they could all come true.
And yet, to a man, we dreamed …
There was Walt Terrell, who as I’ve written had come over with me from the Texas Rangers in that Lee Mazzilli trade, putting us in the same boat for the next while—only, it was a short while as far as Walt was concerned, because he got the call to the big club ahead of me.
(He probably deserved it, too!)
There was Rick Ownbey, a surfer-dude-turned-pitcher-dude from California who would leave the Mets organization in the trade with St. Louis for Keith Hernandez that would fairly remake our parent club, and who was known primarily for his ability to throw a Frisbee with his bare feet. Understand, Rick didn’t just throw the Frisbee and somehow propel it forward in something resembling an intended direction. No, he would whip that thing in a tight Frisbee spiral—a toss every bit as accurate and purposeful as one an experienced Ultimate player might make with his throwing arm. And he didn’t just throw the Frisbee with his bare foot. He’d catch it with his bare foot, too—an incredible bit of dexterity that could only leave me to scratch my head and think that if baseball legacies were handed out on the basis of poetic justice and uniquely awe-inspiring talent alone, there’d be a plaque with Rick Ownbey’s name on it in Cooperstown.
(By the way, Rick also taught me how to play hacky sack—a typical West Coast pastime that looked only a little out of place on the feet of this particular East Coast kid.)
There was Jeff Bittiger, a short-ish, pudgy-ish kid from Secaucus, New Jersey, with a biting curveball, looking ahead to a twenty-three-year career in professional baseball that would include just four cameo appearances in a major league uniform. He was in his fourth year in the Mets organization when we were Tidewater teammates, so he had no idea of the vagabonding, backwater journey that lay in wait, and so he was as shot through with pluck as any of us Tides.
Jeff’s career was a study in persistence, I have come to believe. He was a September call-up for the Phillies in 1986 and the Twins in 1987, and he’d go on to pitch in parts of the 1988 and 1989 seasons for the White Sox, but other than that he was a minor league lifer, pitching all the way into his forties. His last stint was with the Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks of the independent Northern League in 2002. There was just no quit in this guy. He never believed the writing on the wall was meant for him. What I remember best about Jeff was that he had a tremendous sense of how to get people out—but I guess he was never able to get enough of them out, at just the right time, in just the right way, to pitch his way into a sustaining big league career. Still, he managed to win nearly 200 games in his 23 seasons of organized ball (only four of them at the major league level), so in this way, at least, he’d make his mark.
For some reason, there was an unusually deep and gifted class of future managers and coaches on our Tidewater roster, including Mike Cubbage and Wally Backman, who would go on to build impressive résumés as minor league skippers, as well as Ron Gardenhire, Clint Hurdle, and Bruce Bochy, who would go on to post 4,092 major league managerial wins among them as of the start of the 2018 season, with four World Series championships and three Manager of the Year awards (one each!) to their shared credit—quite a lot of pedigree to be found in one dugout, at any level of the game.
Actually, I should probably amend the qualifier at the front end of the last paragraph, because that some reason was almost certainly the presence of Davey Johnson playing the part of our own manager—one of the game’s great leaders, who in 1983 was just logging his time in the minors, waiting for an opportunity to do his thing on the main stage. Davey was always drawn to student-of-the-game types like Gardy, Wally, and Clint—and they, in turn, were drawn to him.
Bruce Bochy, whose hardly great claim to fame was that he’d once played community college ball with former Saturday Night Live castmember Darrell Hammond, was already gone from the organization by the time Davey took the helm at Tidewater, soon to embark on a brilliant managerial career of his own.
Mike Cubbage had pulled the plug on his playing career as well, but he went on to manage the Jackson Mets, the team’s Double-A affiliate, during our championship season of 1986, and he would step in for Bud Harrelson as the big club’s interim manager at the end of the 1991 season, a couple months after I’d been traded to the Expos, so our paths never again crossed on the long and winding roads of our intersecting careers. However, Mike earns a special place in my memory as the first person I ever played with who’d hit for the cycle in a big league game—he did it in 1978, as a member of the Minnesota Twins, in a game against the Toronto Blue Jays—and I was struck by the ways that singular achievement had been stitched to the back of his baseball card, a reminder that each of us could be great on any given day.
Davey Johnson will surely go down as one of the game’s all-time great managers—the winningest manager in Mets history and the first National League manager to pilot his team to 90 or more victories in each of his first five seasons. (His Mets career also comes with a neat little asterisk, because as a second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, it was Davey who made the final out against the Miracle Mets in the 1969 World Series.) But as I’ve already indicated, in writing about Mel Stottlemyre and Dave Duncan as two of my most formative influences in the game—father figures, each in his own way—I tended to connect more to my pitching coaches than to my managers, and here in Tidewater that connection was to Al Jackson, one of my first mentors in the game.
Just to be clear, the Tides didn’t have a pitching coach my first year in Triple-A. Jack Aker was the manager that season, and he’d been a former pitcher, so his idea was he could take on a dual role. The gaping flaw in this strategy was that Jack never took the time to actually speak to his players—at least, he never took the time to speak to me. This was a problem, if I hoped to grow my game and learn to pitch effectively at this level, and that’s where Al Jackson came in … not right away, but soon enough.
Al’s Mets pedigree ran to the team’s inaugural 1962 season, when he went 8–20 for one of the worst teams in baseball history. He went 8–20 again in 1965 for the (mostly) same Mets team, this one very nearly
as bad, and what struck me as remarkable about Al’s early career was his dogged pursuit. I don’t think he missed a start during the team’s first four seasons, logging over 200 innings each year—a record of workmanlike resilience that would command a long-term, eight-figure contract in today’s game.
It was Al Jackson who taught me what it meant to call yourself a professional ballplayer. He also taught me the splitter. I’ll deal with the former first, because up until my second season in Tidewater I’d never really thought of baseball as a job. It was just a game I loved that I happened to be pretty good at. Yeah, it also happened that somebody seemed to want to pay me to keep playing it, but I didn’t think about that when I was with the Rangers. I didn’t think about it my first year in Tidewater. I simply accepted it as my due. But Al set me straight. Without ever saying as much, he got me to think of the opportunity I’d been handed and what it meant to rise to it.
He used to say, “If you treat the game like a job, it’ll pay you back.”
He also used to say, “Ain’t nothin’ gonna be handed to you.”
In a lot of ways, I was closer to Al than I was to anyone else on those Tidewater teams. We weren’t friends—ours was very much a mentor-mentee type of relationship. I don’t think we ever went out for a beer after a game. But I enjoyed Al’s company immensely. He was all business, all the time, but there was a soft, sweet side to his personality, and it bubbled to the surface from time to time. He had an incredible laugh that could light up the clubhouse, and he had a deep affection for the game that was fairly infectious.
More than anyone else at the beginning of my career, he was my pitching guru—Mr. Miyagi to my Daniel LaRusso, for readers of a certain age who might appreciate a gratuitous Karate Kid reference.
One of the biggest changes to my approach under Al’s tutelage was how I handled my off days. I’d always been a hard worker on the mound, but between starts my thing was to rest my arm, maybe get a little light running in, and otherwise twiddle my thumbs until my turn came around again in the rotation. With Al, I started to realize that I was always on the clock. Each game was a chance to learn something new, and I got in the habit early on with the Tides of sitting with Al during games when I wasn’t pitching. He’d break down the opposing pitcher’s game, push me to consider his approach. He wouldn’t do it when our guys were on the mound—I guess because as pitching coach he was meant to be championing their efforts, not criticizing them—but we’d scrutinize every pitch when the Tides were up at bat.
“See what he’s doing there?” he’d say, leaving me no choice but to scramble for something intelligent to say, which in turn forced me to think long and hard for a piece of insight I could pass off as intelligence.
Second or third time through the order, Al would point out the ways the other team’s pitcher might change things up. The guy would throw a curve, maybe the first one of the game, and Al’s face would light up like he’d just seen a shooting star. He’d say, “Ah, he’s mixing in his curveball now. He’s got a good one. We’re in for a heap of trouble, ’cause he’s been able to save it till now.”
And he’d be right—we’d be in for a heap of trouble.
Al used to compare baseball to golf. He was always speaking in metaphors, and this was one of his favorites. He had this idea that you can’t really learn to play golf until you hit the ball flush. He’d say, “You can go out there and hit the ball, hit it thin, hit it fat, but you can’t really play until you hit it flush.” What he meant by that was that you’d just be hacking away until you learned to attack the golf course and place the ball where you want.
To him, pitching presented a similar challenge. He believed that you couldn’t really pitch until you mastered the corner of the plate, low and away. That’s the foundation of everything you’re trying to do on the mound.
Without that mastery, he’d tell me, you’ll never be a good major league pitcher.
With it, you give yourself a shot.
He’d say, “We can work on all that other stuff, Ronnie, but you know all the stats, ’bout what hitters like to hit. You tell me, if you’re fishing and all the fish are on one side of the pond, where you gonna throw your worm?”
One of Al’s great lessons was to get me to accept what the other team was giving me. First time he said it, I thought it was just something to say—you know, one of those old-school baseball homilies that don’t really mean anything. But this was Al’s way of telling me I didn’t have to overwhelm hitters with my stuff if I could get them out with my second- or third-best pitches. It was a lesson that came roaring back to me one night early on in my major league career, facing Pittsburgh, when I found myself mowing through the lineup with just my fastball. Maybe it was because the Pirates hitters were so bad, or so eager to hit the showers on getaway day. Or maybe it was just that I was really bringing it. All night long, I kept thinking I’d reach the point in my game plan where I’d have to dip into that bag of tricks all pitchers carry, but I never needed to, and as I stood there on that mound, taking what these Pirates were giving me, I kept thinking of Al and those long, sweet afternoons in the International League when I learned to watch the game through his eyes.
Next thing I knew, I was shaking hands—thinking, This was the easiest fucking game I ever pitched in my life.
Al was a ball-buster when it came to fitness. To his mind, those easy games would only find us if we put in the hard work. He had us do a line-to-line drill, where we’d run from foul pole to foul pole. We’d start at a jog, then sprint, then dial it down for a stretch at three-quarters speed before walking it off. We’d do this twenty times, and to keep things interesting he’d lead us with these soft-toss throws that were just enough ahead of us that we’d have to really bust it to make the grab. It was a killer, that drill, but only if you went at it all out. A lot of guys, they would kind of lope their way across the outfield, and simply go through the motions of exerting themselves, and Al would never say anything to them. But after a couple weeks under Al’s spell, I couldn’t do that. The idea of letting him down was anathema to me. He expected me to give it my all, so I gave it my all, and when twenty reps did not seem nearly enough, I started doing thirty, and then forty, and on and on.
Al taught me to appreciate that being in shape and being mentally sound were the two parts of my game within my control. He also taught me the power of precision. The science of pitching, at bottom, is the ability to put the ball where you want it, when you want it, in the way you want it, so we would work endlessly on developing the muscle memory that can find you in the form of purposeful repetition. We used to end each session with me hitting my spots: ten out of ten on the outside corner, ten out of ten on the inside corner. If I missed, I’d have to start over, and what that teaches you, over time, is not to miss.
Learning how not to miss … that’s the art.
Now, to the splitter. I’d pitched to only middling success during my first Triple-A season, left mostly to my own devices thanks to our noncommunicative manager–pitching coach, and as I watched several of my fellow pitchers get plucked from our ranks to join the Mets’ lowly staff I began to realize I needed to step up my game. The 1983 Mets were a last-place, pitching-poor ball club, and I couldn’t understand why there was no room on the big league roster for the likes of me—and, relatedly, why these other guys were getting the call, one by one, ahead of me. But instead of despairing or banging my head against the clubhouse wall, I had one of those career-changing epiphanies. I looked in the mirror and thought, Okay, hotshot. You’re just not ready. And I wasn’t. I was good, but not great. So I set about it, and in my newfound resolve to work harder I stumbled across this pitch. What happened was I was trying to develop a screwball, and even though I was making progress I was a long way from feeling confident enough in the pitch to use it in a game. The screwball came about because I’d been struggling with my changeup. Plain and simple: I couldn’t get it to behave in the ways I wanted it to behave, so I thought I’d try something n
ew. The reason I reached for the screwball was because that had been Al’s go-to pitch during his major league career, which despite his won-loss record with the Mets was something to admire.
Al happened by as I was messing around with this new pitch, and we started tinkering with my grip and my arm angle, and soon I was throwing a split-fingered fastball. I hadn’t meant to develop a splitter, and I hadn’t realized one was taking shape … but there it was. Alongside of that, Al and Davey spent some time with me to undo the hitch in my delivery I’d developed in my short time in Tulsa. The Rangers had me pegged as a strikeout pitcher, leaning more and more on the hard slider and away from the three-quarters delivery I’d naturally developed in college, so Al and Davey set me up with one of our catchers, Mike Fitzgerald, and told me to throw like I’d always thrown, before the Rangers got their hands on me.
So I did … and it was a revelation. To Al … to Davey … to me.
At the end of this one bullpen session, Al came over to me and clapped me on the back. It wasn’t like him to get excited over the hard work that happened away from the game itself, but here he was clearly excited.
He said, “You got something now, Ronnie! You got something to work with now!”
Yes, I did—only, it wasn’t enough to get me to the bigs just yet.