by Ron Darling
He was pretty much done as a Met after this shit outing, and he finished out the season with us as a kind of clubhouse pariah.
Sisk managed to keep the Phillies off the scoreboard for the next couple innings, but then Joe Sambito came on and didn’t fare much better than Gorfax or Schiraldi. Unlike poor Calvin, though, Joe took his lumps like a man. It was a thankless spot, in a game that had been lost in the first inning, so nobody begrudged a guy like Joe his shellacking.
We begrudged the hell out of Calvin Schiraldi, though. And it came back to bite him in a big-time way, because when he donned his Red Sox cap and came on to face us in the bottom of the eighth, Game 6 of the 1986 World Series—Boston up 3–2 in the Series, and 3–2 on the scoreboard—we all remembered the quit he showed in that Philadelphia game. Really, it felt to us like Red Sox manager John McNamara was waving the white flag and giving up on this game—no one on our side of the field feared Calvin Schiraldi. We didn’t believe in him as a teammate, and he gave us absolutely no cause for concern as an opponent. Indeed, we were giddy at the thought of facing him. We knew we would get to him, and we did. We pushed across the tying run in the eighth on a Gary Carter sac fly with the bases loaded, and it was Schiraldi who set the merry-go-round in motion for us in the bottom of the 10th, giving up a couple singles and a wild pitch and the game-winner off the bat of Mookie Wilson that found its way through Bill Buckner’s legs and into Mets lore.
And then, after kicking Schiraldi’s ass in Game 6, we were feeling even more confident that we would kick his ass again in Game 7, and McNamara gifted us the chance to do so when he brought him in with the game tied in the bottom of the seventh.
We’d gotten a whiff of the stink of weakness on Calvin Schiraldi as he kind of shrugged his shoulders and went through the motions during that laugher against the Phillies, and now here we were a little over a full year later, in a series of games that mattered most of all, and we could still smell it on him.
* * *
When I was traded to Oakland in the middle of the 1991 season, the A’s sent right-hander Joe Slusarski to their Triple-A team in Tacoma to make room for me on the roster—just one example of the dominoes that fall when a team makes a move. Joe had been up and down with the big club, but he seemed to figure in the team’s plans for the future, so I think he took this demotion in stride. The assignment was only temporary: Joe was named to the A’s starting rotation the following year, after beating out Jim Deshaies in a heated spring training battle for the final spot.
(Take that, Dave Righetti!)
Joe continued to pitch well and appeared to be on the upward arc of a solid career … until he wasn’t. Before we broke camp the following spring, he played a round of golf with fellow pitchers Gene Nelson and Rick Honeycutt at a resort in Scottsdale, where he was felled by a jumping cholla. Joe hit a ball into what passes for “rough” out there in the desert, where it came to rest near a bush or a cactus of some kind. It turned out to be a jumping cholla plant, which drops all these menacing stems and seeds to the ground at the slightest touch. Those suckers can be deadly! Joe got a mess of spines stuck in his pitching hand when he reached for his golf ball, and within minutes he was screaming in pain. His fingers swelled to the size of ballpark franks, and there was damage to the tendons in his middle finger.
He was never the same pitcher after that—at least, not in the eyes of A’s management. He made two more appearances in an A’s uniform, the first in relief of me in a game at Comiskey Park later that season, where neither one of us pitched well, even though we eked out a 12–11 win with a three-run rally in the ninth.
Joe finished out his career with the Astros and Braves, who (mercifully, for Joe) played their spring training games far away from the not-so-friendly confines of the Cactus League.
* * *
As I look over the names of my former teammates, I stop and smile when I get to Rusty Staub, who died on Opening Day of the 2018 baseball season, after a long illness.
I shed a couple tears, too.
I went to visit Rusty at the hospital in West Palm Beach during spring training, and it broke my heart to see him suffer. It breaks my heart, now, to think of him gone. Really, I can’t imagine a world without Rusty in it—just as I can’t imagine my career without him. Someday, I’ll write a book about Rusty, who was such an influential part of those great Mets teams of the 1980s. He was also a huge influence on me. Remember, Rusty’s career dates to 1961, when he was drafted and signed by the expansion Houston Colt 45’s, the same year the New York Metropolitans opened for business. He later became an original member of the expansion Montreal Expos, where he starred for several years, and was embraced by the team’s French-Canadian fans, who dubbed him “Le Grande Orange.” He ended up playing for twenty-three years—the only player in major league history to collect at least 500 hits for four different teams.
Consider the baseball history baked into Rusty’s career: his first year in Houston, he played with Pete Rennels, who’d had some big years in the 1950s and ’60s for the Washington Senators and my beloved Red Sox. Rennels’s first big league manager was Bucky Harris, who played with Hall of Famers like Walter Johnson, Goose Goslin, Charlie Gehringer, and Heinie Manush (another one of the game’s all-time great names—the Tucker Ashford of his day!—and a helluva hitter), so I came to look at Rusty as a link to the game’s rich and storied past.
My goodness, it was through Rusty that I was connected to these all-time greats as well, in a once-more-removed way.
Consider, too, the noblesse oblige that Rusty showed throughout his career. He was celebrated in our clubhouse for the annual picnic he held to raise money for the widows and orphans of New York City firefighters and police officers—an event that became even more important in Rusty’s retirement following the tragedy of September 11, 2001. His extra efforts on behalf of those in need were an inspiration that left me thinking early on of the ways I could give back to the community once I became more established as a ballplayer—a model that continues to inspire.
For a kid like me, eager to soak up what I could of baseball tradition, and to learn the history of the tension that existed between Major League Baseball and the players’ union—an issue that was very much at the forefront when I signed my first professional contract during the strike-shortened 1981 season—I could think of no better teacher than Rusty.
He was my friend, my mentor—a docent who helped to set the tone (and, the standard!) for my own lifetime in the game.
I only got to see Rusty play at the end of his truly remarkable career. By the time I joined the club at the end of the 1983 season, he was getting up there in baseball years. He was a little out of shape, but still a prolific pinch hitter—the best in the game at the time. And yet he didn’t sign on for that role, with his second go-round with the Mets. When he rejoined the team as a free agent ahead of the 1981 season, Frank Cashen assured him he would be the everyday first baseman. At the very least, Rusty expected to be in the starting lineup against right-handers. But then the Mets went out and traded for Dave Kingman, bringing the one-dimensional slugger back into the fold for a second stint of his own, and Rusty was pushed from the starting lineup and relegated to the bench. Like the professional he was, Rusty never carped about the change to his circumstance, and I think he came to relish his role as the team’s elder statesman.
Being around Rusty was like hanging with the Dalai Lama. His deep affection for the game, his deep well of understanding of the game’s many nuances, his deep knowledge of the game’s history … it was all there for a kid like me to absorb in full. You know how golfers talk so reverently about Harvey Penick as one of the great sages of their game? How his Little Red Book is considered a bible for golfers? Well, Rusty was like that for us players, only we got to soak up his hard-won wisdom and insights directly.
Rusty had all the answers, and he gave them to you straight. No bullshit, no sugarcoating. Once, he took issue with a slow curveball I threw to Mike Schmidt in a ga
me against the Phillies. Never mind that I got away with the pitch—Schmidt hit a ground ball to short to end the inning. Rusty still had something to say about my pitch selection, and he had a special way of making his point. He came over to where I was sitting in the dugout and whacked me on the shin with a bat—not hard enough to leave a bruise, but hard enough to hurt. In the middle of a game!
I turned to him and said, “What the fuck, Rusty?”
He said, “Don’t you ever throw a slow curveball to Mike Schmidt.”
I wasn’t really listening, and Rusty could see I wasn’t really listening, so he elaborated—said, “Right-hander against right-hander. Power hitter. Do not ever throw a slow curveball.”
I heard him, loud and clear—but the message didn’t really sink in. I was too focused on the game I was still pitching.
Later that night, over sakes and beers at Tokubei on the Upper East Side, a couple blocks from Rusty’s restaurant, I asked him what the hell he was talking about. One thing I want to make clear: Rusty wasn’t the kind of guy who did idle chatter. He could bullshit with you as well as anyone, but when talk turned to the subtleties of the game he was all business. You knew you had to think long and hard before you pressed him on something, because you were talking to a true sage of the game, and you didn’t want to waste his time.
I said, “When you whacked me on the shin, what was that about?”
He said, “I wanted to get your attention.”
I said, “You have my attention. Why don’t you throw a slow hook to a right-handed power hitter?”
He said, “Because they don’t have to get it all. You could make a good pitch, and if they just get it out front, it’s still a home run. You can beat them and they can still hurt you.”
I thought, Okay, good to know. And I thought, Could’ve done without getting whacked on the shin, though.
The best example of Rusty’s influence on our young ball club came about on the back of my desire to live in Manhattan during my rookie season. I’d joined the team as a September call-up in 1983, and made it a point to live in the city during the off-season, to try on the idea of being a bona fide New Yorker. What I didn’t know at the time, however, was that the Mets had a strict policy forbidding rookies from living in Manhattan, so I got some pushback on this from Frank Cashen when I learned I’d made the Opening Day roster.
I had an apartment all lined up—a fully furnished one-bedroom sublet that belonged to this sweet old lady. The place was a great deal, if I could get past the sweet old lady furnishings. (If I was lucky enough to bring a girl back to the apartment, I realized, she would’ve thought I was living with my grandmother.)
Anyway, it was all arranged … until it wasn’t.
Frank Cashen called me in to tell me about the team’s policy, told me I would have to make another arrangement.
I happened to mention all this to Rusty, and he took it on himself to intervene on my behalf. He’d cast himself as a bit of an advocate for our young players—in part because he truly believed we needed a veteran voice to serve as a kind of go-between with management, but also because he loved to stick it to the owners. He’d had a contentious relationship with every front office he’d worked under, which was one of the big reasons he never stuck with any one club for too, too long. He was known to be a demanding player, at a time in the game when most players were still treated like chattel.
I didn’t really appreciate any of this at the time, but I was nevertheless grateful for Rusty’s help on this. He went up to Frank Cashen one day as we were preparing to break camp and made my case. He said, “Frank, this kid worked his ass off all winter. He’s had a great spring training. He’s gonna be a big part of this ball club. He’s been living in the city the whole off-season, and I think you should bend the rules on this. I’ll vouch for him. I’ll make sure to drive him home with me every night, make sure he gets something to eat, makes sure he stays out of trouble.”
To Rusty’s great credit—and to my great surprise—Frank Cashen relented on this, and Rusty was good to his word, introducing me to life as a professional athlete in a city like New York and to the many charms of the city itself.
* * *
My career is inextricably linked to the career of Frank Viola, one of the dominant pitchers in the American League throughout the 1980s, who was traded from the Twins to the Mets in the middle of the 1990 season. As collegians, he and I faced off against each other in what many people have called the greatest college ball game ever pitched—that 1981 NCAA playoff game I mentioned early on in these pages, the one that pitted Frank’s St. John’s Redmen against my Yale Bulldogs.
Many have written about that game (including me in my first book, The Complete Game), but none so movingly or memorably as Roger Angell of The New Yorker, whose long-form account, “The Web of the Game,” is widely seen as one of the small masterpieces of baseball journalism. That article, as much as the game itself, has helped to cement the game’s place in college baseball history.
Someday I’ll write about that, too, but for now I’ll just offer up a thumbnail account, before turning to the story I want to tell about Frankie V: St. John’s won the game 1–0 in 12 innings. Frank and I had been trading zeroes all game long. I was pitching a no-hitter through 11 innings, while Frank had merely kept us off the scoreboard with 11 shutout innings of his own. In the top of the 12th, I allowed a single to start the inning, and then the St. John’s runner stole second, stole third, and came home on a double steal. In the bottom of the 12th, Frank gave way to a right-handed relief pitcher named Eric Stampfl, who was later drafted by the Mets and topped out with a season of Single-A ball at Lynchburg in the Carolina League. Stampfl finished us off, and that was it for us Bulldogs.
It was inevitable, then, that when Frank was traded to the Mets, folks in and around baseball would bring up this game. It was epic, historic … and Frank and I were at its center. Now that we were teammates, it was an opportunity to reflect on what it meant to pitch the game of our lives as our professional careers lay in wait.
So that’s the backstory to our reunion with the Mets. The front story was that Frank Viola was immediately cast as the Rodney Dangerfield of our clubhouse. Certainly, he was given the least respect of any player with such impeccable baseball credentials: a former Cy Young Award winner, a former All-Star, a bona fide ace who would go on to win 20 games for the Mets in his first full year with the club. But with the Mets, in the words of Tom Petty, we kind of kicked him around some. We all called him “Half a Woman,” a nickname repurposed from Frank’s college career, pinned on him a second time by John Franco, his St. John’s teammate. I suppose the name fit, because Frank wasn’t exactly the best-looking guy on the team, and he certainly wasn’t the biggest or the burliest.
Frank had already been tagged with one of the greatest baseball nicknames of all time by ESPN’s Chris Berman: “Sweet Music.” But to us, from almost the moment he set foot in Queens, he was known as “Half a Woman”—not exactly the most flattering moniker for a major league ballplayer, and yet Frank was such a good-natured soul who was so confident in his abilities as a pitcher that he never seemed to mind the ribbing he received off the mound.
To be honest, I was a little shocked to see my teammates ripping into him so mercilessly after he joined the club, but I joined in soon enough. I mean, he made himself an easy target, so why the hell not? Once, during his first full year with the Mets, as he was chasing his 20th win of the season, one of our teammates put a wad of chewing gum on the top of Frank’s baseball cap as he went out to start the game. He pitched with that wad of gum on his cap for the entire first inning—a sequence that would have surely become one of the all-time great memes in today’s social media age, but back then just induced a couple snickers from those who were in on it.
* * *
Bob Welch wrote candidly about his struggles with alcoholism in the book Five O’Clock Comes Early—one of the best baseball memoirs of all time. He’d had some tremendous y
ears for the Dodgers, and had won a Cy Young Award for Oakland the year before I joined the team—going 27–6 with a 2.95 ERA.
He was one of the most unusual guys I played with in the bigs. He had a bunch of nervous habits, which today might be diagnosed as symptoms of ADHD, but back then were dismissed as peculiarities. Most peculiar, perhaps, was the way he would fidget before every start. He was so restless on the night before a game that he’d set off on a long walk, deep into the wee hours. It wasn’t unusual for him to leave our hotel at eleven o’clock at night, if we were on the road, roam the streets of whatever city we happened to be in for a couple hours, and wander back at three or four in the morning.
It was the strangest thing. But that’s what worked for him—it was a way to settle his nerves, I guess, and once you take alcohol out of the equation, you do what you have to do to stay the course and keep sober.
Now, contrast Bob’s laudable coping mechanism with that of my friend Half a Woman Viola, who took a more typical approach. Like Bob, Frank would also get incredibly nervous before his starts, but since he wasn’t an alcoholic he was able to drink to his heart’s content to calm himself down—typically, two six-packs of beer the night before one of his starts.
Go figure.
* * *
I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed of myself than I was on a bus ride early on in my Mets career, when I was overheard making an off-color joke about Mookie Wilson’s appearance. As bad luck would have it, the person who did the overhearing was Mookie, which of course explains the shame.
Now, out of respect for Mookie, I will not share the off-color joke here, but let the record show that it was not racist. It was simply insensitive, having to do with Mookie’s looks, and I hated like hell that he’d heard it. Truth was, I’d always liked Mookie. I liked the way he played, and I liked the way he carried himself off the field. Over the years, connected as we are now by the threads of the game and the tapestry of Mets history, we’ve become good friends—like brothers, in a way.