by Ron Darling
Junior Ortiz’s stutter and Steve Karsay’s back-shoulder pickoff look weren’t the only tics or twitches or peculiarities I’d encounter during my time in the game, but they were two of the most memorable I got to see firsthand. Of course, I’d come of age as a ballplayer in the shadow of another pitcher from the Worcester, Massachusetts, area named Mark Fidrych, famously known as “The Bird” for his uncanny resemblance to Sesame Street’s Big Bird, but also for some of his goofy, quirky behavior on the mound. If you remember, Mark became a pop cultural phenomenon when he burst onto the scene with the Tigers in 1976, and captivated fans with the way he would talk to the ball and pat down the mound. He was like a folk hero in his rookie year, landing himself on the covers of Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone, and on the mound to start the All-Star Game.
I was still in high school at the time, and a lot of the guys I was playing with and against had played with Mark, so his success and his strange behaviors were the talk of the region. Years later, I’d hear from Mark’s critics, who claimed his many affectations on the mound were calculated to distract opposing hitters, but from the outside looking in they’d always struck me as a natural by-product of his goofy, quirky personality.
But there was never anything wrong with Mark Fidrych beyond his runaway exuberance. He was flaky, that’s all, but in the buttoned-down, traditional world of baseball, that flakiness was sometimes seen as a tic or a peccadillo—something to be studied and analyzed instead of embraced and enjoyed.
There was another would-be superstar who briefly lit the baseball skies in and around Boston with his abundant talent and the promise of what lay ahead. Rogelio Moret was a lanky left-handed pitcher from Puerto Rico who could throw serious heat. Trouble was, the heat was a little all over the place. Later on in his career, Rogelio would go by the name of Roger—that’s the name he put on his baseball card, and the one they used in the box scores when he finally made it to the bigs—but I first heard it as Rogelio, and that’s the name that stayed with me. The Red Sox drafted him out of high school in 1968, around the time I was starting to follow the game in my own obsessive-compulsive ways, and once he was on my radar I tracked his every move on the field. The speed guns they used in those days weren’t always the most reliable, but it was said that Rogelio could throw the ball 100 miles an hour. Today, there might be a couple pitchers on every big league staff capable of hitting triple digits, but back then … not so much.
Speed alone wasn’t enough to earn Rogelio a steady gig. His control problems left him shuttling from Boston to Pawtucket to Louisville over parts of three seasons, and I would chart his comings and goings and root for the day when he would start striking out batters like nobody’s business. He’d pitch with flashes of brilliance, and then he’d lose the plate. For a couple games, he’d be unhittable … and then, for a couple games, unwatchable.
He finally put it together toward the end of the 1974 season, when he almost no-hit the Chicago White Sox at Fenway—a complete game shutout, with 12 strikeouts. (The one hit he allowed that day was an infield single to Dick Allen—see how it all ties in!) Rogelio started the 1975 season in the bullpen, but pitched his way into the fifth spot of the rotation for the second half, posting a 14–3 record on the season and earning the praise of none other than Bill Lee, the “Spaceman” himself, with more than a few idiosyncrasies of his own, who credited Rogelio with putting the Red Sox into contention, claiming that it was his emergence as a starter that allowed the team’s established starters to pitch with a little extra rest (and a little extra bullpen certainty).
Rogelio’s story took a dark turn a couple years later, after he’d been traded to the Texas Rangers and he fell into a kind of catatonic state one day at Arlington Stadium. His teammates later said he’d been behaving bizarrely, and then a group of them noticed Rogelio frozen in front of his locker for the longest time. At first, the other players thought he was fooling around, and they tried to joke him out of it, but eventually the team’s medical staff was brought in and Rogelio was taken to a nearby psychiatric hospital. One of the Rangers players said it looked like they were removing a statue from the clubhouse—that’s the condition Rogelio was in when they took him away.
He was released from the hospital a few days later, but Rogelio Moret never again pitched in the major leagues, and to this day nobody seems to know what might have triggered the episode. To those who knew him, who played with him, who followed the game, it went down as just one of those things—a sad, strange reminder that the weight of the game can sometimes be too much for a ballplayer to carry.
* * *
Perhaps the best illustration of the frailty of the American ballplayer is a condition that’s come to be known as the yips. It’s the term used to describe the sudden and often incomprehensible loss of fine motor skills in experienced, accomplished athletes, and it’s not unique to baseball. Indeed, the term comes from the world of golf, where it is often attributed to the legendary champion Tommy Armour, winner of three majors, who found himself unable to sink his short putts during the Shawnee Open, just one week after winning the 1927 U.S. Open. Armour ended up carding the first-ever Archaeopteryx—18 over par for a 23 on this one par 5 hole, to this date the highest-score ever on a single hole in PGA history.
(Thanks, Wikipedia!)
In baseball, the first time I ever heard of a ballplayer who suddenly and inexplicably lost his ability to throw accurately was when the Pirates’ Steve Blass unraveled in the 1973 season. He’d been a World Series champion in 1971, and an All-Star in 1972, and in 1973 he could only pitch to a 9.85 ERA, averaging about a walk per inning. It was such a remarkable transformation that sportswriters diagnosed his condition as “Steve Blass disease,” and for years the term stuck to him like shit on your shoe.
In fact, the term stuck until one of my first broadcast partners came along about ten years later. Steve Sax was a perennial All-Star second baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers—one of the game’s great table-setters. As a pitcher, I never liked facing those Dodger teams of the mid-1980s. They could hurt you in so many ways, and Steve was at the heart of a great many of those ways. But early on in his career, right after his All-Star, Rookie of the Year debut in 1982, he couldn’t make the simple throw to first from the second base slot. His mechanics were all screwy, and he labored mightily to keep his job—and to keep his team in the game. Just to make things worse, sportswriters weighed in and started referring to his condition as “Steve Sax Syndrome”—a dubious honor for a twenty-three-year-old kid to carry.
Steve managed to keep his spot in the lineup for most of that year. The Dodgers were patient with him as he tried to work his way through his troubles. Still, he ended up making 30 errors that year, most of them throwing errors, but that number doesn’t even get close to the number of times he held the ball a couple beats too long and cost his team a shot at a double play, or the number of times he might have lollipopped or underhanded the ball to first because he couldn’t get off a decent throw.
One of the all-time great lines to emerge from Steve’s “lost” season of 1983 came from his Dodger teammate Pedro Guerrero, the Dominican slugger. Pedro was an outfielder by trade, but he was asked to play third base for a stretch of games that year. When a reporter asked him what he was thinking about as he went into his crouch before each pitch, Pedro allowed that his first thought was, I hope they don’t hit it to me. His second thought? I hope they don’t hit it to Sax.
I ended up working with Steve on my very first broadcasting gig—an afternoon show for Fox Sports called Baseball Today. Steve was the main host, and I traded sidekick duties with former Royals pitcher Mark Gubicza. The show was set up that way because the producer, Hank Siegel, wasn’t sure Mark and I were up to the job. I’d work one week in Los Angeles with Steve, and then Mark would step in for his week with Steve, and we went back and forth like that for the next while.
From time to time, Steve and I would get to talking, but we never really talked about his struggl
es in the field. Ballplayers didn’t like to talk about this type of thing. Anything that made them come across as weak or less than or vulnerable … that was off the table. It’s like we have to put out this macho front, when in reality everyone who’s ever played the game has had a moment or two when it feels to him like the game has gotten away from him. But Steve and I didn’t have to talk about the yips for me to know his mind, and the more I got to know him, the more I came to appreciate his confidence. He was completely relaxed on-set, and around even the most intimidating television executives, and I mention this here for the way it stands in such sharp contrast to the tentative ways he played when he was having all that trouble throwing the ball. The one didn’t seem to jibe with the other … and yet there it was.
As I’ve written, Steve Sax was a bit of a nemesis in my career, a guy I never wanted to face, but there was one time in particular when he cost me a moment—indeed, it might have been one of the very finest moments of my career, were it not for Saxy. He was in the on-deck circle, bases loaded, one out, when the Dodgers put on the squeeze. It just worked out that I had it read the whole way. I came running in from the mound, and scooped up the bunt with a pretty little shovel-and-dive move that just nipped the runner at the plate—one of the greatest defensive plays I’d ever made, at any level. As a pitcher, I always prided myself on my contributions with my glove or my bat, and this one was right up there. But then Saxy strode to the plate and promptly stroked a single up the middle, scoring the runners from second and third. Just like that, my pretty defensive gem was erased, irrelevant, beside the point. If I’d somehow gotten out of that inning, it would have been a personal highlight, and now it was as if it never even happened.
On the highlight reel of my career that occasionally plays in my head, this defensive “gem” that was and wasn’t stands as the home version of Endy Chavez’s near-legendary grab from Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series against the Cardinals, when he plucked a two-run home run off the bat of Scott Rolen from the left field bullpen. Recall, the score was tied 1–1 in the sixth inning, one out, runner on first, when Endy fairly soared over the fence to make the grab and then fired to first to double-up the runner to end the inning. It was an eye-popping play, an all-time stunner, and it would have been remembered by Mets fans with great reverence instead of mere fondness if Yadier Molina didn’t step to the plate in the ninth inning and stroke a two-run homer of his own, this one well beyond Endy’s superhuman reach, to end the Mets’ season.
In my head at least, this shovel-and-dive play against Steve Sax’s Dodgers was like that … a little.
Happily, Steve’s yips were short-lived—or, at least, he found a way to power past them and let muscle memory take over. He went on to make a couple more All-Star teams, and to make his mark on the game for another ten years. We even crossed paths as teammates for a short while in Oakland—Steve’s last stop in his fourteen-year career.
Somewhat less happily, the other similarly afflicted Steve, Steve Blass, was never given the chance to right himself—perhaps because his condition found him late in his career. The silver lining here, though, was that Steve was such a beloved figure to Pirates fans that he was able to segue into the team’s broadcast booth, where he worked as a color commentator for over twenty years, and I offer their stories here with admiration and sympathy for what these two competitors endured … feelings I wish I could attach to the story I’m about to share about a former battery-mate who famously fought his own battle with the yips.
* * *
Mackey Sasser.
The name alone can excite/enrage/entertain Mets fans of a certain age, depending on his/her point of view.
My point of view came from a place of frustration, because from where I stood on the mound I could only look on and wonder—and curse the baseball gods for putting me in a spot where my catcher couldn’t even get the ball back to me without making me sweat.
Perhaps a little setup is in order …
Mackey joined the Mets ahead of the 1988 season, in a trade with the Pirates, ostensibly to back up Gary Carter behind the plate. Mackey was known in those days for his bat and his arm. Really, he was a helluva hitter, which during my time in the game was a bit of a luxury—to have two catchers on your roster who could hit a ton should have given us an edge, going into the season. And it did, for a while … until a collision at home plate left Mackey with one of the worst cases of the yips I’d ever seen or heard about or been forced to play through.
Out of nowhere, Mackey started double-clutching on his routine throws back to the mound. Or he’d have to tap his glove two, three, or four times before releasing the ball. It was almost painful to watch him agonize over getting the ball back to the pitcher, especially when you stopped to realize that when the ball was in play he could barehand a slow roller up the first base line and fire to first for the out, or gun down a runner trying to steal second. It’s when he had all the time in the world between pitches that he found a way to fill it with a whole lot of weirdness.
Now, I don’t mean to dismiss Mackey’s difficulties, or to trivialize them in any way. The yips are a very real, diagnosable condition, covering a constellation of twitches and glitches in any number of practiced behaviors relating to a very specific fine motor skill—say, throwing a baseball, or sinking a putt, or playing darts. Basically, anything involving a repetitive motion that’s been developed over time and grooved into routine. As an organization, the Mets went out of their way to help Mackey through this. They set him up with a sports psychiatrist, a physical therapist … they tried everything.
But what they didn’t do was talk to the team. The rest of us were yips adjacent, and I’m sure it would have helped Mackey to know that his teammates were on his side—which, sad to say, we weren’t.
There’s been a lot of research into what might cause the yips, and nobody’s come up with a surefire way to cure them. Sometimes, they go away on their own—leaving the poor sod who endured them to forever wonder if and when they’ll return. And sometimes, they don’t—putting an effective end to an athletic career. They seem to surface in a problematic way with top-level athletes who have spent a lifetime perfecting certain specific aspects of their sport, and I think it gnaws at those of us who played the game to think how easily it could have been us on the jittery end of these worries.
In baseball, every pitcher who’s being completely honest with himself (and with his coaches!) goes through a stage when he stands on the mound and has no idea where the ball is going. Maybe the baseball just doesn’t feel right in his hands, or a certain arm angle is no longer comfortable. Most times, the feeling lasts for just a couple pitches or so, and if you’re lucky those pitches happen during your warm-up. We’ve all seen it: a reliever comes on to put out a rally and sails his first pitch all the way to the backstop. Usually, it’s just nerves, and once you settle in to the game or the situation the ball once again feels right and true.
It’s when the feeling becomes chronic that it can derail a career, like it very nearly did with Steve Sax, and like it almost certainly did with Steve Blass. With Mackey Sasser, it threatened to derail our entire season, because as a catcher he had to handle the ball after every single pitch. His presence in the lineup changed the mood of the entire clubhouse … and not to the good. Nobody on the staff wanted to pitch to him, because he could barely get the ball back to the mound. Sometimes, he’d roll it, like a bowling ball. Or he’d loft an underhanded toss that would fall like a teardrop into the no-man’s-land in front of second base. Teams around the league were of course well aware of Mackey’s shortcomings in this area, and they used their scouting reports to full advantage. Base runners on first would anticipate one of his lollipop throws and scamper to second in the time it took the ball to find its way back to the pitcher—a move that would go down as a stolen base, even though it always felt to me like it was closer to catcher’s indifference … or, cruelly, catcher’s incompetence.
I must’ve p
itched to Mackey thirty, forty times during our overlapping tenures in New York, and each time out it was an adventure wrapped inside an enigma. I can remember standing on the mound for what always felt to me like an interminable period of time, wondering if and how and when he’d get the ball back to me. Often, I’d have to finish my delivery and start walking toward the plate, meeting Mackey halfway so he could hand the ball back to me. Sometimes, he’d drop it in my glove and then pat me on the butt to make it seem like we were meeting to discuss how to pitch to the next batter, or some other piece of strategy—a charade that always pissed me off for the way it suggested that Mackey was somehow running the show from behind the plate.
(You know, as I set these words to paper I can’t help but wonder how these meet-in-the-middle hand-offs would be treated alongside the rules changes in today’s game, when trips to the mound are now limited.)
Occasionally, if there were runners on when Mackey was catching, I’d have to drop to my knees to “block” one of his errant throws and try to keep the ball in front of me, and whenever that happened I’d think, What the fuck? He’s supposed to be the one blocking my throws.
No question, we were vulnerable with Mackey behind the plate, but Davey Johnson kept trotting him out because Mackey could hit. Oh, man … Mackey could hit. His bat kept him in the game—and, got to admit, there were times I caught myself wishing he’d fall into the kind of prolonged slump at the plate that would leave management to reevaluate his abilities versus his liabilities.
He wasn’t my favorite teammate, let’s just say that. And it wasn’t because of the yips. I mean, the yips were a part of it, to be sure, but you’d think, when a guy’s struggling like that … when he’s become a burden to his teammates … when he knows he’s become a burden to his teammates … when everyone around him is extending a kind of helping hand, he might go out of his way to apologize for putting us all in a tough spot. Or, at least, to acknowledge what was going on. But Mackey wasn’t like that. He just went about his business and seemed to assume that all these little brushfires he was setting off around him when he took the field were someone else’s problem.