by John Smoltz
That was a good thing, because thanks to my thumb injury, the one thing I didn’t have was the luxury of time. I didn’t have the benefit of spring training to work things out. The season started and I basically had to learn on the job. And fast. It was sort of like trying to put your mouth around the end of a garden hose. You really only get a few good swallows before you get drenched trying to keep up with the flow of the water. I came to the park every day and did my best to be a sponge and soak up as much as I could every night. The lessons were hard—especially when my mistakes were liable to be played on a seemingly endless loop on ESPN’s SportsCenter or Baseball Tonight for the next twenty-four hours. But eventually I started to get the hang of it and the pace seemed to slow down. Everything was still going 100 mph, but eventually it began to feel more like 70 mph. And I could handle 70 mph, no problem.
So there I was, finally settling in as the Closer, and there’s still something else to worry about: I didn’t have a walk-in song yet. You know, a specific song they play when I walk out to the mound from the bullpen when we’re playing at home. Now I could really care less, but the public relations guys kept giving me a hard time about it. It’s not that I’m not into music or anything; I just wasn’t going to waste my time thinking about what they should be playing on the speakers when I walked out the door. At the moment I had bigger issues on my mind, namely, how I was going to pitch after I walked out the door. So, finally, I just told them, “Look, I don’t even know what to pick and I don’t really care. Pick something. If it sticks, it sticks.” I was really hoping it would just work itself out.
So the season went on and I never really paid too much attention to what was playing as I’d take the field. Everything was fine until one day I walked out the door and I noticed “Dancing Queen” was being played. Seriously. I started laughing on my way to the mound. Now, I did say I didn’t care, and nothing against ABBA (I actually have one of their CDs), but “Dancing Queen” is not the song you want to have in the back of your mind when you’re staring down a hitter. It does absolutely nothing for your fastball, trust me.
So the game ended up going okay; I think I got a save actually, and I was just hoping nobody had noticed the music, or if they did, they had forgotten about it by the time the game was over. Yeah, not so much. I really took some heat from the guys. The music guy actually came all the way down to the clubhouse to apologize to me. Apparently it wasn’t intentional at all; the guy had just made a mistake. The whole thing really didn’t rile me up, but it did make one thing obvious: The time had come for me to do something about “The Song.”
So I rounded up the guys from the bullpen and told them, “Guys, you’re going to have to do something. I’m putting you in charge of the song. Pick anything you want, but I’m telling you ‘Dancing Queen’ can’t be it.”
So the bullpen guys got together and picked something out. The next day they came back and told me, “You’re not going to believe it the next time you come out the door.” They wouldn’t tell me what it was but said, “We’re going to blow you away.”
That comment landed me precisely in the situation I was trying to avoid all along: thinking about the dang song. Now I was champing at the bit for my next time out just because I wanted to find out what they had cooked up. Great. Well, finally, a couple days later I got my chance. I opened the door, and after about thirteen steps, I had to put my glove over my mouth because I was laughing my butt off. AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” was absolutely rocking Turner Field. They had lightning bolts on the screen and everything. The funny thing is, if you know me, I’m not a heavy-metal guy at all. But there was no turning back now.
As I said, I didn’t care in the beginning, but now I was hooked. The next thing you know, I’m tracking down the PR people myself and having them put together a little mix for me. From that point on, every time I opened the door, the Star Wars theme song would play while I walked through the outfield. Once I stepped on the infield, it switched to “Thunderstruck.” It ended up being the coolest thing in the world to me. The fans seemed to love it, too. And I guess I have “Dancing Queen” to thank for it all.
So now I had figured out my routine, refurnished the bullpen, and I had my own walk-in song. All I had left to worry about was what I was actually getting paid to do: to get my team safely out of games in the ninth inning. This is probably going to sound a little silly, but one of the first things I knew I had to do when I moved to the bullpen was not forget about pitching.
As a starter, you come into a game expecting to face the other team’s lineup several times. The entire game you are thinking about matchups and how to exploit hitters’ bad habits and/or weaknesses. The sequence of pitches you throw to a guy in the first inning, and their relative outcome, affect how you approach the same batter in subsequent innings. Effective pitching requires effective execution certainly, but it also comes down to working out a sound game plan with your catcher and knowing what to throw to what guy on what count.
Meanwhile, as a closer, with usually only one inning of work expected, it’s really easy to forget about all this, about pitching, and just throw. Since you are only going to face each hitter once, it changes the complexion of everything. You aren’t concerned with future matchups, you’re really only concerned with getting outs any way you can. Sometimes closers, especially power pitchers like me who can really get something on the ball, can get lulled into just throwing as hard as they can, without taking into full account what a hitter may or may not be expecting. It’s easier than you might think to stop concentrating, get lazy, and just reach back, grunt, and let it go. I had seen this happen to guys before. They might get away with it a couple times, but in the end, the results could be disastrous. I tried to make a conscientious effort to avoid this tendency and always keep pitching, not throwing, out of the bullpen.
Now, at the same time, that’s not to say I wasn’t throwing hard. I was actually throwing as hard as I had ever thrown, with my fastball humming in at 96, 97, even 98 mph. My resurgence in velocity actually caused some folks to raise their eyebrows and wonder if the extra couple miles per hour I had regained were all thanks to my surgically repaired elbow. The myth in baseball is that if you’ve had a bad ligament and you get a new one, you’re going to throw harder. But that just isn’t the case. Tommy John surgery didn’t give me a 98 mph fastball. It was there before, but when you pitch hurt for so long, you don’t have ninety-eight left in your arm. Also, as a starter, I always used to have to tone it down and not use my extra gear so that I could last the whole game. These are adjustments you have to make to keep your fastball hopping toward the end of games when your pitch count is topping out at 110, 120 pitches or more. When I was a closer, endurance and maintaining my velocity were never issues, so I could go in and use my extra gear right away.
One advantage my experience as a starter gave me was an edge, a certain cockiness or bravado or swagger. I had already earned that through my previous fourteen years of starting. If I had been a rookie or a guy who had never found much success as a starter, I wouldn’t have had that edge. It would have been harder to approach closing with as much confidence as I did.
Now, with that said, the funny thing is that when I was walking out the door of the bullpen and taking the field, I wasn’t actually thinking, I’m coming in here to take you guys down. People ask me about this all the time actually—they want to know what I was thinking that helped me be successful. Everyone is always shocked by the answer I give: I thought I was going to give it up. When I walked out of the door, I thought I was going to give it up. About this time the same people are usually looking at me trying to decide if I am messing with them or serious. Once they find out I’m serious, they want to know why in the world I would have such a negative thought process going on in my mind. But to me, it wasn’t a negative thought process. I know it sounds contradictory, but let me explain.
When I told myself, John, you could give it up today, it was a motivator to myself to stay on task. I
put the pressure on myself, and it really helped me focus. Now look, it’s not like I had to do this all the time; I mean, if you can’t get amped up for a game that’s tied or one in which your team is leading by one lone run, then you really shouldn’t even be on the field. I’m talking about the games where you are coming in to get three outs and your team is leading by four and five runs. In those situations, it can be easy to start thinking, All right, let’s get this over with or Man, my six-year-old son could get us out of this game. Once you start taking outs for granted, things are liable to turn ugly fast. Before you know it, you’ll have just thrown your fifth pitch and the bases are loaded with no outs. Welcome back to your 100 mph commute—it’s time to buckle your seat belt.
I was determined to be more mentally tough on the mound than my opponent. That was part of my edge. I would always be telling myself something like, You could possibly give it up today, so get after it John. This is three outs you’ve got to get. That’s what I used to get myself locked in. I always seem to perform best under pressure.
Other guys had other ways of approaching it. I’ve heard guys talk about using all kinds of things—visualizing their kids getting abducted, their wife or girlfriend being threatened by another man, their mint-condition 1967 Shelby GT getting vandalized—just whatever it took to get themselves worked up and have that little bit of adrenaline pumping through their veins. Some guys used anger to be successful. I used failure. I wouldn’t suggest it for everybody, because some people don’t function well under pressure, but it’s what worked for me.
I’ve always used this analogy that there’s this beast within all of us. The beast basically represents your impulsive tendencies or instinctive behaviors that determine how you respond in times of stress and crises. It’s what you are liable to do when the pressure is on. It’s not a bad beast per se, but it’s a beast that wants to get out and do what it wants to do. In order to be successful, you’ve got to learn what your beast is, what it wants to do, and how to tame it.
Like when I play golf, I’ve learned there’s no word for lay up in my beast’s vocabulary. My beast could care less about the odds or recommended safe shots, particularly on long par fives. My beast constantly eggs me on and tells me, “Pick up your driver, John. Darn those bunkers, you can reach that green in two!”
When it came to closing, I learned the hard way that when I walked out of that door, I had to channel my beast in a very peculiar way to be successful: by simply telling myself over and over again, John, you could give it up. You could give it up right here.
Thankfully, more often than not, I didn’t.
For all the challenges that closing presented, there were certainly things that I did love about it. I loved the incredible rush of adrenaline as I walked out the door and took the field. I loved being the guy my team called when the game was on the line. I loved coming in and getting my team out of jams.
There were also parts that I hated about closing. Most of all, I hated waiting around and seeing if the other guys, our starters, could be effective. I wanted to be in their shoes. I wanted to be going head-to-head with Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, and Jack Morris. I loved those moments; I missed those moments. Through all the innings in the bullpen, I really never let go of starting.
And after three years of doing what Atlanta had asked me to do—and having to largely stand by and watch my team falter in postseason after postseason, I was ready to ask for something from the Braves: another chance to start.
This wasn’t just some passing thought. I had really started seriously thinking about it midway through the 2004 season, and since that time I had devoted a lot of time and effort to exploring the idea from all sides. While my personal preference was certainly to start, it was essential to me to first ensure that my desire to start didn’t in any way go against what my doctors, coaches, or trainers thought was best for me and my arm. Given my age and the arm problems I had already faced, I wanted to find out from them if one position, starting or closing, offered me any better chance at sustainability.
It proved to be a difficult question to answer objectively. We were basically in uncharted baseball territory and there was little scientific or medical evidence to support one position over the other. It became a really subjective question. When you really sat down and weighed the pros and cons of the two positions, it almost seemed like it was a draw—that the perceived benefits of one balanced the perceived disadvantages of the other. But over the course of three years of closing, I had realized closing had two distinct drawbacks: the lack of true rest and the long-term impacts of throwing as hard as I could as often as I was.
After I weighed all the available evidence and spoke with my trainers and doctors, it was obvious to me that closing was worse for me physically than starting. So I started preparing myself to make my case to Bobby and the front office that I should get ready to do what no one in the history of the game had done successfully—to go from starting to closing and then BACK to starting. My argument was going to come down to two key points:
Our rotation needed power: The truth of the matter is the one thing that had always propelled us into the postseason year after year, strong starting pitching, had gone by the wayside shortly after I moved to the ’pen. To add insult to injury, Tom Glavine left for the New York Mets after the 2002 season and Greg Maddux went back to the Chicago Cubs after 2003. I didn’t harbor any grand illusions that my return to the rotation was the only thing we needed in order to mount another championship run, but I really felt it could be part of the solution. I also knew that without some power in the rotation, they wouldn’t need me as a closer because there were going to be fewer games where we were in position to win.
Closing wasn’t better for my arm: My original assignment to the bullpen was motivated, at least initially, by the mind-set that it would be a better way to rehab my arm coming back from Tommy John surgery. From that point on, I think it was just always assumed that shorter outings from the bullpen would be better for sustaining my career than returning to the rotation. After three years of closing, I was no longer convinced that this was the case.
When I came in to a game, I was there to throw as hard as I could and to record outs immediately. In 1996, I pitched nearly 300 innings—253 in the regular season and 38 in the postseason. I didn’t think I could be more spent than that. After one year of closing, I realized I was more mentally and physically exhausted than I’d been in 1996. The cruising speed I pitched at as a starter was more sustainable than the quick spurts of max effort required as a closer.
There was also the issue of daily wear and tear and the lack of true rest to consider. As a closer, I was sometimes called into games four days in a row. In the three years I had spent in the bullpen, I had only had two designated off days where I sat there in tennis shoes and truly had a rest day. Every other day I was lacing up my spikes for a possible appointment on the mound.
And then, there was all the warming up. When I first began closing, I would throw around forty, fifty pitches before going in to pitch one inning. I realized quickly that my arm was going to fall off if I didn’t make a drastic change. I soon learned to settle for fifteen pitches in the ’pen and then the eight I would get out on the mound once I got called into the game. This strategy would save my arm in the long run.
This may not sound like much, but I think what a lot of people don’t realize—myself included when I was a starter—is how many times you get up to warm up and do not end up in the game. Sure, they’re warm-up pitches, but let me tell you, they add up. I was called in to seventy-seven games my first full year in the bullpen, but I warmed up more than 140 different times. And that number isn’t a total for the year—that’s just when I gave up counting. In one game alone, I warmed up seven different times. We were in Minnesota and the game went fifteen innings, I believe. That’s an extreme example, but there were plenty of games in which four to five warm-up sessions were very possible.
When it came down to it, there
was no way to predict the future, but I had done my homework. All the doctors and trainers had weighed in and the one thing we could all agree upon was that starting was certainly no worse on my body than what I was already doing in the bullpen—which is all I needed to hear. I was already convinced that I could do it, and now there was no reason for me not to try. I had no idea what my statistics might look like, but I believed with everything I had that I could be successful as a starter again. That is, if I was given the chance.
Chapter Eight
ME AND THE HOMEBOYS UPSTAIRS
It was October 11, 2004, and I had just returned to the clubhouse from the bullpen after watching us lose yet another National League Division Series. I hadn’t so much as picked up a ball all night in our 12–3 losing effort against the Houston Astros, a team we ourselves had historically sent packing in the opening round of the playoffs, and it was eating at me. As I went through the housekeeping motions of wrapping up another season, storing my gear and deciding what equipment to take home or leave in my locker, I was already thinking about next season. About how I hoped things would be different, and not just in the postseason.
It was obvious that we didn’t have what it took in the starting rotation anymore, and it was absolutely brutal for me to sit in the bullpen, watching my team fall short in the postseason, knowing that I could still start and knowing that maybe with me in the rotation, things could have been different. Maybe it would be us packing for a flight to St. Louis that night to face the Cardinals in the National League Championship Series.