Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  Toweling off when he returns, Burris listens to a list of the pitches he threw Schmidt. The third baseman batted four times, drawing two more walks, popping out to the shortstop, and striking out again. For his part, Schmidt is growing impatient with himself, but knows that four games into the season is no time to start thinking slump. Burris is content with the way he pitched Schmidt. At least he didn’t give him anything to hit. As each pitch is described, he nods, remembering it.

  “Fastball,” he says. “That was my fastball.” Or, “Slider, that was an outside slider.” But Burris is unwilling to comment in detail. At one point he catches himself on the verge of explaining why, in the fourth inning with no outs and no one on base, he wasn’t worried about walking the cleanup hitter.

  “Hey, this isn’t for publication, is it?” he asks the man who has introduced himself as a reporter and who has been jotting notes ever since he started talking.

  “Of course it is.”

  “Hey, I don’t think I want any of this printed,” Burris says.

  “That’s why I’m asking you questions, to write an article for publication.”

  “Well, look,” Burris says, a dark look coming over his face. “This has to do with strategy, man. I got to pitch to Schmidt again this season. I don’t want him knowing how I pitch him.”

  In the Phillies’ clubhouse, Schmidt is standing stark naked before his locker, surrounded by about fifteen reporters and an assortment of handheld cameras and klieg lights, which reflect sharply off the gold cross dangling in the hairs of his chest. Schmidt is holding a towel in one hand and a plastic bottle of shampoo in the other—a none-too-subtle hint, as if his nakedness were not enough, that this is a man on his way to take a shower, guys. But the questions keep coming, and the third baseman, the old pro, keeps fielding them with an edgy mix of candor and impatience. The sports columns will be filled for another day.

  Finally, he escapes to shower. But when he returns, fifteen minutes later, one stray television reporter is waiting with his cameraman for an interview.

  “Come on. Schmitty. Just one question,” he begs.

  “But I’m naked,” Schmidt protests.

  “We’ll shoot you from the shoulders up, you know that.”

  Schmidt shrugs, resigned. “Okay, one question,” he says, and of course it is The Question—“Are you concerned that you haven’t been hitting well, Mike?”—which the reporter knows Schmidt wants least to hear, especially after just granting this small favor, so he rallies quickly with an ounce of empathy—“Is it the toe?”

  The ballplayer has to laugh. He shakes his head, then looks up at the camera with mock seriousness, “Yeah, Frank, it’s the toe,” and he grins. The reporter signals his cameraman to stop taping.

  “Come on, Mike,” he pleads…

  Later, Schmidt is seated in a back room of the clubhouse. His left foot, the one with the double-sized shiny red second toe, is in a yellow bucket of ice. He is wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of gray Phillies gym trunks. The lower parts of his legs and ankles are crisscrossed with thick blue veins, and there are wicked U-shaped scars on both knees—souvenirs of surgery for serious high school football injuries. One of Schmidt’s knees is pinned together artificially inside.

  He is watching black-and-white videotapes of his at bats this game, images recorded by a Phillies employee who sits each game with a small camera directly behind home plate under the stands, protected by a Plexiglas screen. Schmidt doesn’t like what he sees. He has the cameraman roll the tape back again and again to take a closer look at a few crucial swings, and complains to himself as he watches—“Look at that, see the way I’m pulling my lead shoulder out and away from the plate as I swing? When you open up the shoulder like that you sacrifice all the power in your swing….”

  Watching the tape of his one strikeout this game, Schmidt winces as he sees his wild swing at an outside breaking ball for strike three.

  “I missed because I didn’t see it good, didn’t pick up the spin,” he says. “It’s a day game, it’s cloudy…in that split second in the swing where it matters I was swinging at where I thought the pitch was instead of where it really was. It was a good pitch to hit. I just missed it. The same pitch another time I’ll crush.”

  Midway through the screening, Schmidt lets go of his basic complaint, a frustration that applies to every strong hitter in the big leagues.

  “Look at the way Burris was pitching me today,” he says, agitated.

  “It’s what you call pitching around a hitter. Look at that!” he shouts, watching another pitch on the screen. “Look at that!”

  Then he grabs a black dustpan off the shelf behind him and lays it on his lap to serve as home plate. “They pitch me almost exclusively out here,” he explains, holding his hands about eighteen inches apart, one hand just over the edge of the dustpan, the other well outside it. “The man had no thought for the inner three quarters of the plate,” he says of Burris. “He’s working the outside almost exclusively. Ain’t nobody going to be mad at Ray Burris for walking Mike Schmidt. So he doesn’t care if he misses. Just keep it outside and away. Burris is strictly a sinker, slider pitcher. Sinker, slider. And every one of them is way out here,” again indicating with his hands the zone well off the dustpan.

  “I have to deal with that all year,” he says. “I can deal with it better when I’m hitting like a good hitter. But I’m not a good hitter yet this year. Not yet. If I don’t get a hit off Randy Jones in New York Tuesday, then you’ll know I’m in trouble.”

  Again it is Tuesday, April 13, 1982. Opening Day at Shea Stadium. Phillies vs. the New York Mets.

  It is a cool day of intermittent sunshine. For the traditional Opening Day spectacle, the entire Phillies and Mets baseball clubs are standing single file along the first and third base lines. As a dark-haired waif, star of a hit Broadway musical, fills the whole U-shaped arena with her gutsy rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a jet passes overhead, descending to nearby La Guardia Airport, roaring down—in competition or affirmation? Across the colorful celebration the plane’s shadow flits quickly, ominous somehow.

  The Phils had their own Opening Day at Veterans Stadium against the Mets last week. It has been a bad five days. They have lost three of their first four games. They are like an automobile engine balking at ignition in the early-morning chill.

  A big part of the problem is Schmidt. He has batted sixteen times now and has gotten only one hit. He stands fourth in the row of Phillies players along the third base line, legs apart, stretching slowly to the right and then the left, limbering. He pulled a little something in his torso during batting practice, but he doesn’t feel it now. In about fifteen minutes he will.

  After the Mets make three quick outs in their half of the first inning, Schmidt trots back to the dugout with a knot of excitement at the center of his chest. Now. He can’t wait. He remembers how he ripped that pitch off Jones last week. He wants another hit badly.

  Grabbing his bat, he dons a red batting helmet and stands off behind home plate limbering up slowly as Jones finishes his warm-up throws. Schmidt feels confident. Time to feel again that electric surge of bat on ball.

  Then it is time. Mike Schmidt eases into the batter’s box with ritual, a lifetime of accumulated tics….

  THE GREAT POTATO PICK-OFF PLAY

  OCTOBER 1988

  This story is one of the most widely reprinted of my magazine articles. It resulted from a small item on the newswire about a “Potato Day” at the ballpark in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in honor of Dave Bresnahan, who had pulled off a stunt with a potato in a game the previous year that had gotten him kicked out of baseball. I attended Potato Day, and got Bresnahan and his teammates to reconstruct the stunt, which I think captures both the fun and frustration of playing out a career in the minor leagues.

  Now, some say there is no more than a hair’s difference between minor league baseball and the bigs. Most who say so, admittedly, are minor-leaguers, whose dreams oft
en dine at the table of delusion. The idea is also promoted by bush league team owners, who have been known to float an occasional lie in promoting 140-odd second-rate ball games every summer. But in the late summer of 1987, nobody was making that boast about the Bills of Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

  Twenty-seven games out of first place in the Class AA Eastern League, two organizational rungs and an equal number of light-years away from the majors, their season was an embarrassment of near-epic size.

  It was the time of year when shadows in late innings stretch long on the infield grass, and when ballplayers languishing on the lower rungs of the baseball ladder come face-to-face with youth’s end. It was on a night like this, August 31, 1987, that the Bills met the Reading Phillies at Williamsport’s quaint Bowman Field to play two of the last three games on their schedule.

  Ball games had long since become grim duty for Orlando Gomez’s squad. In fairness to Gomez, the Bills’ manager had started off at a disadvantage. Most members of that year’s team had been led to a Class A championship the previous year by manager Steve Swisher, a gung-ho leader who owned their loyalty and esteem. As a reward, Swisher and most of the team had been moved up to Class AA ball in Williamsport and were holding their own in high spirits through the first month of the season until Swisher got promoted. The Cleveland Indians, the Bills’ parent organization, gave Swisher the club’s higher-level Class AAA team, which had been struggling under Gomez’s management. The Bills got Gomez.

  Orlando Gomez is a swarthy, moustachioed Puerto Rican gentleman with a round face, who had been coaching in the minors for ten years. He is an emotional man, and his feelings about the demotion showed. The Bills, having lost their boisterously confident manager, now found themselves managed by a sensitive, sad, volatile fellow. Gomez might react to a loss one day with a compassionate postgame lecture, complete with a tearful “I luff you guys,” and the next day challenge team members to a fistfight. That, coupled with a certain language barrier (Gomez spoke fluent Spanish and most of his team did not), made for a troubled managerial transition.

  One of Gomez’s least-popular moves that summer had been to send the Bills’ catcher, Dave Bresnahan, back down to Class A ball. In every tight group of young men, whether they are convicts, soldiers, schoolboys, or ballplayers, there is a character like Bresnahan.

  He was a short, blond-haired kid of twenty-four with a pink complexion and traces of a blond moustache. Brez, as he was known to team members, had torn up the Little Leagues in Phoenix, Arizona, had been an all-state catcher in high school, and all-conference in junior college. When he broke his right throwing hand one summer, Bresnahan taught himself to throw left-handed so he could play winter ball. He played that winter catching and throwing with the same hand and, emboldened by the feat, had taught himself to hit left-handed as well. When he was drafted by the Seattle Mariners in the eighteenth round in 1984, Bresnahan had made himself into potentially one of baseball’s rarest finds, a competent switch-hitting catcher. But like so many blazingly talented youngsters, Bresnahan’s promise ran afoul of baseball’s relentless leveler—professional pitching. It was the same from both sides of the plate; every once in a while, Bresnahan would go on a two- or three-day tear, but over the long haul, he couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat.

  By the summer of ’87, he was still playing on the strength of his catching ability and winning personality. Released by the Mariners, then picked up by the Indians, Bresnahan clung to his dream of a big league career with inspiring intensity. An avid fan and amateur baseball historian, he approached the game with an irrepressible fun streak that endeared him to managers, coaches, fans, the media, and, above all, his fellow players. When, in a fit of anger over a loss, Gomez outlawed drinking beer on the team bus during the long trip home, Bresnahan led the squad in rousing tuneless renditions of inane TV sitcom theme songs, such as The Dick Van Dyke Show or The Brady Bunch. Beneath the chorus one could just discern in the back of the bus the faint but unmistakable swish of tabs popping off cans of smuggled suds.

  When the Bills started to lose, and lose they did after Gomez’s arrival that summer, sending Bresnahan down to Class A ball seemed a logical step. The team needed a change, Bresnahan was hitting under .200, and there was a catcher in Kingston whom the Indians considered a prospect. What the new manager could not have known was how important Bresnahan was to the team in less measurable ways. He could not have known, for instance, how Brez, despite his anemic bat, had driven in four runs in a crucial playoff game the year before. Gomez couldn’t have known the countless goofy ways Brez motivated his teammates daily. The Bills took the field the day after Brez left town that summer with the right sleeves of their blue-and-red jerseys rolled up as a gesture of mourning.

  A month later the Bills’ starting catcher got hurt, and Bresnahan was back, but by then, in early August, the season was already a write-off. Bus rides seemed interminable. Everyone was sick to death of each other, of ballpark hot dogs, of the faintly nauseating odor of stale cigarettes and spilled beer in the team bus, and of Gomez’s vexed Hispanic lamentations. It was about then that Bresnahan first started talking about the potato.

  One evening in August, Bresnahan was drinking beer at Joey’s, a popular hangout in Williamsport, with his roommate, Rob Swain. Swain was a short, crewcut infielder with a muscular frame and such tiny feet that his teammates used to say his shoes were small enough to drape over a rearview mirror. The roommates were watching the bar’s giant TV screen when a piece came on about big league pitchers scuffing baseballs.

  “This is a kooky, crazy game,” said Bresnahan, whose pensive musings on The Game tended to flow with a few beers. “People are always trying to get away with stuff. I read once that a player used a potato in a baseball game.”

  A potato?

  He told Swain that he couldn’t remember where he read it, or how the potato was used, but there was something about the idea that intrigued him.

  No one knows how greatness comes to a man. For some it is a gift at birth, for others it comes with a struggle.

  For Dave Bresnahan, it came in a moment of blind inspiration on a team bus in junior college. He thought: Wouldn’t it be funny to use a potato in a baseball game? But through his school years and early years in the minors, the games had all seemed too important.

  Now, the time had come. The potato haunted Bresnahan the way a cliff seems to beckon those who fear heights.

  “I’ve always wondered if it would work,” he said one night to Mike Poehl.

  Bresnahan explained that the trick would be to make a runner on third believe the ball had been overthrown into left field. Then he could be tagged out at home. “You would have to have a guy on third and a potato shaped just the right size…,” Bresnahan explained.

  Poehl laughed, but not heartily. The Indians’ number-one draft pick in 1985, Poehl was a passive, pampered, towering Texas thoroughbred with a big league fastball and a tragically fragile arm. More than the Bills’ wins and losses, Poehl worried about his earned run average. He told Bresnahan he thought it would be real funny so long as it didn’t happen in his game.

  But most of the Bills loved the idea. The potato got to be the one thing they looked forward to more than the end of the season.

  Since a second-string catcher can be sure of playing only during a double-header, and the season had only one double-header left, it was decided that the game would be Monday, August 31. Sitting around a Reading hotel room Saturday afternoon, two days before, Bresnahan was chewing over the idea with Bills first baseman Bob Gergan, a power-hitting preppie with a bad back. Bresnahan said he had one reservation:

  “What if they let the run count? I talked to Poehl about it, and he doesn’t want the run to count against him.”

  Gergan said he was sure that the run wouldn’t count.

  “There’s nothing in the rule book about a potato,” he said with certainty.

  But for Bresnahan this wasn’t good enough. So Gergan phoned a friend
who worked as a major league umpire and explained the proposed scenario. His friend said no clear rule would apply. This meant the ump would be on his own. If it happened to him, Gergan’s friend said, he would most likely send the prankster to the showers and move the runner back to third—no harm done—and have a good laugh about the whole thing later.

  When Bresnahan got a chance to play that night, he tried to pick a Reading runner off at third base. Reading would be back in Williamsport for the Monday double-header. He wanted them to note that, on occasion, this Bills catcher tried to pick runners off third.

  Just in case.

  On Monday morning Bresnahan visited the produce section of the Weiss market in Williamsport, seeing fruits and vegetables in a new light.

  As he walked past the onions he had a fleeting thought…but, no, an onion might come apart.

  Then the cantaloupes…but, no, too big. He stopped in front of the potato display, removed the twist-tie from the top of a plastic sack of Idaho spuds, and began rummaging through.

  “Can I help you?” asked a produce clerk.

  Bresnahan was so startled he jumped back and stammered a reply.

  “Yeah, uh, I’m looking for some potatoes…My parents are coming over. They like really big potatoes.”

  Bresnahan couldn’t believe how foolish that sounded, but the produce clerk seemed unfazed. He reached in and sorted out four choice spuds.

  Back in his kitchen at home, Bresnahan set a baseball on the counter next to the potatoes to serve as a model. First off, the color was wrong. So he walked next door to borrow a potato peeler. He scraped the four potatoes bare. Next, their shape was too oblong. He whacked off the ends with a butcher knife and whittled away until they were round and white. Then he tried to draw on the seams with a red ballpoint pen, but the shaved potato was moist, and the ink wouldn’t take. He squinted at his handiwork and began to worry that the stunt might not work.