Alas, Pittsburgh, like so many other cities, suffered terribly at the hands of baseball vandals in the late 1960s and 1970s. Not since Cromwell’s troops, their puritan sensibilities offended by beauty, went around smashing decorative art in churches has there been an act of folly comparable to the abandonment and destruction of Forbes Field, the Pirates’ home for generations. The outrage was made worse by the replacement of Forbes Field by Three Rivers Stadium. Forgive my intensity, but a fan remembers with special fondness the ballpark where he saw his first major league game. My first was in Forbes Field in 1950. The loudspeakers were pouring forth the pop song of the moment (“Good Night, Irene”) as the 9-year-old from central Illinois entered. He left after the Pirates rang up a thumping victory over the Cardinals, one of only 57 Pirate wins that year. Forbes Field was one of those old parks that combined a sense of spaciousness with a feeling of intimacy.
Three Rivers Stadium was opened in 1970, which means it was dreamed up in the 1960s, which is no excuse but explains a lot. Almost everything about the 1960s, from politics to popular music to neckties, was marked by wretched excess. It was, of course, a decade in love with professional football. It is to baseball’s credit that when the times were out of joint, baseball was out of step. As Bill Veeck said, “The Sixties was a time for grunts and screams…. The sports that fitted the time were football, hockey and mugging.” Three Rivers Stadium was built to accommodate both football and baseball. Big mistake. And speaking of mistakes (there are so many to speak of), there were those Pirates uniforms. From 1977 through 1979 the Pirates pioneered new forms of gaucherie in their three uniforms (one yellow, one black, one white with pinstripes) and two styles of hats. Could there be a more complete contrast with the sedate, unchanging vestments of the Dodgers? In many ways Gott offers a complete contrast with Hershiser. Hershiser is intergalactically famous. Gott is not. No Bob Hope specials for him. Hershiser works in one of the nation’s two biggest media markets. Gott worked in one of the smallest of the 26 major league markets. Los Angeles is synonymous with glitter. It should not be. It is as much the home of gang war as of Hollywood. (Gott, by the way, was born in Hollywood.) Pittsburgh is synonymous with sweat and soot. It should not be. The image of Pittsburgh as the Steel City is more than a generation out of date. No steel is made within the city limits. There is only one producing steel mill in the metropolitan area. The city’s largest employer is the University of Pittsburgh. But the biggest contrast between Hershiser and Gott is in what they do. Hershiser has a star’s job: starting pitcher. Gott’s job is to prevent disasters and sometimes tidy up messes that other pitchers have made. Hershiser has the glamour of a surgeon. Gott is one of those harried doctors you see—and are mighty glad to see—coping with crises in busy emergency rooms. When major league managers reach for the dugout phone to call the bull pen they should dial 911. The Book of Job—the relief pitcher’s handbook—got it right: Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.
You do not have to be a bit touched in the head to want to earn a living as a reliever, but many relievers seem to be. There is a tendency for relief pitchers to seem a bit mad—mad meaning angry (Goose Gossage), mad meaning crazed (Sparky Lyle), or both angry and crazed (Al Hrabosky). Moe Drabowsky collected the phone numbers of bull pens all over the major leagues and enjoyed lightening the burden of boredom by calling bull pens in other cities. Imitating the voices of various coaches, he would order relievers hundreds of miles away to start warming up.
Gott, too, tends toward the manic, another complete contrast with cool-hand Hershiser. “My father was a very hard worker, came from nothing and made a lot of money. You don’t listen to parents when you are growing up, so my dad found other people for us to listen to.” Gott’s brother went to golf camps and twice won the California state high school golf championship. Gott went to baseball camps. As a junior in high school he went out for football for the first time. He did it on a dare. Someone challenged him to prove that he was tough enough to play. He could play. As a senior he was all-conference. UCLA recruited him as a defensive end and middle linebacker. But his father had been a baseball prospect who injured his arm just at the time he was about to make the transition from amateur to professional ball and he wanted one of his children to be a ball player. “My brother,” says Gott, “is an introvert and went into golf.” Gott is not an introvert. For a while during his, shall we say, vigorously lived youth, which extended well into his twenties, Gott was, he admits, “the classic million-dollar arm with the ten-cent brain.” He will be 30 on Opening Day, 1990, and he is still not your typical sight when he arrives at the mound.
It is one of the oldest sayings in baseball. It is what innumerable coaches and managers have said (or are said to have said) to innumerable pitchers having problems: “Babe Ruth is dead—throw strikes.” It is said that Art Fowler, Billy Martin’s Sancho Panza and pitching coach at various stops in Martin’s career, was once approached before a game by a young pitcher who said: “In the late innings I seem to lose my control. I’m doing something wrong—opening my shoulder or otherwise developing a flaw in my mechanics. Watch me closely tonight and see if you can spot the problem.” Around the seventh inning the young pitcher did indeed lose his control and walked three people. Fowler came to the mound and the young pitcher asked anxiously, “What am I doing wrong?” Fowler, drawing upon years of experience, said, “You’re walking people and Billy’s pissed.”
Fans are forever wondering what gets said to a relief pitcher when he comes to the mound in a difficult situation. With Gott, says LaValliere, “I just try to stop him from snorting. He comes in like a horse, running in from the bull pen. He’s huffing and puffing, so the first thing I want to do before I go back to warm him up is let him catch his breath a little bit.” Doesn’t that surge of adrenaline make it hard for him to keep his mechanics stable? “That is one reason why he has to throw from a stretch even when he is starting an inning. He gets so excited he really couldn’t keep all the body parts going in the same direction enough to throw strikes.” Steve Carlton used to go into a semi-trance of concentration before a game. But Carlton was a silent, solitary, withdrawn man most of the time. Gott is the soul of sociability, up to a point. “You can talk to him in the bull pen until up around the seventh inning,” says LaValliere. “Then he goes into a kind of trance. When he finally gets the phone call, he works himself up. He has to be in fourth gear when he comes in.” Gott says, “We’re little kids playing a little kid’s game. Why shouldn’t we show emotion?”
There is an answer to that question. Showing emotion is just not done because baseball is such a humbling game. The exultation of success is going to be followed in short order by the cold slap of failure. Any team’s success. Anyone’s success. So why get high when a low is just around the corner? Baseball is a life best lived in an emotionally temperate zone. Still, relief pitchers and especially closers can be forgiven for being different. Gott sure is. The highlight of his 1989 season may have been painting the horse’s testicles silver. And even that, although worth doing, did not go right. Wrong color. No one got gold paint.
When visiting teams leave their hotel in downtown Chicago, heading for Wrigley Field, their bus takes Lake Shore Drive, getting off at the Belmont exit, where there is a statue of General Philip Sheridan on a horse—an anatomically correct horse. A few years ago a tradition got started involving the horse. It was said that things would go better for a team that season, and that the team’s rookies would have long careers, if during the team’s first visit of the season to Chicago, the rookies painted the horse’s testicles the team colors. The rookies would go out to perform this rite, the veterans would alert the police, the rookies would get hauled into the station house where they would sign the baseball celebrity prisoner book, and that would be that. A good time was had by all. In 1989 Gott, who is not a rookie, went along with a rookie to do the job. But the visiting clubhouse man got silver paint. The Pirates’ colors are black and gold.
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p; Gott had flown back from Pittsburgh to Chicago to do the daring deed. He had originally left the team in Chicago and flown to Pittsburgh to see a doctor, who promptly put Gott on the 15-day disabled list. He had tenderness in his elbow and the doctor hoped that all it would require would be a short rest. But Gott flew on from Chicago to Los Angeles to see a specialist in pitchers’ problems. The specialist saw the need for a simple, 45-minute operation. However, when the specialist got into the elbow he saw a lot of debris (bone chips) and loose ends and frayed things. The operation took four hours and Gott went home with his arm in a cast, his season a shambles and his career on hold.
Gott is a grown-up. He knows the risks of what he does. Pitchers get hurt. They break. They wear out. A 30-year-old pitcher probably has an arm a great deal older than that.
Ron Fairly, a broadcaster of Giants games, once said, “Bruce Sutter has been around a while and he’s pretty old. He’s 35 years old. That will give you an idea of how old he is.” Even with modern conditioning techniques and nutrition plans, even with the care players take to prolong today’s lucrative careers, 35 is the sear, the yellow leaf. This is especially true for a pitcher, who lives by abusing his throwing arm. “Your arm is your best friend,” says Tom Seaver, “but in the end you’ve got to treat it as if it was your worst enemy.” That is, taking up pitching as a career is deciding to injure yourself every four or five days. Throwing a baseball is a highly unnatural act. As the arm accelerates past the ear, it gains terrific speed and then changes direction, turning down and decelerating sharply. Muscles stretch and tear and bleed. And that is when everything is going well. Lots of blood and other stuff must then be given time to go away—time, and encouragement. Ice and heat and exercise and massage and sound waves and other things are used to help the healing process.
Roger Angell reports that when, during the 1978 season, the Yankee team physician put Catfish Hunter under anesthesia to manipulate his damaged pitching arm, the physician was so startled by the popping noise when he broke the old adhesions in Hunter’s shoulder that he thought he had broken one of Hunter’s bones. And muscles are not the only things that suffer wear and tear. Sandy Koufax retired at age 30 at the end of a season when he won the pitcher’s triple crown. Never mind the numbers, he knew his arm was worn out. By October, 1966, his left elbow had suffered so much traumatic arthritis that his arm had begun to turn inward and he had to shorten the left sleeves of his coats. There was nothing Koufax could do about his elbow except take too many cortisone shots, which could have crippled him. He refused to run that risk.
Nowadays much more is known about the mechanics of pitching, how to minimize physical stresses and how to recover from their ravages. “Back in the old days,” Roger Craig remembers, “the pitching coaches didn’t really care about your delivery or your stretch position. They would just run you to keep you in shape. They didn’t worry about mechanics.” Another change in pitching concerns medicine. Roger Craig pitched for 12 years with six National League teams. He pitched and lost the last game the Brooklyn Dodgers played in Philadelphia. “About the third or fourth inning,” he recalls, “I snapped something in my shoulder that I now know was a rotator cuff. In those days you never heard of that. If that had happened now they would have gone in and ‘scoped’ [arthroscopic surgery] it. I pitched the last seven, eight years I was in the major leagues with a sore arm.”
It is remarkable how recently ice and weights became part of pitchers’ regimens. Until recently baseball has been backward about exercises. Unlike in football, where exercise programs have been devised to enhance performance, baseball has regarded exercise as primarily corrective, something you do when something has gone wrong. After a game, Hershiser, like most pitchers, ices his shoulder with a huge pack taped to his upper torso and he ices his elbow in a tub on a table. This cuts down the swelling and begins the healing, a practice begun on the Dodgers remarkably recently, in the 1960s, by Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax. The day after pitching is the off-day on which Hershiser works hardest: He has the most time to recuperate before his next start. He no longer is sore the day after a game, which he attributes to the work he has done with free weights and Nautilus equipment. The work develops strength and flexibility and long, lean muscles. Before he began weight training he was so stiff on mornings after games he could barely get out of bed. He does a free-weight program for his shoulder and rotator cuff, another for the elbow and ulnar nerve. For pitchers, that cuff and that nerve are the parts that are most apt to suffer incapacitating or even career-ending injuries. For cardiovascular conditioning Hershiser uses a Versiclimber, a sort of treadmill in the form of a ladder. He calls it “a way of climbing a mountain without going anywhere.” He also uses a stationary bicycle.
Gott also does all that stuff, and more. In the spring he thought a cortisone shot would put the pain away and let him pitch as though everything inside his arm was all right. He prepared for an appearance against the Texas Rangers by wearing, strapped to his forearm, a gadget that sent healing sound waves into his arm. At the Rangers’ posh Spring Training complex at Port Charlotte, Florida, Gott came in for an inning of work in the eighth with the Rangers leading, 6–4. He got two quick outs, then surrendered a solid single, balked the runner to second, gave up a run-scoring single, then a run-scoring double. Two runs on three hits. After the game in the clubhouse Ray Miller said, “I’m not worried about Jimmy. What he needs is 50,000 in there.” Miller means that Gott needs the presence of a crowd—the more the merrier; 50,000 if possible—to get himself pumped up. But Miller should have been worried.
After Gott went on the disabled list, Jim Leyland said he was not surprised: “I was suspicious because of his control. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when a guy starts his motion and then pulls his arm in because it hurts him to leave it out, or he leaves his arm extended because he doesn’t want to pull through, something hurts and it makes him wild. Being wild is very uncharacteristic of Jim Gott. If there is one thing he can do it is throw strikes.” Gott will be back, running the Dodger Stadium steps with Van Halen reverberating in his head, and throwing strikes, abusing his arm for a living, and loving it.
The way to minimize arm abuse is to pay attention to the way the arm bone is connected to the shoulder bone, and the way all the bones go together, right down to the leg bones. As Shea Stadium’s loudspeakers blare Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” into the fetid air of Flushing—the surf city by Flushing Bay—Hershiser raises his voice to make himself heard, explaining pitching mechanics with reference to “the law of the flail.” A pitcher’s body works, he says, like a catapult or whip. The reason a whip snaps is that the tip of the whip accelerates when the handle stops. A pitcher’s planted front leg is the handle; the arm is the end of the whip. “That’s why they say a pitcher is only as good as his legs.”
Be that as it may, Ray Miller believes that the key to velocity is arm speed. “Willie Mays used a 32-ounce bat. Mickey Mantle used a 34- or 32-ounce bat and hit the ball as far as anyone who ever lived. So what’s the size of the bat got to do with it? R’s the speed of the bat at contact. And it’s the speed of the arm as the ball leaves your hand.” Miller is a man worth listening to. He says a pitching coach contributes to a 20-win season this way. Assume 35 starts a year for a strong pitcher. If he is lucky he will have his best stuff perhaps 15 times. If the pitcher is working for a good team, he may win 10 of those. On the other 5, says Miller, you may pitch reasonably well but may pitch against Hershiser and lose. On the other 20 starts, that’s where the pitching coach comes in.
Miller comes into any relationship with a pitching pupil with a simple credo: “Throw strikes, change speeds, work fast.” That’s it. End of science. No philosophy.
Throw strikes, starting with the first pitch. In 1988, 43 percent of all first pitches were balls. But 25 percent were called strikes, 6 percent were swinging strikes and 12 percent were fouled. So 43 percent of first pitches resulted in 0–1 counts. The other 14 percen
t of first pitches were put in play. In the fifth game of the World Series, Hershiser worked on short rest, after an exhausting September and the draining seven-game League Championship Series. The Athletics came out trying to “run the count,” to take a lot of pitches and make him work. But that strategy would work only if Hershiser could not get the first pitch in. He got it in.
In a nine-inning game, Hershiser usually throws 110 to 115 pitches. That is on the low side for complete games by major league pitchers. It is low because, although he consistently ranks among the league leaders in strikeouts, he does not consider himself a strikeout pitcher. “Batters know I come after them with first pitches so they are swinging and I get a lot of first-pitch outs.” If a pitcher gets the first strike on a batter, he can miss with the next three before he is in dire straits. If he gets one more strike the batter is in dire straits. A pitcher ahead 0–2 should rarely fail to retire the batter. Probably the stiffest fine in the history of baseball was levied by Giants manager Mel Ott on pitcher Bill Voiselle, who gave up a home run to a Cardinals batter on an 0–2 pitch. The fine was only $500 but it concentrated Voiselle’s mind wonderfully. He was making $3,500 that season. Ray Miller probably approves of Ott’s criminal-justice system. Miller is a first-pitch fanatic. “It’s 90 percent of the game—strike one. If you throw strike one you’ve got five possible pitches left to throw for two strikes.” And “there are always about 12 million guys in baseball who are first-pitch fastball hitters. If you don’t throw them a fastball on the first pitch you eliminate about 75 percent of their game plan.”
Men at Work Page 21