Mays was so intense that he periodically came to the edge of physical collapse. Bill Russell, who revolutionized the role of the center, and hence the nature of basketball, once said of the notion that blacks are “natural” basketball players: Then why did I spend ten hours a day practicing on San Francisco playgrounds? Good question. Gwynn is a “natural” who early on chose a hero because of the hero’s work habits.
When Gwynn was a boy in the 1960s he would go to Dodger Stadium. He would go early to get a good look at his hero, Willie Davis. Davis exemplified the difference between 1950s and 1960s baseball. He was an outfielder who got twice as many stolen bases as home runs (398 SB, 182 HR). The 1960 White Sox outfield (Al Smith, Jim Landis, Minnie Minoso) had more stolen bases than home runs (48 to 42). In 1980 five teams’ outfields had more stolen bases than home runs. In fact, in 1980 American League outfielders (with the Athletics’ trio of Rickey Henderson, Tony Armas and Dwayne Murphy stealing 131 bases and hitting 57 home runs) averaged more stolen bases (13.3) than home runs (13.1).
Davis was Gwynn’s hero because Davis was black, left-handed and “aggressive but under control.” He admired the way Davis took infield practice. Unlike many established stars whose actions during practices were perfunctory, during infield practice Davis “always went all-out, he’d charge the ball, he’d come straight over the top [with throws], but”—and here comes the key phrase again—“he was always under control. Being aggressive at the plate means attacking the ball. Doing it under control means not going out to get the ball, letting the ball get to you, not trying to hit the ball out in front of the plate.” Gwynn admired Davis’s work habits. “It was the way he did his business every day.” There it is again, the recurring sense of baseball’s everydayness, which drives Gwynn in his pursuit of consistency.
There is a fine and sometimes fuzzy line between admirable intensity and disfiguring obsession. Once when the Cincinnati Reds’ plane hit severe turbulence Pete Rose turned to a teammate and said, “We’re going down. We’re going down and I have a .300 lifetime average to take with me. Do you?” No jury would have convicted the teammate if he had strangled Rose, but if he had, the world would have lost a striking specimen of a man utterly defined by his vocation—perhaps too much so. The melancholy example of Rose shows that people with particularly narrow tunnel vision have no peripheral vision for adult responsibilities. However, the grand example of Gwynn is a refreshing reminder that a passion for excellence need not be disfiguring. Gwynn, who had the example of Willie Davis, is in turn an example to his peers, and to the rising generation of players.
In 1989 there were approximately 22 million American boys aged 6 to 18. Approximately 600,000 young Americans played on organized baseball teams. In addition, there were 40,000 college players and 6,000 in the minor leagues. Fewer than 1,000 men played in major league games. Only one-fourth of them had at least five years of major league experience. It has been calculated that the odds of a boy becoming a major league player are more than 100,000 to 1. The odds of the boy becoming an established (five years or more) major league player are about 500,000 to 1. Only about 2 percent of all the players who sign professional contracts ever see the inside of a major league clubhouse.
Only a fortunate few have the gifts necessary to become great athletes. However, no “gift” is sufficient for greatness. Greatness is never given. It must be wrested by athletes from the fleeting days of their physical primes. What nature gives, nurture must refine, hone and tune. We speak of such people as “driven.” It would be better to say they are pulled, because what moves them is in front of them. A great athlete has an image graven on his or her imagination, a picture of an approach to perfection.
Stanley Coveleski, who played for the Indians in the 1920s, once said, “The pressure never lets up. Don’t matter what you did yesterday. That’s history. It’s tomorrow that counts. So you worry all the time. It never ends. Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.” And Coveleski was a pitcher. Most tomorrows were days off. For Gwynn, the pressure, which comes from within him, is an everyday experience.
Rolling north out of San Diego toward Gwynn’s suburban home in a development on a mesa rising above the city, Gwynn inserts the BMW into the flow of freeway traffic and gives himself over to dissecting and deploring his 0-for-4 afternoon against the Astros. “The first couple of times up I opened up too soon. I knew it as soon as I did it. Knepper [the Astros’ pitcher] isn’t overpowering but he’s crafty. He’ll throw you a slow breaking ball and then he’ll take a little bit off it and throw it again a little bit slower.” That is an effective tactic for tantalizing a batter into opening up too soon, turning his shoulders and hips ahead of the arrival of the pitch in the hitting zone. One time up that afternoon, Gwynn bunted. There were runners on first and third, no outs, and the Padres were two runs behind. “Facing Knepper, you can almost bet you’re going to get a ground ball. So I figured, why not just bunt the ball, get the run in, move the other runner up, stay out of the double play, and we’ve still got two cracks to tie it. I thought he’d start me off fastball in, but he started breaking ball in. So when I squared to bunt it, I was trying to bunt it past the pitcher toward second base but I bunted it right to first. All the first baseman had to do was come off the bag and throw to the plate. So I came back to the dugout and Jack McKeon sat me down and said, ‘I know you were trying to move up the runners but in that situation go ahead and swing the bat. If you hit into a double play, we get a run in anyway.’”
Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow Cincinnati will be in town. Gwynn has no tape of the pitcher the Reds will start, but he faced him in Cincinnati and was l-for-3, a home run. Speaking as though reading a file to himself, Gwynn says, “Right-hander, pretty good fastball, straight over-the-top curveball and straight change—like what I hit out in Cincinnati. Two of the last three home runs I’ve hit have been on changes.” Most of his home runs go to right. “I haven’t hit one to left since”—pause—“ ‘eighty-six.” He has a good memory but most of what he remembers are problems, such as home runs hit the wrong way.
4
THE DEFENSE
Cal Ripken’s Information
On the night of July 5, 1989, the Orioles surged to a 5–0 lead midway through the third inning in Toronto. They hung on to win, 5–4. The next morning the box scores in the newspapers included this line in agate type, directly below the inning-by-inning line score: “DP: Baltimore 3, Toronto 1.” One of those double plays may have saved the game. It certainly symbolized the Orioles’ season.
With Toronto trailing, 5–3, the Blue Jays’ Kelly Gruber and George Bell opened the sixth inning with back-to-back singles off the Orioles’ starting pitcher, Bob Milacki. Out to the mound went Orioles manager Frank Robinson, out of the game came Milacki, in came relief pitcher Mark Thurmond, up to the plate came Fred McGriff, who, in an earlier at bat, had smashed his nineteenth home run. This time he hit a hard, fast ground ball on the quick new carpet of the Skydome. The ball was headed for right field, far to the first-base side of the infield. Second baseman Billy Ripken, ranging far to his left, fielded the ball, spun counterclockwise and fired the ball to his brother, who arrived at second as the ball and George Bell arrived almost simultaneously. Almost simultaneously. The ball beat Bell, shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., hung in against Bell’s hard slide (Bell is big, 6 feet 1 and 202 pounds,- Ripken is bigger, nearly 6 feet 5 and 220 pounds) and fired to first to double-up McGriff. Rally killed.
After the third out the two Ripkens ran off the field, same pace, arms held in the same position, forearms cocked slightly above parallel to the ground, eyes straight ahead, looking into the dugout. They ran past their father, the third-base coach. It was just another night on the factory floor for the Ripken men, but it brought the Orioles to the halfway point of the season with a record of 47–34 and a 6½ Va-game lead in the American League East, a lead 4½ games larger than that of any of the three other division leaders.
What else were the Orioles lea
ding in? Not much. Not batting average, not hits, not extra-base hits—not exciting stuff like that. Rather, they were leading in two crucial but, to most fans, boring categories: fewest errors (40), fewest unearned runs allowed. (They also were leading in fewest walks allowed, most intentional walks received, most sacrifice hits, fewest hit batsmen, most triple plays executed [one].) Pat Gillick, general manager of the Blue Jays, said, “Watching the Orioles is like watching a basketball team that’s playing well together. Defense is a rhythm, team thing, and everyone’s hustling and trying to outdo one another. It’s great to watch.” No one expected anyone to say anything like that about the 1989 Orioles. The 1988 Orioles had been comprehensively awful in a way that few teams ever have been. The 1989 Orioles were about 400 percent better, and about 80 percent of the difference was defense.
Tom Boswell is right. The 1989 season was baseball’s saddest season in seventy years, since 1919, the year of the Black Sox scandal. Wade Boggs was tarnished and Pete Rose was disgraced. Donnie Moore, a relief pitcher, committed suicide, and some friends said he had never gotten over giving up an important home run in the 1986 American League Championship Series. Dave Dravecky of the Giants broke his arm on the mound while trying to make a comeback from cancer—then broke it again in the on-field celebration after the Giants won the pennant. Commissioner Giamatti died. An earthquake shoved the World Series to the periphery of the nation’s attention.
However, beginning in the spring, on Opening Day when the Orioles beat Roger Clemens and the Boston Red Sox, and throughout the summer and into the autumn, the Orioles’ ups and downs—the unexpected ups, and the downs that never lasted as long as expected—were the sweetest story line in the season. They were in the pennant race entering the last weekend of the season. They were leading the league in not a single major pitching category and their only boasts about their offense were that they were second in walks and third in sacrifice bunts. Yet they finished two games out of first with an offense that outscored their opponents by just 22 runs over 162 games. Why? Defense. The 1989 Orioles made just 87 errors, the fewest in the major leagues. (The 1989 Athletics made 127.) They were the second team in history to make fewer than 90 errors. The Orioles’ fielding percentage of .98602 was the highest ever. Good defense—just 38 errors in their first 82 games—propelled the Orioles to the top of their division. Then when the wheels fell off the Orioles’ wagon in mid-season, the principal problem was bad defense: 24 errors in 25 games. (The Orioles’ slump after the All-Star Game gave rise to one of those What-kind-of-lunatic-thinks-these up? statistics: The Orioles’ 5–17 patch tied the 1975 Pirates for the worst streak of 20 or more games by a team in first place the entire time.) Over the last 71 games the Orioles batted an anemic .238 and averaged just 3.8 runs per game. Defense kept them in the race. But over the 162 games it was defense more than anything else that enabled the 1989 Orioles to match the 1967 Cubs for the most victories by a team that lost 100 games the previous year.
On the final day of the 1989 season—the day after the Orioles had been eliminated from the race by Toronto—shortstop Tony Fernandez of the Blue Jays played one inning, then left the game. It was his 140th game, the minimum necessary for him to be credited with the record for fewest errors (6) by a shortstop in a season. (The previous record was 7, set by Eddie Brinkman of the Tigers in 1972.) Fernandez plays all his home games, and thus most of his games, on plastic. In 1989 Ripken played 162 games, most of them on grass and dirt, and made just 8 errors. His final error of the season ended a 47-game errorless streak, the longest of his career. It was only his second throwing error of the season. He led all major league shortstops in putouts (276), assists (531), total chances (815) and double plays (119). In 1989, even more than in his 1983 MVP season, Ripken set the tone of the team, and he did it on defense.
“I was raised to play for the team, not for yourself,” Cal Ripken, Jr., says. “When you’re not in the race, it makes the last month awful hard.” Imagine, then, how hard it is to “play for the team, not for yourself” when the team is like the 1988 Orioles, who were out of the race at the end of the third week of April. No team ever started a season more miserably than the 1988 Orioles. They lost their first 21 games. It is difficult to pick the lowest point in the streak, but it probably came early, in game eight in Kansas City, when the Royals set a club record with seven consecutive hits while scoring nine runs in the first inning. In 1988 the Royals became the first club in 35 years to sweep an entire season series against the Orioles. At the 40-game mark, the Orioles’ record was 6–34, the worst record any club ever had that late in a season. The Orioles’ record in 1988 was 54–107, the worst record of any major league team in the 1980s. The Orioles had two potential Hall of Famers hitting third and fourth (Cal Ripken and Eddie Murray), and still lost 107 games, the tenth most losses in American League history. The Orioles were 20–61 on the road, the fewest road wins since the 162-game schedule began in 1961. (The 1952 Tigers won just 18 on the road.) The Orioles won fewer games (54) than the Mets won at home (56). The Orioles finished 23 V2 games out—out of sixth place. By the time the Orioles left the field in Toronto on closing day, 1988, they had compiled progressively worse records for five straight years. Only three other teams have done that, the 1901–1905 Dodgers, the 1932–36 Athletics and the 1938–42 Cubs.
So why, five months later, was that large man skipping—literally skipping, in high bounds—across the Sarasota outfield grass in March, 1989? Because when you have lost 200 games in two years you will try almost anything, even if it makes you look silly. A flexibility and conditioning expert was hired by the Orioles (tell that to an old-time baseball person and stand far back from the explosion) to see if he could help. The skipping person was the shortstop. By Spring Training of 1989, Cal Ripken, Jr., was the only member of the 1983 World Champion Orioles still with the team. By then the Orioles had just two players (both pitchers) over 30 years of age on their 40-man roster and Ripken, then 28, was the team’s ranking member in terms of seniority. The 1989 Orioles entered the season with six rookies and twelve players with less than two years’ experience. The 1989 Orioles became the first team to get 25 wins and 25 saves from rookie pitchers since saves became an official statistic in 1969. In 1989 the Dodgers had baseball’s largest payroll, with a per player average of $850,000. The Orioles had the smallest, averaging about $275,000. (The payroll included Ripken’s salary of $2.47 million.) It may have been a bargain basement team, but it was a bargain. Approximately one-third of the way through the 1988 season the Orioles had been 14–42 and 22Va games out of first place. One-third of the way through the 1989 season they were 31–23 and leading the American League East. At that point the Orioles had made just 23 errors, putting them on a pace to break the major league record, set in 1988 by the Twins (playing indoors and on a carpet), for the fewest errors by a team in a season. Orioles infielders had made just 3 errors in May. The catchers and first basemen had made no errors all season. The team had allowed just 6 unearned runs all season. (The Yankees had allowed the Orioles 11 unearned runs in the first three innings of a game the week the season reached the one-third mark.) In 1988 the Orioles were in last place every day of the season. In 1989 they were never in last place and were in first place for 116 days, 98 of them consecutively. By August 1, after 103 games, Orioles pitchers had just 6 complete games. The truth was that the pitching was barely adequate. But the defense made it satisfactory. What made the defense special was the speed of the new players, supplemented by adrenaline. “When you’ve been around seven or eight years,” said Ripken in 1989, his eighth season, “you might think twice about making a diving catch on gravel and sliding into the wall. But at this stage of our young players’ development, they don’t think about it.” Ripken, who will be 29 on Opening Day, 1990, is hardly elderly, even by baseball’s standards. But in a sense, he has about 29 years of baseball seniority.
Talk about the fruit not falling far from the tree. Cal Ripken, Jr., was raised in Aberdeen, Marylan
d, site of the U.S. Army Proving Ground, where tanks and other large things are tested for toughness. But in another sense he was born into baseball, into the Baltimore Orioles’ organization.
Cal Ripken, Sr., smokes Lucky Strikes and drinks Schlitz beer. The Luckies are not filtered and the Schlitz is not light. He is a former minor league catcher who looks like something whittled from an old fungo bat. When tanned, his skin is the color of a new baseball glove, but it has the wrinkles and creases of one that’s seen a lot of hard use. Any reader of John Tunis’s boys’ books knows that a short, scrappy former catcher should be “bandy-legged.” Cal, Sr., is. He played in Phoenix, Arizona; Wilson, North Carolina; Pensacola, Florida; Amarillo, Texas; Fox Cities, Wisconsin; Little Rock, Arkansas; Leesburg, Virginia; Rochester, New York; Aberdeen, South Dakota. He played in 9 towns in 8 years. He managed in 9 towns in 14 years: Leesburg, Virginia; Appleton, Wisconsin; Aberdeen, South Dakota; Tri-City, Washington; Miami, Florida; Elmira, New York; Rochester, New York; Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas; Asheville, North Carolina.
When Willie Mays was six months old his father taught him to walk by enticing him with a rolling baseball. Cal, Jr.’s, childhood was like that, only more so. He was always around ballparks. Jim Palmer, who at the end of his career was playing with Ripken, remembers the three-year-old Ripken gamboling at the Aberdeen, South Dakota, ballpark in 1964. Ripken remembers, “I had the luxury of taking ground balls with Belanger when I was 14 years old, and asking him all kinds of questions.”
Men at Work Page 33