by Roger Angell
There are some figures that even fans can understand, however: in 1980, Fisk’s last year in Boston, the Red Sox won sixty-eight games and lost forty-four when he was behind the plate but were fifteen and thirty-three when he was not. His bat helped, then and always (he is a lifetime .281 hitter, with two hundred and nine career homers, and of course he is the man whose twelfth-inning home run won the sixth game of the 1975 World Series—still a high-water mark of the October classic), but Fisk, in conversation, showed a splendid ambivalence about the two sides of his profession. Hitting mattered, but perhaps not as much as the quieter parts of the job.
“Catchers are involved every day,” he said, “and that’s one of the reasons why, over the years, they’ve been inconsistent in their productiveness. You can go a month and make a great offensive contribution, and then maybe a month and a half where there’s little or none. But because of the ongoing mental involvement in the pitcher-batter struggle you don’t have the luxury of being able to worry about your offensive problems. You just haven’t got time. I think catchers are better athletes than they used to be. They run better and they throw better, and more of them hit better than catchers once did. I’m not taking anything away from the Yogi Berras and the Elston Howards and the rest, but there never were too many of them. With the turn of the seventies, you began to get catchers like myself and Bench and Munson, and then Parrish and Sundberg and Carter, and then Pena—you go down the rosters and they’re all fine athletes. Bench started hitting home runs and Munson started hitting .300, and that old model of the slow, dumb catcher with low production numbers started to go out of date.”
Then there was the shift: “It always bothered me that catchers seemed defined by their offensive statistics—as if a catcher had no other value. Famous guys who hit twenty-five or thirty home runs or bat in a hundred runs may not have as much value as somebody hitting .250 or less—a Jerry Grote, say—but his pitchers and his teammates sure know. Look at Bill Preehan, with that good Detroit team back in the sixties and early seventies. He was a very average sort of runner, with an average, quick-release sort of arm, and nothing very startling offensively. But you just can’t measure what he did for that Tiger pitching staff—people like McLain and Lolich and Joe Coleman.”
He had brought up a side issue that has sometimes troubled me. There have been a hundred and seven Most Valuable Player awards since the annual honor was instituted by the Baseball Writers Association of America, in 1931, and thirteen of them have gone to catchers—very close to a one-in-nine proportion, which looks equitable. Catchers who are named MVPs tend to get named again—Roy Campanella and Yogi Berra won the award three times apiece, and Johnny Bench twice—but it is hard not to notice that almost every MVP catcher posted startling offensive figures in his award-winning summers: Gabby Hartnett batted .344 in 1935, Ernie Lombardi batted .342 in 1938, Bench had a hundred and forty-eight runs batted in in 1970. And so forth. Only one MVP catcher—Elston Howard, in 1963—had offensive statistics (.287 and eighty-five RBIs) that suggest that his work behind the plate had also been given full value by the voting scribes. The BBWAA is engaged in an interesting ongoing debate about whether pitchers should be eligible for the MVP award (as they are now), given the very special nature of their work. I think we should look at the other end of the battery and consider the possibility that, year in and year out, each of the well-established veteran catchers is almost surely the most valuable player on his club, for the reasons we have been looking at here.
Fisk cheered up a little after his musings. He tucked a nip of Skoal under his lower lip, and told me that catching left-handed pitchers had been the biggest adjustment he’d had to make when he went over to the White Sox. “Except for Bill Lee, we didn’t have that many left-handers my twelve years in Boston,” he said. “Because of the Wall. But there are good left-handers on this club, and that’s taken me a little time. When you’re calling a game with a left-handed pitcher against a lot of right-handed batters, you have to do it a little differently. A left-hander’s breaking ball always goes to my glove side, and his fastball and sinkerball run the other way. That fastball up over here, from a lefty pitcher, is a little harder for me to handle, for some reason. I’m still conscious of it, but I’m beginning to have a better time of it now.”
I thought about Fisk often and with great pleasure last summer, while his White Sox streaked away with the American League West divisional title. He batted .289, with twenty-six homers, for the year, and the Chicago pitchers (including LaMarr Hoyt, whose 24–10 and 3.66 record won him the Cy Young Award) outdid themselves. Fisk’s season ended in the White Sox’ excruciating 3–0 loss to the Orioles in the fourth game of the American League championship series, at Comiskey Park, in a game in which Britt Burns, the young left-handed Chicago starter, threw nine innings of shutout ball before succumbing in the tenth. Fisk had but one single in five at-bats in that game, but I think he found some rewards just the same. There in Sarasota, he’d said, “When things are working well and the pitcher stays with you the whole way and you’re getting guys out and keeping in the game—well, there’s just no more satisfying feeling. You want to win it and you want to get some hits, but if your pitcher is doing his best, inning after inning, then you know you’ve done your job. It doesn’t matter if I don’t get any hits, but if I was an outfielder in that same game and all I’d done was catch a couple of routine fly balls—why, men I wouldn’t have anything to hang my hat on that day.”
Tim McCarver also spoke of this sense of deeper involvement. Like many useful long-termers, he was moved to easier positions when the demands of the job began to wear him down, but he didn’t like it much not catching. “Joe Torre had been through that same shift,” he said to me, “and he told me that when I changed position I’d be amazed how much my mind would begin to wander. When I moved out to first base—I played more than seventy games there in 1973—I couldn’t believe it. I had to keep kicking myself to pay attention.”
Calling a game, of course, is the heart of it, and what that requires of a catcher, I came to understand at last, is not just a perfect memory for the batting strengths and weaknesses of every hitter on every other club—some hundred and sixty-five to a hundred and ninety-five batters, that is—but a sure knowledge of the capabilities of each pitcher on his staff. The latter is probably more important. Milt May said, “If I had a chance to play against a team I’d never seen before but with a pitcher I’d caught fifty times, I’d much rather have that than play against a team I’d played fifty times but with a pitcher I didn’t know at all.”
The other desideratum is a pitcher with good control—far rarer, even at the major-league level, than one might suppose. “There are very few guys who can really pitch to a hitter’s weakness,” May said. “Most of ’em just want to pitch their own strength. Young pitchers usually have good stuff—a good moving fastball—and they pitch to hitters in the same pattern. Most of their breaking balls are out of the strike zone, so they go back to the fastball when they’re behind, and of course if you’re up at bat you notice something like that.”
Here is Bob Boone again: “It’s much more fun catching a guy with excellent control, because then you feel you’re part of the whole jockeying experience. Here’s a ball that’s just inside-fine. Now go back outside and put the ball on the corner this time. You’re orchestrating that. Catching somebody like Tommy John is more work mentally, but it’s much more pleasurable, and after it’s over you’ll both think, Hey, we had a great game. There’s no doubt that a catcher can help a pitcher, but he can’t be a dictator out there. When you’ve established that rapport with a pitcher you know, what you put down in a situation is almost always just about what he’s thinking. When that happens, it gives the pitcher the confidence to throw a good pitch. You adjust as you go along—to the hitters and to your pitcher’s abilities on that given day. If you can do it, you want to save something to use late in the game, because there are always a few batters you can’t get out the sa
me way more than once. If you’ve got through the order the first time without using your pitcher’s whole repertoire, you’re a little ahead. But pitchers change as a game goes along, of course, and then you have to adjust to that. Say your pitcher’s best pitch is his slider, but then by the way he warms up for the next inning you think Uh-oh, because suddenly it isn’t anymore—not at that moment. But then four pitches later it may be back again. It’s a feel you have, and that’s what you really can’t teach to young catchers.
“Sometimes you get a sudden notion for an exotic call—something that’s really strange in a certain situation that you somehow know is the right thing. You’re jamming the man—throwing the ball right by him—and suddenly you call for a changeup. Ordinarily, you don’t do that, but even if I’m watching a game from the bench I can sometimes feel when the moment comes: Now throw him the changeup. It’s strange and it’s strictly feel, but when it happens and you have the closeness with the pitcher he’ll come in after the inning and say, ‘You know, I had exactly the same idea back there!’ But in the end, of course, it’s how he throws those pitches that matters.”
Pitchers can always shake off a catcher’s sign, to be sure—some shakeoffs are only meant to set up doubt in the batter’s mind—and catcher-pitcher negotiations go on between innings or during a mound conference. These last are not always diplomatic murmurings. “There almost has to be a lot of screaming and yelling between pitchers and catchers if they’re going to get along,” Tim McCarver told me. “With Gibby”—Bob Gibson, that is—“it sometimes happened right out on the mound. I remember a game against the Pirates when Clemente hit one of his patented shots to right field, and when Gibby came past me to back up the throw in he yelled, ‘Goddam it, you’ve got to put down something more than one ringer back there!’ ”
Ted Simmons said, “Sometimes you have to persuade your pitcher out of a certain pitch in the middle of the game. It’s hard for him to remain objective in the heat of battle. If he’s had some success, I might go out there and ask what he’s thinking, and if he says, ‘Over the years, I’ve gotten this guy out with this pitch in this situation, even though it’s dangerous—let’s say there are two on and he’s getting ready to throw a changeup—then I say, ‘Fine. Let’s go.’ But if I go out there and he says, ‘Well, I just got a feel, man,’ and he’s lookin’ at me with cloudy eyes, I say, ‘Look, we’ll do that next time—OK?’ It’s a matter of being convincing.” Ted Simmons, I should add, is one of the most convincing men in baseball. He is a sixteen-year man in the majors—the last three with the Brewers, the rest with the Cardinals—and is one of the prime switch hitters in the game: in 1975 he batted .332 for the Cards and drove in a hundred runs. He is known for his intelligence and knowledge of the game—splendid assets, but what I most enjoy about Simba is his passionate way of talking baseball. He talks the way Catfish Hunter used to pitch—feeling for the corners early on and then with a widening flow of ideas and confidence and variation in the late going: Cooperstown stuff. When we sat down together at Sun City last spring, I asked him about the difference between National League pitching—almost an idle question, I thought, since I was pretty sure I knew the answer: a lower strike zone in the National League, and more breaking balls in the A.L.
“I don’t know how it began, but it’s there, all right,” Simmons said. “It’s a difference of approach. The National League, in my mind, throws the slow stuff early in the count and then throws the fastball late, with two strikes on the batter. To me, that makes more sense, because you’re forcing the batter to hit the ball—that’s the objective—and the odds are always against a base bit, even with the best hitters. The American League approach, from what I’ve seen of it in two years, is to throw hard early—to get two strikes and no balls, or 2–1 or 2–2—and then go to the slow stuff. So if you’re 2–1 in the A.L., you’re apt to go to 3–2 every time, because they’ll throw a curveball and you’ll foul it. Then a curve or a slider, and you’ll take it, for 3–2. Then another slider or curve, and you’ll foul it, then another curve-ball, and you’ll swing and miss it for a strikeout or hit a fly ball for the out. So there are three or four extra pitches on almost every batter, and that’s one reason why the American League has such long games. The A.L. philosophy is to get two strikes and then don’t let him hit, and the N.L. thinks, Get two strikes and make him hit it.”
I asked him which league had the better pitchers, and he thought about it for a while. “I think the American League pitchers are probably better, on balance,” he said at last, “because they have to be refined when the count is against them—to throw that breaking ball and get it over the plate, throw it in a way to get the man out. The very best of them may be more subtle and refined and tough than the N.L. pitchers. I’m talking about guys like Dave Stieb, of the Toronto Blue Jays, and Pete Vuckovich here. Vukey was with me on the Cardinals, you know, but he made the adjustment very fast when he came over to this league. But there are always exceptions. Somebody like Steve Rogers”—of the National League Montreal Expos—“could pitch very well in this league.”
Bob Boone and Milt May have also had experience in both leagues, but they both gave a slight edge to National League pitching. May said that the N.L.’s preference for the slider—the faster breaking ball—as against the American League’s prejudice for the curve, might make the crucial difference. Boone said, “I think the real difference between the leagues is about six National League pitchers. Soto, Seaver, Carlton, Rogers, maybe Reuss, and any one of three or four others. Put ’em over in the American League, and they’re even.” (Tom Seaver, who came to the Chicago White Sox over this winter, has already made the switch.) “I would guess there are deeper counts in the A.L., but I wouldn’t know for sure. I know there’s more confidence in control in the A.L. In either league, it’s hard as hell to get a base hit, most days.”
Simmons wanted to be sure that I understood the extent of the catcher’s involvement with other aspects of the game—with his manager, for instance, and with the deployment of the defense on the field. “With some managers,” he said, “you can come to them in the dugout in the middle of the game and say, “This pitcher has had it. I assume you know that. But I want you to know I’m having to struggle with every pitch in every inning. I can’t set up a program with this man, because he’s faltering. Now I want some notion about your objectives. Do you intend to pitch him one more inning, or three more? Then if the manager says, ‘Wow, let’s get somebody up out there,’ I can say, ‘Well, OK, I can get him through one more inning,’ and you work that inning like it’s the ninth, with nothing held back. But there are some managers who can’t respond to that assertive approach, because of their personalities—I can think of a half dozen of them that I’ve been involved with—and with those, well, you have to find some other way to get the message across.”
We moved along to defensive alignments, and I noticed that sometimes the intensity of his message made Simmons lift his hands to either side of his face as he talked, as if he were peering out of his mask at the game.
“You have to move your people around,” he said. “It’s part of your job, and part knowing how your manager wants things done. You’ve got a left-handed pull hitter up there, and you decide you’re going to do one of two things. You’re going to throw him low fastballs away and hopes he tries to pull it, or slow stuff inside and make him pull it. So you set up your defense accordingly. Your second baseman plays in the hole, your shortstop is back of second base, and everyone in the outfield moves over two steps toward right. But if your second baseman is still playing at double-play depth, then you’ve got to stop and move him over. You can do that with a little gesture, just before you put down the sign—and I never put down anything until I know I have the second baseman and the shortstop’s attention anyway. I just look them right in the eye and go—” He waggled his glove hand imperceptibly. “If he still has a question, when you get back to the bench you can say, ‘Hey, don’t you see how we’re pi
tchin’ that guy?’ This happens a lot, but people don’t always appreciate it. Sometimes you’ll see catchers with large reputations who’ll stop and turn to the umpire and call time out and turn to the world and walk out a few steps and gesture to the man they want to move over, and everyone in the stands will say, ‘Ah, yes, there’s a man who knows what he’s doing.’ But it just isn’t essential. It isn’t done.”
The ultimate responsibility—for the game itself, Simmons suggested—is more difficult. “The catcher is the man who has to be able to think, and he has to make the decisions—and to face the consequences when he’s wrong,” he went on. “Whether it’s fun for you or a burden, that’s where it’s at, and the real satisfaction in catching is making that decision for everyone—for your pitcher, your team, your manager, and the home crowd. It’s all in your lap. Think of a situation. Think of something that happens all the time. The count is two balls and one strike, they have a man on first base, and you’re ahead by one run. There’s a pretty good hitter up—he doesn’t strike out much. Now, you’re the catcher and you’ve got to decide if they’re going to hit-and-run. And with that you’ve got to decide if you’re going to pitch out and negate all that, and what the consequences will be if you’re wrong.
