by Roger Angell
Prototypes have a burrlike hold on our baseball memories, and most of us, thinking back to great relief pitchers of the past, will first come up with some Gossage-like dominator like Dick Radatz, the monster-tall Red Sox flinger who struck out more than one batter per inning in a short career back in the sixties; or, a decade earlier, the dangerously nearsighted Ryne Duren (his first warmup pitch, preserving an image, was often a ten-foot-high bullet to the backstop), who enjoyed two splendid seasons with the Yankees before flaming out; or perhaps even Al Hrabosky, the bearded, angry-looking performer of the Cardinals, Royals, and Braves over the past decade, who habitually turned his back on the batter between pitches while he muttered imprecations and inspirational messages to himself, and then strode balefully toward the rubber like a Bolshevik entering the Union League Club. There is no shortage of thrilling fastballers among today’s short-relief specialists—the Cubs’ Lee Smith and the Yankees’ Dave Righetti come to mind at once—but over the years the lonely specialty has in fact attracted a whole character actors’ guild of different styles, quirks, looks, and dimensions. In my boyhood, relief pitchers seemed fatherly and calming; they were called “wily” in the papers. Johnny Murphy (Fordham Johnny Murphy) sometimes strolled in from the Yankees bullpen (then a shadowed alley between the grandstand and the bleachers in right field) to set things right in the late afternoons, especially if Lefty Gomez had started the game. Hugh Casey, toiling for the Dodgers in the nineteen-forties, ran up a lifetime winning percentage of .718 (fifty-one wins and twenty losses), which has yet to be topped by anybody out of the bullpen. Pitching against the Yankees in the fourth game of the 1941 World Series (I was there, sitting in the Ebbets Field upper deck in deep left field), Casey threw a spitball to Tommy Henrich that struck him out, swinging, to end the game—except that the ball, diving into the dirt, eluded catcher Mickey Owen, allowing Henrich to gain first base. Down a run, the Yankees rallied instantly for a 7–4 victory. A few years later, the ebullient Joe Page had become the celebrated Yankees stopper—the first young, or young-looking (he was almost thirty when he found his proper niche in the pastime), relief man in my experience. Jim Konstanty—a stolid, blue-collar sort of pitcher—won sixteen games and saved twenty-two, all in relief, for the Whiz Kid Phillies of 1950, and was the surprise starter in the first game of the World Series that fall; he lasted eight innings, giving up one lone run, but lost to the Yankees’ Vic Raschi’s two-hitter. Elroy Face, a forkballer, who looked almost dwarflike on the mound at five feet eight and a hundred and fifty pounds, pitched in eight hundred and forty-eight games (mostly for the Pirates) in the fifties and sixties, and accounted for a hundred and ninety-three saves; he was 18–1 in 1959—to this day, it scarcely seems possible—with all the decisions coming in relief. Once you start thinking about them, the relievers, the great extras, begin to come back in a flood: Ron Perranoski, the shining Dodger Stadium favorite, who went 16–3, with twenty-one saves and a 1.67 earned-run average, in 1963; Tug McGraw (“You Gotta Believe!), who pitched so stoutly and stood for so much in two unexpected Mets pennants and one glorious Phillies World Championship; Mike Marshall, the chunky, hard-burning righthander (he had a graduate degree in motion studies, or “kinesiology”), who worked for nine clubs during a fourteen-year career and twice somehow led his league in relief wins, losses, and saves, all in the same year; and Dick Hall, a lesser nova, perhaps, but a stalwart in innumerable significant games for the rising young Orioles of the sixties (he was a Swarthmore graduate who had started as an outfielder with the Pirates, and his cramped, twitchy pitching delivery, somebody once wrote, reminded you of a man feeling under a bed for a lost collar button). Kent Tekulve, the Pittsburgh praying mantis (he went over to the Phillies this spring), saved thirty-one games for the Pirates in 1978 and again in 1979; his skulking, up-from-under mound style much resembled the Quisenberry mode—for reasons we shall get to in a moment. All these, then, and Hoyt Wilhelm, too. A silent, withdrawn man with an odd, twisted tilt to his neck and head, Wilhelm did not win a job in the majors until he was twenty-nine, but then stayed on, with the Giants and eight other clubs, for twenty years. A knuckleballer first, last, and always, he threw the pitch with so little strain to his arm and psyche that he was able to establish lifetime records in five different pitching categories, including most wins in relief (one hundred and twenty-four) and most games pitched (one thousand and seventy—eighty-three more than his nearest rival, Lindy McDaniel, and a hundred and sixty-four more than Cy Young). He went into the Hall of Fame this summer—sailed in, with all seams showing.
It shouldn’t be surprising that so many vivid and stout-hearted bullpen performers come flooding forth in this fashion once we pull the cork, but I still think that relief pitchers are slighted or faintly patronized in most fans’ and writers’ consideration. Ask somebody to pick an all-time or all-decade lineup for his favorite team or for one of the leagues and the chances are that the list will not include a late-inning fireman. Even with the best of the short men, the brevity of their patchwork, Band-Aid labors; their habitual confinement in faraway (and often invisible) compounds during the long early stretches and eventful midpassages of the game; their languorous, cap-over-eyes postures of ennui or lassitude—are they asleep out there?—for the first two or three hours of the event; their off-putting predilection of disorder and incipient disaster; the rude intrusiveness of their extroverted pitching mannerisms into the staid game-party; their reckless way of seizing glory, or else horridly throwing away a game nearly in hand, all in the space of a few pitches—all these confirm some permanent lesser status for them: scrubs, invisible weavers, paramedics, handymen. The slur persists, I think, in spite of clear evidence that relief men—the best of them, at least—are among the most highly rewarded and most sought-after stars of contemporary baseball. Five short-relief specialists—the Dodgers’ Mike Marshall in 1974, the Yankees’ Sparky Lyle in 1977, Bruce Sutter in 1979, Rollie Fingers in 1981, and the Tigers’ Willie Hernandez last year (he appeared in eighty games for the World Champions, with thirty-two saves and an earned-run average of 1.92)—have won the Cy Young award in their leagues, and Fingers and Hernandez also walked off with Most Valuable Player honors in those same years.
Scouts and players, managers and writers whom I consulted on the matter this summer were, nearly unanimous in their selections of the best relief pitchers ever. They placed Fingers at the top of the list and then, in differing order, named Sutter, Gossage, and Sparky Lyle (who retired in 1982 with two hundred and thirty-eight lifetime saves). Almost none of them mentioned Quisenberry, and it seemed peculiar that when I brought up his name nearly everyone said something like “Oh, yes—I guess you’d have to put him in there somewhere, wouldn’t you? He’s a strange one, but he sure gets the job done.” I couldn’t tell from this whether it was Quisenberry’s gently weird pitching style or his refreshing off-the-field manner (he is quick and comical, and much given to startlingly free-form images and put-ons during interviews) that has caused this persistent oversight, but I knew by now that it would come as no surprise to Quis himself, who has yet to win a Cy Young Award, even though he outpolled Hernandez last year by winning both the Rolaids and the Sporting News “Fireman of the Year” awards in the American League, each for the third straight year. If there is anything to my theory that relief pitchers are still a bit patronized in baseball because of their oddity, then here, too, Quisenberry belongs up near the head of the line.
“Relief pitchers like to pitch—that’s what we all have in common. We’re banded together in that small environment, and then the call comes and we’re catapulted out into the screaming masses. It feels good to start thinking and getting ready to pitch. Then you run in—past the umpires and the in-fielders. That’s when I feel absolutely the best—the moment when I’m back in there, into things, in a close game. Until that happens, you’re not really part of the game. You’re not part of anything.”
Dan Quisenberry and I were sitting in the March sunshine at T
erry Park, the Royals’ spring-training camp, in Fort Myers, Florida. It was early in the day, before the morning calisthenics and the first batting-practice pitches, and there was an easy, beginning-of-things taste to the place and the time of day and the part of the year we were in. This was the first of several meetings I had with him during this baseball year—one-inning or two-inning talks, so to speak, almost like his own forays into the game—during which I hoped to get a clearer idea of his difficult profession. It was pleasant work, it turned out. Quisenberry’s face is open and untroubled, and he speaks in a cheerful, self-deprecating fashion that seems to preclude silences or hesitancies on either side of a conversation. On this day, he was wearing his white, home-uniform pants, royal-blue spikes, and a pale-blue T-shirt. Up close, he seemed bigger than I had expected (he is six feet two and weighs a hundred and eighty pounds). He was thin but not frail, and although he is thirty-two his upper body somehow looked as if it might have grown an inch or two overnight, like a teen-ager’s. It was late in the spring preseason, but his naturally pale skin didn’t show much of a tan; it was more like a glow, and the hairs on his forearms were an odd, yellow-gold color. There was a dab of chewing tobacco tucked in the middle of his lower lip.
“Most relief pitchers are pretty aggressive,” Quis said a bit later. “They want to get a lot of attention, and you can see some of them getting psyched up out there on the mound. Gossage gets psyched. Al Holland gets psyched. There are guys who—you know, jump around and raise their fists and all. But there’s such a thing as a casual aggressiveness, too. Sutter and Rollie Fingers are more calm. They’re cool under pressure, and you can see them figuring things out out there.”
I asked him if he thought Sutter and Fingers were better at their profession than he was, and he said, “Yes, they’re the best. They’ve done it longer. It’s nice to have a couple of good years and good stats and all, but the great ones are the ones who get it up year after year after year. But sometimes I see them getting roughed up, too, and suddenly giving up three or four runs in a game, and I think, Boy, they can do that, too—it can happen to them, just like it happens to me! Being a relief pitcher is such a roller-coaster sort of thing. You’re either a hero or the exact opposite, depending on what just happened. Everybody’s coming down on your head, or else you’re almost a religious icon if you’ve won. Neither reaction is totally accurate. If things go wrong, I think you always feel bad. You’ve failed the starting pitcher and let down your teammates, who have played two hours to get that lead, not to speak of your family and the fans who live and die with you every day. But somehow we can deal with that—which isn’t to say there isn’t a kind of a stab about taking a loss. I think short-relief people are always anxious for the next thing. We know we’re always about to get another chance. We’ll be back out there the very next day, most times, while the starting pitcher has to wait four or five days before he gets back in there, and the long reliever or fifth starter might have to wait ten days. There are different kinds of strain. The starting pitcher has to get the same guys out there or four times in a night, which I don’t, but then he doesn’t need any mental toughness for the next four days. I think I’d hate that.”
I asked him if he ever felt overmatched in a game, or oppressed by the fact that he always had to work in difficulties, a perpetual underdog.
“Well, I was a fan of the Braves and the Orioles when I was growing up, in the early sixties, and after that, of course, I was for the early Mets, like everyone else,” he said. “I always liked Tony Cloninger, who wasn’t all that good a pitcher. So I guess I identified with underdogs. I still prefer the underdog position, but with my numbers it’s harder and harder for me to feel that way. Sometimes I think I should be the underdog, because I’m a major-league pitcher with very few resources. I just don’t match up physically with the real athletes in the league. I can know these things, but when I’m on the mound I forget all that, and there are some days when I know I’m being effective. Now it’s more like playing King of the Hill. I’m not supposed to lose in a save situation, ever, and there’s a weight that comes with that, with trying to be the best. But there gets to be a kind of an appetite about getting saves. It almost can’t be fulfilled—you want that ‘S’ after your name, you want to maintain that level.”
Some short-relief specialists prefer to come into a game at the beginning of the eighth or ninth inning, instead of a bit later, when there are men on base and more trouble at hand; Goose Gossage, for instance, always liked the full-inning option when he was with the Yankees, and fretted because his last Yankee manager, Billy Martin, did not often oblige him. I asked Quisenberry how he felt about this, and he told me that he had no preference at all. He said it in such an uncharacteristically vehement way that I thought at first I had misunderstood him. There was a gang mower working up and down the outfield lawn near us at that moment, and I repeated the question in a louder voice; just then the machine cut off suddenly and my words came out in a shout, and we laughed together.
“I have no preference,” Quis went on, more peaceably. “I think I’m going to pitch every night, and I like the uncertainty of that. It doesn’t matter to me if I come in to start an inning or with the bases loaded, and it doesn’t matter to me who’s up at bat. I don’t have any choice, so it doesn’t matter. If I had a choice, I’d say bring up your Class A team and I’ll pitch to them. I also don’t like it if my manager or my pitching coach asks me if I want an inning tonight, just to get my work in, or asks me if I’m tired after a lot of appearances in a row and might want the night off. My answer is that I want to be told what to do. I want to pitch when you need me.”
It took me a while before I quite saw the elegance and usefulness of this attitude. Relief pitchers, of course, deal almost exclusively with dire straits: it comes with the country. If they start to worry about this, if they think about worst-case or best-case situations or which hitters they’d rather not pitch to in a jam, they have made matters infinitely harder for themselves. Quis had simply turned off that kind of anxiety; it had ceased to exist for him. He is good at this—it is almost as much a part of his repertoire as his sinkerball. “When I’m away from the park or at home, I try not to think about my work at all,” he told me on another occasion. “This job would be a killer if you couldn’t do that. There’s plenty of time for me to worry from the sixth inning on.”
One finger down, by ancient tradition, is the catcher’s signal for a fastball, but whoever is catching Dan Quisenberry knows that one finger means the sinker. Quis doesn’t have a fastball. For the sinker, he holds the ball with the seams and tries to throw without undue stress or snap; it arrives at about seventy-eight or eighty m.p.h. and, ideally, executes a small hip swerve as it crosses the plate. Quisenberry likes to give the impression that he has nothing much to do with the action of the pitch or its results. “I’ve always felt that when I throw it something wonderful is going to happen—something good for us,” he said to me once. On another day, he suddenly asked, “Have I ever told you about my agreement with the ball?” I said no, and he said, “Well, our deal is that I’m not going to throw you very hard as long as you promise to move around when you get near the plate, because I want you back. So if you do your part we’ll get to play some more.” He watched my reaction to this with considerable relish, and then elaborated in less Oz-like fashion. “I’ve got good control and some movement, but there are guys around with better sinkers than mine. Greg Minton is one. Jim Acker, who’s with Toronto. Bob Stanley. Mine is generally around the plate and low. You can’t start it out at the batter’s knees, because if you do it’s a ball. If you want it inside on a right-hander, you kind of throw it over the middle a little and let it run in—hopefully down and in. If it’s going to be outside to a left-hander, you’re throwing it to the outer half—the outer half of the plate to him, that is—and it’s supposed to go down and away. If you want it inside to him, you throw it off the plate, and it’s meant to run back over. But of course if the
ball doesn’t do its job, if it starts dancing all over the place-well, then it’s going to get hurt.”
Even when it is doing its job, the Quisenberry sinker is apt to have adventures. He gives up something on the order of one hit per inning, and a lot of his outs come on hard-hit balls that seem to be hit right at one of his infielders. “Magical things keep happening behind me,” Quis often says, and he points out that the Kansas City second baseman, Frank White, has extraordinary range and hands, and that White’s two partners at shortstop in recent years—first U.L. Washington and now Onix Concepcion—are scarcely less talented. The infield at Royals Stadium is AstroTurf, which should be a considerable handicap for a man who throws so many ground balls, but his defense makes up for that, it seems. George Brett, the Royals third baseman, told me that when the team won a pennant in 1980 Quisenberry’s infielders ragged him with references to his “30–30–30 Club”—thirty saves, thirty strikeouts, and thirty great plays made behind him. “He’s a comfortable guy to bat against,” Brett said. “Guys go up there looking to hit the ball. He’s like Scott McGregor, of the Orioles. You feel good batting against him, every time, and at the end of the game you realize you’ve gone oh-for-four—a comfortable oh-for-four.”
Quisenberry, in any case, has some other pitches, and he has worked incessantly to widen his repertoire. It took him until 1982 to develop an effective breaking ball, and last year he came up with a changeup that he at last felt confident about. He tinkered with a forkball for a time but had to junk it. When the Royals made a barnstorming visit to Japan at the end of the 1981 season, Quisenberry mastered the knuckleball—a nasty shock for American League batters the following summer. But the knuckler doesn’t quite work for him anymore, for some reason. “If the knuckleball was my wife, I’d divorce her,” Quis said. “She’s not consistent, she’s not reliable—I just can’t depend on her at all. I can throw it great in warmups or playing catch, but in a game now I just use it to show the batters that it’s there. If it’s done right, it’s the most fun pitch to throw in the world. The good knuckleball pitchers throw it just about all the time. With them, it’s a stronger relationship. I think I’m just about out of new pitches. I can work on locations and different speeds, but there isn’t much more I can think of. I wish I could throw the overhand curveball. Wouldn’t that be a surprise!”
