by Roger Angell
Back at Terry Park, Quisenberry had told me about his conversion into a submariner, which came about on that very field in the spring of 1980. He had been called up from Omaha in the middle of the previous season, at a time when the Royals were desperate for any kind of a middle-innings relief man who could get people out; he was far from their first choice for the job, but he stuck on, and even accounted for five saves; mostly, he was the setup man for Al Hrabosky, who was then the club’s short-relief honcho. Quisenberry was a standup sidearm pitcher then, with virtually no breaking ball. Jim Frey succeeded Whitey Herzog as the Kansas City skipper the next spring, and early in the training schedule Quisenberry had a very bad outing against the Pirates. After the game, Frey asked him to throw for him on the sidelines, to see what he had. After about fifteen pitches, Frey began saying things like “Are you throwing as hard as you can?” and “Is that the way you throw your breaking ball?” and Quis concluded that there might be a quick turnaround just ahead in his career. A day or two later, Frey told him that he’d set up a sidelines appointment for him with Kent Tekulve, the great Pittsburgh submariner, when the Pirates next came down from Bradenton to play.
“I thought he was just going to give me a few pointers,” Quisenberry said, “but when the day came Jim said to Tekulve, ‘We want this guy to be like you. He throws a little like you already, but basically he doesn’t have shit.’ So it was a total makeover. Tekulve showed me there were three basics to the motion, which were: sit on your back leg, bend at the waist, and, most important, extend the left leg—my front leg—way beyond the normal point out ahead. He told me to open up about six or eight inches beyond what’s normal, coming right at the plate with the leg, and not to put that foot out heel-down at first, which is your natural instinct. This opens your body up a whole lot more, and it lets you stay low and keeps your arm low. If I don’t get way out there and do that, I land here”—Quis was on his feet now—“with this front leg locked, and I start and end standing up, throwing the old sidearm way. I’ve always got to fight that. It’s a battle for me, in spring training and all through the season, because when the ball comes up, the way it wants to, I’ve got nothing. Staying down like that is a strange feeling when you first try it, because you’re totally off balance and you keep thinking you’re going to fall over sideways. If I don’t make this little hop at the end of the motion, I do fall over.
“Well, I didn’t like this at all. Frey and a lot of our coaches were watching, and I was throwing all over the place and bouncing the ball before it got to the plate. Teke kept saying, ‘Hey, that’s a good pitch, that’s the way to throw,’ and I’m thinkin’, I have no idea what I’m doing. But Jim liked it, and two days later he put me in another game—it was against the Pirates again, but Tekulve wasn’t here—and I did real well. I was on my way.”
Yes. That summer, Quisenberry, who had never run up more than fifteen saves in a season during his five-year stay in the minors, saved thirty-three games for the pennant-bound Royals, and also went 12–7 in the won-lost accounting, while appearing in a league-leading seventy-five games. He won a game and saved another one against the Yankees in the American League playoffs. He had another win and another save in the club’s losing six-game World Series against the Phillies, but in fact pitched poorly in the classic, unexpectedly giving up some walks and being charged with two of the team’s losses. It was clear that he was very tired at this point, but by most measurements it had been quite a year.
Other submarine-style pitchers have thrived in the majors, to be sure, though never in great numbers. The list is headed by the unfortunate Carl Mays, a starting pitcher who won two hundred and eight games while in the employ of the Red Sox, Yankees, Reds, and Giants, more than sixty years ago, but is remembered now only as the man who threw the pitch that struck and killed Ray Chapman, of the Indians: the majors’ only fatality. Eldon Auker, another starter, won a hundred and thirty games while toiling for the dangerous Tigers of the nineteen-thirties, and subsequent underhanders included Dick Hyde and Ted Abernathy, relievers who both worked for the Washington Senators (although Abernathy’s most successful years came when he pitched for the Cubs and then the Reds), and the capable Cecil Upshaw, a nine-year bullpen stalwart with the Braves in the sixties and seventies. I asked Quisenberry once why more people hadn’t taken up the submariner’s way after he had demonstrated how successful it could be. He said that in fact he had tried to pass along the Tekulve Method to several pitchers—Dick Howser, his present manager, had no objection as long as he wasn’t tutoring pitchers on contending teams in the American League West. “He’s tried to help,” Howser said, “but most guys can’t seem to stay with it for long. What you’re leaving out of the equation is Quisenberry’s maturity and personality. I can’t explain it. Everybody can talk about it and analyze it, but nobody can tell you why some people have that winning attitude and others don’t. I’ve been around some great ones in my time—Sparky Lyle and Gossage and now Quisenberry. They were very different people, but they all had that special thing. They’re unselfish. They don’t want adulation, but they absolutely relish the situation. They don’t have the luxury of making mistakes. And you have to remember that it takes real courage to change yourself over like Quisenberry did, and stay with it until you get it right. If it doesn’t work for you, it can be the end of a career.”
Quis had a good two innings against the Rangers on my last afternoon at Fort Myers. He retired the side on five pitches in the eighth and gave up a harmless single—a bouncer over the mound—in the ninth to nail down a K.C. win. It was another save, if that mattered. He worked quickly, the way he always does, and the sinker was there, although it wasn’t quite on the corners yet. After the game, he seemed boyish and exuberant, exchanging japes and smiles in the clubhouse with Renie Martin, another Kansas City reliever, who is a close friend. (Martin didn’t make the final cut, and pitched in Omaha this year.) Quis’s blond three-year-old son, David, was in the locker room that afternoon, and several of the tall Royals players stopped by to speak to the little boy. Children are a rarity in some clubhouses, even during spring training, but the Royals seem to be strong on family. On our way into the clubhouse, Quis had introduced me to his wife, Janie, and their five-year-old daughter, Alysia, and to Janie’s parents, Fred and Pat Howard, who were visiting from California—a pack of Quis-groupies together on the lawn, waiting to drive the man home for a swim before supper.
Inside, Quis told me that he would probably pitch one more time in Florida before the regular season began. His expression changed a little. “It’s about to start,” he said. “We’re a week away, and to do what the club wants me to do I’m going to have to be great. Rollie’s got to be great, Sutter’s got to be great, Gossage’s got to be great….”
I said that most people didn’t work at jobs where greatness was exactly a daily prerequisite, or could be measured.
“Yes, there’s a tension that comes with that, and when the season comes that tension will be there all the time. It’s starting to happen to me now. I’ve begun to wonder when that little click will come, when the switch will go on. I don’t know where it is—here in the heart or in the brain, or what. I don’t know how I turn it on, but somehow it happens every year.”
The new season began in desultory fashion for Quisenberry. Four times in April, he failed to hold a lead or a tie score in a game he had entered. He steadied for a time, but then was horribly racked in an inning against the Orioles, very nearly blowing a 9–4 Kansas City lead. The worst was just ahead: an exhibition game against the Royals’ Omaha farm club, when Quisenberry, instead of recovering his form, gave up three singles, a stolen base, and a pair of earned runs, all in one inning. Almost everything he threw was hit, and hit hard. Quisenberry, telling me about it later, said that he had felt as if he were in the middle of a pinball machine. “I thought, Uh-oh,” he said. “I knew it was time to climb down from whatever kind of weird flight I’d been on and catch the next plane back.”
He turned things around for a while, starting with a tidy effort against the Yankees his next time out (it was an NBC “Game of the Week” presentation). After that day, Quisenberry put together a dazzling stretch of work, during which he surrendered one lone run (it was unearned) in eleven appearances; he picked up seven saves in eighteen and a third innings pitched, and his earned-run average shrank from 5.60 to 2.75. He was back on track, or so it seemed. His next game, however—at Comiskey Park, on June 1st—was a nightmare. He faced six White Sox batters in the seventh inning and retired none of them, surrendering five hits and three runs; when Howser took him out of the game at last, it was only the third time in his major-league career that he had failed to finish an inning.
I went out to Kansas City at the end of June, to see the Royals play a weekend series against the division-leading California Angels. The Royals were in fourth place, four and a half games behind the visitors, and I was pretty sure that Quisenberry blamed himself to some degree for their disappointing record to date. Things had gone better for him since the debacle in Chicago, and his earned-run average had been slowly dropping for three weeks, but he had been cuffed about here and there as well. He told me that he felt confused and frustrated by the season’s unexpected turn of events, and that at times pitching hadn’t been fun for him. “It’s too big a part of me for it not to be fun,” he said. “There has to be an element of that, or the game will drive you crazy. I’ve known times before when I could throw everything pretty well and still lose, and I’d feel all right, but if balls are being hit off my forehead or keep bouncing against the outfield wall it’s—Well, it gets chaotic.”
A week or two before my visit, Royals pitching coach Gary Blaylock had noticed on a game videotape that Quisenberry’s left foot wasn’t landing far enough out in front and to the left as it came down in mid-delivery; he was blocking himself out a bit, and his sinker wasn’t sinking much in consequence. Quis made the correction, and it helped. When Quisenberry told me about this, I pointed out that this was exactly the chronic problem that he had described for me during spring training. “Yes,” he said at once, “so why is it always so hard?” He threw his hands up in mock despair. Part of the trouble—most of his early trouble, perhaps—was the money. Quis said that back in April and May he had noticed that he was squeezing the ball on the mound in difficult situations and that he’d often found himself trying to throw the perfect pitch: a ten-foot sinker, a nine-foot breaking ball. He said he’d even tried to throw a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball here and there—insanity for him. “Why would I try anything like that at this point in my career?” he said. Others on the club noticed, of course. “He had that one streak when he’d just signed the contract and he seemed uptight, like he was trying to prove to himself and to everybody that he deserved all that money,” George Brett told me. “I’d go over to see him, and he’d be stuttering on the mound when we talked. It even seemed as if he’d forgotten where he was supposed to be on some plays, so I’d have to tell him. It wasn’t like him at all. Now that’s all over with, and he’s back to his old loose self. You take a look at him after a game and can’t tell if he just got the save or took a loss. He’s always the same—you count on that.” Last winter, the Royals front office completed a revolutionary reshaping of its salary structure, which included the offer of extraordinary lifetime contracts to three of the team’s established stars: George Brett, Willie Wilson, and Dan Quisenberry. The decision was not the result of any pending salary negotiations with the three (Quisenberry was in the third year of a four-year contract, which paid him about eight hundred thousand dollars per year) but seemed intended, rather, to guarantee their presence in the Kansas City lineup for the remainder of their professional careers, and to free them—the players and the Royals management, and perhaps the fans as well—from the trauma of future high-level contract struggles and the possible loss of any or all of the stars to free agency if an impasse should develop. The three contracts are differently constituted, but in effect they make the men co-investors in major real-estate holdings now belonging to Avron Fogelman, of Memphis, who owns forty-nine percent of the Royals franchise. Under Quisenberry’s plan, he will be paid about six million dollars for the next six seasons’ work (including this season), but tax-sheltered real-estate reinvestments in that same time will return him something on the order of forty-five or fifty million dollars over the next forty years. No other team, it should be added, has made any such generous or wide-sweeping arrangement with a group of players who are still in the middle years of existing contracts.
Quisenberry looked uneasy when I suggested that his new contract might have been the immediate cause of his early troubles on the mound, and only later in the season, when I brought up the question again, did he say—quietly and almost in an offhand way—that, yes, the money might have had something to do with it. Plainly, he didn’t want to make excuses for himself—most of all an excuse with such impossible proportions and overtones. Paul Splittorff, a recently retired Royals star pitcher, who is a close friend of Quisenberry’s (Quis calls him “one of my life heroes”), has no doubts about the matter. “Early this year, Quis said he felt strange about the new contract,” he told me. “He kept saying that this money was crazy—how important was what he did in baseball to the scheme of the world, and things like that. I kept telling him that they had come to him with the money, not the other way around, so he shouldn’t feel the pressure. But this kind of thing always happens. You’re the same kind of player, no matter what they’re paying you. If you’re a lifetime .280 hitter, that’s what you are, and you can’t make yourself into a .300 hitter because of the money. It’s even tougher on Quis, because if he tries to throw five miles an hour faster—which is inevitable—he’s in trouble. Of course he’s happy about the money, and surprised, but, being the kind of man he is, it’s hurt him, too.”
None of these quandaries and surprises were apparent in Quisenberry’s demeanor when we met in the spacious Royals clubhouse on Saturday afternoon. The coming game, a night affair, was still hours away, but Quis, who habitually arrives very early at the park, was already in uniform and ready for the next thing. Like other veteran ballplayers I have encountered, he seemed exceptionally contented in his clubhouse; he looked almost dug in, and, watching him there, with his friends and his mail and his keepsakes (there was a child’s red fireman’s hat, with a red headlight on it, perched on top of his cubicle), I thought of the Badger at home in his slippers, in “The Wind in the Willows.” Quisenberry is a genial and respected figure in the clubhouse (he is the Royals’ player representative: their elected union delegate in the Players Association), and so many overlapping conversations were swirling around his corner of the den that I was glad when he suggested that we walk out to visit his other place of business—the bullpen. There were a couple of other players in view outside as we strolled across the warm ungrass—the home bullpen is in right field at Royals Stadium—but the sunstruck table of the field and the rising tiers of gleaming empty seats encircled us in a silent bowl of light.
“There’s Charlie Leibrandt over there, throwing up on the sidelines,” Quis said, nodding his head toward one of the Royals playing catch. He watched for my reaction—this is a first-year-Little League baseball joke—and I laughed in spite of myself. “This year’s bullpen is starting to develop,” he went on. “It’s a good group. Each year, the makeup of the pen is a little different, and the feeling changes. Our new man out here is Mike LaCoss”—LaCoss, an experienced National League right-handed pitcher, had been signed as a free agent over the winter—“and we’re getting to know him a little. We call him Buffy and Izod, or Izoid, and Buffenstein. I never know where all the nicknames come from. He likes to mix it up—get on guys and have them get on him. He’s an expert bridge player, or thinks he is. Then there’s Mike Jones, Joe Beckwith, and John Wathan, the catcher—he always sits a little bit apart—and the rest. Joe watches All-Star wrestling, and he likes to show us all the new holds. Renie Ma
rtin used to bring pencil and paper, and he’d draw little cartoons of things that happened in each game. Mike Armstrong and I used to do some games in Spanish—I just remembered. Broadcasts, I mean. Of course, neither of us could speak Spanish, but that didn’t stop us. The trouble with bullpens is that they keep changing. The people in them come and go, so you can’t always keep things going. Last year was a good crossword bullpen, but we’re not so big on that this year for some reason. But we still do the crossword in the paper first thing every day, and then Izod looks at the bridge hand and tells us how Omar Sharif would have played it. The early part of the game is given to the starting pitcher and the other guys on the field, and Muggsy—Jimmie Schaffer (he’s our bullpen coach)—sets the tone. We’re critical, I mean. If a pitcher in the game gets behind in the count, he says, ‘How can you not throw strikes with that garbage?’ and you know he’s saying it about you when you’re in the game. There’s a total freedom in the bullpen—freedom of speech, freedom of action. One of the great things about baseball is that everything gets out in the open.”
