by Roger Angell
I asked if he’d heard from the others in the pen when he was having troubles this year, and he said, “Oh, sure. I was called Firecan and Arson and—well, much better stuff than that, if I could remember it. Silence would be terrible under those circumstances. We get on everybody, except there’s sort of a compact about the rookies—you go easier with them. And then of course you don’t say much to the next man who’s going to come into the game—he’s off in his little world, getting ready.”
Quisenberry, I’d been told, starts to get ready after the sixth inning or so. He becomes withdrawn and abstracted, preparing for what is to come. Players call this “putting on your game face.”
We had reached outer right field by now, and Quis pointed to a spot on the AstroTurf about twenty feet short of the right-field foul pole. “This is where the ball landed when Robin Yount hit a shot against me here once. Clint Hurdle dove for it and missed, and it turned into an inside-the-park home run. Sometimes when you’re sitting over here in the pen, you can see a line drive disappear into the right-field corner, with the right fielder chasing it. Then the ball comes flying past you on the ground, going in the other direction, and then here comes the fielder again after it, like a dog after a rabbit. It’s a great sight.”
He stopped, and began pointing out various places in the empty right-field stands above us. “Two girls from Topeka sit up there, most games,” he said. “They drive all the way here for the games, and then drive home again. Up there, there’s an old gent we call Colonel Sanders—he has that look. Then there’s a great fan named Joe Hess, who has a long white beard. He’s Santa Claus, of course. There’s a guy in Army fatigues who comes a lot—I call him Phnom Penh—and there are three or four grandmas who sit together over here: old sweethearts. You get to know the real fans. Some Sunday games, on days when it’s real hot, I get out the ground crew’s hose and spray the fans, who line up to hang over that incline over the pen. I only do it in the middle of the sixth inning, and the fans who want to cool off come over and crowd around for it. It’s a custom by now, I guess.”
We reached the bullpen—a row of orange grandstand seats under an oblong fibre-glass roof and behind a high chain-link fence, with one larger, round, overstuffed black chair in the corner: Muggsy Schaffer’s throne. The phone to the dugout was on an adjacent wall. There were a dozen or more little marks scratched on the telephone receiver box, and when I pointed them out Quisenberry said they were left over from the previous season, when the bullpen people had begun keeping track of the outstanding fielding plays made by the new Royals first baseman, Steve Balboni—plays that, in their judgment, his predecessor at the position, Willie Aikens, would probably not have made. Behind the bullpen chairs were two pitcher’s mounds and two home plates set out along a stretch of lush, beautiful grass—the only natural lawn in the park. It is a small irony of contemporary baseball that the Royals’ George Toma is considered the best groundskeeper in the business and now has no grass to cultivate except in the bullpens and down some tilted strips of turf that surround the celebrated Royals Stadium fountains, beyond the fences. Quisenberry pointed out Toma’s office, which is under the stands, to one side of the bullpen, and then took me into a vast concrete equipment shed stuffed with mowers and rakes and rollers, a couple of John Deere tractors, coils of thick hose, and so forth. Just beyond this was a long, upcurving concrete tunnel, which held more equipment; several cars were parked in the tunnel.
“This is all wonderful,” Quis said, “because what you want most in a bullpen is distraction. During a long game, you can walk over here and visit with George. His office is air-conditioned, and sometimes he’ll give you a cup of coffee or some of that iced tea he’s made by leaving a pitcher of water and tea bags out in the sun all day. You can watch TV there or read the horticultural news on his bulletin board. You can sit in one of the cars and turn on the radio, and sometimes even bring in another game that’s being played somewhere. There are odometers and things. There are the ground-crew guys to talk to. Sometimes you can even sneak a ride on George’s Suzuki tricycle.”
I asked Quisenberrry about the requisites for a good bullpen, and he mentioned distance from the fans (“You don’t want to hear everything they’re saying to you”), some kind of roof for rain protection, a good bathroom, and a screen to keep balls from getting loose on the field when you’re warming up. He much prefers enclosed bullpens to the ones that border the outer stretches of the playing field in foul ground. California’s bullpen is beyond the fence, and so are the pens in Chicago, Yankee Stadium, and Baltimore; Oakland and Minnesota and Toronto have sideline pens. And so on. Seattle has a sideline pen and no bathroom; the visiting pen there was moved from right field to left field last year, and a player who needs to use the bathroom has to come in between innings, passing both dugouts along the way. (Quis had begun to sound like a Guide Michelin, and I began to envision glyphs illustrating the amenities and points of interest for a young pitcher making his first grand tour of the American League.)
The Royals Stadium bullpen’s bathroom is outstanding, Quis said: air-conditioning, heating for cold nights, a door that locks, a sink, and a mirror. The Fenway Park can, by contrast, has no light and no sink, and the door doesn’t lock.
I asked about the odd bullpens in Tiger Stadium, which are sunk below ground level in foul territory, with a little screen above them to protect the occupants’ heads from foul balls.
“We used to make out that’s a submarine,” Quis said eagerly. “We’d make those pinging sounds, and if a ball came near us it was a depth charge, and we’d fire our torpedoes. If the ball bounced off the little screen, that was a direct hit, and we’d panic and then ask for damage reports. Then there’s always Cleveland, which is interesting in a different way. They’ve gone and reversed their home-team and visiting-team pens this year, too. The pens there are down the line, but they do have shelter and plenty of grounds equipment and all. That and the biggest spiders in the league. Now that they’ve put us on the other side of the field, I don’t know if the spiders will be as good this year. I don’t know their names yet. It’s always wet and damp in Cleveland, and there are lots of mosquitoes, but you can catch the mosquitoes and feed them to the spiders—just toss them into the web. There’s almost always a rain delay there, so there’s plenty of time for all that.” He was laughing.
There are bullpen legends, of course—the bullpen pitchers who have put on groundskeepers’ uniforms and joined the crew sweeping down the infield in the middle of a game, and so forth. Jim Colborn was the first Kansas City pitcher to think of that one, years ago. Quisenberry joined the Royals too late to see Colborn throw his no-hitter against the Rangers, back in 1977, but he knows the story. Colborn, a free spirit, was so entranced with his work that day that he became convinced that he would pitch another no-hitter on his next outing, and insisted that he wouldn’t need anybody in the bullpen that day to back him up. All the relief men obliged him and stayed in the dugout when the game began—except for one cynic, Steve Mingori, who trudged on out as usual. Mingori watched Colborn pitch to three or four batters and then got to his feet and began to wave frantically for more help out there. He was right, it turned out: Colborn got bombed.
Dan and Janie Quisenberry live in a handsome stone Colonial house on a breezy hilltop in the still-rural Leawood section of Kansas City; the house is new and still not much furnished—the family moved in only last fall—but there is space and light and airiness everywhere, indoors and out, and a sense of beginning permanence. The view down the sloping lawns takes in a couple of other sizable houses in the distance, a stand of old, dark trees, and, closer at hand, a new, major-league jungle gym. Before lunch there one day in June, Alysia did tricycle wheelies on the brick patio for a visiting out-of-town writer while Quis broiled chicken on a Weber grill; David, overstimulated by the occasion, went briefly to pieces and was sent up to his room, but recovered in short order (“I’m better now,” he announced from the head of the stairs) and was
welcomed back as we sat down to lunch. Dan said a grace while we all held hands around the table.
The Quisenberry’s are more fortunate than most baseball couples, for he has stayed with one team ever since he made it to the majors, and now he and Janie know they will be in Kansas City for good. They have made friends there outside of baseball, and belong to the Village Presbyterian Church, in nearby Prairie Village. (Quis has granted himself a dispensation from Sunday services during the season.) They are considerably involved in the Harvesters program, a branch of the national organization that enlists restaurants and groceries and chain stores in the process of distributing food to the urban poor. An American League official told me recently that he had run into the Quisenberrys in the Royals’ offices on opening day this year, and when Dan went off to talk to someone there, he ventured to say something to Janie about Quis’s new contract. “Yes, we’re really blessed,” she said at once. “Just think of all the things we can do for other people now, for the rest of our lives.” During my visit, however, I sensed in both Quis and Janie a strong wish for privacy in these matters, and we returned to baseball.
Earlier on, at my request, Quis had dug out some thick old clip books, and, looking through them, we found a short strip of faded yellow Sports-Ticker tape: a double row of numbers, followed by the notation “WP QUISENBERRY”—his first major-league victory, in a road game against the Rangers on July 22, 1979. Janie had joined us—she is shy, and calm, with a sunburst smile—and she shook her head at the sight of those first box scores and two-inch, bottom-of-the-column mentions of a red-haired sidearming rookie reliever. “We used to die for a little clip like that,” she said, “but now he pitches so much I just can’t handle all the cutting and pasting. We always tell ourselves we’ll catch up after the season is over.” The stories grew more frequent, and headlines began to appear (the Kansas City Star. “QUISENBERRY: AH, RELIEF!”) as we turned the pages, and then there was a 1979 item about Quis being carried off the field in Detroit after being struck on the knee by a line drive off the bat of the Tigers’ Ron LeFlore—a ferocious batter who had previously ended the career of the famous knuckleballer Wilbur Wood with a similar shot through the box. “I was listening on the radio,” Janie said, “and I remember the announcer saying, ‘And Ron LeFlore may have sent another pitcher to an early retirement,’ and I turned right around and said, ‘But we just got here!’” Quis recovered quickly, though, and when 1980 rolled around, the pasted-in headline and feature stories and box scores began to take up more and more space on the pages of the clip books. Looking at these now, Quis shook his head. “At first, I kept thinking that the batters weren’t trying,” he said. “They were major-leaguers and I was getting them out, but I thought they’d figure me out once they began to pay attention. They kept saying, ‘Wait till we see this guy next year,’ and I didn’t know if they were right or not.”
But by 1980 Quisenberry was a submariner, and the batters found themselves in deeper difficulties, “CAN QUIZ MAINTAIN PACE?” reads a headline in the Kansas City Times of June 27, 1980, and a Sporting News box from August 9, 1980, shows Quis leading everybody in the league in the Rolaids “Fireman of the Year” standings. He had arrived—even in his own mind—at last. “There was a road trip to Boston and Baltimore and New York after the All-Star break that year, and somewhere along in there I began to think that maybe I wasn’t going to be too bad after all—that it wasn’t just flash, and I wasn’t just fooling them somehow.”
It had taken a while, starting back in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1975—the Royals’ bottom-level, Class A minor-league club; he moved up to the AA Jacksonville club later that summer, then slid back to Waterloo the next year. After two more years at Jacksonville, he and Janie decided to try winter ball in Mexico; he played for Guasave, on the Mexican west coast, and was traded to Mazatlan (Maury Wills was the manager there) on Christmas Eve of 1977. “It was horrible—a disaster,” Quis told me. “We were both sick all the time, and I was about 2–4 for the winter, and my ERA was up in the fives and sixes. I had nothing but a breaking ball, and those were the best hitters I’d ever seen. It was about then that I decided to be a sinkerballer. We’d gone to Mexico to see if I couldn’t break out of AA ball, but it didn’t work—I went right back to Jacksonville and stayed there the whole year.” Slowly, things did begin to pick up, though; he had fifteen saves that summer, and in 1979 he made the AAA Omaha club—his last stop before the majors, in July. He had been a sidearmer since college, by the way, and his Waterloo manager, John Sullivan—he is now the bullpen coach for the Toronto Blue Jays—took one look and very quickly moved him into the bullpen. “I thought it was a demotion,” Quis told me. “But after a while I noticed I was getting into a lot of games, and I decided it was fun. You never know, you know.”
Quis was born in Santa Monica and grew up in Culver City and then Costa Mesa, California. His parents were divorced when he was seven, and his mother remarried and had more children; his older brother, Marty, was a good athlete and a submarine-style pitcher—a better pitcher than he was, Quis insists—who did well in junior-college ball and expected to be picked up in the major-league draft; when it didn’t happen, he gave up baseball for good. He became a minister in the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and is now a family counsellor; the two brothers are still very close. Dan grew up thinking mostly about sports, too—he has kept in touch with most of the kids with whom he played street basketball and street football and Little League baseball back in Costa Mesa—and he wanted to become a professional ballplayer but knew almost from the beginning that he didn’t have the size and physique for it. “What’s happened really is a dream,” he told me. He followed his brother to Orange Coast College and then moved to La Verne College, where he won thirty-one games over two seasons; he pitched an astounding one hundred and ninety-four innings there in 1975 and, somewhere along the line, shifted over to a sidearm style, to ease the demands on his arm. Then he, too, was skipped over in the draft, in a year when the twenty-four major-league teams selected more than seven hundred young players in that process. “It was a crusher,” Quis says. “I’d done some other things in college”—he met Janie at La Verne, where she was an education major—“but I hadn’t concentrated on anything except baseball. I didn’t care for anything else in the world.” His college coach at La Verne, Ben Hines, made some calls, however—to front-office people in Detroit, Baltimore, and Kansas City—and in time the Royals said they just might have a spot. Quis drove up to Santa Ana and was signed by a Royals scout, Rosey Gilhousen. “The contract was for five hundred dollars and a bag of chew to be named later,” Quis recalls. “Well, I think they threw in a bat and a Royals banner, and maybe a sticker for my car. I was on my way!”
The basic Quisenberry style is humorous and invariably modest—a throwaway mode that is more central to the man than his eccentric pitching. I offered the guess that this sort of response, this habitual presentation of himself as an athlete who had succeeded mostly because of repeated and unexpected strokes of pure good luck, might be a way of concealing something. Was it possible that he did not want to admit his own powerful competitive urges?
“Well, I used to be competitive,” he said. “I mean, I used to be competitive and show it. When I was a kid, I cried when I lost—I was one of those. In junior college, I lost a game once and when it was over I stuck the nozzle of a shower in my mouth and turned on the water. I was so frustrated I just did that and drank water until I vomited. Another time, I couldn’t find the ball I wanted to warm up with, and I threw a whole bag of balls around the locker room looking for it. I couldn’t stand things.”
I asked what had happened to that Dan Quisenberry, and he said, “He grew up, I guess. I don’t do stuff out on the mound—throw my hands up when I strike out a guy, and all. I don’t like to show up the other player. I still like to win, but I don’t like excuses. I don’t like guys who brag on themselves. I have to talk to the press like everybody else, but I really don’t like to talk about m
yself, to say what percentage of winning games I’ve been in and all that stuff. I try to stay away from that.” He paused, perhaps sensing that he still hadn’t quite answered my question. “Yes, I’m competitive,” he said. “At this level, everybody is intensely competitive. What I want is to keep that extreme level of concentration but still keep the fun in the game. You have to do that if you’re going to succeed over a period of time. You have to relax and let the unconscious part of you do the playing. The dinosaur brain has to take over. But I work at things, too. I’m trying to be very good at baseball and to keep it from being too important in my life. I have to live on that border all the time.”
In baseball circles, Quisenberry’s humor is talked about almost as much as his pitching—in fact, the two attributes, or sides of him, often seem to be woven together in the players’ and writers’ minds: a funny guy who throws funny, too. Here, as well, the man may be slightly and persistently misperceived. He makes occasional appearances on the winter-banquet scene, and the laughter rattles the glassware, but he does not tell jokes or dredge up ancient and improbable baseball anecdotes. He is fresh and playful and surprising, and you are sometimes disarmed by the notion that he is as pleased and startled by what has just come out of him as his listeners are. Asked by one writer for his thoughts about the infamously bumpy diamond in Oakland Coliseum, Quis suggested that the club might try dragging a dead whale across the infield. After he had given up a game-winning pinch-hit single in a 1982 game against the Angels, he was asked if this was not the worst possible way to lose a game. Quis took the reporter’s question literally, and came up with a dozen or more worse possibilities: he could have balked a man around the bases; he could have thrown ten wild pitches; a sudden earthquake could have jostled a third-out fly ball out of Amos Otis’ glove; and so forth. His line “I have seen the future and it is much like the present, only longer” lingers happily in the mind (I comfort myself with it often, like an Armenian reaching in his pocket for his worry beads), but most of his stuff is transitory and ironical, and is clearly intended to prick holes in the unending and ponderously serious business of the post-game or pre-game sports interview. Sometimes Quis delivers playful or patently ridiculous responses to glum questions and then is amazed to see his lines repeated literally in the papers the next day; earlier this year, he told a visiting writer (a man who evidently did not lift his gaze from his notebook during the interview) that his bad spell in April and May was attributable to the fact that he had lifted weights all winter and become overmuscled. He is not evasive, however, and reporters around the league admire and respect him for never ducking out of the clubhouse after a game, no matter how painful its outcome. To me, the japes and verbal pranks look like a form of self-preservation—a relief from the dreary dailiness and intensity of the relief man’s lot. “I’m not trying to turn anybody off,” Quis said once, “but I’ve been talking with the writers for six years now and I’m getting kind of bored with myself, really.” His friend Paul Splittorff said to me, “The writers come to him for one-liners and stuff, and he feels he should always come up with something. He thinks he can be funny every day, like he pitches every day. The man is funny, but he’s not a natural comedian. There’s more there than that.”
