The Rotation

by Jim Salisbury

  Smart, kid.

  Disrupting Halladay’s workday can be like thrusting a butter knife into an electrical socket.

  Zap.

  If you have ever wondered why spring training lasts six weeks, look no further than the pitching staff. Hitters can hone their swings in less than a month, but pitchers need those six weeks to build the arm strength and endurance that will carry them through a six-month season. And for The Rotation, six months was a minimal expectation. Anything less than a seven-month season, with a trip deep into October culminating with confetti flying in Citizens Bank Park, would be a huge disappointment.

  “We all feel like we’re on the same page,” Halladay said in spring training, two months before his 34th birthday. “We all feel like we’re at the similar points in our careers. Cole probably has a lot longer left than the rest of us, but we all feel like we’ve accomplished personal things, we’ve set ourselves up, and now it’s the ultimate goal—trying to win. The reason I’m playing now is to try to win and win a championship as a team. That’s the driving factor for all of us.”

  Lee confirmed as much, saying he chose the Phillies because he believed they gave him the best chance to win a World Series, a better chance than he’d get with the Yankees, he said, who were getting old.

  After a morning of conditioning, throwing and fielding drills on the first day of pitchers and catchers, it was time to start building arm strength at 60 feet, six inches—the distance from the rubber to home plate. Pitchers were split into two groups that would throw every other day in the bullpen or in batting practice until exhibition games began. On Day 1, Halladay and Cole Hamels took the mound, each throwing for about eight minutes. Hamels had finished the 2010 season on a roll and was a big reason the team had won its fourth-straight NL East title. In 15 starts after the All-Star break, he had a 2.23 ERA, the fifth best in the majors over that span, and 104 strikeouts, the second-most in baseball in that time. Twenty-seven years old, he arrived in camp serious and confident, and it showed in his first bullpen session.

  “Cole could pitch in a game today,” Dubee marveled.

  In national media circles, Hamels quickly became the hot pick to win the Cy Young. Reporters love to make predictions in February, even if they are meaningless by Memorial Day, never mind by October. On a staff that included Cy Young winners and ERA champs, Hamels would be allowed to blend in and perform in the less-pressurized No. 4 spot in the rotation. Many thought he couldn’t help but shine in the role.

  But while Hamels was a fashionable preseason pick for Cy Young, he was only part of the reason that Clearwater had become the No. 1 destination for America’s baseball media in the spring of 2010. Albert Pujols’ contract drama across the state in Jupiter was a hot story for a day or two, but it didn’t have the lasting draw of The Rotation and all its promise. Lee’s signing had taken a golden rotation and turned it platinum. On paper, this was one of the greatest starting staffs ever. In the history-obsessed world of baseball, and among the people who cover the sport, that’s a big story. Everyone wanted a piece of it and that had kept Greg Casterioto awake at night ever since Lee came on board in December.

  As director of baseball communications for the Phillies, Casterioto fields all media requests, and once the winter holidays cleared and spring training came into focus, he was deluged. Casterioto, Bonnie Clark, Kevin Gregg, John Brazer, and Scott Palmer—all members of the team’s public and media relations staff—tried to come up with a plan to satisfy the media’s demand for access to The Rotation without cutting into the pitchers’ preparation for what mattered most—the season. The Phillies PR staff couldn’t have individual reporters from around the land parachuting into camp seeking a few minutes with each pitcher on a daily basis. That’s a lot of potential butter knives around Halladay’s locker.

  Phillies officials came up with a plan. They would hold a news conference and make the Big Four starting pitchers available after the first workout of the spring. It would last no more than an hour and the pitchers would be free from questions about their potential place in history for the rest of the spring. The news conference would be transcribed and any reporter who wandered in on March 10 would have access to pages worth of quotes. It would be televised live on MLB Network and on Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia. The pitchers would be required to appear wearing their red Phillies tops—a branding opportunity for a ball club that needs to sell a lot of jerseys to support a $175-million payroll.

  The player-media liaison in Casterioto thought a group news conference would work. The fan inside him liked it, too. Halladay, Lee, Oswalt, and Hamels all sitting together with bright eyes and big dreams. Wouldn’t it have been cool if the Orioles had done something like that in 1971?

  The idea was the easy part. Selling it to the pitchers, particularly the introverted, routine-obsessed Halladay, would be a different story. The job began and ended with Casterioto’s ability to convince the ace of aces to carve out an hour at the end of a workday that had begun at 5 A.M. to do something he wasn’t particularly fond of.

  “Sure, I’ll do it,” Halladay told Casterioto over the telephone one January day.

  Inside, Casterioto was elated to hear Halladay’s response.

  “As long as Joe is there, too,” Halladay said.

  The numbers on the back of bubblegum cards made it easy to overlook Blanton, and fans, media, and even people who worked for the team were guilty of it. On a staff of stars, Blanton was Average Joe. He had never made an All-Star team. He’d helped the Phillies win the World Series in 2008, but that didn’t stop the team from attempting to trade him in the weeks that followed Lee’s signing. The Phillies found no takers for Blanton and the $17 million that remained on his contract, and as spring training 2011 approached, he lined up to be the club’s fifth starter. Less than a year earlier, Halladay had purchased 65 Baume & Mercier wristwatches—listed at nearly $4,000 a piece—for teammates and club personnel as a gesture of thanks after his perfect game against Florida. “We did it together,” the inscription said. Halladay had defined himself as a team player, and in his mind Blanton was as big a part of The Rotation—the team within the team—as anybody. He had to be at that news conference.

  “It was the first thing Roy said,” Casterioto said. “And he was right. I was mad at myself for not thinking that way at first, but again, I’m a fan and I was caught up in the foursome.”

  More than 70 media members, local and national, and club officials packed the news conference at Bright House Field. Lee sat in the middle flanked by Halladay and Blanton on his right, and Oswalt and Hamels on his left. This was the media’s first shot to hear from Blanton after a winter of trade rumors and hype that completely ignored him. He was the skunk who’d crashed the lawn party, the fifth Beatle, and everyone wondered what that felt like. The question came quickly from David Murphy of the Daily News. Oswalt wasn’t happy that a lightning bolt was thrust into what—for the pitchers—was supposed to be a ceremonial unveiling, a happy time at the beginning of a long journey. The veteran pitcher rolled his eyes in disgust at the question, but Blanton, who’d been traded before, handled it well. He even had his touché moment when Ryan Lawrence of the Delaware County Daily Times asked Hamels about being the only one with a World Series ring.

  Blanton perked right up.

  “Uh, I’ve got a ring,” said the man who earned the win in Game 4 of the 2008 World Series.

  The Rotation’s historic potential was the central theme of the news conference. Halladay, who spent a decade in Toronto wondering what it would be like to pitch in the postseason, looked to his left and said he had to pinch himself being surrounded by such quality talent. Lee summed up everything by acknowledging the staff’s historic potential, but added a warning. “We haven’t thrown a single pitch as a group yet,” he said. “It’s kind of early to say we’re one of the best rotations in the history of the game. Obviously, we’re a very talented group, and there is potential for all of that. But it’s just that—potential.”


  The news conference ended and the pitchers headed off to tape an hourlong television special with Michael Barkann of Comcast SportsNet. All in all, it was a seamless day. The pitchers got their work in and killed a slew of media demands with one stone. No butter knives were thrust into any electrical sockets and Casterioto was happy about that.

  When it was all over, long after the luxury cars and SUVs had pulled out of the players’ parking lot, a spent Casterioto sat at a picnic table behind the clubhouse and reflected on the day he and his colleagues had been planning for—and dreading a little—since January.

  His iPhone buzzed.

  His eyes bulged in mock horror as another media request rolled in.

  “Greta Van Susteren,” he said incredulously. “What’s next, Oprah?’ ”

  Media interest actually continued for a couple more weeks with several national types joining the locals who’d been there all along. Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith spent more than a week in Clearwater. Widely hailed as America’s best long-form sportswriter, Smith was raised near Wilmington, Delaware, and educated at LaSalle University. He had grown up a Phillies fan. Now, with his unique eye for detail and obsession with finding out what makes people tick, Smith was here to chronicle what was the story heading into the 2011 baseball season—The Rotation.

  Smith was one of the first to arrive in the clubhouse every morning, right there with the beat writers, observing the pitchers as they ate breakfast at the cool kids’ table in the clubhouse. (There are two long tables in the Phillies’ spring clubhouse. The veterans congregate at one, the rookies and non-roster players at the other). Computer bag slung over his shoulder and yellow legal pad in his hand, Smith constantly scanned the room for interesting details. Patient and polite, he waited for days to get his shot to interview the pitchers one-on-one. He also conducted lengthy interviews with teammates and club officials for a 5,000-word piece that ran in SI’s baseball preview issue.

  Not everyone was as patient as Smith. Pat Jordan spent 11 days in Clearwater working on a story for the New York Times Sunday magazine. Jordan had been a highly touted pitching prospect in the Braves’ system in the early 1960s—he chronicled the death of his baseball dream in his 1975 memoir, False Spring—and big hitter at Sports Illustrated in the 1970s. He recalled doing interviews with Tom Seaver while the two drove to Shea Stadium. Those were the days when a player would show up in the clubhouse and chat leisurely with a writer while putting on his uniform, the days when a player would grab a brew and rehash the day with a scribe in front of his locker after a game. Those days, of course, are over.

  Clubhouses used to be locker rooms. Now they are glorified coat rooms, places to hang your clothes and change before hustling off to get treatment in the trainer’s room, lift weights, work with a strength and conditioning coach—a new addition to the baseball world in the last decade—or watch video, all in areas off-limits to media. Players simply don’t have the time—and in many cases, the interest—for media interaction as they once did. Oh, the young ones like to be written about and will give you all the time you need to promote their prospecthood. But things often change once they’ve made it. All this is compounded by the increase in media. There are more people asking for a minute of a player’s time than ever before. Walls have gone up, leaving old-school grads like Jordan frustrated.

  “I’ve never done a story where the people I’ve needed to speak with are so difficult to get,” he said.

  Jordan spent days wandering in and around the clubhouse, tiptoeing around Halladay’s and Lee’s work schedules. He always looked ready for a Jimmy Buffet concert as he wore shorts and untucked Hawaiian shirts and never took off his Ray-Ban sunglasses. Outside the back of the clubhouse, the gray-bearded writer puffed on a cigar as the sound of clinking metal could be heard through the open doors of the weight room.

  “You can’t smoke around here,” a team official told Jordan. “The smoke is blowing in the weight room.”

  Imagine that story? HALLADAY MISSES START DUE TO SMOKE INHALATION.

  Jordan rolled his eyes. He had no patience for the new breed of player, media relations officials, or modern, regimented spring camps, and it showed in the story he produced for the Times magazine. He wrote learnedly about the art of pitching and how it pertained to The Rotation, but he left no doubt that things were better in his day. Maybe if they had let him smoke, the tone would have been different.

  Everyone was looking for an angle to best capture The Rotation. Legendary Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss had the most unique. When it came to access, the pitchers had no qualms giving it to Iooss. He was safe. In his own way, he was as talented as the pitchers and they knew it. And he would only make them look good. So good they could hang it on the wall.

  On the morning of March 5, Hamels was scheduled to throw a between-starts bullpen session. Usually these are solemn workouts, a trip into the pitching laboratory where pitcher and pitching coach smooth out deliveries and adjust release points by a tenth of an inch. On this day, Hamels’ “bullpen,” as they call it, was a show. Iooss and his staff had spent two hours setting up strobe lights and reflectors, all powered by a humming portable generator. The lights lured curious minor leaguers out of their clubhouse. Everyone was in the mood for a show. Hamels, in full uniform, delivered.

  The lanky left-hander began by throwing fastballs. Iooss, kneeling on a towel a few feet away, started snapping pictures—10 frames per second so he wouldn’t miss the sweat rolling down Hamels’ cheek or the veins bulging in his neck. In time, Iooss was laying on the ground, shooting up at the pitcher with the blue Florida sky as a background.

  Hamels was remarkably focused with such a production buzzing around him.

  “Nooo,” he spat after throwing a pitch that he didn’t like. He conferred with Dubee about the importance of releasing the ball on a downward angle.

  Hamels didn’t need much persuading when SI asked to shoot him at work. (They don’t call him “Hollywood” for nothing.) He had been the subject of Iooss features in the past and liked the photographer’s work. Iooss had promised to give Hamels some of the pictures.

  “Cole likes to be photographed,” Iooss said. “He feels he looks good and that helps, too. He’s self-confident about how he comes across in pictures.”

  Iooss began shooting sports, everything from Super Bowls to Olympiads, in the 1960s. He’s been around the block.

  “Cole’s a great-looking guy with personality,” Iooss said. “He’s lucky he’s married. Road life can kill a man.”

  Before leaving camp, Iooss got The Rotation together for a shot that appeared on the cover of SI. It was Lee surrounded by the other starters, a shot modeled after a 2007 Rolling Stone magazine cover depicting the rock band Maroon Five. SI editors debated which pitcher to put in the middle—Halladay or Lee? They went with Lee “because he came back and created all this drama,” Iooss said.

  ON THE ROAD UGH-AIN

  One of the perks of being a major-league veteran is getting to occasionally skip a long spring training bus trip.

  You don’t get a day off, per se, but working out in Clearwater and taking a short day sure beats a two-and-a-half-hour drive over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to Fort Myers at 7:30 in the morning. And don’t even get us started about the ride back.

  The schedule makers had the Phillies taking that trip on March 3 for a game against the Red Sox. At midday the day before, Bench Coach Pete Mackanin pinned the travel roster to the clubhouse bulletin board.

  Cole Hamels was on it because it was his day to pitch. The only other veteran regular on the list was Shane Victorino, a fact that didn’t elude third baseman Placido Polanco, who was staying back in Clearwater.

  “Hey, Vic,” Polanco called over as Victorino packed his bag for the early ride down I-75 the next morning. “Bring me back something from Fort Myers.”

  Victorino is the biggest needler on the club, so teammates relish the opportunity to give it back to him. He took Polanco’
s ribbing in stride and laughed as he placed his spikes in his red travel bag.

  “They have oranges down there?” Polanco asked Victorino. “Bring me back some oranges.”

  Victorino is a live wire, the chattiest of all Phillies. That doesn’t always go over well on a long, morning bus ride.

  “I have my iPod all charged up so I don’t have to listen to him,” Manager Charlie Manuel deadpanned.

  Victorino only played four innings in that game. He was replaced in center field by utility man Wilson Valdez. Funny thing was Valdez wasn’t even supposed to make the trip. He was one of the lucky ones scheduled to stay in Clearwater, take a few swings, and go home. But when the bus rolled out of Bright House Field, Valdez was on it. He’d assumed he’d be making the trip and never looked at the travel list.

  “That’s OK,” Valdez said with a laugh. “I like to play. But I will look at the list from now on.”

  Cognizant of the media pull on the pitchers, Iooss recalled something Michael Jordan used to tell him.

  “I like you, Walter, because you’re good and you’re fast,” Jordan would say.

  “At this point they’re all pretty fed up with pictures,” Iooss said after the group shot of the Phillies pitchers. “I was trying to get it over as fast as humanly possible. I got them out of there fifteen minutes early.”

  Maybe Pat Jordan could pick up that extra time.

  Nah.

  In the days that followed the first workout for pitchers and catchers, the clubhouse filled as position players trickled in before the February 19 first full-squad workout. Pitchers no longer owned the room. Big personalities such as Shane Victorino and Jimmy Rollins arrived. Ryan Howard’s hulking presence seemed to fill one side of the clubhouse.