Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  “Of course, I can’t always do that,” he says.

  If there is a way, though, Mike Schmidt will probably figure it out. Excellence dogs the man. Gifted with extraordinary strength and athletic ability, he is also possessed of (and by) an analytical mind, a mind that grabs a problem like a bull terrier grabs a throat. He approaches the game—any game—with enormous physical talent, filtered through layer after layer of pure thought.

  “Did you ever think about baseball for just a minute, about how perfect it is?” he asks. Thwack! He is talking while he strokes, head down, reaching over with the iron to roll the next red-striped ball into place. Setting, swinging, Thwack! “I have. It’s one of the only sports where the players are not overtaking its dimensions. You take basketball. The players are so big now that scoring points is like nothing. The baskets ought to be higher. And I was watching football this year and it occurred to me that the kickers were regularly kicking the ball completely off the field, over and out of the end zone. It never used to be like that.

  “But baseball—take a ball hit between the second baseman and the shortstop. A hard-enough-hit ball is going to go through, no matter how quick the fielders are. There is just enough space between them so they can’t cover it all. The same thing is true between the third baseman and the shortstop, and the outfielders. A home run is just far enough away so that a plain old hard-hit fly ball won’t make it. The dimensions of the game are, like, perfect.

  “Now you know when ole Abner Doubleday set down ninety feet between the bases and sixty feet between home plate and the pitcher’s mound that he couldn’t have known all that, but it works out that way. Incredible.”

  Great baseball players have this in common. To the thoughtful baseball fan, the game can serve as a rich metaphor for life, but to a professional ballplayer, baseball is life. Schmidt lives to play baseball well, and playing badly just about kills him. But the intensity with which he plays is different from, say, that of Pete Rose.

  Rose’s obsession is outward-directed, combative. Rose is in a battle with the other team, and he is unrelenting. You can see it in his slide, which is not so much a slide as a banzai lunge—bombing himself at the bag headfirst, as if it were the only way to arrive, launching himself at a dead run a good five paces off, hungry, hard, and fast.

  Schmidt plays with equal intensity, but with him, the passion is directed inward. He is battling himself. Sure, the other team is there to be beaten and his teammates are there to help, but the key to victory is performance, and the secret to perfect performance is locked somewhere deep inside, soul deep. Schmidt knows how much of the game is instinct. He knows that success or failure in that instant after a ball is thrown or hit rests as much in a realm outside his conscious control as inside it, just as his golf swing stubbornly resists his will to make it perfect, to blend that extraordinary power with proper technique.

  When he plays badly he is often accused of thinking too much, which is probably true. Even he acknowledges it. But, you see, that’s Mike Schmidt. His way is to think his way out. Master those instincts. That’s why the man so often seems perplexed with himself. Why can’t he get those goddamn neurons in the deepest part of his brain to fire exactly as he wants? Why not?

  Roger Angell, noted baseball writer for The New Yorker magazine and a man who has spent almost five decades watching major league baseball, mused in an article on hitting last year about the chances a batter has of making contact with a ball thrown by a wily, strong, big league pitcher, and concluded that it simply ought to be impossible.

  Think of hitting as a duel, fought between two circular patches of dirt sixty feet, six inches apart, one with a bare rubber slab at its center, the other divided into two rectangles on either side of a rubber pentagon—home plate. The pitcher’s mound at mid-diamond is raised about ten inches, an elevation that can seem mountainous when the pitcher is well over six feet tall with arms as long as most people’s legs. Up on that mound is a man with a body seemingly designed especially by God to hurl a small, hard, leather-bound, stitched sphere at high speed past the waiting batter, whose job it is to hit the moving ball with a long, cylindrical wooden bat.

  Today’s fireballing big league pitchers can throw the ball at speeds of 95 m.p.h., which is to say 140 feet per second, which means their opponents in this duel have less than half of a second to decide, first, whether the damn thing is going to hit them; second, whether it is close enough to the strike zone to try to hit; third, gauge where the ball will pass before them; and, last, swing the bat quickly enough in the right place to hit it.

  Little League coaches are always telling their charges to keep their eye on the ball until it makes contact with the bat—which is a physical impossibility. The ball moves too fast. While it isn’t a bad idea to try to watch the ball all the way in, to make contact a hitter needs to almost instantly intuit where it will be when it reaches him, and to swing to that spot. Ultimately it is as much a matter of feel as eyesight or technique. It is, as most boys or girls learn early, something you either can or cannot do, no matter how much you may want to do it.

  At least for most people. Schmidt believes he has turned himself from merely a good hitter into a great hitter solely by the application of technique.

  He talks of two breakthroughs. The first had to do with controlling fear, the bugaboo that roughly separates the several dozen truly great hitters in baseball from the rest of humanity. The second had to do with controlling desire, ego, and natural exuberance, a battle he is still waging today.

  By the time Schmidt was playing college ball at Ohio State in the late 1960s, he figures he had progressed about a far as natural ability would take him. He was a switch-hitter then. The change began when his coach, Paul Wren, persuaded him to stick with hitting right-handed only.

  “I had a big swing and I could hit it out of the park either way—I can still hit them out of the park left-handed—but I still felt like I wasn’t getting the most out of the talent God gave me,” Schmidt says. “The reason hitting left-handed appealed to me was that I hated curveballs.

  “You stand there watching the pitcher and he throws the ball and it’s coming straight at your eyeball. You can see it spinning. At the last moment it breaks over the plate. I didn’t like it. Watching the ball speeding straight at my head was tough. I’d be doing this,” and Schmidt demonstrates by assuming his batting stance, holding his golf iron instead of the bat, and then pulling sharply away from the imaginary ball, jerking his head back over his left shoulder.

  “I just didn’t like it. I’d watch my buddies and I just couldn’t understand how they did it. They’d just follow that sucker on in until it broke over the plate and then smoke it! They could even hit it to right field! I was just in awe of it. I thought, God, how do you do that? When I hit these home runs right-handed they were fastballs, of course. Anytime I got a curve I’d be bailing out, or just freezing up completely. Still, I was having more success batting right-handed because that was natural to me. Hitting right-handed all the time forced me to deal with that fear, and made me a better hitter.”

  Still, Schmidt says, when he began playing pro ball in the early ’70s he had not overcome fear. It was a lesson he had to learn in the pros, because in the big leagues good pitchers use fear. It is an essential part of their arsenal in the duel. Schmidt says the main difference between top-quality amateur baseball and the pros is that, in the pros, the pitchers really do throw at you. Deliberately.

  “Back in 1973, as a rookie, I hit a home run to beat Bob Gibson 2-to-1 in the eighth,” he recalls. “It was 1-to-1 in the eighth and I hit a slider out. Gibson was a big mean-lookin’ guy. He just stared at me all the way around the bases, like he was saying, No fucking rookie is supposed to hit me like that. Well, the next time I faced him he threw me another slider and I hit a cue shot, you know, off the end of the bat, that squiggled like this”—Schmidt wiggles his fist—“right up the middle between his legs. Again I got this look from him, like an evil eye. Gi
bson—that’s just the kind of pitcher he was—he just figures at that point that I’m hittin’ him too good.

  “So the next time up he just drilled me right in my left arm. Zinged me. It came at me so fast I don’t think I even had time to move, just barely saw it coming. Hurt like a mother. And he just stared at me as I trotted down to first. He had this self-satisfied expression, like he was saying, Hey, kid, I’m Bob Gibson and I just threw that ball at you and if you don’t like it well then go ahead and do something about it. That’s why he was a great pitcher. A lot of pitchers lack that killer instinct.”

  Over the years, Schmidt says, he has taught himself simply to not fear getting hit. He knows sometimes he will; it has happened to him often enough. He knows how much it hurts, and how quickly the pain goes away. He is used to it. Getting hit isn’t something he likes, but he accepts it. It’s one of the reasons he is paid more than a million dollars a year to play baseball. Usually he gets hit in the left upper arm or high on the fleshy part of his back. He assumes a batting stance, holding his golf iron like a bat, and demonstrates how he turns to absorb the blow.

  “Now, you take Nolan Ryan, there’s a different story,” he says. “His pitch gets there about a good foot ahead of everybody else’s. I’m scared to death sometimes when Nolan is pitching. If I thought he was throwing at me, well, then you’re talking about life and limb, you’re talking a man with a family. With Nolan, if just one pitch hits me in the wrong place, that could blind or kill me. I don’t want to be blind or dead. But I not only go up to bat against Nolan Ryan, I get hits off of him.

  “I like to have the ball thrown at my head every once in a while. It exercises that reflex for getting out of the way. You have to have confidence that you can get out of the way when it comes, so it’s good to prove it to yourself every once in a while. I’ve earned my reputation in this league. Pitchers know I ain’t gonna back down, even if I know they’re throwing at me. That’s why I make more money than just about anybody playing baseball.”

  Last year, he says, a rookie pitcher threw a fastball right at him that just missed hitting him in the ribs.

  “I made it a point not to move a muscle,” he says. “I just stared back out at the guy and spit, and set up for the next pitch. They want you to at least get riled, so maybe you’re trying too hard to clobber the next pitch. But the key is just to not let it intimidate or bother you.”

  There are two aides to the intimidation game. Opposing pitchers know how important Mike Schmidt is to the Phillies, how a healthy home run hitter is money in their pockets. Throwing at Schmidt is an invitation for retaliation. In the National League, pitchers still have to take their turn at bat.

  And there is the direct reaction. If Schmidt feels strongly enough that a pitcher doesn’t respect him, he’ll retaliate himself. In a Sunday afternoon game at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh three years ago, Pirates pitcher Bruce Kison hit Schmidt with what the hitter took to be a deliberate assault. Schmidt calmly started walking toward first base until Kison turned away, and then he charged the mound. He says he got in a few good shots before both benches emptied and pulled them apart. In the ensuing confusion, someone stepped on one of Schmidt’s fingers and fractured it. But he considers it to have been a necessary thing.

  He smiles just thinking about it. “I was out to inflict the maximum amount of physical damage to the man in the shortest length of time,” he says. “From my perspective, I want the pitcher to know that if I think he’s throwing at me, he can expect to see me, if not then, then in the parking lot after the game.”

  Schmidt’s second big breakthrough as a hitter is still happening, the way he sees it. He talks about having arrived at a new level of the game, one where he deliberately targets his performance for the good of the team, suppressing his own desire to play dramatic baseball, to swing from the heels all the time the way Reggie Jackson does, so hard that the force of a mighty miss knocks him over.

  The great revelation in this—which Schmidt sees as profoundly connected with his concurrent spiritual awakening several years ago—is that by suppressing his desire for personal glory he achieves not only better team performance but also, like some kind of heavenly bonus, better personal performance.

  “In my first few years in the majors, I was a guy who did nothing but pull the ball,” he says, miming with his golf iron a swing at an inside pitch. “I was hitting thirty or more homers each year, driving in more than one hundred runs, but batting about .270. I wanted to hit like Roberto Clemente,” who consistently hit for a high batting average and could hit the ball to any part of the field with power. “My coaches and teammates laughed at me. They told me to relax, to settle down, that I was already good enough. The thing is, I really wanted to be better. I was determined to be better than that.”

  Pull hitters rarely have better then a .270 batting average because they are too predictable—fielders know where to play them and pitchers know how to pitch them. So Schmidt did the unthinkable. He experimented with success. He changed his batting stance, moving farther away from the plate, and he began deliberately swinging the bat with only about 70 percent of his strength.

  At the same time—he demonstrates this with the golf iron, flexing his muscular forearms—he concentrated on driving the bat down at the ball, attempting to hit at precisely the point in his swing where he turns over his wrists.

  “Bam!” he says as he strokes down at the imaginary ball. “Hitting down at the ball like that gives it backspin when you hit it right. It will carry ten or fifteen more feet with spin like that on it. A lot of my home runs hit the fence in center and just bounce over for a home run. I’ll take ten like that and sacrifice the one towering blast that everybody talks about all year.”

  In the last three years Schmidt’s batting average has gone from .253 to .286 to .316, and in each of those seasons he hit home runs at a greater rate than ever before (though last year’s home run total reflects the shortened season caused by the players’ strike). He now hits a home run, on average, every fifteen times he comes to the plate, an astonishing percentage that has been bettered or equaled by only five players in the history of the game: Babe Ruth (who averaged a homer every 12 at-bats), Ralph Kiner, Harmon Killebrew, Dave Kingman (all with an average of one every 14 at-bats), and Eddie Mathews (15).

  “I’m lucky, because I’m one of those guys who has enough strength so that I can afford to slow down on my swing without giving up home runs,” he explains. “I hit more homers by slowing down my swing. Swinging with all your might is a hitter’s nemesis. It is the standard flaw. Fans get down on me at the Vet every once in a while—not so much anymore—because they never see me really swinging so hard my batting helmet falls off. It looks like I’m not really trying. But I’ve discovered, and the stats prove it, that by relying on technique more than brute strength I hit for a better average and I hit more home runs.”

  Last season was Schmidt’s best ever. Standing under the Florida sun, hitting the last of his golf balls two months before the 1982 season begins, Schmidt is confident the ascent toward his goal of excellence has just begun. After nine years of major league play, he expects to reach his peak during the next five seasons—at a point in most baseball careers where players must cope with decline. He works out easily, no weight lifting or heavy running, just an elaborate series of stretching exercises daily and an occasional run of a mile or so.

  “At this point in my career, I’ve got all the strength I need,” he says.

  “I work out primarily to keep fit and prevent injury, not to bulk up. My goal is to play 162 games”—the complete schedule. “I’m no good to anybody if I’m built like a gorilla from the waist up and I snap a hamstring muscle at midseason.”

  Friday night, April 9, 1982. Veterans Stadium. The Phillies’ second game of the season. Top of the second inning; the Montreal Expos lead, 1–0.

  Schmidt stands off behind home plate swinging his bat with a lead doughnut around the end, loosening up as he watches
Expos pitcher Steve Rogers finish his warm-up tosses. It is a cold, cold night, and Schmidt is freezing. No night for baseball.

  Standing on the playing field at the Vet when the stands are full, it is hard for a player not to feel that he has arrived at the exact center of world attention. The green plastic rug is made up of a zillion plastic squibs, soft and crinkly underfoot. Balls bounce off it uniformly, with a dull thud. Walls rise up all around, moving multicolored walls of people, thousands of them, so high that you have to turn your head straight up to see sky. It is like being at the bottom of some Olympian bowl.

  But tonight most of the seats are empty, rising in thick bands of red, orange, and yellow. Only about 7,000 fans have braved the cold and dampness for this game, though it is only the second of the year. It has been snowing all day.

  The Phils had lost their opening game the day before to the New York Mets, after having two games called off earlier in the week because of snow. In the opening game, Schmidt batted four times. He hit well the one decent pitch thrown to him by the Mets’ Randy Jones, but the ball flew on a line directly into the glove of the third baseman for an out, which is the way things sometimes go in baseball. But Jones had taken notice. The next two times Schmidt batted Jones simply refused to throw the ball near the strike zone, walking the Phils’ cleanup hitter twice. Schmidt had taken advantage of the gifts by stealing a base and scoring a run.

  Now, watching Rogers warm up, he knows it’s unlikely he’ll get a good pitch to hit tonight—even if he felt warm and flexible enough to swing the bat well. Rogers is a skinny guy with a moustache who has been playing major league ball for eight years, only one year less than Schmidt. He pitches more with brains and finesse than power. Schmidt sees him as a sort of opposite number to himself.