That is a big “if” because won-lost records are not very revealing, as 1989 showed. In 1989 Hershiser was 15–15. He only climbed to .500 by winning his last start, 3–1. It was a twelve-inning game. He pitched eleven innings. His ERA was 2.31, comparable to his 2.26 in 1988. He pitched approximately the same number of innings (256⅔ to 267) and got exactly the same number of strikeouts (178). In 1988 his ratio of hits plus walks to innings pitched was a sparkling 1.052. In 1989 it was 1.181, a difference of about 1 hit or walk every 8 innings. In 1989 he lost four times, 1–0, and in four other losses the Dodgers did not score while he was in the game. In his last nine starts the Dodgers drove in just 7 runs. At one point he found himself in the midst of another kind of scoreless innings streak: The Dodgers went 34 consecutive innings without scoring while he was pitching. In his 15 losses the Dodgers scored a total of 17 runs. He allowed only 41 runs in those 15 losses. If the Dodgers had scored just 19 more runs for him in his last eight losses, his record would have been 23–7. In 1988, 23–8 won him the Cy Young Award and a contract that for the next three seasons would pay him about $600 per pitch.
The 1984 season was the first full season for both Hershiser and Dwight Gooden of the New York Mets. Through 1989 their records were: Gooden, 100–39; Hershiser, 98–64. Over that span Frank Viola won more games than either (106–73). During those six seasons Hershiser had three more victories than Jack Morris (95–68) and Roger Clemens (95–45) and just eight more victories than the fifth winningest pitcher, Charlie Hough (90–82). Hough is hardly a byword for glamour, or even a household word, even in the homes of baseball fans.
The famous “Class of ’84” included these seven rookie pitchers: Dwight Gooden, Roger Clemens, Mark Langsten, Jimmy Key, Mark Gubicza, Ron Darling and Hershiser. Gooden is the class of that class, so far. In 1984 the 19-year-old Gooden set a National League record with a total of 32 strikeouts in two consecutive games. In those 17 innings he walked none and in one game he did not go to three balls on any batter. In that game he threw only 28 balls in 120 pitches. In 1985 Gooden became the youngest pitcher ever to win 20 games, the youngest to win the Cy Young Award, and the first since Sandy Koufax in 1965 and 1966 and Steve Carlton in 1972 to win the pitcher’s triple crown, leading the league in wins, strikeouts and ERA. In fact, Gooden, like Koufax in 1965 and 1966, led the major leagues in those three categories. At the end of the 1989 season he was in the select circle of starting pitchers with a winning percentage of .700 or better over six seasons.
On June 19, 1989, when Gooden won his one-hundredth game at age 24 years and 7 months, he was the third-youngest pitcher (behind Bob Feller, who was 22 in 1941, and Frank “Noodles” Hahn, who was 24 years and 2 months in 1903) to win 100 games. Gooden’s record was 100–37, a .730 percentage. On that day Hershiser, then 30, had a record of 91–55, .623. However, Hershiser is doing something that neither Gooden nor Roger Clemens is certain to do. It is something that one can not assume that any young pitcher will go on to do. Hershiser is pitching with steady success in his thirties. He may be one of those pitchers who are markedly better after 30. This is more an achievement of mind than of muscle. Or, more precisely, it testifies to the use of mind to conserve muscle.
Anyway, a .623 winning percentage is very good, particularly for a man who began life as a spina bifida baby. “Clark Kent at least had a good body,” Hershiser says. “I’m Jimmy Olsen.” Not true. When Nature designed Hershiser, it had a pitcher in mind. Hershiser has a pitcher’s body and mind. He may look slight; when he is standing next to Kirk Gibson, the Dodgers’ unshaven and untamed former football player, he may even look frail. But at 6 feet 3 and 192 pounds Hershiser is very much the modern player. Long ago pitchers used to be the biggest, strongest men on the field. They were intimidators. And pitchers have not been getting smaller. (In 1988 Nolan Ryan, at 6 feet 2 and 210 pounds, was only the fifth-largest Astros’ pitcher.) But other players have been getting bigger faster. So there is a sense in which Tom Boswell is right when he says “hitters are mesomorphs, pitchers are ectomorphs.” Rendering that thought into the vulgate, Boswell says that in the locker room pitchers look like the guys the other players beat up. Indeed, the most dominating pitcher over a full season in the Seventies and Eighties weighed about 160 pounds. That was Ron Guidry’s weight in 1977.
Actually, Hershiser is one of baseball’s best all-around athletes. “I’m an everyday player in the guise of a pitcher.” He was a terrific schoolboy hockey player, but he always had his eye on the ball, not a puck. When he was eight years old the Personna razor blade company sponsored a nationwide throw, hit and run contest. Hershiser finished third in the nation and got to go to Yankee Stadium for the finals. “But,” he says, “from there my career went downhill.” His coaches at Cherry Hill High School in New Jersey and at Bowling Green State University in Ohio must have been surprised when he went on to serious success. He was cut from his high school varsity team in his freshman and sophomore years. He was cut from his college team in his freshman and sophomore years even though he was on a baseball scholarship. His 6–2 record as a junior was just good enough to get him drafted by the Dodgers in the seventeenth round, “more as a suspect than a prospect,” he says.
There is no shame in being selected deep in the draft. Baseball is so difficult, and its particular skills require so much honing, and the honing requires so much character, that the baseball draft is a highly unscientific, uncertain plunge. Other players picked in late rounds who turned out to be good investments include Andre Dawson (11th round), Roger Clemens (12), Jack Clark (13), Dave Parker (14), Jose Canseco (15), Mark Langston (15), Frank Viola (16), Kent Hrbek (17), Bret Saberhagen (19), Don Mattingly (19), Ryne Sandberg (20), Bob Boone (20), Paul Molitor (28) and Keith Hernandez (42).
“Ever since I was eight years old I wanted to come back to a big-league stadium, and I never doubted that I would.” Almost never. He says that once when playing Double-? ball in San Antonio he gave up 23 earned runs in three appearances and began to wonder whether he would get “back to” a big-league stadium. Ever since he was eight he had felt as though he had been there.
Born in September, Hershiser’s parents had a choice about when he would start school. They took the early option, so he grew up competing with boys a bit older. He thinks it helped him. “I was always battling uphill. It gave me good work habits, made me work hard.” Hershiser is a German name. It descends from one of the Hessian mercenaries that George Washington routed at Trenton after he crossed the Delaware—which he did after pitching a dollar (à sinker?) across the river, or so ’tis said. Hershiser got his nickname, “Bulldog,” from that fountain of folk wisdom and applied philosophy, his manager, Tommy Lasorda. Early in Hershiser’s career, when he was struggling, Lasorda called him into his office for a pep talk. Lasorda is nothing if not long on pep. In the course of what you may be sure was a soliloquy, Lasorda said he was going to start calling Hershiser “Bulldog.” Why? asked the pitcher. Lasorda explained: “Suppose the game is tied in the ninth against Atlanta, the bases are loaded, Dale Murphy is up and I bring you in to pitch. If the public address announcer says someone called Orel Hershiser is coming in, Murphy is eager. But if the announcer announces Bulldog Hershiser, Murphy may be worried.”
Or as Ron Perranoski puts it, with the pith one would expect of a former relief pitcher, “We nicknamed him Bulldog for the very aggressive face he doesn’t have.” Perranoski remembers Hershiser from Single-? ball in Clinton, Iowa, and before that in the Arizona instructional league. “The first impression of him is of a librarian. But when he was in the instructional league I knew he liked to play golf and I wanted to test what kind of competitor he was, how aggressive he was. We had a little wager.” Pause. “He showed me he was a great competitor.”
Two kinds of people are particularly important to a pitcher, those who catch him, and his pitching coaches. Perranoski, the Dodgers’ pitching coach, was in the 1960s one of the developers of the speciality of relief pitching. It is a vocat
ion for the professionally aggressive. He pitched for 4 teams over 13 seasons, compiling 179 saves and a 2.79 career ERA. Because he made his living primarily by putting out fires other people had lit, and preventing late-inning disasters, he is a connoisseur of pressure. He has iron-gray hair—one understands why—and a solid, stolid mien.
When warming up starting pitchers in the bull pen before games, Perranoski has them work on their various “release points”—the different arm positions at which the fastballs, breaking balls and change-ups are released. When Hershiser is pitching, Perranoski’s job is to watch for mechanical problems, particularly a tendency for Hershiser to “open up” his shoulder—to turn it too much toward third base—which causes his fastball to come up in the strike zone. Perranoski’s experience is that “you lose the snap on your curveball before you lose the velocity on your fastball. Then the curveball, instead of snapping, it just sort of rolls.”
Perranoski recalls that when Hershiser first came up to the major leagues, “I really had to calm him down a little bit as far as his actions on the field were concerned. If he was going good, striking batters out, he had a little bit of hot dog in him. He might get the ball back from the catcher and snap it with his glove. He wasn’t trying to show anyone up but they might not understand that. I’d say, ‘Don’t wake up a sleeping dog over there.’” Rick Dempsey understands that, but adds, “How a pitcher conducts himself on the mound is very important to the rest of the guys out there.” Dempsey is convinced that the confidence of a Hershiser or a Roger Clemens is contagious. When they take the mound confident they can handle the other team, their own team relaxes. Their teammates are apt to score more than they would if they were pressing because they were worried about needing to get runs in bunches. “It’s funny,” says Dempsey. “When you think you aren’t going to have to score a lot of runs, you are apt to score a lot. And when a new young pitcher comes up the team is apt to think, ‘We’ve got to bear down and score some runs for this guy,’ and they wind up not getting many.” If relaxation is something that can be willed, a pitcher—central to his team’s emotional as well as physical geometry—can will it for his team.
One evening in August, 1988, Dempsey was relaxing in the dugout in Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. It was the beginning of the road trip that would take them next to Montreal, where Hershiser’s scoreless innings streak would begin. Hershiser, said Dempsey that evening, is like Jim Palmer, who was easy to catch precisely because he was so opinionated about pitching. A trace of wonder still comes into Dempsey’s voice when he remembers Palmer’s extraordinary recall of crucial experiences. Standing on the mound, Palmer could inform Dempsey that he was not going to throw a particular pitch to a particular batter in a particular situation because the batter had hit such a pitch hard in a similar situation two years earlier. “I called a game for Palmer once against the White Sox when I never dropped down two fingers. He never threw anything but fastballs. He changed speeds a lot, but never threw any other pitch. Every batter was waiting for him to throw his curve. Everyone was baffled. And he beat them, 5–1.”
Hershiser, like Palmer, has a confidence easily mistaken for arrogance. But confidence is necessary, especially in the National League. In that league a pitcher who lacks confidence may be constantly tempted to try to tailor his style to the team he is facing or the park he is in. For example, says Dempsey, some pitchers make the mistake of making fundamental changes in their approach when they are facing the Cardinals, a team some players think of as a track team that has been taught to play baseball. Some pitchers want to throw the Cardinals more fastballs than they normally would throw. “But if you do that you are falling right into their hands as far as hitting-and-running goes.” If a running team can be confident of an unusually high ratio of fastballs, it can be more confident of hitters making contact, and hitting-and-running becomes safer. Dempsey says an opponent’s running game is not a big factor “if your team is hitting the ball well. If you’re not and you’re playing a lot of one-and two-run games, you’ve really got to slow the other team’s running game down a bit.” On the other hand…. There is always another hand. “In the case of the Cardinals, who don’t have a lot of power, and are counting on getting a lot of singles, you can call a lot of fastballs.” Because few are going to be hit into the seats.
Dempsey, who has caught in both leagues, believes there are more “low-ball umpires” in the National League, umpires who call as strikes some pitches that in the American League would generally be called low balls. The higher strike zone in the American League could be a lingering effect of the umpires’ equipment. Until 1980 American League umpires behind the plate did not wear, as they now do, the sort of chest protectors that National League umpires have long worn, the small wraparound kind under their shirts or jackets. They wore “mattress”-style protectors over their clothing. These cumbersome protectors made it difficult for them to bend over and look along the catcher’s sight line. As a result, while National League umpires crouched low, on the inside corner, American League umpires called pitches from directly behind the plate, over the catcher’s head. And National League umpires saw more low strikes, or so it is said.
According to Mike Scioscia, who has caught most of Hershiser’s games, Hershiser’s four-seam fastball (a ball held across, rather than with, the four seams) “gives the illusion of rising but all it does is probably stay a little straighter than the sinker.” When Scioscia is catching Hershiser he has two signs for location (inside and outside) and four for pitches (sinker, breaking ball, change-up, four-seam fastball). If Scioscia wants the ball up in the strike zone, it is such an odd call for a sinker-ball pitcher that he usually goes to the mound to ask for it. Hershiser’s sinker requires Scioscia to resist temptation and exercise diplomacy, lest he have trouble with the man in blue standing behind him. Scioscia says a lot of catchers try to “steal” strikes for their pitchers by not turning their mitts palm-upward on a low pitch. This, they think, will not make the pitch seem so low. But catching a low pitch with the fingers up requires the catcher to, in Scioscia’s words, “jerk the pitch.” Once the umpire sees that, he assumes the pitch was low.
One way Scioscia can be helpful to Hershiser is by being watchful, and thoughtful. Talking to Sports Illustrated’s Peter Gammons about the 1988 World Series, Scioscia said, “I watched the A’s hit in batting practice before the first two games to look for little tendencies. For instance, when I heard the hitter ask the batting practice pitcher for a curveball, I watched to see if the hitter made any adjustment with his feet. If he did he would probably move his feet similarly in a game, and that would indicate to me that he was sitting on [waiting to pounce on] the breaking ball.” (Mike Flanagan of the Blue Jays says “stance-reading” has attained such subtlety that some batters try to mislead those doing the reading: “Chet Lemon will move way up in the box like he was looking for a curve so that you’ll throw him a fastball.”)
A pitcher sets his own pace but the catcher calls the game, so he can influence the pace. Scioscia says, “You pace a pitcher with pitch selection. It’s not cutting down on the number of fastballs you call because actually it takes more effort to throw a curveball. The key is the number of pitches you’ll waste in a game. You’re not going to pitch around as many hitters as you might earlier in the game.” By “pitch around” he does not mean giving the hitter first base by not throwing strikes. Rather, he means trying to get an undisciplined free swinger out on pitches that are not strikes. “Pitching around” a batter requires more pitches than otherwise might be thrown. It is a defensive weapon that may have to be used late in a game. In every election, American democracy gives the government essentially the same instructions: Maintain our services, cut the deficit and do not raise taxes. Pitchers, too, are forever being given unhelpful directives: “Don’t give this guy anything good to hit—but don’t walk him.” That is what is meant by pitching around a batter.
With a runner on first when Hershiser is pitching against a
team managed by someone who likes to bunt, Hershiser, according to Scioscia, does a few unorthodox things. First, he’s not afraid to throw breaking balls, thereby breaking the rule that in such a situation you throw high fastballs because they are hard to bunt. Hershiser’s theory is that a bunter is like any other hitter, so the first priority is to upset his timing. However, Scioscia says, Hershiser’s approach is the luxury of someone who knows he can throw his breaking pitches for strikes.
Sometimes the best thing a pitcher can do about a runner on first is to forget about him. Mike Scott of the Astros is a severe realist. He is not the only National League pitcher who believes that the only way to cope with Vince Coleman as a base runner is to prevent him from becoming one. Scott’s approach is: If you can’t keep him off first, at least keep him off your mind. He can outrun the ball, so there is no point in fretting. You only make matters worse by losing your concentration on the next hitter. Scioscia says he has been taught not to change pitch selection to subsequent batters just because a base-stealing threat, even the likes of Coleman, has reached first. “If you change your pitch selection you’re apt to get a hit and have first-and-third or, worse, a double with a run in. What I’ve got to do is first check the runner’s lead and then control his jump. You control it by varying your timing to home plate, throwing over to first, stepping off the mound. Don’t let him time your movement. Now, once you start you’ve got to keep a short leg kick, which Orel has, to give the catcher a chance to get the runner if he goes.”
Men at Work Page 14
