There are people who believe that the plodding pace of games set by White Sox catcher Carlton Fisk works, like a basketball coach calling time out when the other team is on a roll, to make it difficult for opponents to generate momentum for a big inning. But Hershiser is a man after Ray Miller’s heart. According to Dempsey (who was the catcher in Baltimore when Miller was coaching there), Hershiser “wants the ball and to get right back up on the mound.”
On the mound Hershiser seems to be all business. Seems to be. Actually, he has fun there. Often when he steps on the rubber, he drops his head, which suggests solemnity. Actually, he is avoiding the distraction in front of him—the umpire standing up, the catcher getting set, the batter digging in and the television and other cameras and radar guns and equipment and activity that are often behind the screen directly behind home plate. “When I lift my head, they are waiting for me.” Off the field, Hershiser is a formidable businessman. And because of his religiosity, an aroma of incense and an aura of sanctity cloak his public persona. This is unfortunate. He has a dry wit that surfaces constantly in conversations. Once on a team flight, when some of the players were flirting with the flight attendants (or perhaps it was the other way around in the friendly skies that day), Hershiser said, “You’re writing about men at work? How about men at play?” Hershiser’s wife, Jamie, comes from Mattoon, Illinois. A sign on the interstate highway that passes near Mattoon notifies drivers that the town has “Food, Gas, Lodging.” “All three,” says Hershiser with a tone of mock wonderment.
On Friday morning, July 21, 1989, the Dodgers awake in the Gateway Hilton, just a ten-minute walk across a bridge from Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. They are to play a doubleheader that night and another on Sunday as part of an unusual six-game series, the result of rainouts. The Dodgers’ pitching staff is toiling with little support from Dodgers hitters, which is why the Dodgers are in fifth place, 13 Va games behind the division-leading Giants and only 3 Mi games ahead of the last-place Braves.
However, this morning Hershiser is going to have fun. He is going to watch a tape he has not watched before, a tape of the seventh game of the 1988 Dodgers-Mets League Championship Series. He pitched that game. On the screen the tape shows Tommy Lasorda pacing and fidgeting nervously before the first pitch. Hershiser, watching with quickly mounting interest the events of nine months ago, says to the Lasorda on the television screen, “Don’t worry. We win, 6–0.”
“Before the game they [the Mets] came out with quotes that ‘we’re not worried because we’ve got Hershiser figured out.’ I took it to mean that they were going to try to take my sinker away from me by the left-handers crowding the plate—Strawberry and Backman and Dykstra and Hernandez and Jefferies and Mookie Wilson.” Also, Mets manager Davey Johnson had said that Hershiser must be tired. That, Hershiser thought, meant that the Mets would assume that he would rely entirely on his sinker away. So he decided to disabuse them of this idea by pitching inside more than he normally would early in the game.
“I wasn’t tired,” he says. “I was going on adrenaline. In fact, early in the game I wasn’t throwing the ball really well because my adrenaline was so high. My ball wasn’t sinking, it was going sideways. I was throwing too hard, and when I throw too hard my mechanics can move sideways, so the ball goes more sideways.” His shoulders were tilting down toward first base instead of staying close to parallel with the ground. “When your mechanics are slowed down and you stay within yourself”—the phrase “stay within yourself” recurs constantly in players’ talk, as we shall see with Tony Gwynn—“you can create the proper angle. But if I start to rush and overthrow, most of my motion becomes lateral. Just as my arm is starting to come forward, my left shoulder is already flying open [turning to Hershiser’s left]. I am firing too early and killing my whole left side. I’m not going to have any left side to throw against.” That is, because his left shoulder has turned too far too soon, his torso is out in front of his arm, leaving the arm to do too much of the work, unassisted by the position of his frame. When that happens, everything he throws—the curve, the sinking fastball—is harder and, for that reason, flatter than it should be. Against the Mets his curveball was rolling out of his hand and drifting high and inside to right-handed hitters. He can not quite remember but he thinks he went into the Dodger Stadium tape room between innings early in the game to watch what he was doing wrong. However, he says, there are limits to what you can do to iron out imperfections. “Sometimes you’re human and just don’t do it. No matter how much thinking and practicing you do, no matter how ready you are, you just don’t do it.”
Hershiser was not the only player who was feeling the heat of that winner-take-all seventh game. “See, that’s uncharacteristic for Keith [Hernandez]. You can tell it’s the adrenaline of a big situation. I’ve thrown three pitches at a 3-and-2 count and he swung at [and fouled off] all of them, and two of three or maybe three of three have been balls. In the regular season he’d just be flipping his bat and taking his walk—he’s got a great eye. He’s swinging before he’s decided it’s a strike. He’s just pumped up—game seven.”
The Mets did not score in the top of the first. The Dodgers scored one run in the bottom of the first. The Mets did not score in the top of the second. In the bottom of the inning the wheels came off the Mets. There was an error, a defensive mix-up that turned a sacrifice bunt into a hit, and the Dodgers scored five runs. On the bunt the batter, Alfredo Griffin, should have been called out without the Mets doing anything right. Griffin did something very wrong. When he squared around to bunt his left foot was a foot out of the batter’s box, directly in front of the catcher. If the umpire had noticed, Griffin would have been called out. But when you are hot you are lucky and the Dodgers (remember, there will be those 11 hits in 15 hit-and-run attempts in the World Series) are very lucky-hot.
When the second inning ends the score is 6–0, as it will be at the end of the game. But pitching with a five-run lead is, says Hershiser, its own kind of burden. The pitcher’s basic job is to keep the game close, keeping his team in the game until its batters produce some runs. In the 169th game of the Dodgers’ season, it was no longer up to the hitters to win the game, it was up to him not to lose it. “A lot of pitchers,” says Hershiser, “when they get a big lead, they say, ‘Let’s just go with the odds of baseball. Throw the ball hard down the middle and let them hit it. Let them swing the bats and make outs. If they don’t make outs, we’ll go back to pitching.’ A lot of times they go directly to their fastballs and throw a lot of strikes right over the plate, and then, later, when they get into a jam, they don’t have their other pitches with them anymore and the other team gets a chance to catch up. So when we get ahead I do the opposite. I go to every pitch possible. I go to my fourth- and fifth-best pitches, just to keep the repertoire ready. They are pitches I normally don’t use in key situations, but the lead has given me a chance to not worry about getting beat on my fourth or fifth pitch, or about giving up a one-run home run on my slowest of slow curveballs. Then I’m prepared for the jam, and the batters have seen a lot of different pitches in at bats before the jam and they have doubts in their minds. ‘Boy, he has never thrown me that before.’ ‘I’ve never seen him throw a curveball that slow.’ ‘He’s never thrown me back-to-back change-ups.’”
On this morning in Pittsburgh Hershiser watches the videotape as the Mets’ Gregg Jefferies hits a long fly to right field off a change-up. Jefferies was out in front of the pitch. It was the second consecutive change-up Hershiser had thrown to him. Jefferies was not expecting two off-speed pitches in a row. Expecting something faster, he had the head of his bat about four inches too far out over the plate. It was in the hitting zone before the ball was. Hitting is timing. Hershiser upset Jefferies’s timing.
On a 3–2 pitch with two outs, Kevin Elster got a single off a fastball right down the middle. “Three-and-2, two out, nobody on, I’m not going to show him a pitch I might need to get him out in a jam. If it’s runners on
second and third and two out and I need to get him out, he’ll get a breaking ball or a real my-pitch sinker low and away.” Husbanding his better pitches, anticipating the possibility of trouble later, was pure Hershiser.
Later in the game, with Darryl Strawberry up with a 3–1 count, catcher Mike Scioscia called for a sinker away. Hershiser preferred to throw a change-up, and did, without telling Scioscia. Scioscia, annoyed, stepped out in front of the plate and fired the ball back at Hershiser faster than Hershiser had thrown the change-up. Watching this scene on tape, Hershiser laughs merrily: “Wham! He airs it back at me as if to say, ‘What are you doing out there?’ With men on base it [throwing a pitch Scioscia had not called for] doesn’t matter because I’m not screwing him up as far as his rhythm to throw someone out. I’m screwing up the infielders a little bit because they might be shading the opposite way instead of to pull with the change-up. But I do it because when I get a rhythm I don’t want to stand there and shake my head because I might lose that feeling—the flow.” The change-up that he threw was a strike. The next pitch was a curveball for a called third strike, the pitch of a pitcher at the peak of his performance. “A 3–2 curveball with a 6–0 lead!” He laughs delightedly, as though seeing all this for the first time.
With two outs and one on in the top of the ninth, with the Mets’ Lee Mazzilli up with an 0–2 count, with the crowd on its feet and the Mets one strike away from winter, Hershiser hits Mazzilli. That happened because before the pitch “I decide Til let my game face off and I walk around the mound and take in the whole situation, the standing ovation, with our team going nuts and their team all depressed. I almost started to cry, and that’s when I stopped it and put my game face back on. And then I get back on the mound and throw the pitch. It’s a fastball inside. Scioc [Scioscia’s nickname; pronounced Sosh, rhymes with gauche] calls the sinker inside but I threw the cutter [cut fastball]. Scioc comes halfway to the mound and I walk out to meet him. He says, ‘I wanted the sinker inside!’ I say, ‘Well, I threw the cutter—I wanted to make sure I got it in.’ He says, ‘But you might hit him if you do that.’ I say, ‘I did hit him.’ It was hilarious.” In Spring Training Hershiser told Mazzilli what happened and apologized. Mazzilli thanked Hershiser for sparing him the indignity of being the last out of the Mets’ season.
It was a movie with a happy ending, in the Hollywood tradition. But now, back in real time, it is time to get his contact lenses, put his wire-rim glasses aside and go across the river to Three Rivers Stadium, to work.
Looking out across the Three Rivers diamond, Ray Miller says, a trifle wistfully, “I’ve got this little spiel when a guy comes up from the minors. When I’m walking him in from the bull pen, right before the game starts, I say, ‘You know, I never got to do this, what you’re doing today. But don’t be nervous. You’re working on a perfect mound. You have the best defense you’ve ever had behind you.’ Then I go to the dugout and smoke fourteen cigarettes.” Don’t be nervous? Hard not to be. The pitcher’s mound is where the pressure is constant.
The pressure of the 1988 season produced sufficient heat to temper the steel in Hershiser. “I know about myself that I can perform under any pressure. I found out I loved it. And the thing about the game I love even more is competition. I want to be in there. In the eighth inning in game five [the final game of the Series] when Canseco and Parker were coming up, runners on first and second, in a hole I’d put myself in, I wanted to be out there. I wasn’t looking to Tommy and saying, ‘This is scary, I don’t want to be out here.’” A year ago, would he have looked and said that? He pauses to consider, then says softly, “I wouldn’t have complained about losing the ball.” He adds, “I am at the point in my career now that I will complain when they take me out. They come out to the mound and I make sure they see in my face and in my actions that I want to stay there, no matter how I feel. I have no fear of failure now. You get to a point in your career when you know you are going to be a big leaguer, you know you are going to have a job. So where is the fear of failure? The fun is competing, so why get out?”
The 1989 season was bound to be a special kind of challenge, the challenge of pursuing excellence while knowing that he had hit a peak he would not reach again. “I got all that after 1985 when I was 19–3, 2.03. People came to me and said, ‘What is it like to have the best year of your career in your second year? It’s all downhill from here.’ And I said, well, you never know.” Indeed, no one in 1985 could have imagined what was coming in 1988. In December, 1988, Hershiser was in Washington, D.C., to attend Ronald Reagan’s last State Dinner, which was for Margaret Thatcher. He said, “Someone asked me at a speaking engagement two nights ago what are my goals now after accomplishing so much. I said I want to be the best Orel Hershiser I can be.”
There is a Jewish parable about Moshe, a humble shoemaker who, after dying, finds himself about to meet his Maker. He begins to utter self-deprecating laments and excuses for his failure to have made more of himself in life. Whereupon he is warned: “When you are in His presence He will not ask you why you were not Moses or King David or one of the Prophets. He will ask you why you were not Moshe the shoemaker.” The point is that the point of life is not to be great but to be all that you can be. That is hard work. And as is well known, the harder one works, the luckier one becomes. “Whatever you do, do it well. Everyone says, ‘This is a big game’ or ‘This is not a big game.’ I say to myself, ‘It’s a big game because it’s the only game—it’s the only game we can win today.’”
Pitching, like politics and marriage and other difficult undertakings, illustrates the axiom that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Which means: In the real world, be ready to settle for something short of everything. “There are pitchers,” Rick Dempsey says, “who, when you score a run off them, you can see you’ve ruined their perfect day and they lose their competitive edge. Then the dam breaks and they give up six, seven runs.” Does Hershiser go to the mound in the first inning planning to pitch a complete game? “A perfect game,” Hershiser replies. “If they get a hit, then I am throwing a one-hitter. If they get a walk, it’s my last walk. I deal with perfection to the point that it is logical to conceive it. History is history, the future is perfect.”
3
THE BATTER
Tony Gwynn’s Muscle Memory
Early in the 1989 season Tony Gwynn hit home runs in consecutive games and was even more displeased with his hitting than he generally is. The second home run came after an afternoon spent toiling to remove the flaws in the way he had swung the bat in the game in which he hit the first one. He knew the flaws were there. In fact, the home run was evidence that he was not hitting the pitches he wanted to hit in the way he wanted to hit them. So the afternoon before the night when he hit the second home run, he went to work early, several hours before game time.
The previous night he had hit two balls hard. One pleased him, the other distressed him. The pleasing one was an out, the distressing one was a home run. When he hit the ball hard for an out, as he started his stride forward his hands moved in the opposite direction. They came back so he could keep the bat back long enough to “inside out” the ball to left field, lashing a line drive that was caught by the left fielder. To “inside out” is to sweep the bat through the strike zone at a slight angle, from the back inside portion of the plate toward the outside front portion. When a left-handed hitter does that, he has power to the left side of the diamond.
On the home-run swing his hands came forward too soon. That is what he means by being “out in front.” He drove the ball to right field. Sure, it went over the fence, but he knows that over the course of the long season, hitting the ball that way is a recipe for the sort of frustration he experienced in 1988. “When my hands don’t go back I have this kind of loop in my swing.” Call it a flawed 1980s swing or a satisfactory 1950s swing. In the 1950s, when parks were smaller and home runs were emphasized, uppercutting the ball was not considered such a vice. Be that as it may, Gwynn will no
t stand for it. Besides, he is mired in a .360 slump. (Ball players are never just in slumps; they are always “mired” in them.) So he came to the stadium this day shortly after noon. There was work to do before the playing began.
“Hitting,” says Jim Lefebvre, “is a summation of internal forces. It’s everything. It’s not just hands or wrists. You have to get the whole body into it.” Lefebvre says hitting is the most overcoached and undertrained facet of baseball. He means there is too much theory and too little hard, humdrum repetition, the blister-causing tedium that builds up muscle memory. He may be right, but not about Gwynn, who is baseball’s Mr. Humdrum. Gwynn’s repertoire of repetition begins beneath the stands at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium.
Men at Work Page 23
