Late in Carl Yastrzemski’s 23-year career his Achilles tendons became so damaged that he had to tape his calves and ankles so tightly that his feet became numb. At that time he told Tom Boswell, “I actually have to look down to see where my feet are in the batter’s box.” When Lou Brock was getting up in age for a baseball player—he was 35—he stole 118 bases, the record until Rickey Henderson topped it by 12. Brock says, “You brace your slide—if you slide feet first—with your hand. Pretty soon the pain is terrible. At one point in 19741 could hardly hold a glass of water.” But he could hold a bat well enough to hit .306.
Ed Linn, the sportswriter who helped Sandy Koufax write his autobiography, recalls the condition of the index finger on Koufax’s pitching hand in May, 1962. The finger became numb, then white and lifeless, then a deep reddish-blue, and swelled like a grape, with gangrene about to set in. “In the 8 games he pitched with his finger rotting under him, he allowed 4 earned runs in 67⅓ innings for an ERA of 0.53, struck out 77, walked 20.” In this wounded condition he beat Warren Spahn, 2–1 (and hit his first home run). He beat Bob Gibson, 1–0, walking no one. He pitched his first no-hitter, with 13 strikeouts. After winning a 16–1 laugher against the Phillies, he faced the Giants. Linn writes, “When he took the mound he found that the formerly lifeless finger had become so sensitive that when he tried to rest the ball against it, in order to throw his curve, it felt as if a knife were cutting into it. With the Giants fully aware that he couldn’t throw anything except fastballs, he had a no-hitter until the seventh inning. He still had a three-hit shutout until the ninth inning when the whole hand went so numb that he could no longer hold the ball.” Four days later, in New York, he had a three-hit shutout through seven innings when again he lost his ability even to feel the ball, and had to leave the game. Four days later he started in Cincinnati. Linn writes, “Before the first inning was over, the finger split wide open. No blood. Just a deep cleave in the dead meat.” Finally, he was sent home.
Players playing well while injured are admirable. Players playing well while suffering the effects of excesses can be no less astonishing. Paul “Big Poison” Waner, brother of “Little Poison” Lloyd (they are both in the Hall of Fame), said he often played hung over or even drunk. In fact he sometimes found intoxication an advantage when hitting because the ball looked blurry, so there was “more of it to hit.” Waner, said an admiring Casey Stengel, “had to be a very graceful player because he could slide without breaking the bottle on his hip.” And he slid in some strange places. Bill Veeck recalled seeing him take a wide turn at second and go “sliding into the bull pen mound in the left-field foul ground.” Waner’s drinking did not prevent him from playing 20 seasons, winding up, at age 41, at Yankee Stadium. There a fan yelled, “Hey, Paul, how come you’re in the outfield for the Yankees?” Waner, a realist to the end, replied, “Because Joe DiMaggio’s in the army.”
Big Julie Isaacson, then president of the Novelty Workers Union, was a city slicker who became the boon companion of Roger Maris, the young man from Fargo, North Dakota. Isaacson told Tony Kubek about the time in 1962 when Mantle talked Maris into relieving the tensions with a night on the bricks. A night and a dawn, it turned out. The two sluggers showed up at Isaacson’s apartment in the morning very much the worse for wear. In fact, they were still reeling—literally reeling—from their all-night bender. Maris at least could walk. Mantle could barely stand. Coffee was funneled into both, with little effect, and they had to be helped into the Yankee Stadium clubhouse to dress for that afternoon’s game. Manager Ralph Houk, who was called “The Major” because of his role in chasing the Nazis across the Rhine at Remagen Bridge, put them both in the starting lineup as punishment. During the national anthem Roger had his head down and Mantle was swaying. In the top of the first, the other team hit three infield grounders, thereby depriving baseball of what might have been memorable episodes in the outfield. In the bottom of the first inning the first two Yankee batters got on. Maris, batting third, took a called third strike. Then Mantle stood in the batter’s box, swaying ominously. “The pitch,” Isaacson remembers, “was a change-up and Mickey started to swing and then stopped. Then he swung again and hit it into the center-field bleachers 460 feet away. Mickey started trotting around the bases. He hit first base and looked like he was going to keep running down the right-field line. The umpire was Ed Runge and he said something to Mickey and sort of pointed to second. Mickey finally made the turn and got around the bases.”
Such stories of achievements by players in pain, including self-inflicted pain, may lend some credence to Gwynn’s insistence that his injuries had nothing to do with the drop in his batting average between 1987 and 1988. When asked point-blank how much of his trouble in 1988 was related to his hurting hand he flatly declares, “None of it,” and will not budge from that position. You judge. But before you make up your mind try hitting—not necessarily a pitch, a fungo will do—while you have, say, a slightly infected finger or a mildly sprained thumb. Then try to imagine getting the bat on an inside fastball from Dwight Gooden.
“Hi, Dwight.” Gwynn’s high-pitched voice pierced the thick gauze of noise that filled Shea Stadium like the strong 4:00 P.M. sunlight. Dwight Gooden, taking batting practice with other Mets pitchers, waved a greeting toward the visiting team’s dugout. It was late May, 1988, and the light late-spring air was clogged with noise, noise compounded. It was the noise of unreasonably amplified rock music that is the preferred background music for batting practice, and the eardrum-shattering roar of planes taking off from nearby La Guardia Airport and landing, it sometimes seems, in the right-field bull pen. Shea Stadium is like New York City itself—all the hard unloveliness of an urban environment and no softening graces. The baseball experience has never been less pastoral, less conducive to serenity, than it is at Shea.
Gwynn was not serene. He was two days away from coming off the disabled list, where he had landed after he landed on his thumb in Pittsburgh. “I’m kind of anxious to get out there and see what’s going to happen.” He may have been anxious; he usually is. His team certainly was eager for him to return. At that point the Padres had won just two games, and were averaging only 1.2 runs per game, on the road. While unable to play, Gwynn had not even wanted to be on the bench amid the flying sunflower seeds, getting slapped in the neck with tongue depressors and having a “flying W” put in his cap (the bill bent into the shape of a W). “These guys are kind of loose,” he said. Perhaps they knew that their tantrum-throwing, tension-producing manager, Larry Bowa, was about to be fired while the team was in New York and replaced by the more avuncular Jack McKeon. Looking across the diamond at the Mets and anticipating his return to the lineup, Gwynn speculated, “I wonder what Ojeda will throw me. A couple of years ago he was throwing a lot of off-speed stuff. He’d throw you a change-up 0-and-2 or 2-and-0. But because I’ve been out three weeks they’re going to bust me inside to see if I can turn on a fastball inside.” That day Gwynn had done 20 “liners” (running on the warning track from one foul line to another). Then he went into the clubhouse “to do my dumbbells,” which he uses for curls to strengthen his wrists and forearms. Then he took some fly balls and batting practice. Then he got back to his avocation: worrying. “The pitch Gooden always gets me out on is a straight-over-the-top hard curveball. He’ll set it up with a sequence of pitches, fastball in, fastball out, then he’ll come back with something hard inside, perhaps a slider.” Gwynn was worried that when he got back to swinging at real pitching he would not be able to “stay back,” keeping his hands behind his stride. Standing up in the dugout to demonstrate, Gwynn said, “If I take my stride and my hands come with me, I’m not going to hit it, at least not hard. I have nothing left. That’s what it means to ‘get out in front.’ You wind up hitting on your front foot, hitting with your arms. If I take my stride and push my hands back, I’m all right.”
He does not often feel he is doing things right. When, early in the 1989 season, Gwynn was among the league
leaders in hitting and, in his view, hitting poorly, he said, “The biggest problem I’m having right now is much like the problem I had last year. It’s that I’m not staying back. Even though the results are there, I’m not swinging the bat the way I want to swing it. I’ve hit one ball hard to left field out of the 27 at bats I’ve had.” When was the last time he did not think he had problems? “About the middle of July last year.” Early summer 1988, about the time he was at Shea Stadium fidgeting through the last days of idleness, was the low point of Gwynn’s major league career. He had been injured. He had had surgery on his hand. He had been on the disabled list, and anyone who had to be around him during this time probably was ready to go on such a list. He does not take to idleness. But, then, he had not really been idle. “I had a lot of time to look at a lot of tapes.” What he saw on tape was himself hitting well. But what he was living through was a slump of serious proportions for a hitter of his stature. He says he was so embarrassed that if he had not signed a contract with McDonald’s (the Padres are owned by Joan Kroc, widow of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s) he would have backed out of his endorsement agreement. “I was hitting .240 and was introducing what they [McDonald’s] called a triple play: a big sandwich, a super order of fries and a super Coke. So I’d go up to the on-deck circle and people would yell, ‘Hey, Tony, how about a triple play?’” At one point he was hitting .237 and was, he says, going to the plate “thinking like a .230 hitter.” By that he means “not having an idea of what I wanted to do.” Now, what does thinking and knowing what you want to do have to do with the defensive, reactive task of hitting a baseball?
Steve Carlton was famous for going into a trance before pitching. Some batters do a similar thing. They are in something like a trance while hitting. Actually, “trance” is not quite the right word for the kind of concentration involved in batting; that word suggests mental blankness. That is not what Al Rosen, the San Francisco Giants’ general manager, means when he explains why he thinks Will Clark, the Giants’ first baseman, is someday going “to shoot the lights out”—have a monster season. “When he’s at the plate,” Rosen says, “the house could burn down and he would still only see one thing—the pitcher.” Red Schoendienst, Stan Musial’s roommate on the road, said Musial “started to concentrate when he was tieing his shoelaces in the clubhouse.”
“Concentration,” said a dugout Spinoza (actually, Ray Knight, 1986 World Series MVP for the Mets), “is the ability to think about absolutely nothing when it is absolutely necessary.” Concentration, defined as complete mental blankness, is (to put the point politely) quite easily achieved by some players. Gwynn is not one of them.
When Gwynn was struggling (“struggling” is the indispensable word in the baseball players’ lexicon) in 1988, and denying all the while that his aches and pains had anything to do with his problems, he said that the problem was “just an attitude.” A baseball broadcaster once defended a player accused of having “an attitude problem.” The player, said the broadcaster warmly, did not have any attitude. Gwynn’s attitude problem was too much self-consciousness. “I was going up there thinking about everything—my mechanics, who was pitching, what he threw, where he liked to pitch. I had never done that before. You should have an idea of what guys try to do to you, but when you get up to the plate, all you are thinking about is seeing the ball come out of his hand and reacting to it. Instead, I was thinking, are my hands right, am I striding too long, are my hips opening up too soon?”
This is a lament as old as baseball. Bobby Murcer of the Yankees once explained what it is like being in a slump: “You decide you’ll wait for your pitch. Then, as the ball starts toward the plate, you think about your stance; and then you think about your swing; and then you realize that the ball that went past you for a strike was your pitch.” Gwynn knows exactly what Murcer meant. “When you’re going good, you don’t worry about anything mechanical at the plate. You just go up there and see the ball and react to it. As soon as you start to struggle you start worrying about the mechanical part of it, your hands, your stride.” And then, particularly if you are a highly driven person, as Gwynn is, you run the risk of becoming paralyzingly aware of your every movement at the plate. Then, says Gwynn, “instead of just concentrating on seeing the ball out of the pitcher’s hand, you go up there and start worrying about am I striding right, are my hands… whatever. I’ve talked to Tim Raines, Keith Hernandez—a lot of hitters—and the guys who are struggling say they’re out in front and are trying to stay back. The guys who are swinging the bat good say, ‘I’m just seeing the ball right now and putting it in play.’”
When batters are hot they are often peculiar. Gwynn’s teammate Tim Flannery once had a hitting streak of 14 games that he was glad to have end: “I’m superstitious. I was eating Chinese food and drinking tequila after every game. The streak had to end or I was going to die.” Of course, not all batters are peculiar when they are hot. Henry Aaron was more or less hot for a generation and his pulse never seemed to vary. Nothing else varied either. When Lew Burdette and Warren Spahn were Aaron’s teammates on the Milwaukee Braves they once examined a bat he had used for half a season. They found that all the dents were clustered on the “sweet” part of the barrel of the bat. Remember the story about Maris in 1961 worrying because Kubek’s rear foot was not in precisely the right spot in the batter’s box? Maris understandably wanted nothing to change that might change the groove he was in when he hit 24 home runs in 38 games. Imagine the groove Frank Howard was in when, in a span of just 20 at bats in The Year of the Pitcher, 1968, he hit 10 of his 44 home runs.
When batters are slumping they try to be stoical. Baseball encourages a kind of stoicism that would have caused Marcus Aurelius to say (if he had had Catfish Hunter’s flair for colorful summation) that “the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.” But in 1988 Gwynn was not consoled by that philosophy, or by repeated assurances from all sides that he would “come around” because he was “overdue” for a hot spell. Those words seemed to suggest that slumps are things beyond anyone’s control, to be endured. That is not Gwynn’s attitude toward life. He does not like the optimistic fatalism of the word “overdue,” and neither do I.
I grew up in downstate Illinois listening to the Cubs on the radio and listening to my father, a professor of philosophy, across the dinner table. I learned a lot from both. When I first fell for the Cubs, in the early 1950s, they were not much. Only a team named after baby bears would have a shortstop named Smalley. Roy Smalley was a right-handed hitter, if that is the word for a man who in his best year (1953) hit .249. From Smalley I learned the truth about the word “overdue.” A portrait of this author as a child would show him with an ear pressed against a radio, listening to an announcer saying: “The Cubs have the bases loaded. If Smalley gets on, the tieing run will be on deck. And Smalley is overdue for a hit.” That was the most consoling word in the language: “overdue.” It meant: In the long run, everything is going to be all right. No one is really a .222 hitter. We are all good hitters, all winners. It is just that some of us are, well, “overdue” for a hit, or whatever. Unfortunately, my father is a right-handed logician who knows more than it is nice to know about the theory of probability. With a lot of help from Smalley he convinced me that Smalley was not “overdue.” Stan Musial batting .249 was overdue for a hot streak. Smalley batting .249 was doing his best. Smalley retired after 11 seasons with a lifetime average of .227. He was still overdue.
By early summer, 1988, the great Gwynn slump had made him tentative and unaggressive. “When you’re going bad, you don’t want to be fooled. You want to see the ball first and then react, instead of kind of reacting to the ball before it is thrown. I was sitting at the plate waiting for the ball to be released before I even made any movement at all. I was starting my stride after the ball was released, which is too late. Normally I start it right before they release the ball—I pick my hands up and get into a hitting position.”
In 1988, “No
one was throwing me a change-up early in the count. They worked the count to their favor and then tried to fool me with a change-up or a slow curveball to get me out in front [with his weight shifted to his front leg]. Last year I saw a variety of everything early in the count. This year I’m just seeing fastballs in on my hands, then as the count gets in their favor they start taking a little bit off with the change-up or curve away from me.” Why were they pitching him differently? His answer implies that the questioner is dim: “Because they were getting me out.” Communication throughout baseball is quick and pervasive, so quick adjustments by batters are vital. “They’ve got scouts everywhere,” says Gwynn, trying not to sound persecuted. He was seeing an unusual number of fastballs. “In the major leagues, when they get you out in a certain way, they stick with it. Everyone has a scout watching, and they said, ‘They’re getting him out with inside pitches, fastballs in. Get ahead of him, then away….’” He sought help from tapes of the 1984 season because that year, with speedy Alan Wiggins on base so often in front of him, he was seeing a steady diet of fastballs. What he saw in the tapes was that in 1984 he had no trouble hitting inside fastballs to left.
Men at Work Page 31
