High Heat Page 11

  Compounding the lack of any semblance of control was the company Dalkowski began to keep. Even though management warned him to steer clear of teammate Bo Belinsky, the two pitchers became fast friends. Soon they were both reassigned to Pensacola in the Alabama-Florida League. Not a good move. Belinsky was a ladies’ man (he would go on to date actress Mamie Van Doren), who didn’t keep regular hours.

  “Bo wasn’t really as bad as everyone thought,” Barber told Jordan. “He was very conscientious about getting eight hours of sleep a night. He just didn’t get the eight when they wanted him to.”

  Somehow the Orioles allowed Dalkowski and Belinsky to drive from Aberdeen, South Dakota, to their new assignment in Pensacola with a stop in Baltimore along the way. The leg to Baltimore alone took nearly a week, with the two wild-living pitchers spending several days in Chicago, hitting the strip clubs. Things went from bad to worse in Florida because that’s when the pair hooked up with Barber, another hard-throwing pitcher who loved the good times.

  “Bo and me were roommates in Pensacola,” Dalkowski explained to Jordan. “He was going out with a girl at the time. One day, he went on a road trip with the team—I stayed behind with a cold and there was this knock on the door. It was the sheriff and the girl’s mother, looking for Bo. He never came back from the road trip.

  “You know what I always wonder? Bo made the big leagues and he didn’t throw hard. How come? It blows my mind sometimes.”

  Indeed, Belinsky did make the majors, a journeyman at best. He played for five teams in eight years after breaking in with the Angels in 1962. By then Dalkowski was down to his last strike.

  In 1960, Dalkowski was featured in Time magazine, which called him the fastest, wildest pitcher the game had ever seen. At 21, he was already a legend—often for all the wrong reasons. The Orioles tried to enforce a curfew on him to help curb his drunkenness, and his manager in Stockton, the long-suffering Billy DeMars, even took him to a psychiatrist that practiced hypnotism. None of it worked. Dalkowski set a league record for walks at Stockton (262 in 170 innings). His wildness continued the next season at Kennewick, Washington (196 walks in 103 innings). In one minor-league game, he struck out 24, walked 18, hit four batters, and lost 8–4. In another memorable contest, he finished with a one-hitter, striking out 15, but he also walked 17 and lost 9–8.

  Throughout it all, the occasional guy who connected with one of his fastballs never forgot it. In a Stockton-Reno game, Dalkowski was on the verge of recording his league record 20th strikeout. At the plate was a rookie, Bobby Cox, who would go on to be the Atlanta Braves manager. Cox had struck out in his previous four at bats, and Dalkowski soon had two strikes on him. But somehow Cox connected with the next pitch, driving it out of the ballpark for a game-winning, grand-slam homer. “It’s something I’ll never forget,” Cox says. “Hitting one off the likes of him.”

  Before a night game in mid-May, at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, David Price and I are talking in the home dugout. Almost sheepishly he admits he has never heard of Steve Dalkowski—this old fireballer I’m so excited about. Price feigns interest when I tell him about that rising fastball, how Dalko was the real-life basis for Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham. But when I begin to talk about how Dalkowski fell in with the wrong crowd, allowing his gift to be corrupted by others, I begin to sound like another jaded adult.

  Triple-A baseball remains the game’s best version of purgatory. Rosters are populated by two types of players: ones ascending to the sport’s highest level, the major leagues, and those on their way down, probably forever. In April 2009, the Bulls’ roster included Adam Kennedy, who was once a cog on the St. Louis Cardinals and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Unlike topflight prospects like Price, Kennedy was fighting for another chance at the major leagues. (He soon got one after being traded to Oakland.) Target almost anybody on either team tonight, and the stakes are the same as they are in the movie: Can a guy make the last step and reach the promised land of the major leagues? Sometimes who does and who doesn’t can be pretty unfair. Just ask Crash Davis.

  The Bulls moved into this new ballpark before the 1995 season. The new digs sit alongside Durham’s state-of-the-art performing arts center and headquarters for one of the Triangle area’s television stations. Out in left field lies “the Blue Monster,” a knockoff of the left field wall in Boston’s Fenway Park. Atop it stands a billboard of an angry bull, standing upon a field of green grass. “Hit the Bull, Win a Steak,” says the inscription. “Hit the Grass, Win a Salad.” On this night, nobody comes close to either culinary offering.

  Of course, the billboard is another nod to yesteryear. One like it stood in the old ballpark, where such major-league stars as Joe Morgan and Chipper Jones played. That can be a great thing about baseball. The way the past, present, even the future can be rolled into one night’s experience, complete with Cracker Jack and cotton candy. Until steroids knocked the whole rig into the ditch, one could string Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds together into the same sentence, and most fans would know you were talking about the game’s single-season home-run record, at one point the most cherished mark in sports. But for the guys playing Triple-A ball, history doesn’t mean much, and maybe that’s how it should be.

  When he was growing up, David Price’s first home didn’t have a basketball hoop. So, by the age of three, he had dreamed up his own solitary game. With a plastic ball and bat, the youngest of three boys would hit the ball up onto the roof, often clear over the house, and then tear around to the other side to catch it. The game kept him happy for hours at a time.

  “I’ve never seen a little kid be able to do that,” recalls Debbie Price, David’s mother. “He could throw that little ball up with one hand and get both hands on the bat in time to smack it up in the air at that age. We were living in a one-story ranch home back then, so we’re not talking about a huge place. Still, Dave could hit that ball so hard that it would carry quite a bit. He’d run around to the other side; I remember he had to unlatch the gate to get from one side to the other side, too. Then he’d hit it back over again. The ball was one of those solid plastic ones and the bat was one of those thick red ones you’ll still see in the stores.

  “Our older two sons, who were both good athletes, wouldn’t have been able to hit that ball until they were seven or eight years old. Here was Dave doing it by the age of three, so we knew this kid had something special here.”

  Even though his stepbrother, Jackie, had won a football scholarship to Kentucky State and Price’s middle brother, Damon, was a basketball star in high school, David’s first love was baseball.

  “We always had all kinds of balls around the house,” Debbie Price says, “but it was always that baseball that David gravitated toward. Typically, we’d be cleaning house on Saturdays and trying to catch up on some things. I remember having to set the timer in the kitchen and tell Dave, ‘OK, I’ve got to clean house for 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, we can go outside and I’ll throw you the baseball.’ When he was little all he wanted to do was throw and hit that baseball. When that timer went off, he was coming around that corner, looking for me, ready to go outside. We did that all Saturday.

  “I played catch with him until he was age 11. By then I wouldn’t throw with him anymore because he threw too hard. He was 13 when my husband stopped catching with him. He was always able to throw it a whole lot harder than you’d think a kid his age could.”

  By the age of eight, Price was pitching to kids four years older than him. The buzz was the Price kid could bring the heat. “Since I was small, I always throw hard, harder than the other kids,” he says. “I guess it was always there. It’s funny, I didn’t really notice it that much, but other people sure did.”

  Ironically, as Price made his way up the ranks, starring at Vanderbilt University, baseball became irrelevant to the African American community. In 2007, according to the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, the percentage of blac
k players at the major-league level fell to 8.2 percent, an all-time low.

  To understand how far baseball has come and how far the game still has to go at the grassroots level, especially among today’s kids, the game’s next generation, I accept an invitation from Phil Pote to tour inner-city Los Angeles. Pote was a pitcher and outfielder for the Los Angeles State College of Applied Arts and Sciences, now California State University at Los Angeles, in the mid-1950s. After his playing days were over, he coached at several of the Los Angeles high schools. Pote went on to become a scout for the Seattle Mariners, beating the bushes for talent in a pickup with a camper shell that occasionally blew off as he barreled down the southern California freeways.

  A generation ago, Los Angeles was home to such future major leaguers as Ozzie Smith, Eddie Murray, Reggie Smith, Darryl Strawberry, and Eric Davis. A single high school, Fremont High, produced 23 major leaguers. Today, though, few scouts and fewer college coaches travel the hard streets of Los Angeles to seek out ballplayers at such high schools as Locke, Crenshaw, Centennial, Fremont, and Dorsey.

  “You’ll still go there,” Pote says as we turn onto the freeway bound for Crenshaw High School. (I can’t help glancing back at the camper shell to make sure it’s still secure.) “But it’s not a priority like it once was. In the old days, you didn’t dare not go.”

  Crenshaw’s open-air campus bustles with activity this morning. Nearly 3,000 kids attend this school, and Darryl Strawberry still ranks as one of Crenshaw’s most famous sports celebrities. In many ways, Strawberry’s star-crossed career symbolizes the promise and heartbreak of L.A. ball. If a pittance of the fame or fortune that he garnered as a member of two world champions, the Mets and the Yankees, had come home to roost, Crenshaw and inner-city baseball would be the better for it.

  “But it’s almost unfair to hold Darryl to such comparisons, especially now,” says Willie West, the former coach of Crenshaw’s prestigious basketball team. “With all the troubles Darryl has had, he’s having a tough enough time taking care of himself, let alone trying to help us out.”

  No doubt West was referring to Strawberry once owing almost $4.5 million in back taxes, alimony, and other debts. In recent years, Strawberry has attended the occasional football game at Crenshaw, signing autographs in the stands. During the 1994 labor meltdown, he and Eric Davis, who were teammates on a Connie Mack team in inner-city L.A., worked out at their old high schools. Still, to many kids, the ballplayers are little more than riddles. The names might be familiar, but any real recognition has long since faded.

  “The vast majority have no idea what they did, how good they were,” says Ken Maxey, Crenshaw High’s ex-assistant athletic director. “Part of that may be the players. I suppose it’s easy to blame them. But I think the whole problem goes deeper than that.”

  John Young, who started several youth baseball programs in South Central L.A. during the late 1970s, says the game “lost a generation of players.”

  “Anybody who scouted this area could see that,” he adds. “The gangs had taken over the parks. Kids in this city weren’t getting a chance to play. The schools that used to turn out such great talent weren’t generating much of anything.”

  A short drive from Crenshaw lies Los Angeles’s “Field of Dreams.” The state-of-the-art field cost nearly $500,000 to build and hosts games almost every afternoon and night. When Pote was a kid, this stretch of land was empty fields and sandlots. Kids rode their bikes across the open space and nicknamed the area “Devil’s Dip.” Today, gazing out the van window, Pote surveys what has become the epicenter for baseball’s revival in L.A. “It was worth the wait,” he says.

  If baseball intends to keep young people as part of its fan base, it must embrace its roots, especially in the inner city. “That remains our biggest challenge,” says former National League President Leonard Coleman, who is actively involved in Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI), a Major League Baseball–sponsored program. “I look at cities, and I say we have to take baseball in those communities to the next level. We have to for this game to continue to grow.”

  Price agrees and wonders if the game may have turned some kind of corner in the 2008 World Series. Months after the Philadelphia Phillies defeated the Tampa Bay Rays in the Fall Classic, a study revealed black participation in major-league baseball had increased to 10.2 percent.

  “Right now in the African American community, baseball isn’t deemed very cool,” Price says. “Certainly that’s the case compared with basketball and football. That’s why the World Series was great. I mean not just for me on a personal level, but for what it did for the game in the African American community. You had Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Carl Crawford, B. J. Upton—there was just a ton of guys out there. That’s good for the game and showing fans. Many of the superstars on both teams were African American and that’s great for how this game has to grow.”

  Price made two appearances in the 2008 World Series, pitching in relief in Games Two and Five. Certainly it wasn’t as heady as getting the final four outs to clinch the American League pennant (three of those outs came on strikeouts), but he was there, a part of it all. Those are the moments that he still thinks about, admittedly a bit too much, on evenings like this at Triple-A Durham.

  In spring training, Price focused on winning a place in the Rays’ starting rotation and was disappointed when that didn’t pan out. Now, almost six weeks later, he wonders if he made a mistake. Perhaps he should have said he was willing to move to the bullpen and taken the same direction as Jonathan Papelbon of the Red Sox, who advocated to be the team’s closer when many in the front office still saw his future in the rotation. “I could have been a good starting pitcher,” Papelbon explains. “But I can make the Hall of Fame as a closer.”

  Price nods when he hears that statement. “I’m very blessed and I know that. God has given me a gift he doesn’t give to a whole lot of people, especially from the left side,” he says, smiling. “As for what’s best right now, I don’t know. In spring training, I was focused on making the rotation, being a starter. Now I’d go back even if it meant coming out of the bullpen. I just want to get back up there.”

  Sometimes a change in scenery can mean everything in the world to a pitcher. Such was the case with Nolan Ryan. Moments after he was traded from the New York Mets to California, Angels general manager Harry Dalton called him on the phone. “You’re the main part of my first trade and I want it to be a good one,” Ryan remembers Dalton telling him. “You can be a big star with California, and we’re going to give you every chance to be one. Here you will get a chance to pitch.”

  After struggling to land a regular turn in the Mets’ rotation, that was sweet music to Ryan’s ears. So, in 1972, he headed west, to the Angels’ spring training camp in Holtville, California. Although the ballclub was excited to have him on board, somebody forgot to tell coach Jimmie Reese to go easy on the newcomer.

  Reese ordered Ryan to take infield practice and started peppering ground balls at him. This went on for a good 20 minutes, with Reese hitting them to Ryan’s left and right, until the pitcher was ready to keel over. “One more ground ball would have done it,” Ryan remembers. “I was about spent.”

  That’s when pitching coach Tom Morgan called Ryan over to pitch batting practice. Although Ryan had barely escaped with his dignity, Reese’s impromptu workout had made an impression. Ryan decided he needed to be in better shape, a commitment that continued throughout the remainder of his 27-year big-league career. In addition, he and Reese became fast friends, with Ryan regularly taking infield practice with the enthusiastic coach always ready to swing the fungo bat.

  “There was no quit in that guy,” Reese said years later. “I could tell from the minute Nolan walked in the door, he was willing to do what it took to be a big winner in this game.”

  In short order, Ryan had gotten Dalton’s commitment from the front office and a primer in fitness from Reese. But arguably what helped to really turn his career around wa
s his work with catcher Jeff Torborg.

  I’ve often found catchers to be among the most intelligent guys in the game. Joe Torre, Cal Ripken Sr., and Mike Scioscia come immediately to mind. Years ago, when I was an editor with Baseball Weekly, I profiled all-star catcher Tony Pena as he caught three categories of pitchers—a rookie (Mike Gardiner), a journeyman (Greg Harris), and a superstar (Roger Clemens)—on consecutive nights against the White Sox on Chicago’s South Side. How Pena effectively assumed different personas, moving from a teacher in dealing with the rookie, to a drill sergeant with the journeyman, to a confidant with the staff ace, remains one of the best tutorials in business management I’ve ever seen.

  In Torborg, Ryan found a guy who had caught Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax in the Dodgers’ organization. At their initial workouts in Holtsville, Torborg told Ryan that he was rushing his delivery.

  “I’ve always worked hard to get the ball up there,” Ryan replied. “I thought that was what helped account for my speed.”

  “No, Nolan,” Torborg said. “When you rush your motion and you stride out too soon, your arm can’t catch up and the ball gets released too soon. That’s why you’re wild. You’re not wild side to side but wild high.”

  So began almost daily sessions with Ryan throwing to Torborg that the Hall of Fame pitcher would later describe as “learning to pitch all over again.”

  Those early days with the Angels were almost derailed by a players’ strike. Torborg was the team’s player representative and gathered the team, as best he could, for workouts at a playground down the road from Anaheim Stadium. That would be the first place his teammates really got a look at Ryan’s live arm and, more importantly, where the refinement of his pitching motion progressed.

  “When Nolan came to the Angels, he was already a legend,” Torborg says. “At least his arm, how hard he could throw, was. Whether he’d ever be a winning pitcher was the question.