High Heat Page 24

  Richard grew up in a farm family, one of six kids. The Richards ate the vegetables they grew, and after chores the boys played ball in the fields, with tennis balls and broom handles for bats. At Lincoln High School, Richard had several games for the ages, including pitching a no-hitter in which he also hit four home runs and drove in 10 runs. Signed by Houston, he struggled in the Astros’ farm system for many of the same reasons Randy Johnson labored initially.

  “Because of his size, J.R. had to work harder than most people,” Hub Kittle, the team’s old pitching coach, told the Houston Chronicle. “Because he was so tall, we had to change his delivery in the very beginning. At first, he tried to come straight over the top—and he was just so tall, he didn’t have any leverage.”

  Despite his striking out 15 in his big-league debut, the Astros sent Richard down to the minors to gain more experience. So began an uneasy relationship between the player and ballclub, which would soon border upon the dysfunctional. By 1975, Richard had made the team for good and appeared ready to settle in as the team’s ace. Richard, like Koufax nearly two decades earlier, had seemingly solved his control problem almost overnight. And he threw hard. So hard that his slider was in the low- to mid-90s, with a fastball that “topped 100, with gusts up to 104,” columnist Mickey Herskowitz wrote in the Houston Chronicle in 2004.

  “So what does that make J.R. in his prime?” Herskowitz added. “We can answer that one easily. It made him Randy Johnson with a chest....

  “J.R. was an intimidator who might have been bigger than the Hall of Fame. That is, whether or not he had the kind of years that land a player in Valhalla, he was going to be legend, the kind of pitcher the old-timers talk about as one of a class.”

  Unfortunately, so much of that disappeared in a great hurry, leaving incriminations and finger-pointing in its wake. As the 1980 season began, Richard was acknowledged by many to be the top pitcher on a deep staff that included Ryan. Even though he had pitched no fewer than 267 innings in any of the previous four seasons, Richard felt out of sorts that season.

  His ailments ranged from an upset stomach to blurred vision to losing feeling in his fingers to a tired arm. A visit to Dr. Frank Jobe, who had performed the first ligament replacement, or Tommy John surgery, was arranged with no medical cause or injury found. There certainly didn’t seem to be any preexisting condition as that season progressed. Only a few days before the doctor’s visit, Richard had pitched two scoreless innings in the 1980 All-Star Game, in which he struck out Reggie Jackson. The Astros’ team physician publicly advised Richard to get more sleep. Several of his teammates grumbled that Richard was a slacker. Richard didn’t do himself any favors when he complained about Ryan’s new contract. Richard was making $850,000 at the time, while the Astros had just made Ryan baseball’s first $1-million man.

  “Am I bitter? Yeah, you might say that,” Richard said at the time. “I think it’s life in particular, baseball some—but life in general. I’ve been through a whole lot of things in my life, a little bit of everything. Prejudice. You name it, I’ve been looking at it.”

  He was about to be looking at a whole lot more. Sixteen days after the Astros’ doctor told him to get more sleep and cut down on his social life, Richard suffered a devastating stroke. On July 30, 1980, he was playing catch with teammate Wilbur Howard before a game at the Astrodome when he collapsed. Rushed to the hospital, he fought for his life while doctors removed a blood clot from his neck. Due to the stroke, Richard suffered paralysis to the left side of his body, including his arm. Through rehabilitation Richard would regain use of his arm and leg, moving well enough to attempt a return to the Astros, but he would never be the pitcher he once was.

  Instead of getting a bronze plaque in Cooperstown, Richard became a cautionary tale for ballplayers of his era. Another reminder that being blessed with a rocket arm could be as much a curse as it was good fortune.

  “They didn’t believe J. R. Richard because they didn’t want to,” Jim Palmer told the Los Angeles Times days after Richard left the hospital. “If you’re J.R., you’re 10–4 with a 1.89 ERA and you say you’re hurt. They’re in a pennant race and he’s their top pitcher. . . . Obviously some people thought he was unhappy that Nolan Ryan was getting more money. People want to make all kinds of insinuations.”

  Richard received a reported $1.2 million in a medical malpractice suit. But that wasn’t enough to stabilize his life and to fill the void left by not playing baseball. His first marriage broke up, lousy investments were made, and in 1993 Richard was found by a Houston Post reporter living under an overpass, not too far from the Astrodome, where he once starred.

  Richard eventually found a home for himself in south Houston, conducting baseball clinics and becoming a minister at the Now Testament Church. In 2004, before the All-Star Game in Houston, Richard signed 6,000 autographs in two hours. Unlike many of today’s players, he reveled in the attention—delighted that people still remembered him.

  “I don’t have any velocity,” he said after Sports Illustrated asked how hard he could still throw, “but I can still throw strikes. You never forget how to pitch—it’s like riding a bicycle.”

  Well, maybe not. Sometimes throwing a baseball never quite becomes second nature, no matter how much science and psychology can be brought to the equation.

  Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve Blass remains the classic example of somebody who came down with such a dramatic case of nerves, or the “yips,” that he couldn’t throw a strike to save his life. As a result, Blass went from pitching two complete games in the 1971 World Series to disappearing from the playing ranks by the age of 32. To this day, Blass says, he has no idea what really happened to his form and delivery. “But I learned that life goes on,” he says. “It is what you make of it. I just feel fortunate to enjoy the success I had before it was taken away from me.”

  Other players have been bitten by the yips bug. Because of it, for a time second baseman Steve Sax couldn’t throw accurately to first. Dale Murphy had to shift his position from catcher because too many of his return throws to the pitcher ended up in center field. Mackey Sasser came down with the same mental block. But among the fireball community, the one everyone remembers is Mark Wohlers.

  As the closer for the Atlanta Braves, he once clocked at 103 miles per hour. If in doubt, he went with the heat, in the mold of Goose Gossage, Jonathan Papelbon, and Billy Wagner.

  The first sign of trouble appeared when Wohlers began to throw wildly to first base on routine fielding plays. In the Braves’ dugout, pitching coach Leo Mazzone told manager Bobby Cox that they better hope such wildness didn’t carry over to Wohlers’s pitches to home plate. Soon enough, though, Wohlers started to walk batters. Then some of his deliveries were flying past the catcher, sailing all the way to the screen. Overnight he had morphed into the second coming of Steve Dalkowski.

  Ironically, Wohlers’s wild streak only affected his fastball. His slider and split-finger fastball remained accurate enough. But soon hitters realized that the right-hander couldn’t throw strikes with his lightning-quick fastball anymore and began to sit on the slower stuff. After saving 97 games in three seasons, Wohlers was sent down to the minors in 1998. Despite a comeback bid with the team’s Triple-A affiliate in Richmond, sessions with therapists, and the efforts of a personal trainer, he was never the force he once was. When asked what went wrong, Wohlers told the New York Times, “I wish I knew.”

  Even though science failed to forecast the emergence of Wagner and Lincecum and couldn’t put Richard back on the mound, ballclubs nevertheless still attempt to quantify the gift and mystique of the fastball.

  By Memorial Day 2009, David Price was back up with the Tampa Bay Rays—this time he hoped for good—and made his season debut against the Cleveland Indians. He came out firing. Scouts said his first dozen or so pitches were all four-seam fastballs, in the 94- to 98-mile-per-hour range. But when the Indians’ Jamey Carroll drew a leadoff walk, followed by Grady Sizemore’s flare hit dow
n the left field line, Price was facing two men on base with none out.

  He then began to mix in his hard slider, clocked at 86 to 88 miles per hour. This was the pitch Price lost for a time down in Durham because he was working so much on his changeup. Using the slider to set up the fastball, he struck out Victor Martinez, Jhonny Peralta, and then Shin-Soo Choo. For a brief moment, the sky appeared to be the limit for the 23-year-old phenom.

  In the second inning, though, things went downhill in a hurry. Staked to a 5–0 lead, Price walked the leadoff batter on four pitches. From then on, he fell behind too many hitters. By the time he was lifted with one out in the fourth inning, he had already thrown 90 pitches.

  “I didn’t have a feel for anything,” Price told the Associated Press afterward. “I’ve got to do a better job than that. I was averaging 10 pitches an out. That’s not good enough.”

  In his next start, the left-hander struck out 11 and recorded his first major-league victory of the season against the Minnesota Twins. He followed that with two no-decisions against the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels. On June 16, in his fifth start, Price managed to make it into the seventh inning but was on the losing end of a 5–3 loss to the Colorado Rockies.

  Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci wrote that Price “may have the stuff of an ace, but the Rays’ left-hander is a long way from being an ace.” At the same age (two months shy of turning 24), Price’s progress paled when compared to that of somebody like CC Sabathia of the New York Yankees. Price had a single victory and had never thrown 110 pitches or more in a game. In comparison, Sabathia already had 45 victories and 29 110-pitch games by that point in his career.

  Rays manager Joe Maddon maintained that the organization was waiting for “a moment of epiphany” when it came to Price. After that switch goes on, “he’ll be [the next] Sandy Koufax.”

  Although Maddon wanted Price to go deep into ball games, the young left-hander rarely got past the sixth inning during this initial run through the league. The culprit? Perhaps pitch counts.

  Tampa Bay, of course, has a lot riding on Price’s long-term success. As a result, like many pitching prospects, he’s allowed to throw only 100 pitches or so a game.

  “It’s a different era,” Phil Pote says. “Quite honestly there’s a lot more money involved, and nobody’s too interested in talking about the ramifications of it all.”

  I don’t understand what Pote means by “the ramifications of it all.”

  “OK, think this through with me now, partner,” Pote replies. “Say somebody like David Price is pitching today and there’s a 90-pitch count on him and, god forbid, he ends up getting hurt and he throws 89 pitches; everybody is probably OK with it. At least how it happened. He didn’t exceed the predetermined pitch counts.”

  “All right.”

  “But if somebody like David Price throws 91 pitches, somebody’s going to ask the pitching coach, the manager, what’s going on.” Pote continues, “That’s just the way it works. You have agents, general managers, ownership, trainers involved. Everybody is in this thing. Is it right or is it wrong? The answer is, it’s just different.”

  As a result, for many teams pitch counts have become standard operating procedure. Except down in Texas. The same week Price was lifted after 4 ⅓ innings and 105 pitches against the Angels, Nolan Ryan sent a directive throughout the Rangers’ organization: From this day forward, pitch counts were banned.

  “He wants us to toughen up,” says Texas ace Kevin Millwood, “go deeper in ball games. He knows there’s no reason we should be using five or more pitchers to pick up the victory”

  If anything, Ryan was trying to lead by example, in a retroactive fashion. As the Philadelphia Daily News pointed out, Ryan threw 5,684 pitches in 333 ⅔ innings in 1974, his seventh full season in the majors. He averaged 135 pitches a game and went on to play another 19 seasons in the big leagues. But not even that number represents the limits the human body can come close to enduring. In a throwback to the heyday of Pud Galvin and Amos Rusie, the Red Sox Luis Tiant threw an incredible 163 pitches in winning Game Four of the 1975 World Series.

  ASMI’s Glenn Fleisig says pitch counts are necessary at the youth levels, but pitchers at the minor- and major-league levels “shouldn’t have strict pitch counts. They have coaches who should know what to look for, as opposed to Little League.

  “You have to remember pitch counts weren’t around 15 years ago. Now the pendulum may be swinging back. There’s an awareness that these guidelines don’t need to be set in stone. Most people coming to me now ask, ‘Don’t you think [professional pitchers] have been babied too much?’”

  In reaction to the ban, Bill James recently told Sports Illustrated that “what Ryan is doing is the clearest and boldest example of challenging the conventional wisdom from within the system that I’ve seen in years, and I’m applauding it.”

  Sitting behind his mahogany desk, the late-morning sky finally clearing beyond his office window, Ryan doesn’t look like a revolutionary or rabble-rouser.

  “I’m just trying to bring what I’ve learned back to the game,” he says. “What I was taught worked pretty well in my day. Can it work again? I believe so.”

  After nearly making the Baltimore Orioles’ major-league roster in 1963, only to suffer a serious elbow injury just before heading north with the parent club, Steve Dalkowski was never the same. Even though he went on to post only his second winning record, playing for Elmira, Stockton, and Columbus, the velocity was gone.

  At Stockton, Dalkowski went 8–4, and that’s where Phil Pote, who was just beginning his career as a big-league scout, caught up with him. But after all the buzz, all the talk, Pote came away disappointed.

  “What I saw didn’t match the legend I had heard so much about,” Pote says. “He was still throwing hard, or at least trying to. But I couldn’t help feeling that I had been cheated somehow. I never saw his best stuff.”

  The following season, 1965, Dalkowski struggled in spring training and the Orioles shipped him to Tri-Cities (Pasco, Washington), one of the lowest rungs in their system. Dalkowski’s arm still hurt and his fastball came in on a straight line, no longer rising to the heavens as it neared home plate. He wasn’t able to blow the ball by hitters anymore. Even though Tri-Cities manager Cal Ripken Sr. would become one of the standard-bearers for Dalkowski’s legend, he could only take so much of the left-hander’s antics. After Dalkowski hit a bar that the club had deemed off-limits, his career with the Orioles’ organization was over.

  “I was the one who released him [from Tri-Cities],” Ripken later told Pat Jordan. “Yet there’s not a soul in the world who didn’t like him, including me. He just didn’t give himself a chance.

  “Why, in spring of 1965, he was sent from the Triple-A camp in Daytona [Florida] to the minor-league camp in Thomasville, Georgia, and it took him seven days to make a few-hour trip. Harry Dalton got pissed off, and was going to release him, but I told him I’d take Steve with me to Tri-Cities. I told him he had to be in bed early the night before he pitched. That lasted two weeks and then he drifted the other way.”

  After being released by the Orioles, Dalkowski signed with the California Angels and reported to their minor-league team in San Jose. He pitched only six games there, though, going 2–3. The Angels sent him to Mazatlán of the Mexican League in 1965. After being assigned back to the Mexican League for the 1966 winter season, he retired from baseball.

  At loose ends, Dalkowski began to work the fields of the San Joaquin Valley in California. Places like Lodi, Fresno, and Bakersfield. He became one of the few gringos, and the only Polish one, among the migrant workers. And during this time he developed a new addiction to cheap wine—the kind of hooch that goes for pocket change and can be spiked with additives and ether. White port was Dalkowski’s favorite. In order to keep up the pace in the fields he often placed a bottle at the end of the next row that needed picking.

  “The guys there all picked fruit and drank wine, so I tried
it and got hooked on it,” he later told the Sporting News. “The wine they drink isn’t like dinner wine. It’s got a lot of chemicals. It can kill you.”

  Dalkowski chopped cotton, dug potatoes, and picked oranges, apricots, and lemons. He married a woman from Stockton. After they split up two years later, he met his second wife, Virginia Greenwood, while picking oranges in Bakersfield. But none of it had the chance to stick, not as long as Dalkowski kept drinking himself to death. He was arrested more times for disorderly conduct than anybody could count. He was sentenced to time on a road crew several times and was ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. For years, the Baseball Assistance Team, which helps former players who have fallen on hard times, tried to reach out to Dalkowski. This was how he lived for nearly a quarter century—until he finally touched bottom.

  In 1991, the authorities recommended that Dalkowski go into alcoholic rehab. But during processing he ran away and ended up living on the streets of Los Angeles. “At that point we thought we had no hope of ever finding him again,” says his sister, Pat Cain, who still lived in the family’s hometown of New Britain, Connecticut. “He had fallen in with the derelicts and they stick together. We thought the next we’d hear of him was when he turned up dead somewhere.”

  On Christmas Eve 1992, Dalkowski walked into a laundromat in Los Angeles and began talking to a family there. They soon realized that he didn’t have much money and was living on the streets. The family convinced Dalkowski to come home with them. In a few days, Pat Cain received word—her big brother was still alive. Soon he reunited with his second wife, Virginia Greenwood, and they moved to Oklahoma City, trying for a fresh start. But within months Virginia suffered a stroke and died in early 1994.