High Heat Page 9

  Indeed, the concept now extends throughout most organizations in baseball. Visit the academies in Venezuela or the Dominican Republic, and the players’ dorms or barracks often resemble the chain hotels. The kind that a lucky prospect could call home in Great Falls, Montana, or Modesto, California. Lessons in English are often mandatory, and some recruits can even gain their high school diploma while training for baseball. In Dalkowski’s era, it was much more sink or swim. A Darwinian situation where the players had a lot of down time and little guidance.

  His rookie year, at Kingsport, Tennessee, Dalkowski learned how to chew tobacco, struck out 19 batters in a game he lost, and led the league with 39 wild pitches. Seeing that Kingsport was a dry town, he caught rides across the state line to get his beer. It was also in Kingsport that the legend of his wildness gained a new chapter.

  One night an opposing hitter was crowding the plate and a Dalkowski fastball sailed up and in, striking him on the side of the head. Legend has it that the pitch tore off part of the batter’s ear. Filmmaker Tom Chiappetta, who has spent a dozen years putting together a documentary about Dalkowski, doesn’t believe that the story is true.

  “The guy he hit was named Bob Beavers and he played for the Bluefield Dodgers,” Chiappetta says. “From what I understand Mr. Beavers’s ear may have been nicked, but it was still pretty much intact.”

  Beavers went to the hospital with a concussion, however, and soon retired from baseball. John-William Greenbaum, a student at Indiana University who has done extensive research on Dalkowski’s career, says the errant pitch caught Beavers “just above the right ear,” splitting the cartilage. “There was a lot of blood,” Greenbaum says. “From what I’m told there was a pretty serious scar. But if it took anything off, it was a very small amount of flesh.”

  After the beaning, Dalkowski was so distraught that when he returned to the clubhouse he threw his glove out the window. Later, he visited Beavers at the hospital and told him how sorry he was.

  “From that point on, Steve became frightened of killing somebody with a pitch he threw,” Chiappetta says. “I’m sure it changed him just enough, so he had difficulty moving forward as a professional ballplayer from that point forward.”

  Dalkowski went 1–8 in his rookie year of professional ball, with 121 strikeouts, 129 walks, and an ERA of 8.13.

  During the 2008 season, the Yankees eventually fell out of contention in large part because their young pitchers didn’t come through. Ian Kennedy, Phil Hughes, and Joba Chamberlain were either injured or struggled under all the attention that comes with being in the Big Apple. Of course, Chamberlain is considered the kind of prospect who could one day blossom into the next Bob Feller or Nolan Ryan. He throws in the upper-90s, and with his cap pulled down low—a look of indifference at times bordering upon genuine dislike upon his face. Chamberlain’s the kind of pitcher batters begin to have nightmares about. But for Chamberlain, the 2008 season was more of a disappointment than a star turn.

  Chamberlain was moved from the bullpen, where he had experienced success as the setup man for Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, to the starting rotation in large part because there were so many openings there. With the exception of right-hander Mike Mussina, the New York rotation was a patchwork job at best. In 2009, as Chamberlain struggled in his new role and eventually returned to the bullpen, I found myself thinking about Ryan. In many ways, Chamberlain’s experience echoed what “the Express” went through.

  “Playing in New York, Boston, big markets like that, demands a different mind-set,” Yankees catcher Jorge Posada says. “You have to be careful. You can get sidetracked so easily.”

  In fact, Posada and Rivera, two guys who have been a pitchercatcher battery since the minors, still take it upon themselves to talk shop the day after any of Rivera’s relief appearances.

  “You’d think because we’ve known each other for so long,” Rivera says, “that we wouldn’t need to do that. But it’s still a requirement.”

  “If not, if we don’t talk pitches, what we just did, how Mo’s arm is feeling,” Posada added, “the next thing you know you’re out there, in front of another full house, trying to communicate at this high level. Without those regular meetings, talking honestly even after a bad outing, the big successes don’t happen as much.”

  After talking with Posada and Rivera, I found myself wondering why we prepare prospects from outside our borders better than we do the kids signed closer to home. In my travels to the Dominican Republic especially, which is now the biggest exporter of raw baseball talent to the U.S. major leagues, I’m often surprised how little is left to chance.

  Between the major-league and Japanese professional teams, there are 30 or so baseball academies now in the Dominican Republic. Most are modeled, in large part, on Days Inns or Holiday Inns. The effect can be jarring. Dirt roads in the jungle dead-end at vast complexes with emerald-green fields and residence hotels that would be at home off any U.S. interstate. The equipment and playing surfaces surpass most situations found in the U.S. inner cities. In addition, prospects from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela are usually required to hit the books, taking English lessons several hours a day. One could argue that the formal education they receive at the baseball academies exceeds what’s available in the regular schools down the road.

  “Even if baseball never works out for them,” says Junior Noboa, a former big-league ballplayer now operating an academy in the Dominican Republic, “I’d argue that they’re better off because of the time they spent here.”

  Compare that with the philosophy that was prevalent during Dalkowski’s, even Ryan’s time. After signing with the Mets, Ryan took his first airplane flight to Marion, Virginia, in the rookie Appalachian League. In the summer of 1965, he pitched in 13 games, going 3–6. He struck out 115 in 78 innings. For Ryan, like Dalkowski, control became a constant issue. Ryan walked 56 and hit eight batters. After spending the winter with the Mets’ instructional league in St. Petersburg, Florida, he was promoted to Class A ball in Greenville, South Carolina. There his control was as lousy as ever. In fact, in one game a pitch sailed on him and plunked a woman leaning against the screen behind home plate. The errant throw broke her forearm. The woman was a season ticket holder and asked for a new perch a row farther back in the stands.

  She wasn’t the only one afraid of Ryan’s wildness. In going 17–2 that season, Ryan recalled that the “hitters helped me out by swinging at a lot of bad pitches. As far as learning to pitch, I made little progress.”

  That didn’t stop the Mets from promoting their phenom, a kid who was being compared to Koufax in terms of sheer velocity, to their Class AA team in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. There he struck out 35 batters in 19 innings. But Ryan also sent his catcher to the sidelines with a concussion after another wild one got away. A game against Pawtucket typified how much potential Ryan had and, unfortunately, how far he still had to go. Twice Pawtucket base runners stole home en route to a 2–1 victory over Williamsport, a game in which Ryan struck out 21 and somehow still lost.

  The parent club didn’t seem overly concerned by such inconsistency, though. On September 1, the date prospects are routinely called up from the minors for the last month of the regular season at the big-league level, Ryan flew to New York to join the Mets. He was only 19 years old. He had spent all of 14 months in the minor leagues. He was regarded as a thrower rather than a pitcher. But none of that really seemed to matter to those in charge. Ryan had the gift of epic speed. All the rest—throwing his fastball for strikes, finding complementary pitches, learning how to challenge major-league hitters—would have to work itself out along the way. If not, Ryan would return to Alvin and another kid pitcher would take his roster spot.

  In 1966, there were several constants in the game. One was that the Mets, Ryan’s new team, were a pretty lousy bunch. Not a single position player batted above .300. Few of the pitchers came close to having a winning record.

  The other story line was the weird symmetry t
hat often comes into play with baseball. Ryan’s first year in the majors was the last time around the block for Sandy Koufax, the legendary southpaw with the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was Koufax who once said that “every pitcher’s best pitch is the fastball. It’s the fastball that makes the other pitches effective. While they are looking for the breaking pitch, the fastball is by them.” In 1966, the legendary left-hander led the National League in victories (27), ERA (1.73), games started (41), and complete games (27). He was less than a year removed from his epic perfect game, which is detailed in Jane Leavy’s Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy. Due to arthritis in his pitching arm, the 1966 season would be his last.

  Of course, Ryan had followed Koufax’s career since seeing him pitch in Houston several years before. In his autobiography, Ryan noted how Koufax “went out in a blaze” that final year. In hindsight, the plot makes perfect sense: one hero stepping away and a new one coming onstage. But Ryan’s rookie year, he was a long way from such heights. It would have been like a young politician looking up at Mount Rushmore and daring to believe that his face would one day be chiseled alongside those of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.

  Ryan’s first big-league appearance came in relief on September 11, 1966, against the Atlanta Braves. He served up a home run to Joe Torre and got his first strikeout (Pat Jarvis, another rookie pitcher). Afterward, Hank Aaron said Ryan had one of the best fastballs he had ever seen. While such praise may have flattered some rookies, Ryan found himself troubled by Aaron’s comments. After all, it was one of his fastballs that Torre had smacked well over the outfield fence.

  Ryan’s first major-league start was a Texas homecoming in Houston, at the Astrodome. It was a disaster, with the 19-year-old lucky to last one inning. As his first full season of professional baseball came to a close, Ryan realized that he still had a long way to go.

  “It dawned on me that I’d been force-fed to the Mets and that I would have to channel my abilities—be not just a thrower but a pitcher,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “I really needed guidance, somebody to work with me not only on the physical approach to pitching, but also on the mental game.

  “I was just out there stumbling about. If I hadn’t had the ability and the determination to work to develop myself, I would’ve been just another one of those kids that comes along with a great arm. And two years after they sign with a major-league team they just fade out into the sunset and people ask, ‘Whatever happened to that kid?’ I was determined that something like that would not happen to me. I spent a lot of time observing, picking up whatever insights I could get into the art of pitching.”

  But such insights came few and far between on the Mets. Whitey Herzog, the team’s director of player development, considered Ryan to be “a lazy Texan. He always seemed to be sleeping on the bench when I was talking.”

  Ryan came down with a sore arm while working out with Jacksonville in the Florida State League. Due to the injury and time spent in the U.S. Army Reserve (his unit at one point was scheduled to go to Vietnam), he didn’t pitch at the major-league level in 1967. That year’s highlight was marrying Ruth Holdorff, his high school sweetheart, at the Methodist church back in Alvin.

  By 1968, Ryan was back in New York, and he and his bride tried to make a go of it. They started at a motel near Shea Stadium and then moved into apartment complexes in Elmhurst and later in Brooklyn. Ruth Ryan once tried to explore the city but got stuck on a crowded expressway in the rain, driving a car without working windshield wipers.

  At the ballpark, Ryan kept searching for somebody to help him, especially with his control problems. He found a confidant in Tom Seaver, who had been promoted to the parent club the year before. Seaver became a good friend—the guy who first told Ryan about Walter Johnson and the Big Train’s all-time strikeout record, which Ryan would eventually break.

  What drove Ryan to distraction was that he threw harder than any of the other young pitchers the Mets were bringing on board—Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Tug McGraw. But he wasn’t enjoying nearly as much success. Bothered by blisters, especially on the middle finger of his pitching hand, he appeared in only 21 games in 1968, posting a 6–9 record.

  “I was so frustrated that I nearly quit several times,” he says. “I was ready to go back to Texas, probably go back to school. Mentally and emotionally, I wasn’t into what I had to do to be a pitcher. So, I nearly quit.”

  Let’s pause a moment and allow that comment to hang in the air like a bad breaking ball. One of the best pitchers of all time, a guy who would one day make the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, came close to walking away from the game forever. Why? Because he couldn’t do right by what he had been given.

  “Looking back on it, I’ve come to believe that if you’re blessed with the ability to throw hard, you have to consider all the factors,” Ryan adds. “It’s a gift that you did nothing to earn. It was given to you and what you do with it is up to you. Once I realized that I said, ‘Hey, this is a blessing and I’m going to take advantage of it and be the best I can for as long as I can.’ Only after I decided that did I decide to stay.”

  Despite the frustration, there were glimmers of what could be. Ryan struck out the side on nine pitches for the first time in his career in April of that year. After that the New York media couldn’t help comparing him with Koufax, Bob Feller, or the game’s then current star hurler, Bob Gibson.

  In a season that baseball pundits refer to as “the Year of the Pitcher,” nobody was better than Gibson. The fierce right-hander for the St. Louis Cardinals posted a league-leading 13 shutouts and the third-best ERA (1.12) since the 1890s. Tommy John recalls that Gibson was so good, his stuff so nasty, that he seemed “capable of pitching a shutout every time out” in 1968.

  In fact, that wasn’t too far from the truth. Baseball researcher Bill Deane chronicled a stretch in the middle of that season in which Gibson threw 99 innings (June 6 through July 30) and gave up two runs. As Deane later told ESPN.com, both of those were almost flukes. One came on a borderline wild pitch, while the other was the result of a bloop double that fell inches fair.

  “I went to the mound once after he’d put a couple of men on base,” Dal Maxvill, the Cardinals’ shortstop and a .217 hitter, later told ESPN.com. “I started to say something to him, like, ‘Things are fine.’ He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Get out of here. The only thing you know about pitching is that it’s hard to hit.’”

  Known for pitching inside, Gibson regularly intimidated batters in winning 15 consecutive games that season. His crowning achievement was striking out a record 17 Detroit Tigers in the opening game of the World Series, an accomplishment now immortalized on YouTube. Gibson allowed only one run in the first two games he pitched in the 1968 Fall Classic, setting up the Cardinals to repeat as champions. (St. Louis had defeated Boston’s “Impossible Dream” team in seven games the year before.) But Jim Northrup’s two-run triple, which was uncharacteristically misplayed by Cardinals centerfielder Curt Flood, made Detroit a winner in the deciding Game Seven. Still, Gibson finished with 35 strikeouts, a single-Series record.

  That year Gibson won the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards. In the American League, the Tigers’ Denny McLain did the same thing after becoming the first pitcher since 1934 to win 30 games in a season. Gibson and McLain had plenty of company for pitching honors. In total, 17 pitchers had ERAs of 2.50 or lower, with the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale pitching 58 ⅔ consecutive shutout innings and the Giants’ Gaylord Perry and the Cardinals’ Ray Washburn tossing back-to-back no-hitters.

  Such quality pitching was too much for the lords of baseball. They wanted runs and higher scores. So after the 1968 season, they shrank the strike zone. It had been from the batter’s shoulders to his knees. Now it was from the armpits to the top of the knees, and the way some umpires began to call the game it was destined to shrink even further. In addition, the mound was lowered five inches. Carl Yastrzemski would later say that this last adjustmen
t favored sinkerball pitchers and put the power pitchers, those who threw a hard fastball and curveball, at a real disadvantage.

  “I know for a fact that pitchers love throwing on a high mound more than they do a lower one,” legendary pitching coach Leo Mazzone wrote in his Tales from the Mound. “They lowered the mound in ’69 because of the domination of pitching, because of Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale. Now I think you have to have an equalizer of some sort on the other side. It’s favored the offense over the last few years.”

  Although Ryan won his first game at the major-league level in 1968, that was little more than a footnote in “the Year of the Pitcher.” By 1969, Ryan was mostly pitching out of the bullpen. Seaver and Koosman were the staff aces as the Mets came from 9 ½ games back to overtake the Chicago Cubs and capture the National League East Division and later the pennant. New York mostly did it with pitching, putting up 16 shutouts. Ryan chipped in with six victories, none of them a shutout. In the year of the “Amazin’ Mets,” New York could do little wrong. The Mets even won a game in mid-September when Steve Carlton struck out a record 19 batters.

  Ryan came out of the bullpen to win a game in the National League Championship Series against the Braves. Some in the media expected that would earn him a start in the World Series against the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles. But Ryan didn’t see any action until Game Three at Shea Stadium. The Mets were ahead 4–0 when starter Gary Gentry loaded the bases with two out in the seventh inning. That’s when manager Gil Hodges signaled for Ryan.

  Anxious to get the ball over and not walk in a run, Ryan threw a fastball to the Orioles’ Paul Blair. As soon as the ball left Blair’s bat, Ryan knew it was trouble. It was deep, heading for the fence in right-center field. But Mets outfielder Tommie Agee somehow tracked the ball down, sliding onto one knee to make the grab.