Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics) (12 page)

“Well, this one kamikaze pilot was the ace of the squad,” says Sam.

“How come?” asks Evers.

“’Cause he made 12 successful missions.”

“Oh, I see,” says Evers, and goes back to reading his paper.

“Sudden, Jeez, did you see this in the paper?” Dean Chance comes over to McDowell and hands him a newspaper, which he begins to read as Chance talks.

“What the hell am I gonna do?” says Chance in mock panic. “My financial adviser, Denny McLain, is $400,000 in debt.”

Sam finishes the paper and hands it back to Chance. “Why don’t you call him and ask him the odds on tonight’s game?” says Sudden very seriously.

“Maybe I will,” says Chance with a grin, “maybe I will.” And he walks into the trainer’s room.

“Call him collect,” adds McDowell. “Tell Denny I said he wouldn’t mind.”

When McDowell finishes dressing and is about to go out to the dugout, Cy Buynak, the Tribe’s stubby little clubhouse man, comes over and asks why Sam didn’t fill out his telephone number on a form Cy needs. Sam tells him he doesn’t know his telephone number.

“What do you mean you don’t know your telephone number,” says Cy, hands on hips, indignant. “How could you not know your own telephone number?”

“I just don’t know it,” says Sam, sheepishly.

“That’s impossible. Everybody knows their telephone number. How you gonna call your wife in case of an emergency?”

“I never thought of that,” says Sam. Cy slaps his forehead and walks away muttering to himself. There is a thin smile on Sudden’s lips, and it isn’t until much later that he tells Cy that he’s just moved into a new house and his phone hasn’t been installed yet.

“When I first interviewed Sam one day in spring training,” says Bob Fitzgerald of WJW-TV, “he told me that Birdie Tebbets, the manager, wasn’t pitching him because he didn’t like him. I figured I had a scoop until Tebbets told me the reason he wasn’t pitching Sam was because he had a sore arm. After that I never knew how to take Sam. Then, just recently, I met his father. He had that same devilish twinkle in his eye that Sam has, and finally it dawned on me that all these years Sam’s been putting us on.”

At various times in his career Sam has told interviewers that strikeouts mean nothing to him and his biggest thrill was his 1500th strikeout; he never loses his temper and he once threw a ball out of Baltimore Stadium over an umpire’s call; records mean nothing to him and he’s broken all of Feller’s strikeout records; he takes pitching a baseball too easily and he worries too much about pitching; he could never throw at a batter and he would throw at his mother if she hit a home run off him; and baseball means everything to him and baseball means nothing to him.

“I like to give everybody what they want,” says Sudden Sam, with a grin. “I used to worry about what the writers wrote until I realized they wrote they wanted to no matter what I said. So I decided I’d make it easier for them by saying whatever they wanted.”

Fitzgerald doesn’t think that’s the only reason McDowell is so ready with a quip or a contradiction. “I think Sam was hurt by the bad publicity he got early in his career. He decided to hide behind all these contradictory statements so that no one would be able to discover who he was and hurt him again. He’s just a big kid who’s afraid of being hurt, that’s all.”

As further proof that Sudden Sam is just a big kid in the disguise of a talented giant, Fitzgerald cites his numerous hobbies. In his spare time Sudden manages to collect and build guns, put model boats together in bottles, train German Shepherds, shoot pocket billiards and paint still-lifes. At first glance these interests may seem haphazard, but they do have two things in common. Each can be worked at in solitude; and Sam views each and every one as a personal challenge, isolated from the approval of anyone but himself. For instance, although he admits he is a good enough pool shooter to become professional, Sam refuses to play for money. As one of the few registered gunsmiths in the country, Sam could make a small fortune plying that trade, but instead, he builds and restores guns for his own satisfaction. “I don’t sell them, but if I ever did you could hunt all day with them and hang them up as showpieces when you got through. That’s how I make them.” As a painter of still-lifes, Sam has one small problem. “I try to make the thing I’m painting more perfect than it is. So frequently people don’t recognize what my painting is supposed to represent.”

Sam began training German Shepherds when he bought a Starin German Shepherd to protect his wife and children. “The Starin is the largest of all the German Shepherd breeds,” he says. “They’re supposed to be only one-master dogs and I couldn’t resist training mine so he would obey my wife and kids. Now he’ll obey any kid in the neighborhood. When we have a party for the kids we just put the Starin outside and he scares off all the adults. I never trained him to obey adults,” he adds, with a grin. “Just the kids.”

Besides his hobbies, Sam also owns a pizza parlor and a pool hall in Monroeville, Pa., a small, exclusive suburb of Pittsburgh. And he is a salesman for “Holiday Magic, the Organic Cosmetics.”

When Sam goes on road trips with his team, he carries so much baggage (adding machines, paints, easels, gunsmith tools, etc.) that he has to live alone. “There wouldn’t be room for anyone else with all that stuff,” he says. “I always bring my stuff because I don’t like to go out of the hotel when we’re on the road. For instance, New York scares me to death, so I just eat downstairs in the hotel, then go back to my room to fool with my hobbies or watch television.”

Many people are bothered by Sam’s numerous hobbies, because he treats them with the same interest he does his baseball. It annoys them that he refuses to treat his pitching ability with any more reverence than his ability to build guns or shoot pool.

“He ought to be ashamed of himself,” says a big-league pitching coach. “Hell, if I had his talent I’d win 20 games every year.”

The reason Sam takes as much interest in his hobbies as in his pitching is that he views life as nothing more than a series of isolated challenges, none of which is any more important than the others. Baseball is a part of his life, just as guns and pool are. But few people achieve greatness until they are able to divorce themselves from everything except their profession.

“To be a great pitcher or anything,” says Herb Score, “you have to give up a lot. Some guys just don’t want to make the sacrifice. They’d rather do great now and then, than be great.”

Writers and managers are particularly annoyed with Sam’s refusal to devote his life entirely to baseball. The writers try to pressure him into greatness through bitter articles, while the managers try different tactics.

“When I caught Sam a few years ago,” says Duke Simms, now a catcher with the Dodgers, “Joe Adcock decided to call all of Sam’s pitches from the bench. In Anaheim one night Sam had super stuff but Adcock kept getting him in trouble. Finally Adcock loaded the bases in the sixth inning and I turned to the dugout for the sign, but he turned his back on me. He made Sam get out of it on his own. I think Sam eventually lost that game. But managers have always tried to make Sam throw the pitches they wanted, and he’s seldom had success at it.”

“Managers are mostly ex-hitters,” says McDowell, “and they seldom have any respect for pitchers. They don’t understand that all pitchers are unique and have to be handled differently. Most managers think pitchers are dumb because we like to do our own thing. Yet we couldn’t be too dumb because every year they’re changing the rules to make life easier for the hitters.

“I never wanted to be a baseball player. I’d just as easily have been a teacher or any other 9-to-5 job. There’s no certainty to baseball. I’d like the certainty of a 9-to-5 job. But my father saw I had the talent so he forced me into it. I never thought I was that good anyway. When I signed, all the clubs were promising to send me right to the majors. I was so terrified of that I signed with the Indians because they promised to send me as low as possible, to Class D ball. Even when I made the majors I never thought I was that good. The other players were always gods to me until a few years ago. I used to start every game with the hope I just wouldn’t embarrass myself out there. I’ve always felt I was forced into the majors before I’d harnessed my mental and physical abilities. Even now, no matter how great people say I am, I’ll never believe it. . . . What’s bothered me most about people all these years is how much they’ve demanded from me. No matter what I do they want more. It’s never enough. They seem to be envious of my talent, although I never thought I was so gifted.”

To Fly Like the Gulls

I don’t ever think about it,” he says. “Philosophically, that is. Why do I do it? What does it all mean? That doesn’t interest me. I only know it excites me. It’s the one thing I do in my life that excites me.” Tom Seaver, untanned, wearing a gray t-shirt and baggy Bermuda shorts, is standing in the sand of Madeira Beach, Fla., only a few feet from the Gulf of Mexico. He is holding a piece of string to which is attached a kite that is only a speck far off in a cloudless sky. The sky overhead is aswarm with the flap and caw of sea gulls. Big, grayish, heavy-breasted birds, they must beat their wings furiously, stomachs heaving, necks straining forward, so that for one brief moment they can level off and glide with a hard-earned and uncommon grace.

“Aren’t they fascinating!” says Seaver. “The way they work at it! I could watch them for hours. I’d love to fly like the gulls, but I can’t. So I pitch. If I couldn’t pitch I’d do something else. It wouldn’t bother me much. But if I
could
pitch and I wasn’t, that would bother me. That would bother me a lot. Pitching is what makes me happy. I’ve devoted my life to it. I live my life around the five days between starts. It determines what I eat, when I go to bed, what I do when I’m awake. It determines how I spend my life when not pitching. If it means I have to come to Florida and can’t get tanned because I might get a burn that would keep me from throwing for a few days, then I never go shirtless in the sun. If it means when I get up in the morning I have to read the box scores to see who got two hits off Bill Singer last night, instead of reading a novel, then I do it. It makes me happy to do it. If it means I have to remind myself to pet dogs with my left hand or throw logs on the fire with my left hand, then I do that, too. If it means in the winter I eat cottage cheese instead of chocolate chip cookies in order to keep my weight down, then I eat cottage cheese. I might want those cookies, but I won’t ever eat them. That might bother some people but it doesn’t bother me. I enjoy that cottage cheese. I enjoy it more than I would those cookies because I know it’ll help me do what makes me happy.

“Life isn’t very heavy for me. I’ve made up my mind what I want to do and I do it. I’m happy when I pitch well, so I only do those things that help me be happy. I wouldn’t be able to dedicate myself like this for money or glory, although they are certainly considerations. I know, also, if I pitch well for 15 years I’ll be able to give my family security. That’s a realization. But it isn’t what motivates me. What motivates some pitchers is to be known as the fastest who ever lived. Some want to have the greatest season ever. All I want is to do the best I possibly can day after day, year after year. Pitching is the whole thing for me. I want to prove I’m the best ever.”

Tom Seaver is the youngest pitcher in the history of professional baseball to sign a contract for over $100,000 a year. He has averaged 19 victories per year from the first moment he began pitching for a team, the New York Mets, whose normal finish during his tenure has been fifth place. At the age of 27 and after five years in the majors, he has won 95 ball games. Walter (The Big Train) Johnson, who won more games than any modern pitcher, won 80 games in his first five seasons in the majors. Before celebrating their twenty-seventh birthdays, Grover Cleveland Alexander, second to Johnson, won 70 games; Sandy Koufax, 68 games; Warren Spahn, 44 games; and Bob Gibson only 19 games.

George Thomas Seaver has one of those smooth, boyish, middle-American faces that would be a burden to some men. It possesses that handsomeness so prized in the 1950s of Pat Boone and Tab Hunter, which tempts one to describe it as having too little character, when one would more rightly mean too few characteristics. It is a face of undistinguished parts subordinate only to a single, clear impression of uncluttered good looks.

Seaver stands 6 feet, 1½ inches tall and weighs 210 pounds from November to February, when he indulges himself with an occasional breakfast of fried eggs and beer; he weighs 200 pounds from March to October, when he allows himself no indulgences. He has a squarish, heavy-chested body that tends to fat but is deceptively muscled. His arms, shoulders, chest and thighs are thick with muscles acquired from years of lifting weights. He believes, contrary to the opinion of most pitchers and coaches, that a selective program of weight lifting will add speed to a pitcher’s fastball. As proof, he points to himself. As a high school senior in Fresno, Calif., he stood 5-9 and weighed 160 pounds. He was the third hardest thrower on his team, and he did not pick up speed until he began lifting weights in college and had grown to 6 feet and 190 pounds. Because he worked so diligently in developing those parts of his body that relate to his talent, Seaver is highly critical—one might almost say contemptuous—of less conscientious players. He will say of a teammate whose chest is noticeably undeveloped, “Do you know he hit 20 balls to the warning track last year? Twenty! Another 10 feet and they would have been home runs. I know I’d find the strength to hit those balls another 10 feet.”

Although not conscious of it, Seaver cannot hide his disdain for men who he feels have not fulfilled their potential. For Seaver, a man’s talent is not just a part of the man. It is the whole man, or at the very least a mirror of the whole man. To treat one’s talent carelessly is indicative of a weakness in character that he cannot abide. He once said of a former pitcher who was reputed to have dissipated a promising career, “What a fool he must be to throw it all away like that! If you don’t think baseball is a big deal, don’t do it. But if you do it, do it right.” Seaver studiously avoids such men, as if their weakness was a contagious disease. He prefers to pass his free time with men like Bud Harrelson and Jerry Grote, who have made the fullest use of their talents, no matter how ordinary.

Despite Seaver’s weight lifting, there are certain parts of his physique that are noticeably undeveloped. His waist, for instance, is thick with soft flesh. It is a constant source of kidding for his wife, Nancy, who will say, “He has an old man’s waist. Really, he does! He is a lot like an old man, you know.” This kidding does not bother her husband in the least since he knows a tightly-muscled waist will add nothing to his talent, and as with most things that do not add to his talent, he has only a passing interest in them. (The perfect way to chill a relationship with Seaver, however, is to make a slighting remark about his talent. No matter how much in jest that remark might be, he will grow silent as a stone while the jester’s laugh dies in his throat.)

Seaver is not a vain man. He could no more lift weights in front of a mirror to build an Adonis physique than he could tell an obscene joke in public. He seems to have no real desire to call attention to himself, and if he is at all conscious of the image he presents in public it is only up to but not beyond the point when it offends his own sense of propriety. He dresses neatly but indistinguishably in the clothes he receives from Sears Roebuck and Co., to whom he is committed in business. The only real attention he seeks is when he is on a pitcher’s mound, and even then one senses that he does not demand it for himself but for his superb and unquestioned talent.

“After I won 25 games in 1969,” he says, “I became engulfed in a lot of publicity and recognition. It was like being caught up in a cloud. People who never met me were making judgments about me, and things were happening to me I had no control over. Then I had this fabulous realization—at least it was fabulous for me—that I had to cut all this stuff out of my life. I had to come back to myself, to what was most important to me, to be the best pitcher I could. Now I don’t care about publicity. I don’t worry about what people say or write about me. I can relax and be what I am. And what I am is basically a dull guy. No one interviews me much anymore. Even my success is kinda dull. At least, it looks dull to everyone outside myself. But to me it’s fascinating!

“I used to think you could reach a point where success would become a bore. A boredom with sameness. But now I know that just as I’m refining my pitching, I’m refining the pleasure I get from it. A victory used to give me pleasure, and then a well-pitched inning. Now I get great satisfaction from just one or two pitches a game. I get in a situation where I have to apply everything I know, mentally and physically, on just one pitch. It all comes down to this pitch. I have to think what I should do and then make my body do it. That’s a beautiful point to reach for an athlete. A light goes on in your head and you realize that everything you’ve done in your life has been for this moment. Things you’ve been building for years, things you never knew you were building, are right there for you to use. Suddenly, you’re the most confident person in the world. There’s no doubt in your mind what you can do. You sense you can achieve perfection for just this moment. That’s a great thrill for me. It’s not a jubilant type of thrill, but a great satisfaction that comes from knowing that for one specific moment I can achieve perfection in something I’ve devoted my life to.”

At 27 years old, Tom Seaver has reached this point in his development as an athlete (a point few men ever reach) because as a youth he was blessed with only modest size and ability. He says of himself then, “I was small and I didn’t throw very hard. In my senior year of high school I won five games and lost four. Jeez, but I’d never been the star of any team! Even at USC I had to work hard just to be a starter. Pitching has always been awful hard work for me. I never had anything handed to me. I was aware of my physical limitations at 14. I had to adjust. It was a burden then, but obviously it’s helped me.”

Pitching became for Seaver, at 14, not only a physical activity but a mental one. He was forced by the limits of his talent to become conscious of all those aspects of his craft which, although secondary to sheer ability, were at least within his power to cultivate. He discovered, for instance, that hitters fed off pitchers’ mistakes. Then he would make no mistakes. If he could not throw his fastball past hitters, he could at least throw it where they could not hit is solidly. If he could not strike out hitters, he could at least refuse to walk them. “Walking hitters bothered me even then,” he says. “It was so free!”

Seaver discovered that the control and quality of his pitches was directly related to his pitching motion. He became conscious of that motion, not as a stylized routine that could hide his deficiencies and assuage the demands of his ego but as something that could be cultivated, created even, in a way that would afford him the maximum use of his modest talents. He learned also to listen when anyone talked about his craft. And if those comments made no sense to him, he still retained them for a moment in the future when hopefully they would make sense and he could use them. (He met Walt Payne, an ex-semipro baseball player, only once. On that occasion Payne told Seaver it would be wise to use his left hand more often than his right so as to avoid injury to his pitching hand. “It made sense right then,” says Seaver, “and now whenever I use my right hand for something I’m very conscious of it.”)

Seaver also learned how it felt to be shelled unmercifully in one inning and then have to walk out to the mound to begin the next. “It’s a terrible feeling,” he says. “You want to quit. You feel it’s all so hopeless. You have to force yourself to forget the last inning and start all over as if it never happened. Some guys can’t do that. They’re always fighting things beyond their control.”

Such experiences helped Seaver develop an outlook in his youth (or possibly he just discovered what was all along a part of his nature) that has now become the cornerstone of his pitching philosophy. And, if Tom Seaver could ever admit to having something so grandiose, it has also become his “philosophy of life.”

“I learned,” Seaver says today, “to let my talent dictate what I was on a given day. I learned to adjust to it, its limits, to what it told me about myself. I couldn’t do more than I was physically or mentally capable of. If I tried to throw harder than I could, the ball went slower than it normally would. I couldn’t fabricate conclusions in my mind about how to pitch to a batter if my mind wasn’t ready for them. I couldn’t force things. Sometimes in a game I’ll concentrate so hard on my motion, trying to get it right, that I have nothing left for the batter. Then I let Grote call my pitches. I just respond physically. I surrender that mental load to Grote and it’s one less load I have to worry about. When I get my motion organized I’ll take that load back. But if I tried to perfect everything at once, I’d end up perfecting none of them.”

For Seaver, more became less. The result was unpleasant. And so he learned to deal solely within the framework of his limitations, to circumvent those limits, to co-opt them. He learned that success lay not in making war against one’s limitations but in making peace with them.

The qualities Seaver developed in his youth are precisely those any athlete must have if he is to excel. However, the pattern through which he acquired them was the reverse of that which most athletes follow. The first discovery a young athlete often makes is that he possesses an uncultivated talent—the ability to hit, run, throw, etc.—that allows him to glide with little effort or thought to a point where that talent alone is no longer enough. Faced with fading success, he must begin cultivating the peripheral adjuncts to sheer ability—control, discipline, expertise—that his early explosion of raw talent made unnecessary, but without which that talent will now never be fulfilled.

Sandy Koufax is a perfect example of such an athlete. He reached the major leagues on the strength of his extraordinary left arm, and then struggled for seven years to develop those qualities (primarily control and expertise) that his arm had earlier made unnecessary. Only when he developed them at the age of 26 did he fulfill his raw talent and become a great pitcher. Because of the absence of such a talent, Tom Seaver was forced to develop at 14 the same qualities Koufax developed at 26. However, those qualities alone made Seaver only a decent pitcher. When he graduated from high school he received no professional offers, and so he enlisted in the Marine Corps. When he left the Corps and enrolled at USC two years later, he had grown and his fastball had matured accordingly. The Dodgers offered him a modest $3000 bonus but he declined in favor of USC, where his development continued. He began a program of lifting small weights on the advice of a friend, Jerry Marz, who told him the added strength would help prevent sore arms and also give his fastball more speed. “I knew a lot of baseball people felt weight lifting hurt pitchers,” says Seaver, “but it seemed to help me then and it still does, so I did it.”