Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics) (17 page)

It was not the money that mattered to the modest-living pitcher, but what it signified to him. Sain had gone unrecognized for so long, for one reason or another, that he had come to view the respect and loyalty his teams had for him in terms of their salary offers. How much could a team respect him and his talent, he wondered, if they gave an untried youth almost three times what they seemed willing to pay him? “When people take advantage of me,” said Sain, “they set the rules and then I follow them, too.” During the previous fall, for instance, Sain felt he had been taken advantage of by Cleveland’s ace pitcher Bob Feller. He had promised Sain $2800 if he would pitch on a barnstorming team of professionals that Feller had organized. Sain agreed, but during that tour he seldom pitched. Most of the pitching was done by the more popular Feller, with his blazing fastball, and the flamboyant Satchel Paige, with his blazing personality, both of whom aroused much greater fan interest than would an appearance by that good gray workman, Johnny Sain. At the end of the tour Feller offered Sain $1800 and Sain accepted it, wordlessly. But that humiliation was still on his mind when he took the mound against Feller in the 1948 World Series, and it was with great satisfaction that he defeated Feller 1–0, to deprive him of the one laurel that escaped him throughout his career—a World Series victory.

Johnny Sain finished out his productive years as a relief pitcher with the New York Yankees from 1951 to 1955. He had been acquired by Casey Stengel, always a Sain admirer, who had willingly surrendered to the Braves a fidgety, freckle-faced right-hander named Lewis Selva Burdette. Sain’s years with the Yankees were noteworthy for reasons other than his modest successes on the mound. He made a number of friends with the Yankee heroes of that era—Mantle and Ford and Berra—but most notable of these was his friendship with a light-hitting Army Ranger whose duty it was to warm him up in the bullpen before he went into a game to relieve. Ralph Houk, who came to bat 161 times in an eight-year career, spent most of his time in bullpens. But unlike many bullpen occupants, he put his time to good use. He studied each game carefully, discussed various situations with some of his pitchers, especially Sain, and diligently prepared himself for that day when he hoped he would be called upon to manage those same Yankees. Houk’s diligence was eventually rewarded, and he was able to go from a nonplaying major-leaguer to a successful manager with little discomfort. And when he first made that transition he remembered Johnny Sain, whom he considered not only a friend but also a player whose pitching knowledge he respected greatly.

When Johnny Sain retired from baseball as an active player in 1955, he was admittedly a frustrated man. “It happens to all older major-leaguers,” he says. “There are so many uncertainties confronting you—which game will be my last, what will I do now, why are people treating me differently? It’s a very difficult period. I’ve always felt each club should have a reorientation program for their older players to teach them how to readjust to life outside of baseball.”

The Johnny Sain who was caught up in his own frustrations and fading career in 1955, however, was vastly different from the Sain who became the Kansas City Athletics’ pitching coach in 1959. “To become a pitching coach,” says Sain, “you have to start all over again. You have to get outside of yourself. You might have done things a certain way when you pitched but that doesn’t mean it will be natural to someone else. For example, I threw a lot of sliders and off-speed pitches because I wasn’t very fast. But that’s me. I could also pitch with only two days’ rest (he once pitched nine complete games in 29 days) whereas most pitchers need three and four, although I think they shouldn’t. And I never believed much in running pitchers to keep them in shape. I’ve always felt a lot of pitching coaches made a living out of running pitchers so they wouldn’t have to spend that same time teaching them how to pitch, something they were unsure of. It would be better to have those pitchers throw on the sidelines every day, than run. Things like this I learned on my own. I picked up everything by observation, which is the best teacher. Nothing came easy to me. I had to think things over and over more than guys with natural ability did. Maybe this has made it easier for me to get my ideas across to pitchers. It isn’t that I’m so smart, because I know I’m not very smart at all. I don’t know any answers. I don’t give pitchers answers. I try to stimulate their thinking, to present alternatives and let them choose. I remind them every day of things they already know but tend to forget. I repeat things a lot, partly for them but also for my own thinking, to make sure what I’m saying makes sense. . . . I don’t make anyone be like Johnny Sain. I want them to do what’s natural for them. I adjust to their style, both as pitchers and people. I find some common ground outside of baseball that’ll make it easier for us to communicate in general. I used to talk flying with Denny McLain all the time. Once you can communicate with a pitcher it’s easier to make him listen to you about pitching. You know him better, too. You know when to lay off him, when to minimize his tensions, and also when to inspire him. That’s why you’ve got to know him. Pitching coaches don’t change pitchers, we just stimulate their thinking. We teach their subconscious mind so that when they get on the mound and a situation arises it triggers an automatic physical reaction that they might not even be aware of.”

Sain lasted one full year with the Athletics, for which he was paid $12,000. Kansas City was then considered both a farm team and an elephant’s burial ground for the powerful New York Yankees. It seemed, at the time, that every aging body the Yankees dispatched finished out his days with Kansas City (including Sain four years before), and that every talented youngster the A’s produced somehow landed in New York to aid the Yankees in another pennant drive. (At Kansas City Sain worked with a young Ralph Terry and Bud Dailey, both of whom were eventually traded to the Yankees.) Sain resigned his position with the A’s at the close of the 1959 season because, as he told sportswriters, he felt the organization wasn’t trying to build for the future. “I didn’t want to be someplace where I was putting more into an organization than that organization was.” This dawned on him quite suddenly one day when he went to the office of the general manager, Park Carroll, and asked for four guest tickets to that day’s game. Carroll produced the tickets and then asked Sain to pay for them. Sain paid and left the room thinking, “That sonofabitch! And after all I’ve given him for $12,000. Well, if they don’t care that much about me, I’m going.” Years later Sain would say with a grin, “If Park Carroll hadn’t charged me for those tickets I might still be at Kansas City.”

Sain sat out the 1960 baseball season in Bellview, Ark., where he now owned a new-car dealership. However, when he heard that his friend Ralph Houk had been appointed the Yankee manager for 1961, he knew he’d have a job in baseball again. Ralph Houk did not rehire long-time Yankee pitching coach Jim Turner. Instead, he hired his friend and former bullpen mate, Johnny Sain, for the 1961 season.

“Ralph and I got along as well as anybody could,” says Sain today. “We thought alike about most things and we respected one another. We’d even gotten to the point of discussing family problems with each other.”

At first things did not go well for new manager Ralph Houk. He was confronted with certain undefinable problems, as would any manager who had been a bullpen catcher on a team of Fords and Mantles and Berras and was then placed in a position of authority over those same men. In desperation Houk turned to Sain for help. Sain, the reliable, the tireless, the undaunted, the jouster with windmills, responded. One day after a particularly heart-breaking loss, Sain told a dispirited Houk, “Ralph, things look pretty dark for us right now, but don’t let any sonofabitch know it. Let’s not panic now.” A few weeks later, when the Yankees moved into first place, Ralph Houk, puffing a cigar, told reporters, “Yeh, things looked pretty bad for me last month, but I wasn’t about to let any sonofabitch know it.”

Eventually the Yankees won pennants in 1961, 1962 and 1963, and a World Series championship in 1961 and 1962, under the managership of Ralph Houk who was named Manager of the Year in 1961. During that same period Whitey Ford, Ralph Terry and Jim Bouton became 20-game winners for the only times in their careers under the tutelage of Johnny Sain. Says Ford of Sain, “If you don’t know a coach personally, you’d try his stuff once or twice and if it didn’t work, you’d stop. But you get so personal with Sain, you admire the man so much, that you just have to give his ideas an extra chance. It was Sain teaching me a hard slider and pitching me with two and three days’ rest instead of the four and five days I thought I needed before that made me a 20-game winner.”

But despite their mutual successes, which should have enhanced their friendship, Johnny Sain and Ralph Houk began to drift apart. Houk confided in Sain less and less each year, and when he did it was seldom on a personal basis as it had been before. Sain, as usual, said little. It was during those years that Houk, the ex-Ranger, began to build a reputation as a forceful disciplinarian. (He flattened a slightly drunk Ryne Duren with one punch on the train that brought the victorious Yankees back to New York after their 1958 World Series victory.) Soon Houk was being referred to by fans and in newspapers as “The Major.”

Jim Bouton, wearing bellbottoms and a body shirt of robin’s egg blue, leans forward over his desk at WABC-TV and says, “But does he still like me? I mean, after the book and all. Does Johnny still like me?” Assured, he sits back and says, “Johnny Sain taught me everything I know, from how to put on sanitary socks [inside out so as not to get a blister from the lint that forms in the toes] to how to negotiate a contract. I admire Sain more than any man I ever met. All players like Sain. Black, white, liberal, conservative, loud, quiet—they all do. Sain gets a pitcher’s allegiance before any manager could. Managers don’t like this. But it isn’t Sain’s fault. He doesn’t try to undermine a manager’s position. He can’t help it if what he is appeals more to pitchers than what their managers are, can he? Johnny sees very deeply into things. A lot of managers can’t stand to have him around after awhile. What general likes a lieutenant who’s smarter than him? John has the ability to see right through a bull-shitter, which most managers are, to the essence of the man.

“Who wants to live with a guy like Sain, always standing off in the corner watching you, and every time you do some crappy thing to a player, there’s John, not saying anything, not revealing what he sees, just looking like some knight in shining armor who knows all. Even if he never reveals what he sees, it becomes obvious to everyone. And then the manager loses face and blames Sain for it, although it isn’t Sain’s fault for seeing deeply, it’s the managers fault for doing the things he does. If a manager can’t admit to himself what he is, how do you think he feels knowing Johnny Sain sees it? Take Chuck Tanner, for instance. He’s a nice guy who didn’t know where the bodies were buried when he came to the White Sox. Now he’s a successful manager—mostly because of Sain’s help. How long do you think he’ll want to look over his shoulder and see Sain reminding him, just by his presence, that he owes a good part of his success to him? It takes a big man to be able to live with that. That’s why Ralph Houk got rid of Sain in ’63. At first Houk sought out Sain for help because he was insecure. But when he became a successful manager, “The Major,” he didn’t need a talented coach anymore, especially one who reminded him that he owed part of his success to him. All he wanted was someone who was loyal, and Sain is loyal to himself first, his pitchers second and his manager third. Finally, when Houk quit and Berra took over, Houk was afraid Berra would be a winner with Sain’s help and that would diminish Houk’s success, so he got rid of Sain.

“The funny thing is that Johnny, who’s supposed to be such a radical, is a real Establishment type. He gives you the perfect out to get rid of him. He’s too goddamned nice and people take advantage of him. And jeez, he’s so honest! So damned honest! If I was ever on trial for my life I’d want Johnny Sain on that jury, and then I’d be sure the truth would come out.”

When the Yankees lost the 1963 World Series to the Dodgers in four straight games, John Sain found it strange that Ralph Houk, always a bitter loser, did not seem particularly upset by that humiliation. He knew why when he read in the newspapers that Ralph Houk had been promoted to general manager and Yogi Berra had replaced him as field manager for the 1964 season.

“Throughout 1963 I had seen Berra and Crosetti always huddling and whispering,” says Sain today. “I knew something was up, but I waited for Ralph to tell me. I wanted Ralph to tell me. Then someone told me there was a rumor that Yogi would be the manager next year and I said, ‘No way. The players won’t respect him.’ When I read about it in the papers I began thinking. Well, now Ralph Houk is a man I always thought leveled with me, and here he didn’t tell me about Yogi until after I read it in the papers? Houk sent me a letter saying he hoped it wasn’t too big a shock to me, and after that I got a letter from Yogi asking me to work for him next. I wrote Houk a letter saying that due to increased expenses I needed a $5000 raise from the $25,000 I was already getting, which at the time was the highest salary ever paid a pitching coach, I believe. I also told Ralph I needed a two-year contract, and that Yogi’s biggest problem was going to be getting the respect of the players. Houk called me on the phone a few days later and said Topping wouldn’t go for the extra money. I said, ‘Okay, send me my release.’ He did. If he had been my friend, like I thought, he would have tried to talk me out of leaving. But he didn’t. He just sent my release a few days later. When Bouton found out about it in the papers, he offered to give me the extra money I was asking for out of his own salary. He thought it was just a salary dispute like the papers had indicated. I think, if I really wanted to, I could have stayed with the Yankees, but I walked away from it. Then they put Whitey in as pitching coach, and after him they put Jim Turner back in, and I know what Ralph Houk thinks of Jim Turner.”