Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics) (18 page)

Ralph Houk, chewing a cigar, narrows his eyes and says in an emphatically flat voice, “Jim Turner is the best pitching coach ever. Understand? The best ever! A good pitching coach deals only with mechanics. It can be detrimental to a team if a pitching coach gets too personally involved with his pitchers. He should treat them mechanically. That’s why Johnny Sain had his troubles. I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Sain since he left us. He can’t seem to hold a job, can he? Jim Turner’s been a pitching coach with the Yankees for years. He knows what I expect of him. We get together every day and I tell him how I’m gonna use the pitchers and he does it.”

After Sain left the Yankees he was forced to sit out a year until, in the winter of 1965, Calvin Griffith, the owner of the Minnesota Twins, offered him a job.

“What about salary?” said Sain. “They say I’m a high-priced man.”

“Anything you say will be all right with me, John,” said Griffith.

Sain, who had been getting $25,000 a year from the Yankees, and who had demanded $30,000 a year, then signed with the Twins for $20,000 a year.

Before the 1965 season began it had been rumored that Twins’ manager Sam Mele would lose his job if he did not produce a winner in 1965. When he first arrived at spring training, Sain remarked off-handedly, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Mele became the Manager of the Year?” That year the Twins did win the American League pennant and Sam Mele was voted Manager of the Year.

Despite both Mele and Sain’s success (Sain had produced his usual 20-game winner in Mudcat Grant, who said of him, “He sure puts biscuits in your pan”), the two men did not get along. Mele distrusted Sain and the power he wheeled over his pitchers. Furthermore, he seldom agreed with Sain’s unorthodox pitching concepts, and often the two men would have words over the amount of running a pitcher should do, or how many days’ rest he might need between starts. But beyond those differences, Sain felt he was never able to communicate deeply with Mele, that he never knew where he stood with him, which was fatal to a man like Sain, who seems physically unable to deal with people on only a superficial level. After signing a 1966 contract for $25,000, Sain’s difficulties with Mele grew, until by mid-season they were irreconcilable. The final blow to their relationship came in mid-season when Billy Martin, then a Twins’ coach, berated one of Sain’s pitchers over a pitch he had just thrown. Sain, furious, said to Martin, “Mind your own business, Martin. I take care of the pitchers.” Mele, who was standing beside Sain, said nothing. Later, thinking about the incident, Sain became more and more upset that Mele had not come to his defense against Martin’s intrusion into his private domain. The following afternoon Johnny Sain moved all his equipment and uniforms out of the coaches’ locker room and deposited the lot in the players’ locker room, where he dressed until the end of the season, when he was fired. When news of Sain’s dismissal was made public, Jim Kaat, a 25-game winner under Sain that year, wrote an open letter to the Twins’ front office, which was published in a Minnesota newspaper. The letter accused the Twins of making a terrible mistake in firing Sain, and it implied that the team’s drop to second place that year was because of Mele’s inability to communicate with his players, as well as with Sain.

Dave Boswell, now an infrequent relief pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles and a pitcher at Minnesota in 1966, is sitting on a stool in front of his locker. He was once a 20-game winner with the Twins but has since damaged his arm so severely that he was given his unconditional release by the Twins and was picked up by the Orioles only on a gamble. “If Johnny Sain had any weakness as a pitching coach,” says Boswell, “it was that he didn’t understand hard throwers as much as he should. He never made us run wind sprints at Minnesota because he didn’t believe in running. Some of the pitchers, me and Kaat in particular, didn’t run 10 sprints all year, and we came up with sore arms. But that was our fault, I guess. Johnny left it up to us to run on our own if we thought we needed it. That was what was so great about him. He never pressured you to do anything. He didn’t bother you a lot, but when he did, when he talked about pitching and the possibilities of a baseball, you could actually see them before your eyes. As a kid you put that ball in your hand and you thought of it as just a ball. But after Sain put that ball in your hand you didn’t see it the same anymore. Now it had possibilities you never dreamed of.”

From 1967 to 1969 Johnny Sain coached under Mayo Smith at Detroit. In 1968 the Tigers won the American League pennant and the World Series; Mayo Smith was named Manager of the Year; Denny McLain became the first pitcher to win 30 or more games in one season since Dizzy Dean turned that trick in 1934; and Mickey Lolich won three complete games in the World Series to become only the seventh man in baseball history to accomplish that feat. Ironically, but predictably enough, Sain became close friends with Lolich and McLain, both of whom he had been warned were “real nuts,” while he grew daily more estranged from Mayo Smith, who he had been told “was a real gentleman.”

“McLain and Lolich both wanted to improve themselves,” says Sain, “and that’s all I need in a man. Each was very individualistic, too, and I like that. McLain may have been a little loose off the mound, but on that mound he was all business. And he’s got guts. Him and Lolich, both. You know that Lolich rides those motorcycles of his, and McLain, he’s got a pilot’s license. If McLain was flying an airplane and it died on him, you could bet money he’d still be fighting it when it hit the ground. But it was Mayo I had problems with. He’s a helluva fine guy like everybody told me, and I only really disagreed with him once. But still we never got along. When I came to Detroit I had a reputation behind me, and he was relatively unknown and trying to make a name for himself. Every day the writers and TV sportscasters would seek me out for an interview. They were always asking me questions—like why didn’t I become a manager, which I could never be—and all the time Mayo was hitting that pressroom trying to be a real nice guy with reporters. Pretty soon I could sense there was friction there, between Mayo and me. I don’t like friction. It lingers with me, even small things. It disturbs me if I have to be on my toes with someone, always afraid I might offend him. That’s not what life’s all about. And Mayo had this ability to keep me uneasy all the time. He was so smooth I never knew where I stood with him. I’d rather he declared himself, cuss me out, so we could get things into the open. But he never did. He was always a real nice guy with me.”

Mickey Lolich, a 25-game winner with the Tigers in 1971, sits down for breakfast at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York City and orders four scrambled eggs, four pieces of toast, an order of bacon, a large orange juice and a pot of coffee. At six feet, 230 pounds, Lolich refers to himself as a fat man’s athlete. “Fat guys need idols, too,” he once said. Now, speaking softly and occasionally glancing across to a nearby table where his manager, Billy Martin, is eating his breakfast, Lolich talks about Johnny Sain. “He made me a 20-game winner. Yet he never taught me a single thing about pitching a baseball. Maybe that’s because John’s not a pitching coach, he’s a head-shrinker. He used to straighten out all those hardship cases, you know, mental cases, in flight school when he was a Navy flier in the Forties. Even when you learn from Sain you never feel you’ve learned a thing from him. He lets you think you did it yourself. McLain wouldn’t learn from anyone when he was with Detroit, so Johnny just taught him things without letting Denny know it. McLain used to sneak down to the bullpen like a little kid so he cold practice what Sain had taught him without letting anyone know it. I’ll bet to this day he’ll swear he never learned a thing from Johnny. But every pitcher learns from John. Pitching takes on new shades and nuances with Sain. He loves pitchers. Maybe he doesn’t love baseball so much, but he loves pitchers. That’s why he doesn’t get along with management. He believes pitchers are unique and only he understands them. If the front office tries to trade a guy, he goes to that guy’s defense. He always sides with pitchers first. In the end it gets him in trouble. I think he has this dream that someday a manager will say to him, ‘Here, Johnny, you take the pitchers. They’re all yours.’”

In the spring of 1970, after he had been fired from the Detroit Tigers, Sain was offered the job of minor league pitching coach with the California Angels. He was offered that job by Roland Hemmond, the club’s farm director and a son-in-law of John Quinn, a former executive with the old Boston Braves during Sain’s days with that club. (A year later Hemmond would become the director of player personnel with the Chicago White Sox, and he would bring with him Chuck Tanner and Johnny Sain.) To the surprise of most of the baseball world, Sain accepted Hemmond’s offer. He spent much of the 1970 season driving across the country, stopping at cities like El Paso, Clinton, Salt Lake City and Idaho Falls, where he worked with youngsters who were light-years away from the Lolichs and McLains he had been accustomed to. Yet Sain cherishes that experience in which, in his own words, “I rediscovered the country. I had been having marriage problems and I took that job to get away from things. I’d always thought that in baseball or in life you get to a point where you can relax, level off, but I found out you can never rest. You always have the possibility of sinking. This divorce action with my wife has made me stay young as I grow older. She’s got four lawyers and she’s determined to take my money, my kids and my reputation, and I’m just as determined not to let her. I guess I had always let her do whatever she wanted before. At 50 she wanted to go back to college so I encouraged her. But then she seemed to think she was better than me. We always seemed to be in competition. She said I was too easy and I liked to be kicked around by people. Maybe she’s right. But still, this whole divorce action is very destructive. It’s not only destructive to me and our four kids, but it’s destructive to her as a person. Why, I took care of my wife’s grandparents for years, and when they died I buried them. And I buried her father, too.

“It seems the more responsibility a man takes the more he gets. I’ve been taking care of people all my life. We’re all looking for someone who will stick with us. But all I’ve ever got from people was, ‘You could never do this,’ or ‘You could never do that.’ I was always an outsider. I was never anyone’s glamour boy. I was always looking over my shoulder at some new Dizzy Dean who would make everyone forget me. People were always waiting to drive a nail in my coffin. It’s a human weakness to hope somebody fails. But people are never the way you’re taught they should be. We grow up with standards that we find aren’t true. I always thought if you were straight with people they would be straight with you. But they aren’t. Still, you have to be straight with them. I hate for people to toy with me, to be superior, but I’ve got to give them the chance. I don’t know why I’m always testing people, but I am. Maybe I’m just playing games with them. Maybe I’m fooling everyone.”

Johnny Sain, wearing the bluish-gray traveling uniform of the Chicago White Sox, stands with arms folded behind Steve Kealey, who is working steadily off the pitcher’s mound behind home plate at Fenway Park in Boston. Kealey sweats and grunts as he throws. He is 23 years old. He has red hair, freckles and the muscled, tapering build of a swimmer. While he sweats Sain talks softly to him. Kealey makes no acknowledgment of Sain’s words, which are few, really only a phrase, an exhortation, rarely a sentence.

“Heh, that had the beginnings,” says Sain. “The beginnings.” Kealey, impassive, continues to throw a curveball that is flat and does not break down as much as Sain would wish. “He’ll get it soon enough,” says Sain, loud enough for Kealey to hear. “It’s just a matter of time.” Kealey throws another curveball that breaks down slightly.

“Heh, that’s real nice,” says Sain. He motions to Tommy John walking by. “Wasn’t that real nice, Tommy?”

It is mid-July and Kealey is 1 and 1 with an ERA of 4.39. He is a hard thrower with decent control, but even he will be the first to admit he is far from being a finished pitcher. But he has confidence that wherever his potential might lie, Sain will unearth it. “He tells me things I never considered before,” says Kealey through dazed eyes. “They make sense when you think about them, but who ever thinks of the things Johnny Sain does. John’s whole life is teaching pitchers. It’s like by teaching us to get hitters out it proves he could have done it today, too. You know, his success lives on.”

After Kealey finishes throwing, Sain will walk to the outfield where the rest of the Chicago pitchers are standing around, stirring themselves infrequently to retrieve a fly ball in a half-hearted lope, but more often planted, spread-legged, like gray-flanneled pelicans. Sain will move from pitcher to pitcher, from left field to center to right and then back again. He will stand beside each one for a few moments, his arms folded across his chest, spitting tobacco juice into the still, sunny afternoon, passing the time in small talk that only occasionally drifts into then out of the subject of pitching.

Sain will say very little about pitching to Wilbur Wood, the club’s 30-year-old knuckleballer, because as Sain admits, “I don’t know much about knuckleballs.” Wood, a chunky, smiling, tobacco-chewing man, is an eight-year veteran who had been cast off by the Red Sox and the Pirates, both of whom used him primarily as a relief pitcher. Last year as a reliever with the White Sox he was 9 and 13. The club’s 1971 brochure said that “some thought was being given to restoring him to a starting role on occasion.” That thought belonged to Sain. He made one other suggestion to Wood, and it was that he pitch often with only two days’ rest between starts. Sain felt that as a knuckleballer, Wood put less strain on his arm than did other pitchers with more orthodox stuff, and therefore he could absorb the extra work with ease. Wood started 42 games in 1971 and won 22 of them. He pitched 334 innings, the most of any White Sox pitcher since 1917 and second in the American League in 1971 to Mickey Lolich’s 376 innings. Wood’s ERA was 1.91, second in the league to Vida Blue’s 1.82.