Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics) (2 page)

Someone brought Mr. DeFilippis the latest
Sporting News
with the story about his son. He read the article carefully, nodding, and then he showed it to his friends. He slapped the paper with the back of his hand and said, “See, what’d I tell ya?” The friends nodded solemnly.

It was only the scouts who did not come over and whisper in Mr. DeFilippis’ ear. They sat in deck chairs or stood in small clusters. Although many of them were strangers to me, they did not look so different from the old men I had known 10 years ago. They were still tanned and weatherbeaten from their long Florida springs, while we in New England were just beginning to turn red on these first few warm days, and they still dressed a little flamboyantly for older men, in bright alpaca sweaters and banlon jerseys and white and black tasseled loafers. Some smoked cigars, a few chewed tobacco and only a handful, it seemed, kept careful notation of the game’s progress in their little black notebooks. They looked much more relaxed, convivial, than I ever remembered scouts being. Scouts were nervous, frantic men before the free-agent draft, always trying to figure some way to outsmart their cohorts in latching onto a prospect. Now they looked as if buzzing in Art DeFilippis’ ear was the farthest thing from their minds.

I walked over and sat on the hill behind home plate, a few feet beneath the scouts. They were talking about good restaurants nearby and their next stops and old friends they hadn’t seen in a long while, and none of them seemed to concentrate very much on the game. But then again, it was a boring game. Art DeFilippis had already fanned eight of nine batters with a fastball that was tailing and sinking when thrown low and rising when thrown high. He had a nice loose motion, and I could tell he loved pitching just by the way he savored every moment he was on the mound. He must have been pitching a long time, since Little League at least, because he knew when to turn his back on a batter, when to throw over to first base to hold a runner and when to look for a ball’s rough spots after it had been fouled off. Only once in a while, however, did any of the scouts comment on him. Often they even had to ask one another how he’d gotten that last batter out, because they’d missed it.

In the fourth inning DeFilippis hit an inside-the-park home run. “He hits, too?” asked a heavyset, white-haired man in his 60s who sat down beside me.

“I guess,” I said. He asked the other questions about DeFilippis (What kind of boy was he? Did he like the game? Was he interested in signing?), and we talked for a while, only half-watching the game, until finally he introduced himself as Paul Florence, a Houston scout. Ten years ago, I told him, he had scouted me when I was in high school. He said he remembered, although I’m not sure he did because he kept calling me Bob after that.

“Who did you finally sign with?” he asked.

“Jeff Jones,” I said. “He was with the Braves then.”

“Ah, Jeff,” he said, smiling and nodding with satisfaction. “I’ll bet Jeff romanced the hell outta you in those days, didn’t he?”

“As a matter of fact, he did. Aren’t you doing the same with the kid?” I asked, pointing toward the mound.

“No, it’s not necessary anymore. Not after the draft. If it wasn’t for the draft I’d be romancing his whole family, maybe take them all to dinner tonight and invite them down to Houston. But that would be foolish. I’d just be getting his hopes up, and mine, for nothing if we didn’t get to draft him. All I do is watch him pitch a few times, write up a report on him and turn it in. The front office decides what to do about him after that.”

Art fanned his eleventh of 12 batters in the fourth inning, and I could see his father clapping politely as he left the mound. Paul Florence continued talking.

“You didn’t romance the kid just to get at him, either, you know. The thing was, the more time you spent with him the more you learned what he had inside. What made him tick. You couldn’t measure that just by watching him pitch. You had to know the boy for that. Now, with the draft, you seldom get to know any of the boys you scout. They’re just names.” He stopped for a minute, then added, “It’s all so depersonalized. There’s no excitement, enthusiasm in it anymore. No life—you know what I mean?” He looked at me, a little confused, as if even he were not so sure he knew what he was trying to say. “You know what I mean?” he asked again.

The innings drifted by and as the seventh was about to begin, Paul stood up. “There’s no sense staying any longer,” he said. He shook my hand, said goodby and then added, “It’s a shame, a real shame.”

“What is?”

“It isn’t only baseball, you know. Everything’s depersonalized. No one cares about the people they deal with anymore, not the waiters or department store clerks or anybody. Did you ever see those smiles you get from the stewardesses on an airplane? It scares me to death, the way when they turn around those smiles disappear.”

Paul Florence left and so did most of the scouts. One who remained was Bob Clements, a tanned man in his mid-50s. Clements was formerly a Pittsburgh scout but is now the assistant director of the Major League Scouting Bureau. The bureau, organized in 1968 and run by Vedie Himsl, a former Cub executive, offers freelance scouting services for a fee to all the major league clubs. Although not all clubs have availed themselves of its services, it seems just a matter of time.

“We owe our existence to the free-agent draft,” Clements said. “Before the draft, clubs spent a fortune scouting a kid. One year Kansas City spent over $600,000 in bonuses, and that’s not even including what it cost to keep 30 to 40 scouts on the payroll. If a club liked a kid enough they’d move a scout right into his town for a few years so the scout would get in the kid’s good graces. And then they had to spend $100,000 to sign him anyway. I wouldn’t give an 18-year-old kid $100,000 if he could self-levitate.”

Clements turned to a scout next to him and asked how DeFilippis got that last out. “Strikeout,” said the scout, and Clements marked it in his notebook.

“Things have calmed down a lot,” he continued. “The draft has eliminated all the special treatment the big prospects used to get. Now they’re all the same to us. There’s no distinction. And because it’s no longer necessary for a scout to get personally involved with a boy, you don’t need as many scouts. That’s where we come in. We offer to scout kids and turn in reports on them to all the clubs. It beats duplication of effort. Then all the clubs have to do is send a scout to see the kid in his senior year and they make up their mind how high they want to draft him. They can cut a lot of deadwood off their payrolls that way. Instead of 3 to 40 scouts they’ll need only six or eight.”

I asked him if eliminating scouts wasn’t just another step toward depersonalization of baseball.

“We’re not the cause of that,” he said, as if personally hurt by the accusation. “The free-agent draft did that. We’re just filling a need that came up. Why, before the draft all those old-timers were complaining how tough it was trying to sign a kid. Now they’re complaining it’s no longer fun. I don’t believe any of them. I bet you won’t find one in 40 who would rather go back to the way things were before the draft—except, of course, those whose jobs we’ll replace.”

“Then you think baseball is a lot better off because of the draft and your organization?” I said.

He looked up quickly. “No, I didn’t say that. I never said things were better or worse. I just said this is the way things are, that’s all. And there’s nothing that can be done about it. You have to learn to live with it.”

It was the ninth inning now. Clements stood up, folded his chair, tucked it under his arm and said goodby. He was the last scout to leave. Even the fans along the first-base line were beginning to fold up their blankets and chairs in anticipation of the last out. Art DeFilippis had already fanned 20 batters, and one more would be a new career high for him. Mr. DeFilippis looked worried about his son, who was exhausted after all those strikeouts and the inside-the-park home run. As I walked past, I could hear him talking.

“I don’t know who he’ll sign with,” he was saying, “but whoever it is, they’ll have to meet our price. That’s our only consideration now. I got a call this morning from a New York organization called Pro Scouts. They want to be Artie’s agent for 10 percent. Maybe I’ll let them do the dealing for us. Who knows? And if nobody comes up with the cash, Artie can go to college on a scholarship and then step into my business when he gets out. He can make $20,000 a year with no problem, so why should he sign a contract for nothing, huh? Why?”

Art DeFilippis fanned his twenty-first batter, and his players mobbed him, as did the remaining fans. He didn’t seem to notice that there were no scouts around now, until I mentioned it to him.

“When I was younger,” he said, “I always heard stories about how the scouts took you to dinner and all. Every kid does. But none of that’s happened to me. I’ve hardly said a word to them.”

Most of the people had gone by now. I started walking across the Stamford Catholic football field toward my car, then heard a voice call out my name. I turned around to see Jeff Jones walking toward me, a huge grin on his bushy-browed face. He didn’t seem to have aged at all in the 10 years. When he stuck out his hand I hesitated for a moment, remembering all that bonus money he had sunk into me, and I felt that I should make some explanation or apology to him.

“I thought it was you,” he said, and began talking as if we hadn’t seen each other in a few days and he was eager to catch up on lost news. He asked about my parents. He said he’d always liked them, especially my mother. At first I thought it was strange he said nothing about my wife and kids, until I remembered, of course, he didn’t know about them.

I asked him why he wasn’t out to dinner with the DeFilippis boy right now, and he said he never did that anymore. “It used to be fun competing with the scouts, but now what difference does it make?” Then he added, prodding me lightly with his elbow, “And I was good at it, wasn’t I?” I noticed he didn’t stutter as much as he used to. “You know, I could never understand why you didn’t make the big leagues,” he said. “I thought for sure you would. What happened in the minors?”

“It was just one of those things,” I said. “You remember, Jeff.” He nodded, but I’m sure he didn’t.

“Yes, that’s the way things turn out. Well, I hope you saved all that bonus money. You didn’t waste it, did you?”

I told him I bought a house with it, and he nodded his head in approval.

“Good, good, I’m glad you got something out of it. I always like to see my boys do well, even if they don’t make the big leagues for old Jeff.” We had reached the parking lot. “What are you doing now?” he asked.

“I write,” I said.

“Oh, I see. So that’s why your hair is so long,” he said. “That’s all right. It’s the style today. But you must remember never to let it go to extremes. You must never go to extremes, Pat,” he said with a stern look. It was the same kind of look I remember the day I left for the minor leagues and he told me I must never do anything to embarrass him, because now I was one of “Jeff’s boys.” He had again fallen into that half-sincere, half-created tone that he had used so often with me and a thousand other boys 10 years ago.

“I’m writing a book, too,” I said. “It’s about baseball in the minors.”

“I hope you included old Jeff in the book,” he said. And when I said yes, I had, and looked away from him, it must have occurred to him that I had written something that might not have shown him in his best light.

“You treated old Jeff right in that book, didn’t you?” he said, and he put his arm on my shoulder. “I sure hope you did right by me, Pat. You know I always liked you. I had a special interest in you. . . .”

“Like a father would a son?” I said.

“Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Like a father would a son.”

And just for a moment that old charlatan had me believing he always did have a special interest in me, and I felt suddenly close to him and Jack Brown and Ray Garland and all those other old men, and I thought, damn it, Artie DeFilippis will never even know what he’s missed.

The Living Legend

Stephen Louis Dalkowski, a pitcher, signed a minor league baseball contract with Kingsport, Tenn., of the Class D Appalachian League shortly after his eighteenth birthday in 1957. He was given his unconditional release by San Jose, Calif., of the Class C California League shortly before his twenty-seventh birthday in 1966. In nine years of professional baseball, mostly in Class D and C towns like Kingsport and San Jose, Pensacola, Fla., and Aberdeen, S.D., Dalkowski won a total of 46 games, lost 80 and fashioned a lifetime 5.67 earned-run average. His best won-lost record was 8–4 with Stockton, Calif., in the California League in 1964. However, throughout much of his career, which covered 11 teams and nine leagues, Dalkowski managed records like 1–8 with an 8.13 ERA at Kingsport; 0–4 with a 12.96 ERA at Pensacola; 7–15 with a 5.14 ERA at Stockton; and 3–12 with an 8.39 ERA at Tri-Cities. Dalkowski never pitched an inning in the major leagues, and pitched only 24 innings as high as Triple A, where his record was 2–3 with a 7–12 ERA.

On May 7, 1966, shortly after his release from baseball,
The Sporting News
carried a blurred, seven-year-old photograph of Dalkowski, along with a brief story headlined
Living Legend Released
. The first sentence of that story read as follows: “Steve Dalkowski, a baseball legend in his own time, apparently has thrown his last professional pitch.” The story was not considered particularly dramatic at the time since few people even on the periphery of organized baseball had not heard of Steve Dalkowski.

To understand how Dalkowski, a chunky little man with thick glasses and a perpetually dazed expression, became a “legend in his own time,” it is necessary to go back 10 years to a hot spring day in Miami, Fla. Dalkowski is pitching batting practice for the Baltimore Orioles while Ted Williams watches curiously from behind the batting cage. After a few minutes Williams picks up a bat and steps into the cage. Reporters and players, who had been watching with only casual interest, move quickly around the cage to watch this classic confrontation. Williams takes three level, disciplined practice swings, cocks his bat and then motions with his head for Dalkowski to deliver the ball. Dalkowski goes into his spare pump. His right leg rises a few inches off the ground. His left arm pulls back and then flicks out from the side of his body like an attacking cobra. There is a sharp crack as his wrist snaps the ball toward the plate. Then silence. The ball does not rip through the air like most fastballs, but seems to just reappear silently in the catcher’s glove as if it had somehow decomposed and then recomposed itself without anyone having followed its progress.

The catcher holds the ball for a few seconds. It is just a few inches under Williams’ chin. Williams looks back at the ball, then out at Dalkowski, who is squinting at him. Then he drops his bat and steps out of the cage.

The writers immediately ask Williams how fast Steve Dalkowski really is. Williams, whose eyes were said to be so sharp that he could count the stitches on a baseball as it rotated toward the plate, says that he did not see the pitch, and that Steve Dalkowski is the fastest pitcher he ever faced and probably who ever lived, and that he would be damned if he would ever face him again if he could help it.

Ted Williams was not the only baseball authority who claimed Dalkowski was the fastest pitcher of all time. Paul Richards, Harry Brecheen, Earl Weaver and just about anyone who had ever seen the New Britain, Conn., native throw, claimed he was faster than Feller and Johnson and any of the fabled old-timers. The Orioles, who owned Dalkowski from 1957 to 1965, sent him to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1958 to have Army equipment test the speed of his fastball. The fastest pitcher ever evaluated by such equipment was Bob Feller, whose fastball was clocked at 98.6 mph. On the day Dalkowski threw into the machine, his fastball was clocked at 93.5 mph. But Feller had thrown his fastball from a high mound that added 5 to 8 mph to its speed; Dalkowski had thrown from level ground since there was no mound available. Also, Dalkowski had pitched a game the day before, and that alone would have accounted for at least a 5 to 10 mph loss in speed. And finally, Dalkowski was literally exhausted by the time the machine clocked his fastball because he had to pitch for 40 minutes before he had thrown a fastball within range of the machine’s measuring device. All things considered, it was conservatively assumed that Dalkowski’s fastball, when right, traveled at well over 105 mph, truly faster than that of anyone who ever lived.

But it was precisely his wildness, almost as much as his speed, that made Dalkowski “a legend in his own time” and eventually prevented him from ever reaching the majors. In nine years of minor league pitching he walked 1354 batters in 995 innings. He struck out 1396. In his last year of high school Dalkowski pitched a no-hitter in which he walked 18 batters and fanned the same number. In 1957 at Kingsport, he led the Appalachian League with 129 walks, 39 wild pitches and 121 strikeouts in 62 innings. He once walked 21 batters in a Northern League game, and in another contest he struck out 21 batters—both league records. In 1960 Dalkowski set a California League record by granting 262 walks in 170 innings. He fanned the same number. In 1961 he set a Northwest League record of 196 walks in 103 innings while striking out 150 batters.

Stories of Dalkowski’s speed and wildness would pass from one minor league town to another, each player picking them up, embellishing them and passing them on, as if by the mere act of embellishing he was in a sense sharing in those feats. There was the story of the hapless batter whose ear was torn off by a Dalkowski fastball; or the home-plate umpire who was knocked unconscious for 30 minutes by a Dalkowski fastball; or the outfield fence that was splintered by a Dalkowski fastball thrown on a bet; or the brick wall demolished; or the home-plate screen ripped to shreds, scattering all the fans and convincing them to never again sit behind home plate when Steve Dalkowski pitched. And then there was the Williams’ story. Players who knew of Dalkowski always ended with the Williams’ story, as if that was the one supreme compliment to his talent.

Inevitably the stories outgrew the man until it was no longer possible to distinguish fact from fiction. But no matter how exaggerated the stories might have become, the fact still remained that Dalkowski struck out and walked more batters per nine-inning game than any other professional pitcher. There was also considerable proof that he was the fastest hurler who ever lived. And it was because of his blinding speed that the Baltimore Orioles put up with him through eight years of little or no success. Every spring the Orioles’ management would conduct a new experiment with Dalkowski in an attempt to discipline his talent. They made him throw fastballs at a wooden target. They made him throw on the sidelines until exhausted, under the assumption that once his lively arm was tired and his speed was muted slightly it would be easier for him to throw strikes. They bought him thick Captain Video-type glasses to correct his faulty 20-80, 20-60 vision. They made him pitch batting practice every day for two straight weeks in the hope that facing a batter would help guide his pitches. And finally they made him throw only 15 feet away from his catcher, believing that once he threw strikes from that distance, the distance could be gradually increased to 60 feet, 6 inches, from where he would also throw strikes.

After twenty minutes of throwing at a wooden target the target was in splinters. No matter how long he threw on the sidelines his arm never got tired. His thick glasses only served to further terrify already terrified batters. No matter how long he pitched batting practice he still had trouble throwing the ball inside the cage, let alone over the plate. And after two weeks of throwing at a distance of only 15 feet, Dalkowski could still no more throw a strike from that distance than he could from 60 feet, 6 inches.

In the end, all the experiments failed. There were a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that if ever a man was truly possessed by his talent it was Stephen Louis Dalkowski.

“When I signed Steve in 1957,” said Baltimore scout Frank McGowan, “he was a shy, introverted kid with absolutely no confidence in himself. Even in high school he was so wild he would walk the ball park. But we gave him a $4000 bonus, which was the limit at the time, because Harry Brecheen said he had the best arm he ever saw. It’s possible, too, that Paul Richards might have given Steve a little something under the table because he was so anxious to get hold of him. Everyone knew it was a gamble, he was so wild, but we all thought he was worth it. Now that Steve’s out of baseball I feel there were three things in particular that prevented him from making the big leagues. The first was that boy he almost killed in Kingsport. He hit him on the side of the head with a fastball and the boy never played ball again. They say he was never quite right in the head after that, either.

“Following that incident Steve was always terrified of hitting somebody. One year Clyde King, his manager at Rochester, put a batter on each side of the plate and made Steve throw to them both simultaneously. He threw five of six strikes right down the middle, possibly because he knew that if he threw the ball either left or right it would hit one of them.

“Another reason he didn’t make it was that he was too easily led. He seemed always to be looking for someone to follow, and in the minors he followed the wrong guys. He was never a bad kid, really, but he liked to drink a little, and raise hell at night, which certainly never helped his career. One year I remember we sent him to Pensacola to play under Lou Fitzgerald, an easy-going old-timer. And who do you think Steve got hooked up with down there? Bo Belinsky and Steve Barber. That had to be the three fastest, wildest left-handers any manager had to cope with—both on the field and off. Yet I think Steve could have made it if he was ever led by the right guys. Once we put Harry Brecheen behind the mound to talk to him on every pitch. Steve threw nothing but strikes. But the minute Harry walked off, Steve was as wild as ever.

“And finally I think the Orioles made too much of a fuss over Steve in his early years. They were always billing him as the ‘fastest pitcher alive,’ and I think the publicity hurt him. Stuff like taking him to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and conducting all those experiments. I think he would have been a lot better off if they had just left him alone in the minors and let him move up by himself. . . . But even that might not have done it, I guess. What it all boiled down to was the fact that Steve never made the major leagues because he never did learn to control Steve Dalkowski—period.”

But if he failed to discipline himself and his talent, Dalkowski made a herculean effort. He never took exception to the many experiments the Orioles’ performed with him, even though at times he doubted them. Brecheen once said that if ever a man deserved to make the major leagues it was Dalkowski, “because of the determined way he went at pitching and the cooperation he always showed in those long hours of work.”

Many people close to Dalkowski felt he suffered those experiments too good-naturedly, that he should have gotten angry and rebelled against them. But rather than become angry with all the interest in him, he seemed bewildered and confused by it. No matter how many hours he worked in the distant bullpens of Aberdeen and Kingsport and Pensacola, Dalkowski never really seemed a part of the experiments. He always gave the impression that he viewed them from outside himself, as if they were being conducted not on him personally but on a body that belonged only partly to him and partly to a lot of other people who had a stake in him.

Furthermore, people said, he never got angry enough for success. If he could only begrudge someone else their success, if he could only become mad at those with inferior talent who surpassed him, it might inspire him to succeed. But he said he never envied anyone else’s success, and then added, “I never met a ballplayer I didn’t like.”

“No one ever wanted to succeed more than Steve,” said Ken Cullum, a friend of Dalkowski’s from New Britain. “He would run through a brick wall if he had to. But he always seemed afraid that his success would have to come at the expense of someone else. And he could never hurt anyone like that.”

By 1962 the Orioles had tired of Dalkowski. The previous year they had come up with four young pitchers, Steve Barber, Chuck Estrada, Milt Pappas and Jack Fisher, who together had won 56 games, and now they no longer worried about Dalkowski’s progress. He was shipped to Elmira of the Class A Eastern League, and immediately the front office began scanning their lower minor league rosters to see where they could ship him next once he became insufferable to manager Earl Weaver. But under Weaver, an intense, roly-poly little man, Dalkowski began to throw strikes—relatively speaking. For the first time in his career he walked fewer batters (114) than innings pitched (160), while still striking out a substantial number (192). He won 7 games, lost 10, and posted a respectable 3.04 ERA. He led the league in shutouts with 6, and he also completed 8 of 19 starts, the most of his career. The following spring with the Orioles at Miami, Dalkowski said Earl Weaver had given him confidence.

“I felt that Steve had been given every tip on control that was ever known,” said Weaver. “I knew that the smartest pitching coaches in baseball had worked with him. There wasn’t anything I could tell him that he hadn’t heard a hundred times before. The one thing I did try to do was keep quiet.”

During the spring of 1963 Dalkowski’s progress was the talk of the Orioles’ training camp. In a two-inning relief stint against the Dodgers he fanned five and gave up no hits or walks. Harry Brecheen said that Dalkowski was just the short reliever the Orioles had been looking for, and then added: “The boy has come a long way. There is no doubt of his improvement. He is more settled as an individual and he deserves to make it. Steve is a good kid.”

Toward the end of spring training Dalkowski was interviewed by a reporter who asked him if all the strenuous activity he had placed on his arm had ever damaged it through the years. Dalkowski admitted that he had lost a little off his fastball at the age of 23, but then said, no, he had never really had a sore arm in his life. A few days later in an exhibition game, Dalkowski fielded a bunt and threw off-balance to first base. He got the runner, but also pinched a muscle in his elbow. He was never the same pitcher again.