The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (123 page)

Another ninth, in another city. The Kansas City Royals are leading the visiting Yankees, 5–2, and Royals manager Dick Howser has brought in his prime short reliever, Dan Quisenberry, to finish up. Quisenberry is a slim, angular right-hander, with sharp shoulders and a peaceable, almost apologetic mien. He has pinkish-red hair, a brushy ochre mustache, and round pale-blue eyes. Nothing about his looks is as surprising as his pitching delivery, however. He is a true submariner—a man “from down under,” in baseball parlance—and every pitch of his is performed with a lurching downward thrust of his arm and body, which he must follow with a little bobbing hop off toward third base in order to recover his balance. At perigee, ball and hand descend to within five or six inches of the mound dirt, but then they rise abruptly; the hand—its fingers now spread apart-finished up by his left shoulder, while the ball, plateward-bound at a sensible, safe-driving-award clip, reverses its earlier pattern, rising for about three-quarters of its brief trip and then drooping downward and (much of the time) sidewise as it passes the batter at knee level or below. One way or another, the pitch almost always finds part of the strike zone, but most people in the stands—even the home-town regulars in Royals Stadium—are so caught up in the pitcher’s eccentricities that they don’t always notice this. The oversight is forgivable, since Quisenberry is not a strikeout pitcher. But he doesn’t walk batters, either; in his six hundred and thirty-five major-league innings (going into this season), he had surrendered a total of eighty-four bases on balls—one for each seven and a half innings’ work, which for him comes out at about one walk every fourth game—and had plunked only two batters with pitched balls. Yet Quisenberry when pitching invites more similes than stats. His ball in flight suggests the kiddie-ride concession at a county fairgrounds—all swoops and swerves but nothing there to make a mother nervous; if you’re standing close to it, your first response is a smile. At other times, the trajectory of the pitch looks like an expert trout fisherman’s sidearm cast that is meant to slip the fly just under an overhanging clump of alders. The man himself—Quis in mid-delivery—brings visions of a Sunday-picnic hurler who has somehow stepped on his own shoelace while coming out of his windup, or perhaps an eager news photographer who has suddenly dropped to one knee to snap a celebrity debarking from a limousine.

In the Yankee game, Quisenberry dismisses his first batter, the towering Dave Winfield, on a harmless bouncer to short. The next hitter, Dan Pasqua, who bats left-handed, numbs a Quisenberry sinker down toward third base, where the spinning ball worms its way out of George Brett’s glove for an infield single. Ron Hassey, another lefty swinger, takes a ball and then jumps on a high delivery—an up pitch: a mistake—and smashes the ball to deep center field, where Willie Wilson pulls it in with his back almost against the fence. Willie Randolph steps up to bat, swings and misses on a sinker, takes two balls, and then whacks a sharp single to center, sending Pasqua scooting around to third. The tying run, in the person of Mike Pagliarulo, comes up to the plate, to the accompaniment of some nervous stirrings in the Kansas City stands. Batting left-handed, he fouls off the first pitch, swings at a sinkerball that slips away from him and off the outer edge of the plate, takes a ball, and then stands immobile while another sinker, again backing at the last instant, catches the inside corner, low, for a called third strike. End of game. The crowd, although happy about the win, does not exactly split the sky in honor of this pitching performance, but in most ways it has been a typical outing for Dan Quisenberry: a couple of hits—one of them a half-hit bouncer to the wrong side of the infield—two solid pokes, one of which went for an out; no walks; no runs (one run would have been almost more like it); and another game safely put away. Quisenberry experienced some uncharacteristic pitching difficulties in the first half of this season—the game just set forth was played on July 23rd—but the official save that went into the record books that evening was his twentieth of the year, which put him ahead of all other American League relief pitchers in that department. It was his third save in four days, in a little string that eventually added up to six saves in six consecutive appearances. Last year, Quisenberry had forty-four saves in all, the most in his league, and figured in sixty percent of the Royals’ winning games; the year before that, he set an all-time record with forty-five saves, although a National League pitcher, Bruce Sutter—then with the Cardinals, now with the Braves—tied that figure in 1984.

Baseball’s save rule (to get this out of the way, once and for all) has grown in significance in recent seasons, along with the rise of the short-relief specialist—that is, the man who comes in late in the game, sometimes only to nail down the last out or two (or
not
nail them down, as the case may be)—yet there are very few fans who can say for a certainty what constitutes an official save. The ruling states that the pitcher who is granted an official save when the game is over—it appears as an “(S)” next to his name in the box score—must be the finishing pitcher but not the official winning pitcher. He must furthermore pass one of three additional qualifications:

(a)He enters the game with a lead of no more than three runs and pitches at least one inning, or

(b)he enters the game, regardless of the count on an incumbent batter, with the potential tying run on base or at bat or on deck, or

(c)he pitches effectively for at least three innings.

That “effectively” is a judgment call, made by the official scorer, and there is sometimes hot disagreement about it up in the press box. There is also general disagreement about the value of saves as the ultimate yardstick of a relief man’s work. Certain pitchers—Quisenberry is among them—almost never come into a game when their club is trailing, and therefore tend to accumulate more saves by the end of the year than some of their rivals. Some variously weighted combination of saves, earned-run average, and games won probably constitutes the fairest means of measurement, but here, as in other parlous areas of the pastime, the final word must be left to the writers and the fans, and to the thousand late-night logomachies.

Since Quisenberry adopted his submarine style, at the beginning of the 1980 season, his second in the majors, he has notched a hundred and seventy-five saves—twenty more than Sutter’s total for those five years and forty-five more saves than those accumulated by Goose Gossage, the ex-Yankee and present Padre star, who may be recognized as the model for our classic fireballing bullpen ace in the imaginary inning above. The elegant and obdurate Rollie Fingers, who still performs for the Milwaukee Brewers at the age of thirty-nine, after experiencing some recent serious arm and back difficulties (he sat out the entire season of 1983), he compiled three hundred and twenty-four lifetime saves, the most among all relievers, past or present, but his best five seasons, even when counted non-consecutively, do not bring him within twenty saves of Quisenberry’s work in the nineteen-eighties. No one else comes close. By a different measurement—saves plus wins—Quisenberry, with a total of two hundred and eight in this decade, is also well ahead of the pack. Quisenberry himself, a habitually modest man, would argue with some of these figures—with their significance, above all—but we must embarrass him by suggesting that he may just be on his way to being the most successful practitioner of his odd calling that the game has ever seen.

Prototypes have a burrlike hold on our baseball memories, and most of us, thinking back to great relief pitchers of the past, will first come up with some Gossage-like dominator like Dick Radatz, the monster-tall Red Sox flinger who struck out more than one batter per inning in a short career back in the sixties; or, a decade earlier, the dangerously nearsighted Ryne Duren (his first warmup pitch, preserving an image, was often a ten-foot-high bullet to the backstop), who enjoyed two splendid seasons with the Yankees before flaming out; or perhaps even Al Hrabosky, the bearded, angry-looking performer of the Cardinals, Royals, and Braves over the past decade, who habitually turned his back on the batter between pitches while he muttered imprecations and inspirational messages to himself, and then strode balefully toward the rubber like a Bolshevik entering the Union League Club. There is no shortage of thrilling fastballers among today’s short-relief specialists—the Cubs’ Lee Smith and the Yankees’ Dave Righetti come to mind at once—but over the years the lonely specialty has in fact attracted a whole character actors’ guild of different styles, quirks, looks, and dimensions. In my boyhood, relief pitchers seemed fatherly and calming; they were called “wily” in the papers. Johnny Murphy
(Fordham
Johnny Murphy) sometimes strolled in from the Yankees bullpen (then a shadowed alley between the grandstand and the bleachers in right field) to set things right in the late afternoons, especially if Lefty Gomez had started the game. Hugh Casey, toiling for the Dodgers in the nineteen-forties, ran up a lifetime winning percentage of .718 (fifty-one wins and twenty losses), which has yet to be topped by anybody out of the bullpen. Pitching against the Yankees in the fourth game of the 1941 World Series (I was there, sitting in the Ebbets Field upper deck in deep left field), Casey threw a spitball to Tommy Henrich that struck him out, swinging, to end the game—except that the ball, diving into the dirt, eluded catcher Mickey Owen, allowing Henrich to gain first base. Down a run, the Yankees rallied instantly for a 7–4 victory. A few years later, the ebullient Joe Page had become the celebrated Yankees stopper—the first young, or
young-looking
(he was almost thirty when he found his proper niche in the pastime), relief man in my experience. Jim Konstanty—a stolid, blue-collar sort of pitcher—won sixteen games and saved twenty-two, all in relief, for the Whiz Kid Phillies of 1950, and was the surprise starter in the first game of the World Series that fall; he lasted eight innings, giving up one lone run, but lost to the Yankees’ Vic Raschi’s two-hitter. Elroy Face, a forkballer, who looked almost dwarflike on the mound at five feet eight and a hundred and fifty pounds, pitched in eight hundred and forty-eight games (mostly for the Pirates) in the fifties and sixties, and accounted for a hundred and ninety-three saves; he was 18–1 in 1959—to this day, it scarcely seems possible—with all the decisions coming in relief. Once you start thinking about them, the relievers, the great extras, begin to come back in a flood: Ron Perranoski, the shining Dodger Stadium favorite, who went 16–3, with twenty-one saves and a 1.67 earned-run average, in 1963; Tug McGraw (“You Gotta
Believe!),
who pitched so stoutly and stood for so much in two unexpected Mets pennants and one glorious Phillies World Championship; Mike Marshall, the chunky, hard-burning righthander (he had a graduate degree in motion studies, or “kinesiology”), who worked for nine clubs during a fourteen-year career and twice somehow led his league in relief wins, losses, and saves, all in the same year; and Dick Hall, a lesser nova, perhaps, but a stalwart in innumerable significant games for the rising young Orioles of the sixties (he was a Swarthmore graduate who had started as an outfielder with the Pirates, and his cramped, twitchy pitching delivery, somebody once wrote, reminded you of a man feeling under a bed for a lost collar button). Kent Tekulve, the Pittsburgh praying mantis (he went over to the Phillies this spring), saved thirty-one games for the Pirates in 1978 and again in 1979; his skulking, up-from-under mound style much resembled the Quisenberry mode—for reasons we shall get to in a moment. All these, then, and Hoyt Wilhelm, too. A silent, withdrawn man with an odd, twisted tilt to his neck and head, Wilhelm did not win a job in the majors until he was twenty-nine, but then stayed on, with the Giants and eight other clubs, for twenty years. A knuckleballer first, last, and always, he threw the pitch with so little strain to his arm and psyche that he was able to establish lifetime records in five different pitching categories, including most wins in relief (one hundred and twenty-four) and most games pitched (one thousand and seventy—eighty-three more than his nearest rival, Lindy McDaniel, and a hundred and sixty-four more than Cy Young). He went into the Hall of Fame this summer—sailed in, with all seams showing.

It shouldn’t be surprising that so many vivid and stout-hearted bullpen performers come flooding forth in this fashion once we pull the cork, but I still think that relief pitchers are slighted or faintly patronized in most fans’ and writers’ consideration. Ask somebody to pick an all-time or all-decade lineup for his favorite team or for one of the leagues and the chances are that the list will not include a late-inning fireman. Even with the best of the short men, the brevity of their patchwork, Band-Aid labors; their habitual confinement in faraway (and often invisible) compounds during the long early stretches and eventful midpassages of the game; their languorous, cap-over-eyes postures of ennui or lassitude—are they
asleep
out there?—for the first two or three hours of the event; their off-putting predilection of disorder and incipient disaster; the rude intrusiveness of their extroverted pitching mannerisms into the staid game-party; their reckless way of seizing glory, or else horridly throwing away a game nearly in hand, all in the space of a few pitches—all these confirm some permanent lesser status for them: scrubs, invisible weavers, paramedics, handymen. The slur persists, I think, in spite of clear evidence that relief men—the best of them, at least—are among the most highly rewarded and most sought-after stars of contemporary baseball. Five short-relief specialists—the Dodgers’ Mike Marshall in 1974, the Yankees’ Sparky Lyle in 1977, Bruce Sutter in 1979, Rollie Fingers in 1981, and the Tigers’ Willie Hernandez last year (he appeared in eighty games for the World Champions, with thirty-two saves and an earned-run average of 1.92)—have won the Cy Young award in their leagues, and Fingers and Hernandez also walked off with Most Valuable Player honors in those same years.

Scouts and players, managers and writers whom I consulted on the matter this summer were, nearly unanimous in their selections of the best relief pitchers ever. They placed Fingers at the top of the list and then, in differing order, named Sutter, Gossage, and Sparky Lyle (who retired in 1982 with two hundred and thirty-eight lifetime saves). Almost none of them mentioned Quisenberry, and it seemed peculiar that when I brought up his name nearly everyone said something like “Oh, yes—I guess you’d have to put him in there somewhere, wouldn’t you? He’s a strange one, but he sure gets the job done.” I couldn’t tell from this whether it was Quisenberry’s gently weird pitching style or his refreshing off-the-field manner (he is quick and comical, and much given to startlingly free-form images and put-ons during interviews) that has caused this persistent oversight, but I knew by now that it would come as no surprise to Quis himself, who has yet to win a Cy Young Award, even though he outpolled Hernandez last year by winning both the Rolaids and the
Sporting News
“Fireman of the Year” awards in the American League, each for the third straight year. If there is anything to my theory that relief pitchers are still a bit patronized in baseball because of their oddity, then here, too, Quisenberry belongs up near the head of the line.