The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (128 page)

Earl Weaver
(he came back to manage the Orioles again this summer—his sixteenth year on the job; his winning percentage of .596 is the fifth-best among all managers ever):
He doesn’t get the ballots because he ain’t overpowering. And I guess a lot of people figure that left-handed hitters are going to get to him sooner or later—only they don’t. Like any real good pitcher, he messes with the batters’ heads. He’s got that knowledge-watching where the bat is on that hitter, taking a little more or a little less off the next pitch. He’s always had a good infield to play behind him, but I think he controls those ground balls a little, too. If he throws that sinker to a left-handed hitter, it may be out of the strike zone. Quis [he pronounced it “Queeze”] don’t try to go by too many people, up. A good low-ball hitter like Brunansky, say, he still pitches him low—a little below low. That was always the theory—pitch the good low-ball hitter below low and the good high-ball hitter above high, and you’ll have success. And he’s
had
success. Good attitude and a real good arm.

The Royals struggled through the early weeks of July, at one point falling to fifth place and at another finding themselves seven and a half games behind the division-leading Angels. Then the combination of George Bretts’ hitting (he batted .538 for one July week, with eleven runs batted in), the team’s always exemplary defense, and some stout work by the Kansas City starting pitchers (the team’s set rotation of Bret Saberhagen, Charlie Leibrandt, Mark Gubicz, Bud Black, and Danny Jackson is the youngest and probably the best in the American League) began to make itself felt, and by early August the team had taken a secure hold on second place. In later weeks, the Angels and the Royals looked like a pair of championship stock cars leading the pack in the final laps of a big race, with the second-place Royals machine drafting comfortably in the lead car, inches behind the Angels, and seemingly in a position to pick the part of the track where it would slingshot its way to the fore; this happened, in fact, on Friday, September 6th, when the Royals won a doubleheader from the Brewers and took over first place at last. At this writing, they lead the Angels by two full games. Quisenberry did better and better as the summer went along, stacking up saves in little bunches and whittling away at his earned-run average. By the end of the second week in September, he had thirty-four saves—more than anyone else in his league—and his ERA of 2.24 was fifth-best (among all pitchers) in the A.L. Only his won-lost record of 7–8 (he had made the Sunday stats) gave some suggestions of his earlier struggles this year. As usual, he had appeared in more games than any other pitcher, in either league: seventy-five. He had righted himself, after all.
*

Needless to say, I was delighted by the reversal of Quisenberry’s fortunes. I caught up with him by telephone several times in midsummer, and when we last talked, early this month, he sounded euphoric. “It’s been kind of fun, the way it should be,” he said. “I don’t have to be so cerebral out there now.” He said that he had briefly resumed his romance with the knuckleball, but when Oddibe McDowell, of the Rangers, took him deep on a knuckler, late in August (a home run that cost the Royals a game), he broke off the shady relationship, at least for the present. Earlier in the campaign, he had experienced some other nasty shocks. Perhaps the most painful of all was on July 1st, when Quis came into a game at Royals Stadium against the A’s in the middle of the ninth, at a point when the visitors, down by 3–1, had put a pair of men on base with none out, and gave up an enormous three-run, game-winning homer to Dusty Baker—a cannon shot into the A’s bullpen—and heard boos from the home fans as he came off the field. (“They ought to trade me for the seven hostages left in Lebanon,” Quis said to the writers afterward. “I deserve to be locked up and they don’t.”) This occasional total public humiliation of a relief pitcher is an established occupational hazard, like the bends, and cannot be wholly avoided, but all through July it was clear to Quisenberry that he was pitching a mite higher than usual, for some reason, and was suffering in consequence. He determined to eliminate any pitch in his repertoire that crossed the plate above the batter’s knees, and worked conscientiously at that task for several games; it was the first time he could remember in his career that he had been forced to curb his sinker in this artificial, premeditated fashion. By September, though, all such strictures seemed far behind. “I’m not even thinking about throwing the ball up or down,” Quis told me. “I’m taking it for granted everything will be down. There was no particular game when this began to happen—it just came along. Now I can be an airhead again out there.”

He was joking, as usual—and was talking again, in any case, about the “dinosaur brain” condition that he hopes for when he is actually at work in a game, out there once more in the midst of hideous difficulties—but, because I knew him a little by now, I tried to resist his appealing and carefree portrait of himself. I prefer to think back to the last extended visit I had with Quisenberry, which was in Baltimore in mid-July, a few days after the All-Star Game break. The Royals were just beginning a month-long schedule of games, on the road and at home, against the dangerous American League East clubs, which would go a long way toward determining the kind of season 1985 would turn out to be for them. Nobody knew yet whether their young pitching would jell, as expected, and whether the recent wild outburst of hitting by George Brett would be sustained and could be converted into a steadier offense by the whole team, and whether the permanent installation of Hal McRae in the designated-hitter slot would solidify the Kansas City attack, and so forth. Most of all, of course, the Royals wondered about Quisenberry. He had come out of two bad patches, as we have seen, but the midseason stats (the All-Star Game is the traditional halfway point in the long season) showed that he was ten saves short of his 1984 total at the same juncture, with an earned-run average of 2.79—up from his 2.08 of mid-1984. Some other figures, put together by Kansas City
Star
reporter Tracy Ringolsby that week, were more disturbing. These were more subtle indicators, but by each set of measurements Quisenberry was well off his lifetime averages. Over the years, left-handed batters had averaged .275 batting against him, but so far this year they were hitting .335; right-handers were hitting .236 instead of their habitual .226. Since he came up, in 1979, Quisenberry had only twice seen his hits-per-innings-pitched ratio exceed one hit per inning: it was 1.05 in 1979 and 1.01 the following year. His lifetime H/IP ratio was an elegant 0.94, but so far in 1985 it stood at 1.2 hits per inning. In professional terms, he’d been running a fever, and no one was quite certain when, or if, he would ever get well.

In Baltimore, I asked Paul Splittorff how he assessed his friend’s season so far. Splittorff is pale and lean and dapper, with rimless spectacles; at thirty-eight, he looks exactly the same as he did throughout his fifteen-year career as the Royals’ prime left-handed starting pitcher.

“With Quis, there are so many little pieces that add up to such a big whole that you’re surprised something hasn’t gone wrong before this,” he said. “It’s not just his delivery but the whole thing—the complete man. But he’s got it all figured out—I really think he does. The pressures on him are so tough—you have no idea, because he doesn’t let it show. His job is the toughest on the roster, because this club is going to sink or swim with him. But he never lets that show. I’ve seen him very down after a game—there’s almost a point where you want to go and cry for him—but he doesn’t show it and he never hides. He’s superb that way. He knows he’s got to be in there the next day, and be ready for that, no matter what just happened.”

Splittorff went on to say how much he enjoyed Quisenberry, and told me that if I were a golfer Quis would be no threat: he is a sprayer, with an amazing slice. Then we went back to baseball. “He’s in his sixth year, and this is the first time he’s come under fire from the fans and the media,” Splitt said. “It’s remarkable that he’s gone this far without having a real downslide, and it’s going to be interesting to see how he handles it. It’s going to be a big point in his career. I don’t anticipate any problems for him, no matter how this year turns out. Whatever comes, he’s smart enough to handle it and he has the character he needs to survive.”

Quisenberry didn’t get into the first game of the Orioles series—the Royals lost, 8–3—and the next day I was unexpectedly called back to New York: a turn of events that ended my plans for another weekend with the Royals. I had a couple of hours that morning before I had to catch the Metroliner, however, and Quis and I spent them together. The club was staying at the Cross Keys Inn—an attractive, tree-shaded suburban hostelry on the north side of Baltimore—and Quisenberry and I visited its little shopping center, window-shopping, and then went into a bookstore. Quisenberry’s on-the-road reading this year has included Evan Connell’s biography of General Custer, “Son of the Morning Star;” the Elmore Leonard thriller “Glitz;” and “Blue Highways,” by William Least Heat Moon. But here he stopped before the juvenile shelves and then asked me in some detail what books my children had counted on when they were growing up and how much reading aloud there had been. Out in the sunshine again, he suddenly said, “You know, I really love the road. Or maybe I love-hate it. I miss Janie and the kids, but this kind of day—being quiet, for a change, and all the time you get to put in with the guys: going out to meals, the camaraderie….It’s a special part of baseball.”

In time, we sat down on a low brick terrace wall, in the dappled shade. Birds were twittering. Quis was wearing freshly pressed jeans and a gray T-shirt (ballplayers on the road are as neat as cadets). He told me which teams and players had given him the most trouble over the years—Ben Oglivie and Cecil Cooper and the Brewers, by a wide margin in all cases—but added that he always looked forward to getting back to Milwaukee to take another crack at them. “There’s also the strange thrill of giving up line drives past your ear that you didn’t really see at all—and knowing somehow they missed you,” he said.

When he went on, it was in a different tone. “It’s been strange,” he said. “Here we are in July, and I’m still telling myself ‘Keep the ball
down.’
I’ve had to do a lot more work on the side and a lot more thinking. In spring training, Gary Blaylock and I were talking about our young pitchers—we have a lot of them—and about which ones were going to be his main project this year. And then it turns out that
I’m
the project. If I don’t like this, it’s not because I expect to be great all the time—I know better than that. But I enjoy pitching the ball and getting it right. I don’t enjoy getting it wrong, or getting it half wrong or a third wrong. At the very least, I should throw the ball right, night after night.”

He sounded deeply puzzled—more troubled man I’d ever heard him.

“Do you remember that Olympics cross-country skier named Koch—Bill Koch, I think it is?” he went on. I said I did, and Quis said, “Well, in the 1984 Winter Olympics he was one of the big favorites—he’d won a medal eight years before, I think—but when his race came he didn’t do well. He finished eighteenth, or something like that, but when he got interviewed afterward he didn’t seem upset at all. He looked sort of calm and happy, and he said—I don’t remember the words exactly—he said he felt good, because he’d been at his best level in that race. He couldn’t have done better, he said, and he didn’t need a medal, because he was satisfied with his effort on that day. I’ve heard the pitcher Ray Burns say the same kind of thing, and Phil Niekro, too. Live with what you’ve got that day, they’re saying. Well, that’s the kind of athlete I hope to be. I don’t believe in fate. I’m not an advocate of good luck. I know that players get hot, just like teams get hot, and then there are times when they can’t do better than what you’re seeing. They can’t. All this year means is that I’ve got to go out and do a job when baseball life is tougher. I don’t think I should complain, because that’s what most major-league players go through every season, year in and year out. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Who’s to say what the kids of the future will say about me—will I be Mr. Normal and experience a lot of hard days from now on, or will I be a hero again? Janie said the other day that if it turns out that I’m pitching in the top third of major-league pitchers now instead of the top fifth, the way it’s been, those numbers would still be considered a good career by most people. And I know that—I know she’s right.”

He paused and then gave a little shrug.

“This summer—we’ll find out about this summer. It would be very weak of me if I couldn’t accept a whole year like this. I’m really stuck, though. I’m between a rock and a hard place. I want to have balance—I want to accept failure and accept success, and be human. But at the same time I have these unrealistic goals and ideas on the mound. So part of my fight for balance will never be answered, because I’m expecting perfection.”

Afterword: The two seasons since this account was written have been the most difficult in Dan Quisenberry’s baseball career. Almost nothing went right for him in 1986, when he finished with a 3–7 won-lost record and an earned-run average of 2.77—his highest since his first full season in the majors. He had finished up with thirty-seven saves in 1985, to lead the league in that department for the fourth consecutive year, but in 1986 he accounted for only twelve. His game appearances and innings-pitched were drastically reduced. He pitched well in patches, but the rocky stretches were longer and more noticeable: no saves in the months of May, eleven outings in July that produced no wins and three losses, and a 5.27 earned-run average. Left-handed batters rocked him with a cumulative .310 for the season. Manager Dick Howser (who left the team in July, when it was discovered that he was suffering from a malignant brain tumor) and his replacement at the helm, Mike Ferraro, stopped wheeling in Quisenberry in his accustomed closing role, and Quis, who knows that his peculiar, fine-tuned stuff cannot be counted upon unless he works regularly, felt ill-used as well as ineffectual. The world had turned upside down for him. He tried to accept this without complaint, as one would expect, but Jack Etkin, of the Kansas City
Star,
told me that the summer had been a “typhoon of emotions” for Quisenberry. His difficulties, in any case, were only one part of a horrendous season for the defending World Champion Royals, who fell into a tie for third place in their division, sixteen games behind the pennant-winning Angels; nothing, of course, affected the team as much as the loss of Howser, who died the following July.