The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (70 page)

He fell into a slump, which led to an irreparable loss of confidence.

This is circular, and perhaps more a description of symptoms than of the disability itself. However, it is a fact that a professional athlete—and most especially a baseball player—faces a much more difficult task in attempting to regain lost form than an ailing businessman, say, or even a troubled artist; no matter how painful his case has been, the good will of his associates or the vagaries of critical judgment matter not at all when he tries to return. All that matters is his performance, which will be measured, with utter coldness, by the stats. This is one reason that athletes are paid so well, and one reason that fear of failure—the unspeakable “choking”—is their deepest and most private anxiety. Steve Blass passed over my questions about whether he had ever felt this kind of fear when on the mound. “I don’t think pitchers, by their nature, allow themselves to think that way,” he said. “To be successful, you turn that kind of thought away.” On the other hand, he often said that two or three successive well-pitched games probably would have been all he needed to dissipate the severe tension that affected his performances once things began to go badly for him. They never came.

The remaining pieces of evidence (if, indeed, they have any part in the mystery) have been recounted here. Blass is a modest man, both in temperament and in background, and his success and fame were quite sudden and, to some degree, unexpected. His salary at the beginning of 1971—the year of his two great Series wins—was forty thousand dollars; two years later it was ninety thousand, and there were World Series and playoff checks on top of that. Blass was never thought of as one of the great pitchers of his time, but in the late sixties and early seventies he was probably the most consistent starter on the Pirate staff; it was, in fact, a staff without stars. On many other teams, he would have been no more than the second- or third-best starter, and his responsibilities, real and imagined, would have been less acute.

I took some of these hard questions to Blass’s colleagues. Danny Murtaugh and Bill Virdon (who is now the Yankees’ pilot) both expressed their admiration for Blass but said they had no idea what had happened to him. They seemed a bit brusque about it, but then I realized, of course, that ballplayers are forever disappearing from big-league dugouts; the manager’s concern is with those who remain—with today’s lineup. “I don’t know the answer,” Bill Virdon told me in the Yankee clubhouse. “If I did, I’d go get Steve to pitch for me. He sure won a lot of big games for us on the Pirates.”

Joe Brown said, “I’ve tried to keep my distance and not to guess too much about what happened. I’m not a student of pitching and I’m not a psychologist. You can tell a man what to do, but you can’t
make
him do it. Steve is an outstanding man, and you hate to quit on him. In this business, you bet on character. Big-league baseball isn’t easy, yet you can stand it when things are going your way. But Steve Blass never had a good day in baseball after this thing hit him.”

Blass’s best friends in baseball are Tony Bartirome, Dave Giusti, and Nelson King (who, along with Bob Prince, was part of the highly regarded radio-and-television team that covered the Pirate games).

Tony Bartirome
(He is forty-three years old, dark-haired, extremely neat in appearance. He was an infielder before he became a trainer, and played one season in the majors
—
with the Pirates, in 1952):
“Steve is unique physically. He has the arm of a twenty-year-old. Not only did he never have a sore arm but he never had any of the stiffness and pain that most pitchers feel on the day after a game. He was always the same, day after day. You know, it’s very important for a trainer to know the state of mind and the feelings of his players. What a player is thinking is about eighty percent of it. The really strange thing is that after this trouble started, Steve never showed any feelings about his pitching. In the old days, he used to get mad at himself after a bad showing, and sometimes he threw things around in the clubhouse. But after this began, when he was taken out of a game he only gave the impression that he was happy to be out of there—relieved that he no longer had to face it that day. Somehow, he didn’t show any emotion at
all.
Maybe it was like his never having a sore arm. He never talked in any detail about his different treatments—the psychiatry and all. I think he felt he didn’t need any of that—that at any moment he’d be back where he was, the Blass of old, and that it all was up to him to make that happen.”

Dave Giusti
(He is one of the great relief pitchers in baseball. He earned a BA and an MA in physical education at Syracuse. He is thirty-five
—
dark hair, piercing brown eyes, and a quiet manner):
“Steve has the perfect build for a pitcher—lean and strong. He is remarkably open to all kinds of people, but I think he has closed his mind to his inner self. There are central areas you can’t infringe on with him. There is no doubt that during the past two years he didn’t react to a bad performance the way he used to, and you have to wonder why he couldn’t apply his competitiveness to his problem. Karen used to bawl out me and Tony for not being tougher on him, for not doing more. Maybe I should have come right out and said he seemed to have lost his will to fight, but it’s hard to shock somebody, to keep bearing in on him. You’re afraid to lose a friend, and you want to go easy on him because he is your friend.

“Last year, I went through something like Steve’s crisis. The first half of the season, I was atrocious, and I lost all my confidence, especially in my fastball. The fastball is my best pitch, but I’d get right to the top of my delivery and then something would take over, and I’d know even before I released the ball that it wasn’t going to be in the strike zone. I began worrying about making big money and not performing. I worried about not contributing to the team. I worried about being traded. I thought it might be the end for me. I didn’t know how to solve my problem, but I knew I
had
to solve it. In the end, it was talking to people that did it. I talked to everybody, but mostly to Joe Brown and Danny and my wife. Then, at some point, I turned the corner. But it was talking that did it, and my point is that Steve can’t talk to people that way. Or won’t.

“Listen, it’s tough out there. It’s hard. Once you start maintaining a plateau, you’ve got to be absolutely sure what your goals are.”

Nellie King
(A former pitcher with the Pirates. He is friendly and informal, with an attractive smile. He is very tall
—
six-six. Forty-seven years old):
“Right after that terrible game in Atlanta, Steve told me that it had felt as if the whole world was pressing down on him while he was out there. But then he suddenly shut up about it, and he never talked that way again. He covered it all up. I think there
are
things weighing on him, and I think he may be so angry inside that he’s afraid to throw the ball. He’s afraid he might kill somebody. It’s only nickel psychology, but I think there’s a lost kid in Steve. I remembered that after the ’71 Series he said, ‘I didn’t think I was as good as this.’ He seemed truly surprised at what he’d done. The child in him is a great thing—we’ve all loved it—and maybe he was suddenly afraid he was losing it. It was being forced out of him.

“Being good up here is
so
tough—people have no idea. It gets much worse when you have to repeat it: ‘We know you’re great. Now go and do that again for me.’ So much money and so many people depend on you. Pretty soon you’re trying so hard that you can’t function.”

I ventured to repeat Nellie King’s guesses about the mystery to Steve Blass and asked him what he thought.

“That’s pretty heavy,” he said after a moment. “I guess I don’t have a tendency to go into things in much depth. I’m a surface reactor. I tend to take things not too seriously. I really think that’s one of the things that’s
helped
me in baseball.”

A smile suddenly burst from him.

“There’s one possibility nobody has brought up,” he said. “I don’t think anybody’s ever said that maybe I just lost my control. Maybe your control is something that can just go. It’s no big thing, but suddenly it’s gone.” He paused, and then he laughed in a self-deprecating way. “Maybe that’s what I’d like to believe,” he said.

On my last morning with Steve Blass, we sat in his family room and played an imaginary ball game together—half an inning of baseball. It had occurred to me that in spite of his enforced and now permanent exile from the game, he still possessed a rare body of precise and hard-won pitching information. He still knew most of the hitters in his league, and probably as well as any other pitcher around, he knew what to pitch to them in a given situation. I had always wanted to hear a pitcher say exactly what he would throw next and why, and now I invited Blass to throw against the Cincinnati Reds, the toughest lineup of hitters anywhere. I would call the balls and strikes and hits. I promised he would have no control problems.

He agreed at once. He poured himself another cup of coffee and lit up a Garcia y Vega. He was wearing slacks and a T-shirt and an old sweater (he had a golfing date later that day), and he looked very young.

“OK,” he said. “Pete Rose is leading off—right? First of all, I’m going to try to keep him off base if I can, because they have so many tough hitters coming up. They can bury you before you even get started. I’m going to try to throw strikes and not get too fine. I’ll start him off with a slider away. He has a tendency to go up the middle and I’ll try to keep it a bit away.”

Rose, I decided, didn’t offer. It was ball one.

“Now I’ll throw him a sinking fastball, and still try to work him out that way. The sinking fastball tends to tail off just a little.”

Rose fouled it into the dirt.

“Well, now we come back with another slider, and I’ll try to throw it inside. That’s just to set up another slider
outside.”

Rose fouled that one as well.

“We’re ahead one and two now—right?” Blass said. “Well, this early in the game I wouldn’t try to throw him that slow curve—that big slop off-speed pitch. I’d like to work on that a couple of times first, because it’s early and he swings so well. So as long as I’m ahead of him, I’ll keep on throwing him sliders—keep going that way.”

Rose took another ball, and then grounded out on a medium-speed curveball.

Joe Morgan stood in, and Blass puffed on his cigar and looked at the ceiling.

“Joe Morgan is strictly a fastball hitter, so I want to throw him a
bad
fastball to start him off,” he said. “I’ll throw it in the dirt to show it to him—get him geared to that kind of speed. Now, after ball one, I’ll give him a medium-to-slow curveball and try to get it over the plate—just throw it for a strike.”

Morgan took: one and one.

“Now I throw him a
real
slow curveball—a regular rainbow. I’ve had good luck against him with that sort of stuff.”

And so it went. Morgan, I decided, eventually singled to right on a curve in on the handle—a lucky hit—but then Blass retired his next Cincinnati hitter, Dan Driessen, who popped out on a slider. Blass laid off slow pitches here, so Sanguillen would have a chance to throw out Morgan if he was stealing.

Johnny Bench stood in, with two out.

“Morgan won’t be stealing, probably,” Blass said. “He won’t want to take the bat out of Bench’s hands.” He released another cloud of cigar smoke, thinking hard. “Well, I’ll start him out with a good, tough fastball outside. I’ve got to work very carefully to him, because when he’s hot he’s capable of hitting it out anytime.”

Ball one.

“Well, the slider’s only been fair today.… I’ll give him a slider, but away—off the outside.”

Swinging strike. Blass threw another slider, and Bench hit a line single to left, moving Morgan to second. Tony Perez was the next batter.

“Perez is not a good high, hard fastball hitter,” Blass said. “I’ll begin him with that pitch, because I don’t want to get into any more trouble with the slider and have him dunk one in. A letter-high fastball, with good mustard on it.”

Perez took a strike.

“Now I’ll do it again, until I miss—bust him up and in. He has a tendency to go after that kind of pitch. He’s an exceptional offspeed hitter, and will give himself up with men on base—give up a little power to get that run in.”

Perez took, for a ball, and then Blass threw him an intentional ball—a very bad slider inside. Perez had shortened up on the bat a little, but he took the pitch. He then fouled off a fastball, and Blass threw him another good fastball, high and inside, and Perez struck out, swinging, to end the inning.

“Pretty good inning,” I said. “Way to go.” We both laughed.

“Yes, you know that
exact
sequence has happened to Perez many times,” Blass said. “He shortens up and then chases the pitch up here.”

He was animated. “You know, I can almost
see
that fastball to Perez, and I can see his bat going through it, swinging through the pitch and missing,” he said. “That’s a good feeling. That’s one of the concepts of Dr. Harrison’s program, you know—visualization. When I was pitching well, I was doing that very thing. You get so locked in, you see yourself doing things before they happen. That’s what people mean when they say you’re in the groove. That’s what happened in that World Series game, when I kept throwing that big slop curveball to Boog Powell, and it really ruined him. I must have thrown it three out of four pitches to him, and I just
knew
it was going to be there. There’s no doubt about it—no information needed. The crowd is there, this is the World Series, and all of a sudden you’re locked into something. It’s like being plugged into a computer. It’s ‘Gimme the ball,
boom!
Click, click, click …
shoom!’
It’s that good feeling. You’re just flowing easy.”

—
September 1975

T
HE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS
, it seems, are about to be sold to some Japanese businessmen. The news, which appeared in the
Times
late last month, was somehow both startling and boring—instant antipodal emotions that only stories about quintuplets or the business side of sports arouse in me. The
Times’
account was a blurry, hedging affair, beginning with a denial by the Giants’ front office of the reported deal, followed by several paragraphs explaining why it probably would go through. It was generally known, of course, that the club has been in financial difficulties for several years, and earlier this summer its president, Horace C. Stoneham, announced that his controlling share of the National Exhibition Company (which is the team’s florid, nineteenth-century corporate handle) was up for sale. A San Francisco-based group, headed by a real-estate man named Robert A. Lurie and including the National League president, Chub Feeney, who is a nephew of Stoneham’s, and Bill Rigney, a former Giant manager, had been talking with Stoneham, but the Japanese offer of seventeen million dollars—for the club, its minor-league affiliates, and some baseball and hotel properties at the Giants’ spring-training headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona—is apparently a good deal higher than any other bids so far.
*
The sale, in any case, will require the approval of the other National League owners, who will vote on the matter sometime after the World Series.