The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (96 page)

He left the umpires for a moment and segued into the problems of setting up for the pitcher—presenting the best sort of target for each pitch. “Some pitchers want to throw to your whole body, and not just the glove,” he said. “Then if you want the pitch outside, on that far corner, you have to get yourself on out there in a way that the batter won’t notice. There’s an art in that—it takes time to learn it. You slide over at the last second—and it’s much harder to do that against a batter with an open stance, of course: somebody like Rod Carew, on our club—and you also try to get a little closer, which makes it that much tougher for him to spot you. There are some guys who can always seem to sense where you are, no matter what you do. And of course there are a few peekers, too.”

I said that he sounded disapproving.

“Well, you tell them to cut it out,” Boone said. “But if it goes on you can just say a word to your pitcher. Then you set up outside and he throws inside. That usually stops it right away, and if the batter says anything about it you just say, ‘Hey, you were
looking.’
”

But let’s finish the introductions. I remember Milt May when he was a blond, promising rookie receiver with the Pittsburgh Pirates, almost fifteen years ago. Now much of his hair has gone, and he is on the down side of a respectable, journeyman sort of career that has taken him by turns to the Astros, Tigers, White Sox, Giants, and—early last season—back to the Pirates again, where he is now a backup to the effulgent Pena. I talked to him in Arizona last spring, while he was still a Giant. Milt May, incidentally, is the son of Pinky May, an infielder with the Phillies around the Second World War. Oddly enough, Terry Kennedy is the son of Bob Kennedy, who was a major-league infielder-outfielder and later on served in various capacities, as coach, manager, and front-office executive, with, among other clubs, the Cubs, Cardinals, and Astros; and Bob Boone’s pop, Ray Boone, was a well-known American League shortstop and third baseman in his day. Maybe
not
so oddly: perhaps years of serious baseball talk at the family breakfast table adds a secret something—a dab of sagacity, say—to the Wheaties and thus turns out good catchers down the line.

Tom Haller put in a dozen years at catch for the Giants and Dodgers and Tigers. Now he runs the baseball side of things for the Giants, as V.P. for Baseball Operations. The other catchers in our group, who are leaning forward in the chairs a little restlessly over there as they wait to be heard from, are probably more familiar. The long lanky one is Carlton Fisk, and the intense fellow, smoking a cigarette, is Ted Simmons. In a
minute,
you guys—all right?

Surprisingly, there was more agreement about umpires among the panelists than about anything else. Grudging respect was what I heard for the most part, and then, after the conversation had run in that direction for a few minutes, even the grudgingness seemed to drop away. Ted Simmons, the Milwaukee Brewers veteran, described the catcher-umpire relationship in social terms. “It’s like meeting people at a cocktail party,” he said. “Some you like and some you can’t stand, but you know you have to be at least polite with everybody in order to keep things going.”

“You can beef about pitches, but you always do it when you’re walking back toward the plate from the mound—after a play maybe,” Haller put in. “You don’t turn around and do it, you know. Young catchers are always being tested by the umps, and they have to learn to take some bad calls and not say anything. Catchers who are moaning and bitching all the time really can hurt their team, but there’s such a thing as being too quiet, too. You hear an umpire say, ‘Oh, he’s a good catcher—you never hear a word of complaint out of him,’ but to me that’s a catcher who isn’t sticking up for his team out there.”

“I don’t mess with umpires,” young Terry Kennedy said. “Let ’em sleep. They say, ‘The ball missed the corner,’ and I say unwaveringly, ‘No, it
hit
the corner,’ but I’m quiet about it.” He laughed, almost helplessly.

Carlton Fisk: “Any game where there’s a lot of situational friction—all that yelling and screaming—it can suddenly be very hard on your team. Young umps and young catchers are both new kids on the block, trying to establish themselves, but in time the respect appears, and it can grow. After a while, a good umpire knows you’re not going to give him a hard time, and you start to feel he won’t squeeze you too much back there. I got along real well with Bill Haller”—he’s Tom Haller’s older brother—“who just retired. The same for Richie Garcia and Dave Phillips and Steve Palermo. I get along with Ken Kaiser, who can’t get along with a lot of players. He umpired with me in the minor leagues, so we go back a long way together. With most of them, it’s strictly professional—a ‘How’s it going?’ and then you get on with the game.”

Tom Haller: “Al Barlick was the best ball-and-strike umpire I ever worked with. He took a lot of pride in that. Others—well, Dusty Boggess was on the way out, I think, when I was coming up, and one day I’d been getting on him back there and I said something he didn’t like. The next pitch was right down the middle and I’d hardly caught it when he yelled ‘Baw-ell!’ In time, I learned. As I got older, I began to appreciate how good most of them were.”

Bob Boone: “The umpire has to be himself, so I try to be as honest with him as I can. You’re not going to fool a major-league umpire for long. If one of them asks me about a borderline pitch that went for us—a called strike, I mean—he may do it a couple of pitches later: ‘What did you think about that pitch?’ and I’ll tell him, even if I’m saying ‘Well, I thought it was a little outside’ or ‘I thought it was a little high.’ That way, he knows if I make a gripe on a pitch later on I’m not trying to steal anything from him.”

Milt May: “They respect your opinion because they know you respect them. Some days,
I’m
not seein’ the ball too well, and after the hitter’s gone I might ask, ‘Say, where was that second pitch? Did you think it was high enough?’—or whatever. I think the instant replays have made the umps look good, because it’s turned out they’re right so much of the time. Only a catcher who’s down there with them can know how hard it is. They don’t know what pitch is comin’—whether it’s meant to be a slider or a sinker, or what. That ball is
travelling
and doin’ different things, and maybe one half inch of it is going to catch the black. If there’s a hundred and forty pitches in a game, fifty of them are balls and fifty are strikes, and the other forty are so close—well,
dad-gone,
somebody’s going to be mad.”

Carlton Fisk: “If I know an umpire’s preferences, that gives me some borders to aim at. Some are notorious high-ball umps, and others have a very low strike zone. If you have a high-strike umpire and your pitcher is a sinkerball specialist, you might remind the umpire early in the game: ‘Hey, this guy’s keepin’ the ball down real good the last few games—he’s pitching real well.’ That puts him on notice. And if your pitcher is the kind that’s around the strike zone all the time he’ll always get more calls from the umpire.”

Tom Haller: “Umpires tend to be good at what a pitcher is good at because they anticipate that pitch.”

Bob Boone: “When you change leagues, the way I did, you have to learn the new umpires’ strike zones, and when you can argue and when you can’t. Paul Runge has a low strike zone—he’s going to make you swing that bat when you’re up there. He’s got a little bigger plate than some, but he’s very consistent. You certainly can’t change him. Lee Weyer has an extremely wide strike zone. Everyone knows it, and the catchers sort of count on it. Others have a smaller strike zone, and they’re known as hitters’ umpires.” (Both Runge and Weyer are National League umps, and later on, after this part of our conversation, I realize that Boone, a diplomat, has not discussed his umpire preferences in the American League, where he now goes to work.)

Milt May: “You come to appreciate a pitcher who’s always around the plate, because he’s helping himself with that ump so much. He might miss the black by an inch sometimes, but the umpire will ring it up right away, because he’s come to expect strikes from him. It’s only natural.”

Bob Boone: “The real negotiation isn’t between the catcher and the umpire—it’s between the
pitcher
and the umpire. The pitcher has to show that he can put the ball where he wants it and move it around. If he establishes that he knows where the ball is going, and that he’s not just lucking out on the corners, the umpires will be a lot more forgiving with him than they will with the man who’s all over the place and suddenly comes in with something close. A good pitcher—a Tommy John, who
lives
on the corners—sets up a rhythm with the umpire, and anything he throws will get a good long look. That’s what control is all about.”

Milt May: “The only thing that gets me upset is having two or three pitches in the same spot that are called strikes, and then you come back to that spot and the umpire misses it, just when you most needed that strike. But—well, I’d hate to call about twenty of those pitches myself.”

Bob Boone: “When I’m back there, I want my umpire to call his very best game ever. That’s the ideal.”

Every catcher exudes stability and competence—there’s something about putting on the chest protector and strapping on those shin guards that suggests a neighborhood grocer rolling up the steel storefront shutters and then setting out the merchandise to start the day—but Milt May seemed a little different from the other professionals I consulted. For some reason, I kept thinking that he and I could have played on the same team. I am much older than he is, and I never even lettered in baseball, so this was a dream of some sort. May and I talked during a Giants morning practice in Scottsdale, and he apologized to me each time he had to break off and go take his hacks in the batting cage. He was thirty-two, but he looked a bit older—or perhaps only wearier. Established catchers take on a thickness in their thighs and a careworn slope around the shoulders. Or possibly we only imagine that, from thinking about all those bent-over innings and hours—many thousands of them in the end. But May sounded young and even chirpy when he talked baseball, and up close his face was almost boyish. He hadn’t shaved yet that day, and the stubble along his chin was red-gold in the morning sunshine. At one point, he said, “I think I’m like some other catchers—if I hadn’t been able to catch I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it to the big leagues at all. Maybe you can’t run, but if you’ve got good hands and don’t mind the work you can play. Not too many people want to do it.” A bit later in the day, I noticed that when May flipped off his mask behind the plate his on-backward cap pushed his ears out a little on either side of his head. Then I understood my dream. Milt May is the kind of kid who always got to catch back when I played on pickup teams as a boy. He was big and slow, and he looked sort of funny out there, but he didn’t mind the bumps and the work and the dirt, because that way he got to play. None of the rest of us wanted the job, and most of us couldn’t have done it anyway.

That afternoon, Tom Haller and I sat on folding chairs in a front-row box in the little wooden stadium in Scottsdale and took in an early-March game between his Giants and the Seattle Mariners. Haller is a large, pleasant man, with an Irish-touched face, and a perfect companion at a game—silent for good long stretches but then quick to point out a telling little detail on the field or to bring up some play or player from the past, for comparison. He was watching his own rookies and stars out there, of course, but he had generous things to say about the young Mariner receiver, Orlando Mercado, who somehow folded himself down to about the height of a croquet wicket while taking a pitch.

“These kids we’re seeing today—this one, and that Pefia that the Pirates have—are lower than anybody I used to play with,” he said in his light, faintly hoarse voice. “Maybe they’re better athletes than they used to be—more agile, and all. I still wish they’d move the top half of their bodies more when they’re after the ball. That glove has made everybody lazy. You just stick out your hand.”

There was an infield bouncer to deep short, and Mercado trailed the play, sprinting down behind first base to back up the peg from short. Haller nodded in satisfaction. “It’s hard on you physically behind the plate,” he said. “All that bending and kneeling. One way to help yourself is to get on down to first base on that play and do it every single time. You let yourself out a little, so you’re not cramped up all day.”

A bit later, he said, “Mainly, you have to be a student of the game. There are so many little things to the job. You have to look the same when you’re setting up for the fastball and the breaking ball, so you don’t tip the pitch. A batter steps up, and he may have moved his feet in the box since the last time you saw him play, and that might completely change the way you and your pitcher’ve decided to pitch to him. You can’t stop everything and call a conference to discuss what to do. You have to decide.”

Then: “What you do can get sort of subtle sometimes. If you’re ahead by a few runs or way behind in a game, you might decide to give a real good hitter the pitch that he’s waiting forms favorite pitch. Say he’s a great, great breaking-ball hitter. Normally, you’d absolutely stay away from that pitch with anything over the plate, but in that special situation you might think, Let’s let him have it, this once—let him hit it. That way, you put it in his head that he might get it again from you, later on in the game or the next time he faces that same pitcher. He’ll be looking for it and waiting for it, and he’ll never see it again. You’ve got a little edge on him.”

In the game, the Giants had base runners on second and third, with one out, and the Mariners chose to pitch to the next batter, outfielder Chili Davis, who instantly whacked a double to right, for two runs. “If you’ve got an open base, you should try to remember to use it,” Haller observed. “So often, you have the intention of putting a good hitter on, rather than letting him hurt you. You go to work on his weakness—let’s say, something outside and away—and you get lucky and get two strikes on him, and men the pitcher decides, Hey, I can strike this bozo out. So you come in with the fastball and, bam, he kills you. You got greedy and forgot.