Chapter 10

My experience with playing for a new AA team went about as well as could be hoped for or expected. Everyone knew that I wasn’t really all that happy to be there, but I kept my sometimes too big mouth shut, kept my head down and focused on doing what I was there to do - churn out quality starts, keep my WHIP low below a 1.0, and be seen doing whatever the manager or pitching coach told me to do on my off-days between starts ... and always with hustle and a cheeky smile.

All good so far; Three games started, all three tagged as ‘quality’, a decent ERA and even two wins for my organization’s spreadsheet ledger. All my pitches were working well – and there was no more showing off!

“Space,” my pitching coach Greg Gordon quietly told me one evening after my third game start, “the trouble with you is that you’re a damned throwback to the kind of pitchers we had back in the day, from say the 1930’s into maybe the early 1970’s, when teams all played ‘Small Ball’. It was the era of squeeze bunts, of hit-and-runs, and of lollipop curves meant to entice ground balls. A preponderance of games all ended in low scores like 4-3 or 3-2. Pitchers and base-running dominated and everyone seemed happy, except for MLB ... who decided that the game was now too slow and boring, so they juiced up everything related to batting. Today, by contrast, big-league lineups are now packed with players who can all hit home runs, and so nearly every pitcher panics and most of them won’t ever pitch inside anymore, as they think it’s suicidal. So then the clubs all started trying to negate those extra home runs with strikeouts ... and it doesn’t really work, but it’s all they know to do anymore. There are only a few guys with top level arms that can throw nothing but heat at batters, but the farms all try and churn those guys out from a factory anyway. They’ll take a guy that can throw high 80’s and then wear his arm out trying to nudge his speed up into the 90’s ... all the while neglecting the other assortment of pitches the kids needed just to get there in the first place! For years, in another organization, I was coaching kids coming through that had just possessed one ‘plus-level’ pitch, usually the fastball, and maybe one other average one. That fine, if their goal is to be a reliever, but to succeed as a starter, with or without that plus heater, you need at least two or three other pitches too ... and be able to throw them for strikes at any point in the count. I’ve sure you’ve heard that speech before!”

“Many times, but let me guess,” I replied, “and mostly they couldn’t.”

“Hardly a one of them. Sure you’ll get the top draft picks that have put together most of the skills for success, but I’m talking about compiling the rest of a solid pitching roster. Every team’s got an Ace, or perhaps even two of those studs, but hardly any team can put together a starting rotation with quality 3^rd to 5^th starters anymore. That’s what playoff teams are built from, the back of the rotation guys that can go out there every week and keep their team in the game with a chance to win at least three quarters of the time. That’s exactly the sort of pitcher that teams can’t find enough of and mostly can’t even develop anymore. Our organization is now taking an old-school but fresh statistical based attitude to this and I think we’re starting to see changes ... developing a few more of those finesse type guys. That’s what keeps me going on ... finding a throwback pitcher like you. Now, why did you start throwing the screwball? I think I can count on one hand the number of pitchers I’ve handled that could even reliably throw one, let alone ever locate it for strikes.”

“Picked it up in Arizona last year, about the same time as the knuckler, but I really didn’t get serious about throwing it until late last season. My AAA coach in Memphis was absolutely horrified that I threw it and demanded that I stop – he said it was dangerous and even more unsafe than a curveball, so I kept throwing it anyway.” I laughed.

“Hell, back in the day when I was kid watching Game of the Week every Saturday afternoon on TV in the 1970’s, half the teams in baseball seemed to have a screwballer on their staffs, especially the back of the rotation guys. Hell, I think everyone on the Dodgers threw it, at one point during the Fernando years. When the power culture came in afterwards, the screwball went out and now everyone forgets that Carl Hubbell won 253 games with it and even Warren Spahn started throwing it a lot too when he was in his thirties. No, it’s not power but it’s still effective. As for dangerous and unsafe – nonsense. MLB gave a huge grant a few years to a major orthopedic surgical research group to find out why and how pitchers get injured. They didn’t like the answer that the doc’s gave them – throwing fastballs caused the most arm strain!”

“Actually, it’s so logically that I can believe it. Different pitching coaches on different teams from high school onwards have all told me different things over the years, that certain pitches are more harmful than others, but they never could agree on which pitches were the worst one. Curveballs and sliders ... and the screwball, of course, were all the most dangerous. I think it was due to beliefs handed down between coaches over time with no science behind them. Casey Stengel must have complained about some pitch once to some old-time scout, and thereafter no one was willing to touch it.”

“Well, those doctors did some serious myth-busting that it’s not the curveball and other breaking pitches that’s damaging to the elbow and shoulder, as everyone says. It’s the fastball, thrown again and again over time. Pure physics forces that they could chart and measure. The force exerted on your elbow while throwing the screwball are almost identical to that of the fastball and below that of the curveball. Shoulder stresses were similar. Technically, the screwball doesn’t exceed the fastball in any parameter and so I tell my kids to throw it ... but most of them won’t. I believe that no pitch is any more dangerous than any other if you have a good delivery. If you have a bad delivery, every pitch is freakin’ dangerous. I look at the way some of these kids throw and I just shake my head and know that they’re going to start having arm trouble in a few years. Your mechanics look pretty damn good now, especially compared to your old injury era AA Cedar City game film that I’ve seen, so I’ll credit Randy in Arizona for fixing that. When I start having to demote some of the kids who don’t deserve to be here, I’ll suggest to a few of the smarter ones that they do a remedial season there with him, before trying farm club level AA again. Randy has a mixed reputation in the business, most pitching coaches either think he’s a complete lunatic or an absolute genius, with not much opinion in-between. As for me, I’m a believer ... you are at least the third pitcher I’ve seen get ‘fixed’ enough to make a functional career for yourself, right from the scrap heap of the minors, largely by improving on what you already did well, finesse pitching ... and by adding the knuckler and screwball to your arsenal and turning them into plus pitches.”

“So in our inflated statistical scoring era in which athletes routinely punish their bodies, legally and illegally, to gain even the slightest competitive advantage, here is an apparently safe, permissible weapon for us to use right out here in plain sight, the damned and long forgotten screwball!” I laughed.

“Got it in one,” he agreed, “now go and keep throwing it ten or twelve times a game with my complete blessing! I think it’s a pitch that just got lost in the shuffle when the Power Ball era began, because while a good screwball can make a hitter look silly, but it is not especially a strikeout pitch. With its unpredictable downward break, it yields ground balls and you get a lot of easy, ugly outs. The batter sees the ball right there in front of him and they think they’re going to nail it, but then it swerves down and in, and they get just a piece of it and a certain hit becomes a ground ball out instead.”

“That’s exactly what I could never get my AAA coach in Memphis to understand, that I’d rather throw just three pitches and get three ground outs in every inning than throw at least nine pitches to try and strike out the side. The other deceptive off-speed pitches like the circle change, the cutter, the split-finger and even a cut-fastball that I trot out as an off-speed, are all pretty good and I throw a couple of each of them every game, but they don’t have that big mind-fuck it gives a batter ... to throw them a ball that breaks inside or away from hitters, every time.”

“Welcome to the Power Era,” he laughed again, “Major League Baseball is a funny little club, and there are people who absolutely won’t do things, no matter how much they might make sense because of either conventional wisdom or so-called tradition, and if you’d like a small bit of constructive criticism, you’re dawdling too long between pitches. The league average is about 23 seconds and I thought Randy had you trained to deliver in about eighteen to twenty seconds or so.”

“He did, but the umps here don’t know me from squat and I was worried that if they thought I was trying to rush them right away, until after they learned that I have excellent control and nearly always throw strikes, that it would have the opposite effect and that they wouldn’t give me the benefit of the doubt on close pitches.”

“I see your point, but start hurrying up just a bit, even just 2-3 seconds faster for the next few starts ... and yes, they will still be here. Granted, I’m about ready to give you a pass to AAA, after you’ve had at least six more starts here. Mostly, I’m just wanting to see you facing a little adversity, like how you pitch on days when you don’t have your very best stuff. The minor leagues are all about battling and struggling to survive ... so get to it, you’re making it all look a little bit too easy!”

Little could we guess, my first real challenge would come the very next game!

I knew something was wrong the moment I stepped out onto the mound to take my final warmup tosses before the start of the game. Randy had trained me pretty well to be more observant when I walked out onto the field and before I just started blithely chucking the ball. First thing, as always, was to check the flag from the perspective of the pitching mound to see which way the wind was blowing. Tonight, it seemed to be swirling, sometimes from the north and then a strong gust would surge in from the east. Not particularly good news for either pitchers or hitters. Next, I looked over the crowd to get a sense of both their volume and ambient energy levels. Both were staggeringly low, even for a weekday evening ballgame.

No one enjoys playing in front of minor league crowds and springtime in Maine often feels like wintertime down south. There’s usually fuck-all fannies in the seats in any minor league park and since it’s always an outdoor stadium it’s a guaranteed rule that it will either be too hot or too cold ... tonight it was damp, very cool and gusty. Most people with sense had stayed home, leaving the park to the die-hard fans, the terminally bored, or folks who’d gambled away the grocery money on the outcome of the game.

I gave them a tip of my cap and a good wave anyway when my name was announced, because that’s what you do in the minors. Ownership of my team doesn’t have to pay our salaries (that came from the parent club) but they were responsible for anything and everything else, and even splitting the gate for this sporting event probably wouldn’t cover our bus expenses and laundry service. It’s hard to near impossible to make a dime in the low minors and it’s not much sweeter up in AAA either. That’s the reason also why there are few rainouts in the minors, it’s just too hard to make-up lost games, the lost attendance, bus travel expense, etc. And why we sometimes play seven inning double-header games once or twice a month ... with damn little prior notice, so they can sweep in as many town residents as possible to put more fannies into the seats and maybe sell a few more Cokes.

That’s a big reason why farm teams move around and change parent club affiliations as much as they do – everyone wants to find a slightly better deal and go where the grass is marginally greener, somewhere else. For players, it’s always greener inside the park than looking in from outside, so we smile and thank the fans who allow us to play the game, and thank God for every day spent in a uniform.

The announced attendance was nine-hundred and something, about par actually, but I swear I couldn’t spot even half of that number sitting out in the stands. The moms probably had the kids bundled up out of wind and they were all hanging out by the concession stands, I supposed.

As the visiting team, we batted first but went down in rapid order, so it was now our turn to take the field. I threw my warm-ups and stepped off of the mound to take a few long deep breaths before the umps were ready for the first pitch and I gave a little nod of greeting to Greg and Karin Paige who were sitting on the first row of seats behind the screen at home plate. They both worked for our organization and I saw them at every game, Greg was our team’s traveling road scout and his wife Karin did our official scoring on her laptop, charting every pitch, tracking where every batted ball went, and so forth. Who did what, where, when and how. All of the endless raw comprehensive game data that could be emailed to the sabermetric data geeks at the home club to be churned, after long marinating, into useful data someday. I guess I was all for it – it was nerdy stuff like this that brought my name to the attention of those scouts for possible acquisition in the first place. Right next to them were their counterparts from the home team, happily chatting away with our folks, pretty friendly-like.

Job security in any professional sport is always an uncertainty, especially for the organizational folks working the various office and support positions for the farm clubs. When management heads roll at the Big Club, the fallout can extend all the way down the organization even to the lowest Rookie League farm teams. A new broom in the minor league and player development offices can (and often do) sweep out the staffs of everyone below them, just so that they can hire and reward their friends. Players are always ‘auditioning’ for the 31 other big league organizations, as well as their own ... and it’s no different for the coaches and their staffs either. The friends you can make now with guys and gals from another club, might become your benefactor tomorrow, offering you a job when your old organization has cut you loose.

Behind them, in the next row of seats back, was a pair of the most obvious Men in Black types that I’d ever seen in my life, complete with the wearing sunglasses at night jive! I immediately froze and then felt a driving need to take a completely unnecessary number two in my drawers. Turning my head around to check over the outfield flagpole again helped, a tiny little bit, but I was still in a near complete panic and never even noticed that the plate umpire was ready to go until our second baseman yelled at me to get my ass in gear.

They, the sinister government agents, had to be looking for me and watching ... judging me. Was I that guy who had stumbled into Ram’s Mine a year ago? Was I the one who had seen too much and perhaps had been altered? Was I exceptional? Nope, not at the moment.

My first pitch, a knuckler, bounced on its way to the plate and hopped past the glove of my catcher for a called Passed Ball. Not a wild pitch charged to me then ... but it really should have been. My second pitch a slider that didn’t slide very much got lined to right field for a single. Crap! That was the first time in twenty or more games that I’d ever allowed the leadoff hitter to get on base at the very start of a game. That’s the sort of crap pitching that makes a good pitching coach’s hair turn prematurely white.