Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts Page 26

  Rogers is a tactician. He’s got everybody in the Phils’ lineup figured out and he knows how he’s going to pitch each of them. Schmidt has this little imitation he does of Rogers, as a way of explaining how the guy approaches batters. The big hitter stands with both his feet pressed together, leaning forward from the waist and fingering a baseball out in front of his face; then, in a high, nasal voice, he’ll say, “Now let me see, how’m I gonna pitch to Michael Schmidt?” Then Schmidt laughs.

  But he’s all business now. Schmidt discards the lead doughnut and strides deliberately to the batter’s box. The plastic turf underfoot squishes with each step. Schmidt’s name is announced, echoing high off the empty arena walls. As he performs his standard ritual and steps into the box, the widely dispersed crowd is cheering. A fan behind the first base dugout bellows, “Give us one, Mike!”

  Rogers is standing just the way Schmidt says he does, peering in at his catcher, Gary Carter, and fingering the baseball inside his glove. He’s thinking, I’ve got to keep my pitches away from Schmidt, pitch him low and outside, don’t give him anything he can really tag.

  Rogers doesn’t wind up fully the way most pitchers do. Instead of bringing both hands over his head as he rocks back on his left foot, he continues to hold the ball in his right hand inside his glove out in front of his chest. He justs turns his body to the right as he shifts his weight and lifts his left leg, then propels himself forward with the throw. He has this little hitch in his delivery, when he kicks and throws, that makes it seem, to Schmidt, as though he’s holding on to the ball too long. It’s unorthodox, tricky, and it’s one of the things that makes Rogers hard to hit.

  Schmidt starts at the first pitch and then pulls the bat back, watching it for a called strike. Fastball, outside corner. Schmidt is a bit rattled. He’s uncomfortable hitting tonight. He doesn’t like the way he jumped at that pitch and then pulled back. It’s as though he wasn’t ready to hit it but he wasn’t ready to take it, either. He steps out of the box and takes a deep breath to try to clear his mind.

  Rogers gets the ball back from Carter and stoops immediately to deliver the next pitch. He’s always a fast worker, but especially so in the cold. He needs to stay in motion to keep warm. Schmidt doesn’t hold him up. He sets up immediately to receive the next pitch. If you’re ready, I’m ready.

  Rogers rocks back quickly in the same way and throws the same pitch, fastball low and outside. Schmidt starts to swing at it, striding forward and launching the bat, but then he changes his mind again, checking the swing just in time. The pitch is too far outside, beyond the strike zone. Ball one. The next pitch is another ball, this one a breaking ball to the same place. The count is now two balls, one strike. Schmidt has the upper hand. He steps out of the box to repeat his ritual, knocking dirt from his spikes, tugging at his helmet, taking a deep breath, two practice swings, then he eases back in and sets as Rogers rocks back to throw the next pitch.

  Leaving the pitcher’s hand, the ball looks to Schmidt like an inside fastball, one of his favorite pitches. It makes sense because the first three pitches have all been low and outside and Rogers likes to mix things up. Schmidt strides immediately forward and swings, but just as he does he picks up the spin on the ball, Damn! a slider. In midswing he tries to make the necessary adjustment as the ball breaks out and away from his bat—“I was screwed once I saw the ball move,” he says later.

  Schmidt’s demoralized swing is now just a pitiful, uneven thing that happens to catch the ball right off the bat’s tip—a tribute really to the hitter’s quickness but just a pathetic little squibbler that thuds wetly off the infield rug and dribbles politely down the first base line into the waiting glove of Al Oliver, the Expos’ first baseman, who flips it to Rogers, hustling over to catch the throw and then step on first base. Out. Schmidt runs all the way down to first base, even though he is out three fourths of the way there, and then strides silently back toward the dugout.

  It is an omen for the night.

  Schmidt comes up again in the bottom of the fourth. A beer vendor up in the stands hands a full cup of frozen brew to a customer and quietly suggests, “Honey, why don’t all you people go home now.” The cold seems to be bothering everyone except Rogers, who, until giving up a single to Phils’ left fielder Gary Matthews on the previous pitch, had not allowed a hit. The Phils trail by two runs, and Schmidt would like to do something about it.

  As the league’s best home run hitter steps up to bat, Rogers eyes Matthews on first base and knows he’ll have to pitch Schmidt very delicately—Negate his power by pitch selection, he thinks. Don’t give him anything he can drive. One wrong pitch here and he could tie the game.

  Schmidt is cold. His toe, which he broke in batting practice in the last week of spring training, hurts. Rogers first fires him a fastball on the outside corner, which Schmidt watches for a strike—“Why?” Schmidt says later. “Because sometimes you just walk out there with your head up your ass, that’s why. When you’re that cold it’s like your brain doesn’t really believe your body can move fast enough to hit the ball, so you hesitate.”

  Rogers next throws a fastball high and way outside, almost a wild pitch, but Carter leaps up to catch it. The next pitch is another fastball strike to the outside corner, which, again, Schmidt takes. He is now angry with himself. How could I just watch it? Now he’s feeling stiff and uptight, down in the count. He steps out of the batter’s box for two deep breaths and then climbs back in.

  Rogers has decided to try a fastball low and inside. So far all of his pitches to Schmidt this at bat have been outside. Mix things up, mix things up.

  He does his little half windup after pausing to check Matthews on first base over his shoulder—“Gary wasn’t really a threat to steal,” Rogers says later, and smiles; “the old legs just don’t work that well anymore in the cold”—and throws, wildly. Instead of traveling down, the ball starts right off heading up, up practically to Schmidt’s eye level. The hitter feels a sudden blast of adrenaline. A high pitch! High and inside!—just the kind he loves to hit.

  In that split instant when the decision is made the batter’s mental signals all flash green—“God, it looked like a pitch I could hit!” Schmidt says later, exuberantly—and so he swings, hard, and manages only to tick the ball with his bat before it snaps into the catcher’s mitt. Strike three. It is his first strikeout of 1982.

  Later, Schmidt says, laughing, “The pitch was too high to hit. Hell, I was pretty satisfied with a foul tip.”

  Schmidt faces Rogers again in the sixth inning and draws a walk, a semi-intentional walk. The Expos are still ahead by two runs; there are two outs and a man on base. In this situation, there’s no way he’s going to give Schmidt a pitch to hit. He’d rather pitch to the next batter, outfielder George Vukovich, than risk delivering Schmidt’s first home run ball of 1982. Rogers’s caution is rewarded when Vukovich raps a little grounder back to the pitcher’s mound for the third out. End of threat.

  There is drama in the bottom of the ninth inning when Schmidt comes up to bat for his fourth and last time. Twice fooled, once walked, stiff, cold, and a bit angry with himself, he strides up with another shot at tying the score. Stay calm, just meet the ball. Think hit, not homer. Control the situation. Don’t fall behind in the count. Matthews has just drilled his second hit of the night, a double, so with no outs Schmidt represents the tying run. He is nervous. The crowd is cheering for him big, as big as what’s left of 7,000 freezing fans can. He takes twice as long as usual to step into the box, drawing heavy, deep breaths and exhaling thick clouds of steam.

  Rogers has had good luck pitching low and away to Schmidt all night, so he decides to stay with it. The first pitch is a fastball, low and away. Schmidt starts to swing and checks himself too late; the bat passes through the outside edge of the strike zone. Strike one. He steps out, adjusts his helmet, spits, grooms the dirt with his spikes, and takes another deep breath. Then he steps in for the next offering. Rogers kicks and throws a high
-outside fastball. Ball one.

  That high pitch worries Rogers. He knows Schmidt can step into a high pitch and drive it over the 371-foot marker on the right field wall. So he’s determined to keep his next few pitches low. The next pitch starts off just like the first one. It looks like a fastball, low and outside, which is right where Schmidt is looking for it, but as he steps in to swing the ball breaks. Rogers has thrown a slider and Schmidt has not picked up the spin. On his swing he just tips the ball with his bat and it pops up foul into the upper deck behind home plate. Strike two.

  Rogers is delighted. Schmidt is angry with himself again—“I was not hitting like a good hitter and I knew it,” he says later. “I was doing exactly what I would tell anyone not to do. But that’s baseball. I walked up there afraid of falling behind in the count. It’s a tough situation: bottom of the ninth, man on second, down by two runs, you’re telling yourself to make sure you get your cuts in, don’t give away any strikes, and don’t fall behind in the count.

  “But a good hitter doesn’t worry about things like that. I wasn’t in control. Rogers was. So right behind that fear of strike one is the fear of strike two. I swung at a bad pitch the first time because I was too eager to wait. Then I did it again. If I had been in more control of the situation, like I should have been, the count would have been two-and-oh, not oh-and-two.”

  Strike three came with the next pitch, another slider that broke away from Schmidt’s lunging swing. Again he was looking for a low-outside fastball and Rogers fooled him with a low-outside breaking ball. He turns abruptly on his left heel and strides straight back to the dugout. A loud voice from the stands demands, “Hold your head up! Hold your head up!”

  “I just call it a panic stroke,” Schmidt says. “Three panic swings and I went in and showered with shampoo and conditioner. There’s always tomorrow.”

  In the visiting team clubhouse after the game, Rogers is seated on a folding metal chair before his locker with the standard postgame wad of ice packs strapped around his right shoulder and elbow. Reporters are crowded around him. He has thrown a two-hit shutout, with ten strikeouts, two of them against one of the best hitters in baseball. Rogers is doing his best to acknowledge his pleasure without gloating. Water from the ice packs drips down to a growing pool at his feet.

  “Schmidt? I’ve watched him circle the bases around me a few times, so I know how it feels to have him get the better of me, too,” he says.

  The next day, Saturday, April 10, 1982. Veterans Stadium. Phillies vs. the Montreal Expos.

  Earlier this afternoon, the segment of The Baseball Bunch that Schmidt taped in February was shown on network television. In it, the third baseman talked to a group of youngsters about The Game, touching upon some of the important lessons of life it has to teach. He counsels one little boy who is introduced as a good player who is nevertheless given to terrible tantrums when he strikes out. Striking out is something Schmidt has done often. He holds the major league record for the most consecutive seasons leading both leagues in strikeouts—from 1974 through 1976. In the program, he draws the child aside, and with warm, fatherly words explains that even the best baseball players must learn to live with recurrent failure.

  “If I hit .300, then I’m a great hitter, but that still means that seven of every ten times I come to bat I don’t get a hit,” he says. “Seven of ten times I fail.”

  Now, several hours before game time, Schmidt is down inside a huge net batting cage in the tunnel under the Vet living with last night’s failure. Dressed in a bright red warm-up suit, he is patiently stroking baseballs off a stationary tee, swinging almost in slow motion, trying to impress on his inner brain by repetition the smooth, perfect swing that is his goal. Rogers had gotten the better of him. Tonight Schmidt will face Bill Gullickson, another right-bander, but one with an entirely different style.

  He will get his first hit of the season off Gullickson, a big, twenty-three-year-old kid with a thick shock of brown hair and a heavy dark brow. Gullickson has had only one year in the major leagues, but Schmidt already considers him one of the strongest right-handers in baseball.

  “But Gullickson is just a bear,” Schmidt says, his blue eyes peering out intently from behind the netting. “He can blow it right by you up at the letters”—chest-high, past the letters on the front of the uniform.

  “Rogers figures me as just a cog in the Phillies lineup, a special kind of problem. A guy like Gullickson has no idea how he’s going to pitch one guy to the next. But he sees me as a special challenge to his manhood up there on the mound. If he’s going to be bearing down on anyone out there with everything he’s got, it’s me. He’s out to prove something when he pitches against me.”

  And, sure enough. Schmidt’s first time up against Gullickson he strikes out—a called third strike on what the hitter calls “a nasty slider that just nicked the strike zone on its way outside.” He walks straight back to the dugout, head down, but he’s not angry. He feels as though the at bat was not a total waste.

  “I felt like I was seeing the ball okay,” Schmidt says. “I wasn’t reacting to Gullickson’s motion. I was really seeing the ball. Now I felt like all I had to do was swing at the ball to make good contact. I felt good.”

  The hit comes in the bottom of the fourth. The Expos have already scored four runs, and Gullickson still looks strong, despite having given up a homer in the third to Phils catcher Bo Diaz and allowing a run to sneak in on a wild pitch. Gullickson has started this half of the inning by striking out Gary Matthews on a bad pitch, a wide, slow breaking ball that Matthews will dream about for several days in disbelief.

  Schmidt had stood in the on-deck circle watching Gullickson dispatch Matthews. He has said he admires the way Hank Aaron used to wait his turn at bat with serene confidence, plopped down on one knee, motionlessly watching the duel before him. Schmidt figures that aplomb like that has got to unsettle pitchers. But it’s too cold to sit still tonight. Schmidt is stretching, swinging the leaded bat, limbering, limbering, limbering. He can’t wait to step up and hit. He can feel a hit in his hands.

  Gullickson’s first pitch to Schmidt is a fastball, low and too far away. Ball one. He decides to go inside with the next pitch, to keep Schmidt guessing. He doesn’t want the hitter to discern any pattern in how he’s being pitched, which isn’t hard because Gullickson confesses he has no plan. Just mix ’em up. The next pitch is inside, but too high. Ball two.

  Now Schmidt feels good. In control. But he quickly loses the composure on the next pitch, a slider to the outside corner that he chases with a wild, reaching swing for strike one—“I just waved at it,” he says. “The damn ball bounced, I think. It was a slider in the dirt. I was just overanxious, I guess. I did just what I hoped I wouldn’t do: opened my shoulder, jumped at a bad pitch. I knew right away I should have taken it. So you end up with that half…little swing.” Two balls, one strike.

  The next pitch is in the same place—Gullickson liked the way the first one worked—but Schmidt has gathered his composure somewhat and lets it go for ball three. Gullickson now has to throw a strike, but without giving Schmidt a pitch he can hit well. He decides on a fastball, his best pitch, to the outside corner, away from Schmidt’s real power. Schmidt spots the pitch instantly and goes for it. He swings badly, turning out his lead shoulder again the way he hates to see himself do, but he makes contact anyway and the ball sails over the shortstop’s head for a single.

  “It was a lucky hit,” Schmidt says. “But I loved it. It’s the reason I have a batting average.” His first hit of 1982. On first base, Schmidt smiles. Two batters and two Gullickson wild pitches later Schmidt slides across home plate with the Phillies’ third run of the game.

  Afterward, Gullickson, the winning pitcher this time, has only one comment about his duels with Mike Schmidt.

  “Sometimes I get him,” he says, “but mostly he gets me.”

  Sunday, April 11, 1982. Veterans Stadium. The Phillies have just defeated the Montreal Expos, 1�
�0, for their first win of the season.

  Big Ray Burris, the Expos’ losing pitcher, is seated silently before his locker in the visiting team’s clubhouse under the Vet. He is peeling off his powder-blue uniform and bombing pieces of it accurately across the room into a white laundry container.

  The whole locker room is silent, unlike the boisterous, cheerful place it was after the two Expos victories this weekend. No one is really upset though, except maybe Burris, who pitched well the whole game and then lost. The quiet is just protocol. One reserves respectful silence in the presence of defeat, as for the passing of the angel of death. It was a good game. They played well. Two out of three on the road against a team that has been one of the toughest in the division ain’t bad.

  Burris gruffly agrees to talk, after he showers, about pitching to Schmidt. He plods off looking somewhat comical, naked in his white plastic sandals, a tall, broad-shouldered black man with a white towel in his left hand. He is in the shower for about a half hour.

  Around the clubhouse, players are generally trying to ignore the sportswriters seeking interviews. Lacking anyone better, ballplayers enjoy venting their frustration in defeat on reporters, those annoying creatures huddled on the fringes of the game with pens and pads and cameras and microphones and questions, questions, questions.

  Always they want to know why. Why? Who knows why? A thousand factors are wrapped up in the tight fabric of the game. Blaming teammates or the manager (even if it is clearly warranted) is bad form. Blame anyone but yourself and you just sound like a whiner, making excuses. So professional athletes must learn to regularly blame themselves before large audiences, even when they don’t feel at fault. They don’t like doing it.