The Only Way I Know

Chapter Fourteen

Oriole Park at Camden Yards? The Birds’ new venue was everything they said it was going to be and more. In my opinion, it’s the epitome of the modern game of baseball, with its sky boxes, better sight lines, big screen, and blasting music. The designers wanted—and achieved—a stadium with modern amenities but also an old-time feeling of coziness, with loads of character. The Bromo-Seltzer clock tower beyond left field and the B&O warehouse beyond right field are great. The whole place is great—the best of the new parks.

Initially, however, I have to admit that I missed Memorial Stadium. For one thing, everyone who was there the last weekend of the previous year carried away a tremendous feeling of nostalgia. It wasn’t a great facility, technically speaking, and down in the guts beneath the stands it was dank and smelly, but for me, at least, Memorial Stadium was baseball. It had been the scene for the entire history of the Orioles to that point, and it was sad to leave that history behind. The atmosphere at Camden Yards seemed a little different. The standard distinction that people drew was between blue-collar Memorial Stadium and a more corporate Camden Yards. I don’t know about that. The distinction I drew was between a much more appealing place—who wouldn’t want to go to Camden Yards?—and a place like Memorial Stadium that maybe only diehard fans would enjoy coming to. The Orioles draw much larger crowds now than we ever did at Memorial Stadium. It didn’t sell out, but it was more boisterous. Maybe you heard more from individual fans because it wasn’t filled, I don’t know, but at first in Camden Yards I missed the old camaraderie. Or maybe I just missed the old days, period. I do think you can say with some validity that Camden Yards represents the modern game of baseball as entertainment, while Memorial Stadium represented the game of baseball as just that—the game of baseball, take it or leave it.

Would I rather the Orioles were back at Memorial Stadium? No way. We’re building a new tradition and history at Camden Yards, which is the way it should be. Just don’t ask me to forget the old pile of red bricks on 33rd Street. I can’t do that.

We had a great new park in 1992 in Baltimore, and we had a new spirit as a team as well. As a team, we had to be better than we were in ’91, when we finished in sixth place, 14 games under .500. Johnny Oates had taken over for Frank Robinson the previous May, and although there hadn’t been much Johnny could do to save that season (not that managers save seasons), he thought and I thought that we had some more horses in ’92. The rebuilding program that had started in 1988, overachieved in ’89, then fallen back in ’90 and ’91 might be ready to put something together. Glenn Davis was healthy again, Brady Anderson and Mike Devereaux were looking to make big contributions, Sam Horn was coming off a season in which he hit 23 homers in only 300-plus at-bats, and Rick Sutcliffe was on hand to lead the pitching staff. There was real confidence in spring training; you could feel it.

Of the new personnel that year, Rick was the most important addition, and for that good fortune we could thank Johnny Oates. In the eighties, Rick had been a good, solid pitcher with the Cubs, except when he was hurt, and at thirty-six years old, he thought he had a few good years left. But as a free agent he also wanted to be on a winner, and the Orioles had had losing seasons the previous two years. Over the telephone in the off-season, Johnny campaigned with Rick on behalf of Baltimore. These two guys went way back to the Dodgers in 1979, Rick’s first great season. Twelve years later, Rick told Johnny over the phone that he wasn’t a great pitcher anymore. Johnny said he didn’t need him to be a great pitcher. All he needed was a .500 pitcher who knew his craft and could bring with him a certain presence and be a stabilizing force for the mound staff. I think every manager and front office in the league had been impressed with the way Jack Morris had joined Minneapolis from Detroit in 1991 and led that young Twins staff to the World Series. I don’t know whether Johnny felt we could go to the Series in ’92, but he felt that Rick could help our young pitchers in a similar way. They needed someone to lead by example; if Rick could do that, we’d have a chance.

Johnny was persuasive, Rick signed with Baltimore, and he did lead by example. Dwight Evans was gone after just the one year—released in spring training, a move that surprised me—but Rick moved in as a veteran presence from the first day. There was no get-acquainted period with Rick. His boisterous personality couldn’t wait around for that. He even tried to take charge of a lot of the dinner checks. We sparred over a few of those, because I also liked to pick up some checks for the younger guys. Maybe both of us liked to play the role of big shot.

Rick did instill a sense of unity among the pitchers. There’s no question about that. They got so cocky they started calling themselves the posse. Don’t mess with the posse—if you cross one of us, you cross all of us—if you weren’t a pitcher, you were the enemy: that was their thing, but the rest of us weren’t too concerned. In the event of open warfare, we had ’em outnumbered. One afternoon in spring training, Brady Anderson was lolling around sunbathing on the field on his day off while the pitchers were still at work. Johnny Oates liked to give his players a full day off, and Brady was rubbing this in, looking for trouble with the posse. He got it when they charged and “de-pantsed” him on the spot. Another time, after Joe Orsulak received rude treatment at the hands of the posse, he corraled Sutcliffe by the pitching screen and got a good headlock on him. Trying to get free, Rick twisted his neck and was out for a week, missing a start or two. The details probably didn’t make the papers. During the season, the posse tied me to the training table. I submitted without much of an objection. Let them have their fun.

Rick’s strong personality was the catalyst for all this. He’s a take-charge guy, one reason Johnny Oates picked him to start on Opening Day—Grand Opening Day—in Camden Yards. I thought that was a really smart move. Of course, Rick had thrown a lot of openers in the past because he’d been his team’s ace, but he wasn’t the ace on this Orioles staff. That would have been either Mike Mussina or Ben McDonald, two really young guys. However, Rick had loads of experience. He was the one who wouldn’t be upset if he pitched a great game but lost because the other team’s ace had also pitched a great game. For the first couple of months, Johnny wanted his young starters to have a better chance against the other teams’ third, fourth, and fifth starters. Rick, he felt, could handle the aces. And Rick did, especially on Opening Day, when he shut out Cleveland, my brother laid down a perfect suicide squeeze, and the Orioles won 2–0. We went on to win 10 of our first 11 in our new home, and the stage was set for an exciting season.

From the dugout, Rick called some pitches for the rest of the staff that year. I did, too, especially with Ben McDonald, and maybe now’s the time to tell that story, which has been the subject of rumors in Baltimore ever since. To do so, I have to set the stage by flashing back to the mid-eighties, when Storm Davis was starting out as a power pitcher for the Orioles and having some trouble against the Red Sox and the Yankees, as I recall. Those two teams had Storm’s number, for some reason, and he came to me and asked if I’d help with his pitch selection. Rick Dempsey was doing most of the catching in those years, and he called a perfectly good game, but Storm wanted to break out of his rut, so I sat down and wrote out how I thought he might pitch those lineups. For the Red Sox, I suggested starting off Wade Boggs in the first inning with a fastball down the middle, because Wade takes the first pitch ninety-five percent of the time. Then come in on the inner half of the plate with another fastball, which he’s likely to fight off, then go for the strikeout on the inside edge. As luck would have it, Storm got Wade with these exact three pitches, and when the infield was tossing the ball around, Storm and I exchanged a glance. He went on to get a complete game victory in Fenway, and we came up with a simple set of signs I’d flash from my position when he was in a jam. He started having better luck with these teams, but this wasn’t a matter of my pitch selection so much as the fact that Storm had broken a pattern and gained some confidence. Maybe if Boggs had doubled off one of those first pitches in Fenway Park, Storm would have considered my advice much differently! To my knowledge, no one else knew about our arrangement, and that’s the way it should have been.

With Ben McDonald half a dozen years later, the problem was the one big inning which could determine the game. Ben was a young pitcher who was learning at the big league level after being the number one draft pick in the country. When he became a starter with the Orioles in 1990, we sat down with our catchers, Bob Melvin and Jamie Quirk, and the four of us went over the hitters. We did the same thing the following year with Chris Hoiles, our newest catcher. Two very young players feeling a lot of pressure, they were unsure what to call when things were critical. I started going to the mound to join their conferences, but after a while this arrangement became unwieldy, and one time it even caused a slight problem. We were playing Oakland, Brent Gates at the plate, runners second and third, and I went to the mound and told Ben, “Throw a curve. If it’s a strike, throw another curve. If it’s a strike, throw another curve.” The first curve was a called strike, the second one was pulled foul, then the third one was pulled foul again, weakly. When Hoiles called for another curve, Ben shook him off, and Hoiles put down fastball away. I called time and returned to the mound. Ben said he didn’t want to throw a fourth consecutive curve, so I gave him an option: either that fourth curve or go for a fastball inside, not outside, because Gates could slap that outside pitch to left field while protecting the plate. Ben selected the fastball inside, but it sailed too far in and hit Gates on the wrist. The next day Tony LaRussa tracked me down and wanted to know what was going on out there. He said it didn’t look too good when I went to the mound and then his man got hit by the next pitch. Tony had a point—I hadn’t thought about how these mound trips must have looked—and I told him the whole story. Then Chris, Ben, and I came up with a better system. If they wanted my suggestion, they flashed a sign to me, and I flashed one in return to Chris, who relayed it to Ben. When Jeff Tackett joined the Orioles in ’91, Ben wanted to make sure I had my signs down with Jeff, too, so I went to him and said, “Jeff, I’ve been helping Ben out with pitch selection. It gives him confidence, and that’s what counts, as you know.” So I worked with Tackett, too.

Then, when Rick Sutcliffe joined the Orioles in ’92, he also called some pitches for Ben and some of the other pitchers on the staff. We had signs all over the place, which sounds ridiculous, but it worked fine. Rick and I had a lot of experience—about twenty-five years between us—and our pitchers and catchers had almost none, for the most part. This was our way to help out.

One year after a career season, I was ready to go again in 1992. Then something happened that surprised me as much as anybody watching: with the Orioles playing solid baseball, I struggled for much of the year, and at times things seemed to spin almost out of control. At some point, my supply of confidence—built up in ’91 and continued with a really good spring training—just ran out. I know at least one major reason why I struggled: I made the terrible mistake of letting the business side of the game clash with the baseball side.

My four-year deal was due to expire at the end of the season, and the Orioles’ president Larry Lucchino, my agent Ron Shapiro, and I all wanted to hammer out a new agreement before the season started. Ron had some good negotiating points: my ’91 season, the explosion in free-agent salaries the previous winter, the union’s victory in the collusion case against the owners, and the boom in attendance at Camden Yards. But the Orioles had a great bargaining point as well: they knew I didn’t want to leave Baltimore. The best way for a player to maximize his leverage is to go into the free agency period, but as I’ve said, I don’t believe in filing for free agency as a negotiating ploy. If you do that you have to be willing to leave, and I wasn’t. I’d always been able to live where I wanted to live and play where I wanted to play—Baltimore—but now if this contract didn’t go through, I was going to have to pull up stakes. I would’ve been able to deal with the change—you deal with what you have to in this life—but I didn’t want the change. I’m a Maryland man.