With Earl Weaver, whatever was going through his head came out his mouth. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. In this respect, we were opposites. And in my official rookie season, 1982, some of what was coming out of Earl’s mouth wasn’t very nice. I hit the ball pretty well in spring training and, with my mom and sister in the stands, I went 3-for-5 in a big Opening Day victory against Kansas City, including a two-run homer off Dennis Leonard in my first at-bat (a nice trifecta for me: Opening Day dingers in Charlotte, Rochester, and now Baltimore). Then I went into a deep, deep slump: 4-for-55. In the minors I’d had a moderate number of walks. Now I had one walk. Why bother to walk me? I couldn’t even hit my Dad during batting practice, which I’d been doing since I was a teenager.
Every day, Earl or batting coach Ralph Rowe had me out for extra BP. Earl wanted to work on my position in the batter’s box. I was used to standing well off the plate, then striding into the ball, as we say, toward the plate. People thought I was too far off the plate, but remember, I’m tall and have long arms. Diving toward the plate like I did, I had no trouble reaching the outside corner. I didn’t feel that was the problem at all—it never had been—but Earl wanted me to stand close to the plate like Frank Robinson had done. Frank had handled the inside pitch from that vantage, and Earl thought I could adopt the same approach. In BP, he’d climb up on the bar across the back of the batting cage—otherwise, he wasn’t tall enough to see where the pitches were relative to the plate—and coach me to move up on the plate, always move up on the plate. Then he’d say, “See, now the outside pitch is down the middle.”
“Yeah, Earl,” I’d say, “but now I can’t hit the inside pitch. It’s too close.”
“Oh, that’ll come. That’ll come. The important thing is there’s no place on that plate they can pitch you now.”
“Earl, I don’t feel comfortable with the inside pitches.” I wasn’t debating him. I was a rookie, not even twenty-two years old, while he was maybe the most famous, definitely the most notorious, manager in baseball. He’d been a manager in the Baltimore organization since 1957, and for the Orioles since 1968. My father was his third base coach, whom Earl had put in charge of spring training. Those two had a lot of mutual respect, so I wasn’t about to argue with Earl Weaver. I was just sheepishly responding to his points, for the most part.
On another issue, however, Earl and I saw eye to eye, at least at first. I was patient at the plate, especially facing a pitcher I didn’t know. I didn’t just give him the first strike, but I usually wouldn’t swing at the first pitch, either. I wanted to get some idea what he had. I’d go deeper in the count to get a feel, especially if no one was on base, so I’d have an idea what to expect if I came up later with men in scoring position. I had first gotten comfortable taking a lot of pitches in Charlotte two years before, often waiting for T-Bone Shelby to steal a base. Now with the Orioles, I didn’t know many of the pitchers, obviously, so I got in the habit of taking the first pitch. Back in spring training somebody had written a story about this—they counted the number of consecutive at-bats in which I did it—and Earl had defended me. Give the kid time, he said, adding that Ken Singleton had made a pretty good living following the same strategy. But when the season started, the pitchers caught on, of course, and as the slump went on game after game, that first pitch was usually a fastball for a strike. Then came the slider for strike two, swinging or taking, then a check swing when I’m down in the count and I’m back on the bench, struck out or grounded out and looking bad.
In addition, I was looking for breaking balls, because that’s what I had seen all the time in the minors. But in the majors, the first thing the pitchers want to know is if you can handle the major league fastball, and they’ll throw it until you hit it. Then they want to know what you can do with the inside pitch. Eddie Murray patiently explained all this to me, but still I sometimes outsmarted myself looking for breaking balls. I’d say to Eddie, “I’d wish they’d throw me the curves they throw you,” and he’d say, “I wish they’d throw me the fastballs they throw you.” One day he framed the point a little differently. “Boy, would I love to be you,” he said. “Anytime you’re struggling, all you have to do is look fastball.” I listened, but I guess I wasn’t learning. I’m surprised I didn’t try one of Eddie’s favorite tricks for breaking out of a slump: video games. Our trainer Ralph Salvon’s son-in-law ran some arcades, and the Orioles ended up with a couple of games, including the very popular Asteroids that Eddie felt was great for his concentration and hand-eye coordination. But I was never even tempted to give it a try.
Taking some pitches, trying to be patient and learning the pitchers, I was digging myself a huge hole instead. I’d practically been given the third base job when they traded Doug DeCinces, I’d had a great season in winter ball, I felt I was ready for my official rookie season, I had that home run on Opening Day and had gotten everyone’s hopes sky high—but now, the pits. Everybody on the team wanted to help, of course, and guys reminded me that even Willie Mays had gotten off to a horrible start, but all this advice and consolation worked out negatively with me. I was overanalyzing and overwhelmed. I just couldn’t hit the ball, and I was out-thinking myself (and not for the last time, perhaps). In the batting cage, my father tried to simplify things. “You know how to hit,” he’d say. “You got to the big leagues without all these guys, right? Let’s get back to the basics.” Easier said than done, right then, and slowly but surely I was driving Earl Weaver crazy. In his calmer moments he’d say, “Look, you take the good ones and swing at the bad ones.” A couple of times he was more blunt, exploding on the bench after I’d returned after another weak out, “Take the *#@! pitch right down the middle, swing at the *#@! pitch over his head or in the *#@! dirt! How’s he ever going to hit that way?”
Earl was right; that’s the definition of a slump. Or one of the definitions. Those explosions were under his breath, just barely loud enough for me to hear. I knew all about Earl’s tantrums, of course—in the minors we had always kept abreast of the latest Weaver outbursts—and I talked about the situation with Rick Dempsey, our catcher and my roommate the following two years. Rick had had many run-ins with Earl before I arrived on the scene. Earl would yell at him and Rick would yell back, “You think I’m not trying? I don’t need you screaming in my ear. If you don’t think I’m good enough, don’t put me in the lineup.” One time the catcher actually threw his shinguard in the general direction of his manager, a famous episode around Baltimore. A funnier one was the time Rick found out he wasn’t in the lineup against Ferguson Jenkins. When he stomped into Earl’s office demanding to know why, Earl pulled out his statistics on match-ups. He was one of the first managers to keep these numbers in great detail, and he showed Rick the hard facts of life: four K’s the last game he faced Jenkins; he’d never hit him, period. “I’m due,” Rick countered. Earl said, “I’ve seen too many of those ‘due-fers’ turn into O-fers. Now get out.”
Eventually, after years of combat, Rick developed a theory that Earl wasn’t really yelling at him, but at the pitchers, indirectly, in a way he could get away with. That’s what Rick decided as a form of self-defense, that managers don’t yell at the pitchers, figuring they’re too sensitive to handle it—Jim Palmer might have been an exception to the rule—but Earl could yell at him and know the pitchers would hear it. The pitcher is responsible for the pitch selection, in the final analysis, so if Earl criticized Rick, Rick figured that he was actually criticizing the pitcher, but from a safe distance. The theory among most of the Orioles was that Earl vented his frustrations on guys who wouldn’t be hurt by the accusations, who would even be motivated—like Dempsey, like Jim Palmer, who eventually wrote an entire book about his battles with his manager. Other players Earl would leave alone entirely. He never once yelled at Eddie Murray, from what I understand. I guess he was afraid that yelling would be the wrong thing to do—and I think he was correct about that. Plus Eddie was the best hitter on the team and the best clutch hitter in the league. Why yell? He didn’t need that kind of motivation.
I finally decided Earl did intend for me to overhear his angry mutterings, maybe like he intended for the pitchers to overhear his tirades against Rick Dempsey, but a couple of times he also tried the soft sell, inviting me into his office before the game and telling me not to worry about going back to Triple-A because he didn’t have anyone else to play third. “Doug DeCinces is gone,” he said, “you’re all I’ve got.” This approach didn’t make me feel much better, but I wanted to believe him because I had in mind that they might give me 100 at-bats to get something going, a couple of dozen games. After that, well, even Mickey Mantle had been shipped out his first year.
Rich Dauer, our second baseman, tried to encourage me by telling me all about his own rookie slumps—two slumps, in fact—and about Earl’s reaction. When Rich was called up in September 1976, he was 4-for-39. The following year, he struggled again and at one point was a combined 5-for-80 in the major leagues. Earl had called Rich in and said, “We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to figure something out.” Rich had a great answer: “Don’t worry, Earl, I’ll get three hits tonight.” Even though he didn’t get three hits that night, Earl stuck with him. What could he do? He knew Rich was going to hit once he got his feet on the ground, and, according to Rich, Earl believed I’d hit, too. But he was losing patience. Both of us were.
The pressure was almost as bad that April as it had been at the end of the previous year, when I knew Earl would pinch-hit for me with Terry Crowley or Jose Morales in a close game, and I might have only two at-bats to do something. That’s terrible pressure, but in 1982 Earl also reminded me I was playing a good third base, which was true, and he knew I was working hard.
At some point early that season, my old friend T-Bone Shelby tried to help me out with some horseplay. The Orioles had traveled up to Rochester for the traditional exhibition game against our Triple-A franchise, where T-Bone had started the season. Inside my locker in the visiting clubhouse I found a stack of local apartment brochures—a not-so-subtle hint that I might be looking for a place in ’chester someday soon. I knew who had left those brochures there, and I knew why: more payback from T-Bone. This might still have been about doubles, but I suspect it was about a prank of mine a few seasons back. I knew T-Bone was looking forward to a full winter off, and I found some official Orioles stationery and typed a letter telling John to report to spring training weeks ahead of the normal time. I signed it as one of the front office executives and mailed it to John’s home in Kentucky. It was a great practical joke, I thought, well-conceived and -executed, but something tipped him off, and he patiently waited a year or two for this opportunity to get even. I had to hand it to him, the apartment brochures were a great joke.
One day at the batting cage Earl surprised me by saying, “Okay, stand where you want to stand.” My dad was pitching, I took my favorite position off the plate, and after a dozen pitches I realized they’d all been on the outside corner and I had been slapping them to right field. Dad has good control, he could put the ball where he wanted to, and I suddenly realized what was going on. Earl must have told Senior to throw every pitch on the outside corner to prove to me that I couldn’t hit it with any power from where I was standing. Clued in, I started diving out to get that outside pitch—exactly the same thing I’d do in the game. I anticipated, and I started pulling the ball on the outside edge over the left–center field fence.
Earl said, “I guess you really can hit the outside pitch.” Then he said, “But you know what I mean. When you’ve got a tough pitcher out there and he’s nibbling on the outside corner and the umpire might be giving him a little extra, and you’ve got a 2-0 count, right when he goes into his windup, why don’t you sneak up on the plate and that outside pitch is right in your power?”
I said “Okay, Earl,” even though shifting my stance during the pitcher’s windup was a foreign concept. As it turned out, not long after I finally broke out of that slump, I was facing the Blue Jays’ Ken Schrom, a young pitcher with really good control. The game was lopsided in our favor already, so when Schrom went 2-and-0 on me, I decided to try Earl’s tip about moving up on the plate. The pitch was on the outside edge but I pulled it over the left field fence. Back in the dugout I told Earl I had crept up that time, and he said, “Oh, good! Good!” But I’ve stepped forward like that only a few times in the following fifteen years. (What I have done more often is moved in or out, up or back in the box—not during the windup, but initially—depending on the match-up against a particular pitcher. The most recent episode was in the 1996 playoffs, when I was standing almost on top of the plate à la Frank Robinson. I felt I had to do something to combat the hard breaking balls on, or just off, the outside corner from righthanders Charles Nagy and Orel Hershiser of the Indians and David Cone of the Yankees. I adopted the new position to force the action, and it seemed to work okay.)
I don’t recall the exact date Earl played that trick on me during BP, but I know it was on May 1 when he ran out to argue the balk call against Jim Palmer that had moved Reggie Jackson from second to third base. While Earl was busy kicking dirt on home plate, Reggie called me over to the bag and said, “Look, don’t let everyone else tell you how to hit. You could hit before you got here. Just be yourself and hit the way you want to hit. They traded DeCinces to make room for you, didn’t they? They think you can play. They know you can.”
In 1970, Reggie had had one of his few off years, and he went to winter ball with Frank Robinson because he’d been told that Frank was good with young players. Reggie gives Frank credit for teaching him how to manage his excitable personality and his temper. Their conversations in Puerto Rico had been much longer than our brief exchange standing at third base, but he had learned from Frank that the right words can help a player. They definitely can. I think Reggie had a similarly positive impact on several other young players.
When Reggie called me over, I was afraid at first that he was going to give me more technical advice, the last thing I needed, but what he said was perfect. Dad and Eddie Murray and others had been telling me the same thing, but coming from a guy of Reggie’s stature at the time, and also as a player from another team, it just clicked. When word spread about the Jackson story, Eddie saw the opportunity to apply the needle. He pulled me aside, reminded me that he’d been saying the same thing, and said, “Hey, I can play the game, too. I don’t care about getting my name in the paper, but I can play.”
Maybe Reggie’s timing was perfect because I’d already decided to quit worrying so much, play my best, and let the chips fall. If I was sent down, I was sent down. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, and I’d be back anyway. The next day I responded with two resounding scratch hits and saw Reggie, who wasn’t in the lineup, nodding his head and laughing in the dugout. My batting average jumped to .141. Then the following day I was beaned in the fifth inning by Mike Moore, and that turned out to be an important turning point, without a doubt.
In my first at-bat against Mike, who was also in his rookie year playing with Seattle, I had waved at a breaking ball and hit it off the end of the bat back to the mound. I’m stubborn, of course. If a pitcher got me on a certain pitch, I vowed he wasn’t going to do it again. I went up the next time determined to prove I could hit Mike’s curve. He’d have to get me out on a different pitch. I can’t count the number of times that approach produced a hit in my early years in the game, because the pitchers kept going back to the same well. They wanted to make me prove I could hit a pitch, and I patiently waited for the opportunity. In the minors, especially, but also in the majors sometimes, I would wait two or three at-bats for the curve on the outside corner, then hit it hard somewhere, usually.
In the majors, it probably didn’t take long for me to get the reputation as a hitter who looked for pitches, more so than most hitters. Some people even call this guessing. I call it figuring it out, and my own experience was my guide. A simple example: If I got a base hit on a fastball my first time up, the second time I could safely look for something else. Sooner or later in that at-bat, I’d get it. The calculation gets much more complicated than that, and you also have to determine who’s really calling the game, the pitcher or the catcher. The two positions can think very differently about setting up batters. It’s part of the game I really enjoy.
In any event, the way I hit, often looking for pitches, I have to have confidence in my judgment that this is a breaking ball. Recognize the spin, anticipate the break. When any batter is going great, it seems easy to pick up the spin almost the moment the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. When you’re struggling, you don’t see the ball or the spin as well. This is another definition of a slump. On Moore’s first pitch in that second at-bat, I read curve ball, not because it was a curve ball but because I wanted the curve. I waited for the break . . . waited . . . waited . . . then suddenly realized this pitch was never going to break. It was Mike’s ninety-four-mile-per-hour heater, and it clocked me right in the back of the head. Put me flat on my back; put a dent and a crack in my batting helmet as well. I was sent to the hospital for the standard “precautionary X rays,” which were negative. Our general manager, Hank Peters, sent the helmet back to the company because it wasn’t supposed to break like that. (I tried to find that helmet, but it disappeared. I’d like to have it back.)
I knew I couldn’t let anyone think that this beaning was going to affect me negatively. If word spreads that you can be intimidated by high inside pitches, you’re going to see a lot of high inside pitches. But if you can prove that the intimidation actually backfires against the pitcher, if you become a better hitter, you may see less of those brush-back pitches. In retrospect, a lot of people decided that the beaning woke me up. That’s possible. I like to think that it made me an even more determined hitter.
On a mission following the beaning, helped along by the encouragement from Reggie Jackson and also by Earl’s agreement that I should hit the way I was most comfortable, I finally broke that rookie slump and bit by bit pulled myself out of that deep hole. Earl told me in his office that all he wanted was for my average to go up, that he wasn’t concerned about home runs. But I knew he did expect home runs from his third basemen because every manager does. Especially Earl. At the start of the season I might even have gotten into an uppercutting mode, trying for homers. Now in batting practice I worked hard on swinging level and hitting line drives, letting the homers take care of themselves. With a young player, sometimes a slump in the actual games produces a slump in batting practice, too, because you’re trying too hard to prove that at least you can hit BP pitches. The approach in BP should be entirely different than the approach in a game, but the tendency during a slump is to try to look good in BP by hitting homers off sixty-mile-per-hour straight balls. Now I was careful to stay within myself, in BP and the games. I cut out all the bad habits and got back to the basics of driving the ball gap to gap. The Orioles left for a West Coast swing, and by the time we were back I was smoking and my average had gone up ninety points.
The slump was the first surprise my official rookie season. The second one came on July 1 at Memorial Stadium when I walked into the clubhouse for the Cleveland game and saw the 6 by my name on the lineup board. The number 6 is shortstop. I played 5—third base—and logically assumed Earl had made a mistake. I didn’t notice that he had written 5 by my roomie Floyd Rayford’s name. Then Lenn Sakata, who had been playing shortstop, came up to me in the clubhouse and said, “You know you’re playing shortstop?”
“I am?”
“Yeah.”
“No, that’s just a mistake.”
“No, you’re playing short.”
I found Dad; he confirmed the move and said don’t worry, I’d be fine. Earl and the coaches had talked about the move, and Dad had told them I could handle the job. Right before the game Earl called me in and said, “Look, just make the routine plays. Don’t try to go beyond yourself. If the ball’s hit to you, I want you to make sure to catch it. Take it out of your glove. Get a good grip on it. Make a good throw to first base. Okay?” That’s exactly how he was speaking to me, almost like I was a Little Leaguer. I’ll never forget it. Then he continued, “If he’s safe, he’s still on first.” He paused, I was wondering what exactly he was driving at, then he continued with his voice rising until he was almost yelling, “But if you catch the ball but then throw it over Murray’s head, then not only is the runner safe, but he’s also on *#@! second base!” That was a pet peeve of Earl’s, similar to one of Senior’s, who always said, “If you drop it, I don’t care if it takes all day, pick it up the first time because if you hurry you’ll fumble it again and compound the mistake.” Both Senior and Earl were simply instructing the Oriole Way: don’t give the other team any extra bases; make them earn everything they get. Basic, but effective.
Given what has happened in the following fifteen years, that sudden decision by Earl Weaver to move me from third base to shortstop in 1982 has probably been dissected more closely than any other episode in my career. Earl had always prided himself on his baseball judgment regarding who could do what, and when, and how. Everyone else in the game thinks they’re great at these judgments, too, but Earl had the track record to back him up. He’d say, “They claim the manager might influence six or seven games a year. Well, tactically, maybe so, but what about his choice of the roster in spring training, when he sets up the team? The manager influences all of the games then, making sure he has someone for each and every situation that comes up in the ball game.”
I agree. That assessment is one of the manager’s key jobs. It makes sense that Earl was upset when the organization overruled him by trading Doug DeCinces to make room for me at third base. He disliked that deal on two counts: first, he wanted to keep DeCinces; second, he wanted me at shortstop, not third base. He’d been thinking about me at short ever since he’d seen me as a potential draftee fielding ground balls and clearing the fences at Memorial Stadium hitting off my father. Elrod Hendricks told a lot of reporters about the conversation he overheard on the field about that same time between Tom Giordano, the Orioles’ scouting director, and Weaver. That exchange went something like this:
“Pitcher.”
“Shortstop.”
“Pitcher.”
“Shortstop.”
Earl’s thinking regarding me and shortstop was straightforward. He didn’t care whether I looked the part of the prototype. He didn’t care whether other great shortstops were nicknamed “Scooter” and “Pee Wee,” and he didn’t care that I was “Rip” instead of “Runt.” Apparently I reminded him of Marty Marion, one of his favorite players in St. Louis. Marion was tall, at six-two, but skinny, like I was when I was a kid in Bluefield. They called Marion “Slats” or “The Octopus.” By 1982, I was pushing six-foot-four, 210 pounds. Earl didn’t care whether I was acrobatic like Ozzie Smith, who was setting a new standard for the position while playing in the National League. Earl had always said he wanted three things out of his shortstop, and only three: make the routine play; turn the double play; make the third and final out. Maybe he was even suspicious of acrobatics on the grounds that with anyone but Ozzie, they lead to wild throws over Murray’s head and a runner on second base. Earl wanted dependability from shortstop and, if possible, some pop. Ideal would be the baseball equivalent of Magic Johnson, a big guard who could drive the length of the court but also post up a forward. When DeCinces went on to hit 30 home runs in California in 1982, while I hit 28 in Baltimore, Weaver did the math and moaned that he could have had 58 home runs from the left side of the infield, definitely enough to win the division for us that year, since we came close anyway.
Bobby Bonner had been Mark Belanger’s heir apparent at shortstop, highly touted from his first day in Bluefield, fresh out of Texas A&M. Bobby was about as smooth a fielder as there was. When we were on the same field in Bluefield, he made me look like a klutz. Three years later in Rochester, I was still in awe of Bobby’s natural ability. Hard line drives got past the mound that Bobby stopped behind second base. He threw bullets from his knees deep in the hole. One day I was playing in close at third when a high chopper bounced over my head. When I looked back expecting to see the ball roll into short left field, there was Bobby, catching it while running full speed toward the line. Then he threw back across his body on a dead run to nail the fast runner at first. Amazing.
Earl knew all about these plays, of course, but he also knew about the one that, according to many people around the Orioles at that time, turned him against Bobby. That had been toward the end of 1980, when Bobby had stepped in for Mark Belanger and Lenn Sakata off and on. He’d made a few other errors, but the clincher came in a game in Toronto when Eddie Murray hit three home runs, including one in the top of the eleventh. In the bottom half of that inning, with Lloyd Moseby on second base, Barry Bonnell hit a bullet right at shortstop. On the wet, slick artificial turf, Bobby never got his hands down. Tie score, and the Blue Jays won the game in the thirteenth. My father said it was practically an impossible chance, but Earl didn’t see it that way. The scene in the clubhouse afterward wasn’t nice. Mike Boddicker, who had also been called up at the end of that season and had a locker near Bobby’s, right around the corner from Earl’s office, heard the explosion from Earl: “Where the hell did we get this guy? He’s supposed to be our best shortstop prospect? He couldn’t catch anything!” Earl went nuts, and if Mike could hear the tantrum from his locker, Bobby could hear it, too. Quite a few players said that he crumbled on the spot and never recovered. Mike said he saw it in Bobby’s eyes.
I don’t know. I wasn’t there. All I know is that Bobby and I had been featured on a baseball card as “Baltimore Orioles Future Stars,” and regarding Bobby, I agreed. I thought he was going to be the next great shortstop in the big leagues. He had outstanding tools, but Earl lost confidence in his everyday dependability to help a winning ball club in the majors, which is the only place it counts. Earl could live without pop from his shortstop’s bat—Belanger had 20 home runs for his entire career—but he insisted on dependability.
Mike Boddicker also thought that Earl’s tantrum in Toronto was one of his tests of a player’s character. Doug DeCinces thought that, too, because he felt he’d been given his own test by Earl—and passed it. That’s an instructive story that I’ll pass along because it says a lot not only about Earl and Doug, but about the Oriole teams of that era. It happened in 1978, my first year in the minors in Bluefield, Doug’s fourth year with the Orioles in Baltimore but his first full season as the official successor to Brooks Robinson, who had retired the previous fall.
Suddenly Earl was unhappy with his offense, so he decided to try Eddie Murray at third base, DeCinces at second, Lee May at first. He could count on lots of homers from those three, but could they field? Two of the three—Eddie and Doug—were playing out of position, basically. Doug didn’t respond during the experiment. He’d broken his nose in spring training, never got on track to begin with, and now he was bouncing between third and second, making some errors, not hitting. One day, with guys on first and second, two out, Mark Belanger fields a ball behind the bag but can’t get it out of his glove and tries a backhanded flip to Doug covering second. The toss goes wide and Doug is off the bag when he catches it, stumbles, and turns to see the lead runner, Buddy Bell, going for home. His throw to the plate is high and Bell is safe on a bang-bang play. Earl runs to the mound screaming, and Doug looks over at Mark wondering why Earl’s so upset. Mark shrugs. Maybe it’s the fact that it had been an 0-2 pitch.
When the inning is finally over, Earl is still angry on the bench, and Doug asks Lee May why. Lee just points at Doug.
“Why me?”
“I don’t know. He just picked you out.”
So Doug turns to Earl and says, “Hey, you talkin’ to me?” And Earl comes after him and jabs his finger in his chest. That’s when Doug grabs Earl’s hand and says, “You do that again and I’ll knock the $#%@ out of you.” Earl goes, “Oh, yeah? Smith! You’re on second,” hollering to Billy Smith, a role player for the Orioles for a couple of years. Doug says, “You tell Smith he can play second the rest of the #@^&* year. I’m tired of your little games.”
Doug really blew up. He admitted it later, but he also figured he’d gone through enough difficulty trying to replace Brooks Robinson, now he was trying to convert to second base because Earl had asked him to, and he gets chewed out on a play that wasn’t even his fault, that was messed up to begin with. Elrod Hendricks and a couple of other guys, maybe a security guy in the dugout, had to hold Doug back.
As it happened, that was the first game of a doubleheader, and Earl called a team meeting between games. He talked about tempers and sometimes pushing players too far. In Doug’s mind, Earl almost apologized for the incident. He said he didn’t hold grudges, he was here to win, he expected his players to be here for the same reason. For the second game, Doug started at first base with Jim Palmer going for his 200th victory. In the seventh inning, Doug doubled off the right field wall and drove in two runs. Then he was amazed when Rich Dauer trotted out to pinch-run for him. Dauer was in his second season, the likely second baseman of the future, but he couldn’t outrun Doug. At least Doug didn’t think so, and as he came off the field, Lee May could see that he was steaming and met him on the top step of the dugout. Lee wouldn’t even let Doug stop to pick up his glove. He escorted him straight into the clubhouse and said, “Remember, Earl doesn’t hold any grudges.”
In Doug’s mind he could have folded right then, but he didn’t. In Doug’s mind, Bobby Bonner did fail his own similar test from Earl two years later. Doug and a lot of the Oriole players from that generation had the notion that Earl’s thinking regarding his own temper tantrums was this: If you can’t deal with me, you can’t deal with bases loaded, top of the ninth. If you can’t handle my pressure, how can you handle the pressure of the game?
Maybe, but again, I don’t know. The theory sounds nice, but a lot of people have tried to figure out Earl Weaver. I know he used all kinds of psychological warfare, and Bobby Bonner himself told reporters covering my streak fourteen years later that he knew from that day in Toronto when Earl exploded that he wouldn’t be playing many games for this manager. And he was right. After playing a little in 1982, he didn’t play at all the following year and asked to be traded. That didn’t happen. In 1984 he was sent instead to Rochester, where he had his best year at the plate. Now he was a minor league free agent with other baseball offers in hand, but he had something else in mind. Already a born-again Christian, publicly regretting the wild ways of his youth, Bobby moved with his family to Zambia, where, the last I heard, he’s still working as a missionary.
I don’t think Earl maliciously tried to hurt Bobby Bonner or any of his ballplayers. He could be friendly or he could be so wrapped up in something else that he’d walk right past you in the clubhouse and never say a word. Or he could just ignore you altogether. With injuries, he was always pushing, pushing, pushing guys to get back: “Can you give me a day? Can you give me an inning?” He even had a public run-in with Mark Belanger over the severity of Mark’s back injury. But I don’t think he had a doghouse—DeCinces started the game the day after his battle with Earl, and he started for the next three years, before he was traded—and as far as I know Earl never lied to his players. He could be tough, no doubt about it, and some of the players may not have liked his methods, but they got the truth from him, I think, and they respected him for that. If you weren’t getting the job done, Earl would tell you, like he was telling me during that rookie slump, and if he decided you couldn’t get the job done, he’d get rid of you. But something else about Earl few people know about: as end of the season approached, he called guys into his office and asked if they had any incentives in their contracts that they still hadn’t made—innings played, mound appearances, at-bats, etc. Here’s where the baseball side and the business side can mix. Without passing judgment on whether Earl was right or wrong, policywise, I think it’s really cool. I think it was his way to say thank you for the player’s time and effort.
In 1982, two years after Bonner’s famous error in Toronto, Lenn Sakata was the main shortstop, with Bobby Bonner playing a little—very little. In June, the team fell behind Boston and Milwaukee—but not by much, only five games. I was finally hitting pretty well, climbing out of that hole I’d dug myself, when Earl decided to make the change at shortstop. He thought I could play the position and deliver some offense as a bonus. Floyd Rayford replaced me at third, for the time being. Earl said about the experiment, “If it doesn’t work, Cal can always go back to third, where we know he can do the job.”
At that stage, I was prepared to move, even though I was happy to be the third baseman of the future for the Orioles. I was playing my position about as well as I could, about as well as anyone else in the league at the time: six errors in 69 games. And I was now hitting. Would this new position and the extra responsibilities throw me into another slump? The thought crossed my mind, as it must have crossed Earl’s. This is a pretty bold move, I thought, but I’m game if he is. I’d played fewer than 10 games at shortstop since A-ball in Miami. I knew the rudiments of the position, but it was almost like starting over. On the field I was very deliberate, like Earl said, focusing on the routine play, slowly gaining confidence with the others. Every time a new play came up that I handled, I told myself, Okay, that’s one more you know you can make. Pretty soon most of them were taken care of. Working with two second basemen—Dauer and Sakata—didn’t make things easier, but all of us made the adjustments.
Dauer and I talked a lot about positioning. He warned me that the coaches trying to move me around from the dugout couldn’t really see where I was to begin with. “They can’t really see how deep you are,” he said. “They can’t see the angles. They can’t see what pitch is called. If you have any doubts, play as straight up as you can. Don’t get too caught up in overshifting. If they move you and you don’t like it, nod your head, move, then when they’re not looking, go back where you were.” I also think Senior finally convinced people to leave me alone to work out my positioning with help from Richie. Dad had a lot of confidence in my baseball sense and instincts, and I slowly got enough confidence to start cheating on batters, but only if I had a really good sense of where they’d hit the ball, not just a guess. If I didn’t have a good idea, I didn’t get fancy. (I still don’t.) Soon enough, I was calling the coverages at second base. Dauer was all for it.
Immediately after the move to shortstop I hit maybe half a dozen homers, but then I went into a tailspin, not quite as bad as the slump in April, but almost, and adapting to shortstop might have had something to do with it. Playing third, I had gone into the dugout thinking only about hitting. Playing shortstop, I was sometimes thinking about a play or situation that had just occurred on the field. When I didn’t reach a ball, I wondered if I should have. But slowly I settled in, and after the season, Earl Weaver summed up by saying that I had played well, that maybe I hadn’t gotten to every ball Belanger would have reached, but that I had gotten to some that quite a few other shortstops around the league would have missed. And don’t forget, Earl reminded everyone, it’s easier to find a third baseman who can hit 28 homers. (In theory, that’s right, but the Orioles haven’t had consistent power out of third base in the last fifteen years.)
On May 29, about a month before he moved me to shortstop, Earl gave me the second game off in a doubleheader against Toronto. My roomie Floyd Rayford started that game at third base. It turns out that was the last time I wouldn’t be in the starting lineup for fourteen years . . . and counting.