Today, teams have advance scouts, video, charts, computer printouts, and all kinds of data designed to tell you how you’re supposed to pitch a certain batter. I have to say, all that information does help. But the great pitchers don’t really need all those reports, unless you’re talking about a hitter who just came up from the minor leagues. They’ll file them in their memory banks for information, but generally the good pitcher already has a plan of his own.
Seaver, Gibson, Maddux—they’re on their own programs. They understand their success and what they’re going to war with. And they understand the hitters they’ve been pitching to and have been getting out for years. Regardless of the scouting report, a guy like that knows how he’ll pitch me. I’d have to make an adjustment and hurt him a couple times before he’d change his approach and move on to something else.
I think my best friend in the World Series was the scouting report. Nobody really looked for my slider when we played in the World Series. They all looked for that ninety-five-, ninety-six-mile-an-hour fastball that I probably threw about eighty to eighty-five percent of the time during the regular season. The scouts just saw the fastball, and they heard about it by word of mouth or whatever, and that’s what went down on their reports. Fine.
I had a lot of regular-season games that were better-pitched than some of my best games in the World Series. The difference was that, in the World Series, the batters didn’t know me nearly as well as they thought they did by reading my friend, the scouting report.
I had the same experience. That scouting report was the best thing I had going for me in the postseason.
They had a book on how to pitch Reggie, and the book said to go inside. That was all well and good, but teams like the Dodgers were so hung up on that scouting report that they couldn’t see what was happening in front of their eyes. They couldn’t tell that I was cheating back in the box. They couldn’t see that, for a while there, I was hitting a home run every time I swung the bat.
About the worst thing a pitcher can do is swear an oath to the scouting report. There are just too many things to consider.
Albert Pujols is kind of like Reggie, for example. You can get him out by pitching him in, too. But they’ll trot out some guy throwing the ball eighty-seven or ninety miles an hour, and he’s trying to pitch Albert Pujols on the inside part of the plate. That ain’t gonna work. It’s just not going to work. You’ve got to realize, pal, that some pitchers can pitch him in, but not you!
It’s just a fact that all pitchers are different and very few of them can succeed exactly the same way. A scouting report can be helpful to a pitcher if he understands its limitations, but as a blueprint to getting somebody out it’s not worth much, as far as I’m concerned. Sam Jones might be able to get a batter out with that great curveball of his, but that doesn’t mean I should throw curveballs to that same batter, because my ragtag curveball was nothing like Sam Jones’s. By the same token, I would be able to pitch Reggie, for instance, in ways that other pitchers couldn’t because I had command of two good fastballs and a hard slider and confidence in them all.
How could some other pitcher be expected to approach a batter the same way I do when, if I got in trouble, chances are that I wouldn’t even stick with that plan myself? If, say, you’re a sinker-ball pitcher and the batter is a good low-ball hitter, when your back’s against the wall you’ve got to go with the sinker regardless.
All that aside, if I’d never faced Bob Gibson before and somebody handed me a scouting report on him, I’d definitely look at it. I don’t have to pledge allegiance to it, but I’d take a look. I can use all the information I can get.
Sure, you want to get an idea. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen the way they say it’s going to happen.
In 1965, the Cubs had a little rookie infielder, a Dominican named Roberto Peña who was about five-foot-eight at the most. The scouting report said that this guy could pick the ball up and hit it four times and couldn’t get it out of the ballpark. It said to throw the ball right down the middle and let him hit it as hard as he can. And the very first pitch, I threw it right down the middle and wham, he hit an opposite-field home run to right. His first career home run. The next night, he hit his second career home run, against Curt Simmons. In 1968, he hit his third career home run, against Steve Carlton. In 1969, he hit his fourth career home run, against Carlton. I don’t think our scouting report on Roberto Peña was very good.
The best scouting report is your own history with the other guy, if you have one. When you first get into the league you might keep your own little black book on how pitchers throw to you, but after you’ve been around for a while the book is in your head—at least, when you’re facing the guys you’ve seen over and over. In my last year or so, I’d go to the ballpark in, say, Baltimore, and up on the scoreboard they’d have my lifetime statistics against the Orioles. It looked like a season. I’d have like 580 at-bats, 120 runs scored, 40 home runs … After all that, the Baltimore pitchers and I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from each other.
I saw Jim Palmer from 1969 to 1982. I knew how he was going to pitch me. I faced Nolan Ryan for almost twenty years. When you’ve battled somebody for that long, your rivalry is at a different level. Your plan is already complete. There aren’t many nuances left to think about. There’s not much cat and mouse going on anymore. It’s almost easier, really, because you’ve swallowed so much of the guy’s bread and butter. You’ve come to anticipate the taste of his cooking.
Being a smart hitter is knowing how you’re going to be pitched. You can do that more intelligently against a familiar foe you’ve batted against for a dozen years. Being a smart hitter is knowing what the pitcher’s going to do in certain counts with certain scores. Certainly he’s going to pitch you differently when it’s 6–1 than when it’s 1–0. And he’s going to pitch you differently depending on what pitcher he’s pitching against. If Palmer’s up two runs and we have our number-four starter going and there’s a runner at third base, he’s not going to be worried about that run. He knows he’s in good shape. But if he’s matched against Bob Gibson, Ferguson Jenkins, Roy Halladay, or Johan Santana, then you’re going to be pitched differently because he can’t count on any more run support. He’s going to protect what he has and be a lot more careful.
None of that stuff is in a scouting report. It’s in your head and your history.
Of course, it’s a different story if you’re talking about a rookie pitcher or somebody you’re unfamiliar with. In that case, I’d listen to the scouting report but I’d also do my own scouting by watching the guy throw in his warm-ups. I’d check him out in the on-deck circle. You don’t stand there moving and timing him, but I tried to get a feel and a rhythm for what’s going on. I did that by paying attention.
You hear all the time that young hitters have an advantage their first time around the league because there aren’t good scouting reports out on them yet. And it’s true, it seems to happen that way a lot. But it really shouldn’t. As a pitcher, I feel like it’s easier to pitch to a hitter I haven’t faced before—and who hasn’t faced me, which is more to the point—because I can assume that he’s going by the scouting report. He just knows what I usually do, not what I’m likely to do. I consider that a big advantage.
As a rule, though, I think scouting reports are more useful for hitters than they are for pitchers. At least they tell you how hard a pitcher throws and what his other pitches are like and how good his control is on most nights. That’s information you can use. But whatever they tell you about a hitter, they tell you in the context of a pitcher who isn’t you. As far as I’m concerned, about the only scouting report worth anything to a pitcher is the one that comes from the last time you faced that batter—or better yet, the last fifty times.
When we played Boston in the 1967 World Series, they said you couldn’t throw Carl Yastrzemski high fastballs because he was a high fastball hitter. I thought, really? Well, I was a high fastball pitcher. The first game, I just kept throwing the ball up there and he kept hitting it straight up in the air. I never struck him out. He’d get a good swing at it. But he couldn’t quite catch up with it. If somebody had been writing up a scouting report from that game, it would have said to get Yastrzemski out with high fast-balls. But that wasn’t going to work the next day for Dick Hughes. Yastrzemski had two home runs the next day.
In the 1965 All-Star Game, I faced Harmon Killebrew in the bottom of the ninth with the tying run on second base, in his home ballpark. They told me you couldn’t throw Killebrew a high fastball. Is that right? Struck him out with a high fastball, as I recall.
They told me the same thing about Sadaharu Oh when we toured Japan after the 1968 season. They said you couldn’t throw him a high fastball. Well then, what am I gonna do? I threw him three high fastballs. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Never touched the ball. We got back to the dugout and Cepeda said, “Was that the guy you weren’t supposed to throw high fastballs to?”
I said, “Yeah, I think it was.”
There was a pitcher from Kansas City named Steve Busby who actually figured out and had the guts to pitch me inside. He threw mid-nineties and had an electric slider that crawled up the label. I hated facing him. Also Dave Stieb for Toronto. Stieb had a mid-nineties fastball that I could hit, but he had a slider that looked like it was right down the middle and when I swung it either cracked my bat or I’d foul it off the handle. Sometimes I’d look around and think, man, I hope nobody saw that. Both of those guys caught on. For all I know, it might have been a mistake the first time they figured out about working me inside—sort of like the way Bob figured out how to pitch Eddie Mathews. But I’m sure I looked funny swinging, and I’m sure they thought, ohhhh … yes!
On the other hand, Bert Blyleven was a pitcher who hardly ever tried to come in on me. Blyleven had great stuff. Nasty curveball. Hitting Blyleven’s curveball was like trying to drink coffee with a fork. It was like Nolan Ryan’s. The two best curve-balls in the game belonged to Bert Blyleven and Nolan Ryan. Just like Willie McCovey was the standard for raw power, you measured the curveball off Bert Blyleven, because he would use his a lot more than Ryan used his. But I liked facing Blyleven. He gave up as many as forty or fifty home runs in a season, and I usually felt like I was going to click one. I only got six off him, though, in 140 plate appearances. I had more at-bats against Blyleven than any other hitter did, and at the same time he was the pitcher I faced more than any other. As well as I knew him, and as good as I felt standing in there when he was on the mound, I actually only hit a little over .200 against Blyleven for my career. I must have seen two hundred great curveballs in those 140 plate appearances. But I always thought I was going to get something to cut at. Looking back on it, maybe that’s what he wanted me to think.
You know, I just now figured that out. It took me about thirty years. Kinda slow, eh?
Koufax had a curveball like that. It would start in the same spot as his fastball and then just disappear.
As much as Blyleven threw his curveball, he didn’t hang many. The home runs I hit off him were fastballs that missed his spot. Usually when you get a guy, it’s because he missed his spot.
Here’s the fine line you have to walk as a pitcher. Roberto Clemente just couldn’t hit the ball down and away. But get it up and away, and he’d knock the pee out of it. Just a few inches made all the difference.
There were little subtle things with so many batters, things that you wouldn’t know unless you watched them and sparred with them for a while. Rusty Staub was interesting. He was a left-handed hitter you could pitch away, but only until he got two strikes. Then you’d have to come in on him, because with two strikes he’d try to hit the ball to left field. I knew that. So I’d go boom, boom, hard outside, then beep, he’d shorten up a little and here it comes on his hands. Break his bat.
You just have to study these guys, and you have to remember. And you have to respect them.
Tommy John was interesting to me. Before his elbow surgery he threw about ninety-two miles an hour, and post-surgery he became a sinkerball pitcher. He always had excellent location. I could never hurt Tommy. Even when I hit a home run against him in the 1978 World Series, he was already way ahead in the game. We became teammates on both the Yankees and Angels, and I watched and admired how well he was able to manage a game from the mound. You might feel comfortable against Tommy, and even enjoy batting against him, but that didn’t mean you could beat him or hit him.
On the other hand, Luis Tiant was a guy I looked forward to, and with better reason—eventually. In his heyday, he threw ninety-five and pretty much had his way with me. But after being in the league eight or ten years, he showed me balls to hit and didn’t throw hard enough to get them by me. Tiant had a curveball I could time. He liked to throw his curveball to surprise you, like two-and-oh, three-and-one, something like that.
His style was kind of like Marichal’s. The dance was similar on the mound; but the effect wasn’t quite the same. Tiant was good. Marichal was great.
I thought Marichal was the best pitcher in our era. He didn’t have the best stuff, but he was the best pitcher. He could throw strikes from anywhere. And he could throw a different pitch from anywhere. He was tough.
There are plenty of guys who throw hard, but you’ve got to be able to put the ball in certain places. Sam McDowell was an example of one who had great stuff but wasn’t a good pitcher. He just tried to strike everybody out and threw the ball right over the plate. He was “wild in the strike zone.” You can throw a hundred miles an hour and you’re not going to win if you keep serving up balls right over the plate. Sudden Sam also had a great curveball on top of all that speed. But if you could keep the game close, he’d beat himself.
For a lot of pitchers with great stuff, the book said that if you could stay close they’d give you a ball to beat them with. There will be a loud bang in the seventh or eighth inning.
To me, Frank Howard was the hitter’s version of McDowell. He was a big, strong guy who swung hard, and every once in a while he was going to hit one eighteen miles. But he wasn’t a good hitter in the way that the really good hitters were. He had those massive long arms and he liked the ball out over the plate. I would just stay from the middle in, good hard stuff. Then sliders away.
I got him out pretty well, except one time he hit a ball over my shoulder and I went to catch it and missed, and when I turned around it was heading into the bushes up in center field. Into the bushes. I just got it in the wrong place. You can’t do that.
Denny McLain always gave you a ball to hit. I think he liked home runs almost as much as hitters did. He didn’t mind giving them up as long as he won the game. Late in 1968, the year the Tigers won the World Series, I hit two homers off him one game. Both of them put us in the lead, but true to form he ended up winning, 5–4, and it was his thirtieth victory of the season. Denny McLain was out there to win games.
Nolan Ryan was another one who didn’t seem to care if he gave you something out over the plate. To this day, I don’t know that Nolan threw for spots. I felt like he felt he could throw so hard it didn’t matter where he put it; all he had to do was throw strikes. And to a great extent, he was right. He could get away with pitches that virtually nobody else could. But because of that, he wasn’t so careful with his control.
Of course, he threw a curveball that matched his fastball. You couldn’t hit his curveball. The only reason he ever got hit was because of his control.
When I was coaching in Atlanta, we used to have pretty good luck against Nolan Ryan. We hardly ever scored on him early, but then he’d start getting smart with the curveball and trying to trick you with it. He had, whomp, this great big old curveball, and he’d try to change speeds on it and do various things. The guys wouldn’t even pay any attention to him for the first three or four innings, when he was throwing heat. They’d just be in there talkin’ and spittin’ and waiting for the fifth to roll around. Then in the fifth inning they’d grab their bats and be ready to go, and here comes Nolan with that trick curveball and they’d just rip at it. They knew what was in store.
On the other hand, Jim Palmer didn’t have much of a breaking ball, but he had a little tight slider, a big high fastball that he threw about ninety-five, a big high leg kick, and a lot of smarts. Palmer threw what I call a slop curveball. It was a spinner that he’d just try to get over for a strike. But he was definitely a great pitcher.
That was the same curveball I had. I hardly ever threw it, except occasionally to left-handers. Just like Palmer, it sounds.
I never swung at that curveball, because when a guy throws ninety-five you can’t look for a rolling breaking ball that’s seventy miles an hour. Mostly, Jimmy pitched me away, where I liked it, but a little up where I couldn’t quite get to it. I did hit two home runs off him one game, and we lost the game 3–2. He’d pitch around me a lot of times, and be satisfied to get out the right-handed batters who hit behind me.
Palmer once told me, “I didn’t care to pitch to you.” He threw a no-hitter against the A’s in 1969 and walked me three times. Whenever I faced him with the game on the line, he either walked me or I went after a ball that was up in the zone and hard as he could throw it. I’d swing and miss that high fastball, foul it off, hit a hard ground ball at the shortstop.
That was roughly how I pitched Willie McCovey. McCovey was a guy who had all the power you’d ever want, and he was a low-ball hitter. I don’t think it’s a great idea to throw guys down and in, period, but if you threw one there to McCovey he’d drop the barrel of that big bat and hit it about seven hundred yards.
With Willie, though, I made one exception: I’d throw him a slider down and in—way down and in—if it was the first pitch. He wasn’t about to take it. I could count on him swinging. But then I’d work him up the ladder. The next pitch would be about belt-high, and the next one was letter high or higher. I used to laugh because when I’d get two strikes on McCovey he was so determined to hit that ball at his neck that he’d go up on his toes to get it. He couldn’t—no way—but he was damn sure going to try.
Hoot may say he didn’t like to pitch inside too much, but you can bet he would have buried the ball in on me. He’d have shown me the ball away to make me think something might be there, then he’d have thrown it as hard as he could inside. With two strikes, that slider that starts at the middle of the plate and breaks down and in—lefties swing over it. If we hit it hard, we hit it into the home-team dugout.
I never had the privilege of facing Gibson, other than that one at-bat in the ’72 All-Star Game. I wish I could have, just for fun. I’m a baseball fan, and that would have been a pretty awesome thing to do.
I threw my slider a couple different ways, and I don’t know that I’d give Reggie the big one that broke more. I had a quicker one that got right in on your belt buckle. That’s what I would have shown him. That’s what I did with McCovey when I threw him a slider.
I pitched Willie Stargell a lot like I did McCovey—hard stuff, sliders way in tight, maybe go up the ladder. Most of the good hitters like that—those big, strong lefties—I’d work pretty much the same. Try not to give them anything down and in on the plate.
On Opening Day, 1969, Stargell had three hits off of me. I threw him inside and wham! Just knocked the devil out of it, out of the park to right field. It was a pretty good pitch, I thought. The next time I pitched him away and whoom! He smoked one right up the middle. Next time up, I thought, I’m tired of this, and bam! Hit him right in the back. Next time up, he scorched one to left field. I thought, well, hell. I had to give it to him. He was just hot that day and I wasn’t going to get him out.
More times than not, I reserved most of my worrying for the cleanup hitter. The number-four batter is supposed to be the one who can hit the ball out of the park, and for that reason the number-three batter, generally speaking, is going to get some pitches to hit.
There are exceptions to that. The three-hole hitter typically has the best all-around bat on the team, and he might be so much better than the cleanup hitter that he’s the guy you don’t let beat you. Babe Ruth hit third. Hank Aaron hit third a lot. So did Barry Bonds. The Cardinals bat Albert Pujols third, and that’s part of the reason why Ryan Ludwick had such a big year in his first season as a cleanup hitter. Pujols was on base almost three hundred times, so they had to pitch to Ludwick. To his credit, he responded.
I batted in both spots at various times, but I preferred cleanup. Either way, I always had the advantage of solid RBI people following me in the lineup. In Oakland, it was Sal Bando and Joe Rudi. In Baltimore, I hit third in front of Lee May, who led the league in RBIs the year I was there. Lee May might have been the most effective guy who ever batted behind me. He wasn’t a high-average hitter, but he had dynamite in the barrel. In New York we had Graig Nettles, Chris Chambliss, and Oscar Gamble, and if Lou Piniella hit fifth he could handle the bat and drive in a run. Don Baylor followed me one year in Anaheim. All good hitters.
Had I not had those guys behind me, smart pitchers might have made easy work of me in RBI situations. They’d have taken advantage of my natural aggressiveness. They’d have exploited my instinct to feel personally responsible for driving in the run, which compelled me to expand my strike zone. If I hadn’t been able to trust in Sal and the rest, I suspect I’d have gone too far in that respect, to the point of getting myself out on a regular basis. As it was, I could be selective enough to take the walk if they gave it to me. It was hard, but prudent. At the same time, though, I was more likely to get something to hit than I would if the batter behind me was a soft touch.
A pitcher like Gibby is not going to give me much to swing at if it’s late in the ballgame and he’s got lesser hitters following me, especially right-handed hitters who don’t handle him very well. That said, there might be other games when he’s having his way with me but not the batter behind me, in which case I might get a crack at one. The scenarios change dramatically from game to game, inning to inning, and batter to batter.
I played most of my career before expansion, when the talent was more concentrated, and at that time the great hitters—I’m talking about the guys in the middle of the order—seemed to come in pairs or triplets, which was no coincidence.
The Giants had Mays, McCovey, and Cepeda. The Cubs had Williams, Banks, and Santo. The Braves had Aaron and Mathews. The Pirates had Clemente and Stargell. The Reds had Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson, and then the Orioles had Frank and Boog Powell. The Yankees had Mantle and Maris. The Tigers had Kaline and Cash. Yastrzemski always had some other slugger with him, whether it was Dick Stuart or Tony Conigliaro or George Scott or Ken Harrelson or Reggie Smith or Rico Petrocelli. When two great hitters come up back-to-back, you have to deal with at least one of them.
These days, it’s rare that you find a lineup with two of those guys. When there’s only one big hitter, and say he comes up with a man on second base, I have no problem throwing him some bastard pitches and walking the guy if he won’t chase them. For that matter, I’d almost always pitch to the right-hander instead of the left-hander, unless the right-hander was Aaron.
If it was Hank, I might just go ahead and pitch to Reggie. Well, no might about it. I would. Anybody but Aaron.
Not a bad guy to be second fiddle to.
There was a tough situation in Boston with Ramirez and David Ortiz. If they put runners on base in front of those guys, you had a problem on your hands. Pick your poison.
It’s impossible to calculate the difference that the guy behind you makes, but it’s enormous. If I had a bad year, I couldn’t blame it on the hitter behind me; but you could chart the changes in your success. The strikeouts and walks would go up and down.
In that light, it makes what Bonds did all the more amazing. He had a year when he walked 232 times, and he still hit forty-five home runs. That’s almost unimaginable.
I’d have probably walked him 232 times myself. He would have been my Aaron, the guy who wasn’t going to beat me under any circumstances that I could control.
There’s a hitter like that in every lineup, but there’s no particular formula to tell you how to pick him out. Most of the time it’s pretty obvious—who can hurt me with a home run?—but your gut feeling trumps the numbers. You go with a combination of personal experience and common sense. Billy Williams probably hit me better than anybody, but even so, and despite the fact that he was left-handed, I went ahead and pitched to him because he had Ron Santo and Ernie Banks behind him and I didn’t want either of them hitting two-run homers. If Williams had batted cleanup, I’d have probably pitched around him more.
As it turned out, Billy Williams drove in more runs against me than Banks and Santo combined. He hit ten home runs off of me, and that was more than Banks and Santo combined; and if you throw in Jim Hickman, George Altman, Randy Hundley, Don Kessinger, Glenn Beckert, and Adolfo Phillips—all the best hitters the Cubs had—you’re still two homers short. Strange as it sounds, though, I don’t know that Williams ever really hurt me. I was more concerned with Banks.
It’s respect for the home run. That’s what that is.
As you might expect, I have the same kind of respect. In my day, probably more than today, home runs were a big deal. Your batting average can dry up overnight, but those taters stick to your bones. They don’t evaporate.
Even so, I wish I’d have hit for a higher average—and not for the sake of singles. Hitting for a higher average would have meant more home runs.
I realize now that I should have been a consistent .300 hitter. The only time I made it was with the Yankees in 1980, and that was also the only season in my last eighteen that I hit forty homers. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. There doesn’t have to be a trade-off between home runs and base hits. Contact is a good thing. Eventually, I learned not to lose my cool over strikeouts—which was handy, considering that I struck out more than anyone else in history, by a wide margin—but if I had it to do over again, I’d try harder to keep them to a minimum. If you don’t strike out, you put the ball in play more often. If you put the ball in play more often, and you’re a natural home-run hitter, you hit more home runs.
I don’t see how Dave Kingman could hit thirty-seven home runs and bat .204, and hit thirty-five home runs and bat .210. The kind of season I admire—the kind of season that makes sense to me—is the kind that Alex Rodriguez put together when he hit fifty-four home runs and batted .314, or when he hit forty-eight home runs and batted .321. Hank Aaron batted .305 for his career. Willie Mays was a career .302 hitter. I should have done that. I should have hit for a higher average.
I just didn’t give it the care that I should have. I didn’t realize that base hits and home runs can go hand-in-hand, if you’re good enough.
If I’ve got a bunch of guys on my team who can hit home runs, I’m not worried about singles or walks or stolen bases or anything else. I don’t care about any kind of speed-and-power combination in the lineup.
If I don’t have power, sure, I’ll take speed. I’ll take Brock. I’ll take Rose’s singles and Don Mattingly’s doubles. But if I’ve got a choice, give me Aaron and Mays and Mantle. Give me McCovey and Mathews. Give me Bench and Banks. On that team, I’ll put Reggie at second base and pitch the left-handers outside.
But you know, it’s a little odd that I’d feel that way about it, because the guys who wore me out were the left-handed banjo hitters. Ron Fairly, Willie Davis, Al Oliver. I used to break Al Oliver’s bat and he’d still drop the ball right over the infield. Made me nuts.
Of course, I wouldn’t put Billy Williams in that crowd, except that he swung the bat from the same side. That was the common denominator. Nearly all the guys who hit me were lefties. Part of it was because I had a hard time keeping the ball elevated on the outside corner against left-handers. It would tend to come down when I threw to my hand side. I didn’t want the ball down against lefties, so I’d end up pitching them inside more than I would have liked.
Other than Aaron, who had eight home runs against me, right-handers just didn’t bother me much. Even Aaron batted only .215 against me. I didn’t give up more than four home runs to any other righty, except for Deron Johnson, who had five; and he batted .154. Frank Robinson had four, and his average against me was .229. Clemente had four, and his was .208.
I hit better against right-handers, but the difference wasn’t as significant as some of my managers seemed to think. Billy Martin used to sit me down against lefties now and then. Billy also batted me seventh a few times, so I’d come to expect almost anything from him.
But I didn’t expect to be on the bench for the final game of the 1977 playoffs, when the Royals went with a left-hander named Paul Splittorff, whom I actually hit fairly well. In fact, earlier that year, my first home run as a Yankee had come against Splittorff.
Oh well.
If I’d have been Paul Splittorff, I’d have applauded that move. Get all those home-run hitters out of there.
It must have been motivational genius on Billy’s part, because after that game we went straight to the World Series and I was MVP. That was the Series when I hit five home runs, four of them without swinging at another pitch in between. Of course, none of them was against a lefty.
In reality, I didn’t find it easy to handle a tough left-hander. I considered it something special when I homered against one. I got one against Mickey Lolich in 1968, my first full year in the league, and I felt like I’d taken God out of the park.
But here’s something Billy couldn’t have known. I hit eleven grand slams in my career, and eight of them came against lefthanders. Figure that one out.