Baseball began to really change right around the time I got into it. I’m not saying that the events are related, just that I happened to be part of a very significant period in the game.
My first full year was 1968, and after the season they lowered the mound and shrunk the strike zone …
To me, the biggest effect of all that was the change in the environment. There had been a mutual ill will between pitchers and hitters, and when they started giving out warnings every time a pitch came inside off the plate, that element was taken away.
I was Oakland’s alternate player rep when Marvin Miller got us thinking about a labor strike in 1972 …
And then Gussie Busch sealed the deal with his remark about the players union: “We’re not going to give them another goddamned cent. If they want to strike—let ’em.”
I was with the A’s in 1973 when the American League introduced the designated hitter, which was pushed hard by Charlie Finley …
That went hand in hand with the umpire warnings. The upshot of the DH is that, since the pitcher doesn’t come to bat, the only retaliation against him is to charge the mound. It changed the whole culture.
I was Catfish Hunter’s teammate when he took his contract with Finley to arbitration and became the first free agent …
Curt Flood should have been the first free agent. He was the martyr in the fight against the reserve clause.
And after the 1976 season, I was in the first class of players eligible for the reentry draft. I was the first guy drafted, and ended up signing the largest contract.
At that point, there was no stopping Steinbrenner.
I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I’d been in the game when players were using steroids. You get pressured into that sort of thing if it becomes a matter of keeping up. If other players had been getting ahead of me by taking steroids, would I have done it? Maybe. Maybe.
In spring training a year or so ago I was talking to Jason Lane, who was hoping to hang on as a part-time outfielder. He was telling me how difficult it was for him, being an extra player and having to compete for a roster spot against guys who were taking steroids. He blamed it on major-league baseball. His point was that the commissioner’s office didn’t monitor the situation closely enough, and it cost him a job. He believed that guys were outperforming him because they had taken steroids.
Probably true, and very sad.
I can sympathize with that. I can see where guys might feel penalized for staying clean. I can also see where some players might be compelled to do what they felt they had to do.
Steroids wouldn’t have been a temptation for me in 1968 or 1970, when I was at my peak, but if I’d felt that my skills were slacking and there was something I could take to keep me around longer, that might have been a different matter. I would have been more tempted in 1974 or 1975, when my knees were shot and my legs were gone. But I don’t know that drugs could have helped me at that point.
I have a harder time with players putting up career years and breaking records on steroids, if that’s the case. But then, there’s so incredibly much money at stake these days, and a whole lot of it goes to guys who hit home runs. The ballparks are smaller than they used to be, the strike zones are smaller, the highlights are on ESPN every night—everything is screaming for people to hit the ball out of the park. I’m sure, to a lot of players, the reward seems greater than the risk.
I really believe that if Barry Bonds hadn’t been shut out of the game—and they pitched to him—he’d still be winning home-run titles, steroids or not. He was unbelievable there for a while. He overmatched the league.
With his skills, it’s hard to say where and how much steroids came into play. I remember when Bonds wasn’t nearly as big and strong as he became later; but the thing is, he just doesn’t miss the ball very much. He’s got such a short stroke. He doesn’t have that long, wild swing that most home-run hitters do. Has a great eye, besides.
But when all is said and done, I can’t overlook the fact that, with the advent of steroids in baseball, there were guys who didn’t have power who suddenly got power. There were guys who didn’t throw hard who suddenly threw hard. Then, after testing, they lose eight or nine miles an hour in one year.
So can you acquire performance? You certainly can acquire power. You can acquire a fastball. You can acquire strength. Steroids!
For pitchers, a big advantage would be that, with steroids, you might be able to last longer in a game. Instead of getting tired in the sixth inning, you’re able to pitch eight or nine.
On the other hand, it’s been a while since pitchers went eight or nine innings on a regular basis.
If my father ever thought I’d used steroids, he’d have raised holy hell with me.
He was in the car with me during spring training in Fort Lauderdale one year when I was playing for the Yankees. I stopped at a little store to get three packs of Redman for Catfish Hunter, three packs of Levi Garrett for Ron Guidry, and a couple bags of sunflower seeds for myself. When I got back to the car, my dad was holding an empty beer can that had been under the seat. From there on, I couldn’t get to the ballpark fast enough. He went on and on for two weeks about how you’re going to embarrass your family name, people will think I haven’t raised you properly, your brothers and sisters will all be ashamed if the police pull you over and you get arrested for drinking in the car … This was in the seventies, in the South. If they stopped a black man with an open beer can in the car, he was going to jail, pure and simple. Dad was right, as usual.
My father was crippled, so he had a beach chair that he sat in between the dugout and where I played in right field. He was friends with Steinbrenner, and George came to the game that day and walked down the foul line to talk to my dad. They talked for about three innings. I was scared to death that my dad was going to tell Steinbrenner that I had an open beer can in my car. I came out of the game and was running in the outfield and George still wouldn’t leave. He just kept talking to my father. I was worried sick.
Anyway, I wouldn’t have done steroids. Suppose I’d taken them and they had affected my God-given talent? Suppose the steroids, having been bought off the street, had changed me in a negative way?
No, thanks. God gave me a good body, and my side of the deal was to make the most of it. And be grateful for what I had.
It’s not all that clear to me.
People in baseball have been cheating for years. Gaylord Perry threw spitballs. Don Sutton, same thing. That was illegal. So if they’re in the Hall of Fame after throwing spitballs, how can you be punished for taking steroids when baseball didn’t have any rules against it? They finally made it illegal, and that’s fine, but I don’t see how players can be penalized for what they did before the rules were in place.
That’s a good point, except that the use of steroids is against the law of the land, unless they’re prescribed by a doctor. So why would it be legal in baseball? Why does baseball need a special rule that says you can’t use steroids? Do I need a law that says, as a baseball player, I can’t drive over the speed limit? If you’re pulled over for speeding, you can’t say I’m a ballplayer and I’m on my way to the game. That’s how I view it.
But of the baseball guys who have apparently used steroids, none of them has been disciplined by the legal authorities. The courts of the land haven’t punished Bonds, but the public court has. He’s been judged guilty by the fans and media. He can’t play anywhere.
Baseball is always talking about the integrity of the game. That term just might be a little bit of bull. The integrity of the game seems to be defined by how many people still come to the ballparks and watch on TV.
If a team signed Barry Bonds, it would have a major headache on its hands. Who’d want to deal with all the heat from the press and the public? It would jeopardize the integrity of the bottom line.
The same arguments are going to come up when Bonds, Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro—any of the players publicly connected to performance-enhancing drugs—are eligible for election to the Hall of Fame. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. I think we caught a little preview when Mark McGwire hit the ballot and fell so short of the votes he needed.
If I had a vote, I really don’t know what I’d do. If performance-enhancing drugs are going to keep you out of the Hall of Fame, so be it. But then they have to keep out everybody who used them. Baseball didn’t test during the time when most of these guys are implicated, so how do you determine who was using and who wasn’t? What do you go by?
But then, how do you ban Pete Rose for gambling and give a pass to guys who used steroids? Gambling really has nothing to do with the outcome of a game unless you’re throwing games yourself. Of course, the chance that you can throw a game is there, and the whole situation casts suspicion and erodes the public confidence in the sport. On top of that, baseball has always made it clear that gambling is strictly forbidden. It didn’t do that for steroids. It opened the door to temptation.
Thankfully, I was out of there by that time.
More than anything else, money is what changed the whole dynamic of the game.
It impacts almost everything. The players have become so valuable that it has distorted the sport. There’s an extraordinary amount of concern about the cost involved if they miss some time. As a result, hitters are overprotected and pitchers are overprotected. We’ve lost some of the spirit of the game.
We’ve lost a lot of what we’ve been talking about this whole time—that one-on-one battle from sixty feet and a half. The preoccupation with money has taken the edge off the competition.
I thrived on that competitive element to the game. I think it’s what set me apart. With all the coddling today, I don’t know that I’d be the same pitcher that I was forty years ago.
But I’d be a richer pitcher.
I’m sure not going to sit here, though, and complain about free agency. It paid for my classic-car collection.
It’s just that I’ve seen the Players Association evolve in a way that we didn’t really intend it to. Back in 1972, we were fighting the owners for a piece of the pie. It was a genuine labor struggle. We didn’t have a contract until 1968, and even then it didn’t give us any rights to put ourselves in the open marketplace. The players were essentially owned. We were rebelling against being treated as property.
I believed vehemently in the cause. At the time, Marvin Miller was conducting meetings to familiarize us with what our options were, and he was surprised by how strongly a lot of us felt. I was radical about taking a stand. So were guys like Bob Boone, Tim McCarver, and Brooks Robinson.
Ray Sadecki was involved, too. I suspect that McCarver and Sadecki might have been influenced by having played on the Cardinals with Curt Flood. Flood was the one who paid the price by challenging the reserve clause in the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully—for him.
For that matter, they might have been influenced by having played under August Busch. It’s interesting that Busch and Finley, maybe more than any of the others, were the owners who made the players feel the way we did.
In Oakland, we certainly didn’t feel as though we were treated fairly. That came to a head after the 1974 season, when Charlie O reneged on a deal he’d made with Catfish about deferring salary payments into an insurance account. Charlie found out he would lose a tax deduction if he did that, and refused. Hunter had been burned by Finley before, when Charlie changed his mind about a loan he’d given Catfish to buy a farm back in North Carolina. This time, Catfish wasn’t giving any ground. He charged Charlie with breach of contract. When the arbitrator, Peter Seitz, determined that his agreement with the A’s was no longer binding, Catfish essentially became a free agent. He signed with the Yankees for five years and more than $3 million.
The reserve clause wasn’t really struck down for another year, when Seitz ruled in favor of the grievance filed by Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally. But I think Finley deserves some thanks, nevertheless. And Curt Flood, of course.
If I’d been about six or eight years younger …
The mechanism for free agency was finally in place by the fall of 1976, and that’s when my contract with the Orioles expired. (I’d spent one season in Baltimore after being traded by the A’s.) Steinbrenner trotted me around New York, hustled me in Chicago, and signed me for five years and $2.9 million.
These days, that wouldn’t pay for a backup catcher.
At that point, things weren’t out of whack yet. They were just getting in whack.
My salary never reached a million a year in New York. That happened when I was with the Angels.
I bought more antique cars and a house in the same neighborhood as Clint Eastwood, my favorite cowboy and cop.
If I were a pitching coach today, I’d probably have my starters on a pitch count. Because the manager would tell me to. Because the general manager would tell him to. You can’t just go off and be a maverick these days. You can’t buck the system that the whole game has bought into. There’s too much money involved.
That aside, the pitch count is about the most ridiculous thing I can imagine.
I know they’ve got studies to show that certain pitchers are less effective from the hundredth pitch on, or the hundred and tenth, or whatever, and their risk of injury increases after such and such a point. I respect all that. I also realize that kids today don’t throw as much as we did before everybody started spending their summers in air-conditioning, and their arms don’t build up endurance like mine did, or Warren Spahn’s; and that, as far as their workloads go, pitchers are brought along slowly in the minor leagues because teams are tired of losing their future starters before they even get to the majors; and that the moment a young guy goes down with an elbow or shoulder injury, people are waving statistics in the manager’s face and calling for his scalp. I get all that.
But I’m thinking about playing, I don’t know, the Giants, and it’s 1–1 going into the eighth inning with Mays, McCovey, and Jim Ray Hart coming up, and Red Schoendienst plops down next to me in the dugout and says, “Nice job, Hoot. We’ll let Hoerner take it from here.”
You’ll what?
I just can’t imagine it.
They design the staff now with just that in mind. There’s not a Gibson in the rotation, where the manager can figure that this guy’s going to give him thirty to thirty-five starts, with twenty to twenty-five complete games …
The staff then was ten pitchers, not twelve. They didn’t need to save a slot or two for the sixth and seventh innings. Now they have middle relievers making two, three, four million a year just to get to the guy who’s making four or five or six million to get to the closer, who’s making eight or ten or fifteen million. Who would have thought?
Those dollars dictate a lot of it. When they’re paying a guy millions of bucks to pitch the seventh inning, by golly, he’s going to pitch the seventh inning.
Nobody throws nine innings anymore on a regular basis, except Roy Halladay, C. C. Sabathia, and maybe a couple other rare pitchers. Even for those guys, the inning totals are not close to what Gibson, Koufax, Drysdale, and a lot of pitchers used to put up year after year. Go figure.
These days, if a guy reaches 105 pitches or whatever, they’re looking to get him out of the game. The other team knows that. Some organizations instruct their hitters to take pitches, run up the count, and get the starter out of there.
That’s not much of a ballgame to me. And you’re sure not going to chase me by keeping the bat on your shoulder. You’ll be seeing a lot of strikes.
I just have a hard time believing that you’re going to save a guy’s career by putting him on a strict pitch count. They can cite all the studies they want, and I’ll cite Tom Seaver, who pitched over 250 innings eleven times and stayed healthy enough to win 311 games. I’ll cite Juan Marichal, who pitched 326 innings one year and came back the next year to win twenty-one games. I’ll cite Jim Palmer, who pitched more than 315 innings three years in a row and won twenty-one the year after that. I’ll cite Steve Carlton, who pitched 346 innings the year he won twenty-seven for the Phillies. I’ll cite Gaylord Perry, who pitched over three hundred innings six times in a period of seven years, and kept going until he was forty-four. I’ll cite Ferguson Jenkins, who over a nine-year stretch never pitched fewer than 270 innings. Nobody this century has pitched 270 innings in a season.
The surprising thing about it is that training and conditioning methods have advanced tremendously. It’s a science now. Teams spend enormous amounts of money to target all the right body parts and get everybody in prime shape so they don’t get hurt. A lot of players take it further by hiring high-priced personal trainers.
And pitchers can’t make it to the eighth inning. Or the teams won’t let them.
I remember a game when Spahn and Marichal hooked up for sixteen innings. It was 1963, when Spahn was forty-two years old. He pitched 259 innings that year and won twenty-three games. But not that one. Mays beat him with a home run in the bottom of the sixteenth.
They were talking about it one time in Cooperstown. Spahn and Marichal must have been fifty feet away from each other having this conversation, and we were all listening in awe. Marichal told him, “I didn’t want to keep going out there.”
Spahn said, “Well, why didn’t you stop?”
And Marichal said, “You were forty-two years old and I was twenty-five. I wasn’t going to let some old man outpitch me!”
Then Willie stood up and said, in that high-pitched voice of his, “You remember how that game ended?”
And Spahn said, “Well, you were one-for-six!”
I never pitched sixteen innings, but we didn’t give a second thought to going ten or twelve. The most I threw was fourteen one night in 1970. That was 197 pitches.
I saw Nolan Ryan throw 212 pitches in eleven innings one day at Yankee Stadium. It messed him up so bad that he had to retire sixteen years later, when he was forty-six.
Didn’t miss a start. They moved him back a day, maybe.
Why would he miss a start? He’s a big, strong fellow.
I’d normally throw about 130 pitches. We counted them. But we weren’t ruled by the number.
In 1965, I already had twelve complete games, including the two previous starts, when I pitched thirteen innings against the Giants in St. Louis and Tom Haller, their catcher, beat me with a two-run homer.
In 1968, I had twelve straight complete games at one point and went into extra innings five times over the course of the season. I started thirty-four times that year and never pitched less than seven innings. From my third start on, I averaged just over nine innings a start.
In 1969, I finished the season with a stretch of nine, nine, ten, nine and two-thirds, ten and a third, nine, and twelve innings.
In 1970, I had another streak of a dozen complete games, then went fourteen innings.
But we were on a five-day rotation. A lot of teams back then had their starters going every fourth day. I used to complain about it—especially late in the season if we were trying to win a pennant. I didn’t want to wait five days to get back out there. Sometimes they’d listen.
Catfish had forty starts a couple times. In a span of two years—his last season in Oakland and his first in New York—he had eighty starts, pitched almost 650 innings, and won forty-eight games.
Think about what he did in 1975, when Bill Virdon and Billy Martin managed the Yankees. He pitched 328 innings in thirty-nine starts that year. That’s over eight innings a start. In the games he started, there were only sixteen innings all year that he didn’t pitch. Five of those were from a game at Detroit in April, when he was knocked out after three innings.
The next season, Billy pitched him nearly three hundred innings again.
And people wonder why Catfish’s career didn’t last longer than it did. He only pitched another four years, and never again won twenty games. As great as he was, Catfish won only two games after the age of thirty-two. It’s pretty obvious why.
But he was a workhorse for a period of ten years. Over those ten years, he averaged 277 innings a season. Do you know the last guy to pitch at least 277 innings in a season? Charlie Hough in 1987. Knuckleballer.
And please don’t tell me that pitchers today have more strain on their arms. Hey, I threw sliders, too. Catfish threw sliders. Neither one of us was in the habit of letting up.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not claiming that we were better men than the pitchers today. I’m sure there are guys out there now who would go three hundred innings if their managers allowed them to. I’m sure there are guys who would love to do that.
But that’s not how they play the game anymore.
We didn’t have the advantage of breaking down our swings on digital video. It’s amazing what players can watch now on their computers. With a keystroke, they can pull up all their good at-bats, all their bad at-bats, or all their at-bats against A. J. Burnett on weeknights in May with a forty percent chance of thunderstorms. If the Red Sox bring in Jonathan Papelbon for the ninth inning, Derek Jeter can duck into the clubhouse and quickly run through the last two or three or seventeen times he hit against him. As you watch the tape—I still call it that—you can pause it, slow it down, or set it to a Simon & Garfunkel song. You can even run two at-bats side by side, frame by frame, to examine the differences. If you ground out to shortstop, you can jog straight from first base, through the dugout, to wherever the laptop is set up, and see for yourself what just happened. Teams have full-time video coordinators who gather all this together for the players—whatever they want.
I think it helps. Tony Gwynn could add ten points to his batting average every time there was a technological advance in the study of hitting. I’ve looked at video, and even an old-timer like me is able to read it fairly well.
But every time I watch myself, I wonder how the heck I ever hit the ball.
To me, video is more useful for scouting yourself than your opponent. If I’m having a good day, I don’t care how many or what kind of tapes you’ve been watching; I think I can still get you out.
I’d agree with that. I’d use it for adjusting myself more than studying the pitcher. You’re not worried about the pitcher’s mechanics; you just want to know where the ball is coming from and what kind of movement it has—the things you pick up by actually batting against the guy.
But if it’s somebody you haven’t seen before, it sure can’t hurt to watch some tape on him. The best scout in the game is the video camera. You no longer have to depend on what somebody thinks he saw. Video gets it right. It enables you to actually visualize yourself standing in the batter’s box against Josh Beckett.
Now, with MLB’s live satellite feed, you can sit at home in an overstuffed chair, or in the clubhouse eating Raisin Bran, and watch virtually any game that’s being played. Each one of them comes with a former player or manager or expert of some sort who breaks down practically every pitcher and hitter. It’s all right there for you.
This is not your father’s scouting report.
It beats word of mouth and a few scribbles on a piece of paper. I’m glad the Yankees didn’t have digital technology before the ’64 World Series, or the Red Sox in ’67 or the Tigers in ’68.
Still, the biggest difference to me is not the electronics involved. It’s the fact that hitting is now viewed as a science.
Guys like Ted Williams and Rogers Hornsby may have looked at it that way, but there wasn’t much hitting instruction when I was a young player. The dynamics of how, technically, to swing the bat, or how to hit a particular pitcher, just weren’t thought about like they are now. A lot of players read Williams’s book (The Science of Hitting) after it came out in 1971, but in general we didn’t yet have the knowledge of how to dissect and decipher the mechanics of the game. It was more a case of whether you could hit or not.
On top of that, there’s all the analysis now by numbers. The statistics available for every player these days are mind-boggling. You can just flip around on your computer a little bit and come up with something like a guy’s batting average for the balls he actually puts in play, or the percentage of line drives he hits. I’m not sure what all that tells you, but it’s right there on your screen. You can get a pitcher’s ERA adjusted for the ballpark he pitches in. You can find out what your won-loss record would have been if some of the stuff you couldn’t control—like run support, relief pitching, that sort of thing—had turned out exactly average. I saw somewhere that, in 1968, I should have been 28–4 instead of 22–9.
But there were no instructions on how to apply for the back pay.
It’s ironic: Now that we can see more baseball than we ever could, it seems like fewer and fewer people—outsiders, anyway—are actually using their eyes to evaluate players.
There’s another effect of all the games on TV. A lot more players these days have started thinking of themselves as stars.
In my day, guys didn’t do that much strutting or showboating. They knew better. Really, the only one was Willie Montañez. He’d hit a home run and he’d veer all the way over in front of the other dugout when he was circling the bases.
Reggie took being a star to a different level—he was known for that famous quote, “the magnitude of me”—and he sort of refined the home-run trot; but that was just Reggie. He was an original. The guys today are poor imitations. Every other second baseman has his own trot.
And the hell of it is, if you try to spot a fastball to put a guy in his place, he wants to fight you and the umpire wants to throw you out.
Plus, the batter’s standing in there wearing armor up and down his body.
That doesn’t bother me. I think I could break some of it.
I just don’t like the look of it. I think the game should be played the way it was meant to be played.
When I watched Mantle, when I watched Aaron and Mays, the dream was to wear the major-league uniform and look like one of the great players. They weren’t up there with battle armor and two gloves on. I wouldn’t do it if I played today. If they made me wear an ear flap, I’d get used to the rules and wear it; but I really don’t like all the gingerbread that goes with the armor and the gloves.
The extra padding, to me, is just another little thing that chips away at the basic nature of baseball. But I’m not concerned that it gives the hitter an advantage. If a pitcher makes good pitches, he’ll get most guys out. The protection might make a batter feel a little more comfortable at the plate, which goes against my grain, but it doesn’t matter that much. There are bigger issues than that.
I just never like it when they mess with what I consider to be the natural order of the game—the war between the batter and the pitcher. Retaliation is a part of that. When you allow a guy to go up to the plate in a suit of armor, you’re interfering with the natural process of retaliation.
We old guys tend to think that the natural order of the game is the way it was when we played it. Maybe we shouldn’t get too caught up in thinking that our time is the standard for everything.
I could grumble, for example, that they’ve messed with the baseball itself. I was playing in a fantasy camp in Arizona once, and a guy gave me a sixty-mile-an-hour fastball that I hit over a twenty-foot-high fence more than four hundred feet away in dead center field. I was in my fifties. I couldn’t hit a ball that far in my twenties. I was using an aluminum bat, and I’m sure that accounted for some of it, but there was no doubt in my mind that the ball was a whole lot livelier than the one we played with.
Who’s to say, though, that ours was superior to the one they use today?
Better the ball be juiced than the players.
There are two separate areas in all of this. There’s the spirit of the game and there’s the integrity of the game. If you sit on the back porch of the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, shooting the bull with Hall of Famers, you’ll hear some guys who are concerned about one and some guys who are concerned about the other and some guys who are concerned about both. You won’t hear many old-timers who aren’t concerned about either.
Steroids undermine the integrity of the game. I’d just as soon leave that one for other people to negotiate, because integrity, to me, is a briar patch.
It’s the spirit of the game that I’m worried about.