The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (127 page)

The basic Quisenberry style is humorous and invariably modest—a throwaway mode that is more central to the man than his eccentric pitching. I offered the guess that this sort of response, this habitual presentation of himself as an athlete who had succeeded mostly because of repeated and unexpected strokes of pure good luck, might be a way of concealing something. Was it possible that he did not want to admit his own powerful competitive urges?

“Well, I
used
to be competitive,” he said. “I mean, I used to be competitive and show it. When I was a kid, I cried when I lost—I was one of those. In junior college, I lost a game once and when it was over I stuck the nozzle of a shower in my mouth and turned on the water. I was so frustrated I just did that and drank water until I vomited. Another time, I couldn’t find the ball I wanted to warm up with, and I threw a whole bag of balls around the locker room looking for it. I couldn’t stand things.”

I asked what had happened to that Dan Quisenberry, and he said, “He grew up, I guess. I don’t do stuff out on the mound—throw my hands up when I strike out a guy, and all. I don’t like to show up the other player. I still like to win, but I don’t like excuses. I don’t like guys who brag on themselves. I have to talk to the press like everybody else, but I really don’t like to talk about myself, to say what percentage of winning games I’ve been in and all that stuff. I try to stay away from that.” He paused, perhaps sensing that he still hadn’t quite answered my question. “Yes, I’m competitive,” he said. “At this level, everybody is intensely competitive. What I want is to keep that extreme level of concentration but still keep the fun in the game. You have to do that if you’re going to succeed over a period of time. You have to relax and let the unconscious part of you do the playing. The dinosaur brain has to take over. But I work at things, too. I’m trying to be very good at baseball and to keep it from being too important in my life. I have to live on that border all the time.”

In baseball circles, Quisenberry’s humor is talked about almost as much as his pitching—in fact, the two attributes, or sides of him, often seem to be woven together in the players’ and writers’ minds: a funny guy who throws funny, too. Here, as well, the man may be slightly and persistently misperceived. He makes occasional appearances on the winter-banquet scene, and the laughter rattles the glassware, but he does not tell jokes or dredge up ancient and improbable baseball anecdotes. He is fresh and playful and surprising, and you are sometimes disarmed by the notion that he is as pleased and startled by what has just come out of him as his listeners are. Asked by one writer for his thoughts about the infamously bumpy diamond in Oakland Coliseum, Quis suggested that the club might try dragging a dead whale across the infield. After he had given up a game-winning pinch-hit single in a 1982 game against the Angels, he was asked if this was not the worst possible way to lose a game. Quis took the reporter’s question literally, and came up with a dozen or more worse possibilities: he could have balked a man around the bases; he could have thrown ten wild pitches; a sudden earthquake could have jostled a third-out fly ball out of Amos Otis’ glove; and so forth. His line “I have seen the future and it is much like the present, only longer” lingers happily in the mind (I comfort myself with it often, like an Armenian reaching in his pocket for his worry beads), but most of his stuff is transitory and ironical, and is clearly intended to prick holes in the unending and ponderously serious business of the post-game or pre-game sports interview. Sometimes Quis delivers playful or patently ridiculous responses to glum questions and then is amazed to see his lines repeated literally in the papers the next day; earlier this year, he told a visiting writer (a man who evidently did not lift his gaze from his notebook during the interview) that his bad spell in April and May was attributable to the fact that he had lifted weights all winter and become overmuscled. He is not evasive, however, and reporters around the league admire and respect him for never ducking out of the clubhouse after a game, no matter how painful its outcome. To me, the japes and verbal pranks look like a form of self-preservation—a relief from the dreary dailiness and intensity of the relief man’s lot. “I’m not trying to turn anybody off,” Quis said once, “but I’ve been talking with the writers for six years now and I’m getting kind of bored with myself, really.” His friend Paul Splittorff said to me, “The writers come to him for one-liners and stuff, and he feels he should always come up with something. He thinks he can be funny every day, like he pitches every day. The man is funny, but he’s not a natural comedian. There’s more there than that.”

Quisenberry pitched in two of the three games I saw the Royals play against the Angels out in Kansas City, and picked up a win and a save in the process. In the Friday-night game, an almost interminable fourteen-inning affair, he came on in the twelfth, with the score tied at 3–3, and retired the side without incident. Doug DeCinces led off the top of the thirteenth for the Angels with a slick bunt—a base hit—and moved along to second on Daryl Sconiers’ dunked, wrongfield base hit. Ruppert Jones hit a low liner to Frank White, which was almost turned into a double play, but DeCinces came around to score on Bobby Grich’s clean single to right center. Then Gary Pettis was safe at first on another half-nubbed infield hopper—the fourth hit of the inning. The bases were loaded and Quisenberry looked to be in the soup, but Dick Schofield, pinch-hitting, rapped a bouncer to White, who threw home to start a second-to-catcher-to-first double play that retired the side. Even in an overeventful, unsuccessful inning like this, I noticed, Quisenberry’s work seemed brusque and businesslike. Barely pausing between pitches, he leaned, sank, bobbled, threw, hopped sidewise, got the ball back, and did it all over again. His work was funny-looking and profoundly undramatic, and he went about it like a man sweeping out a kitchen.

The Royals got the run back in their half in thrilling fashion, when Lonnie Smith tripled over the center fielder’s head with two out, scoring Jim Sundberg from second base. Reprieved, Quis returned to his kitchen—and instantly gave up a leadoff single to Bob Boone. A sacrifice moved Boone to second, and Quis walked the next man intentionally, thus setting up a double play on an infield grounder by DeCinces, which ended the inning; Quisenberry’s last pitch, a sinker, splintered DeCinces’ bat. The Royals won the game in the bottom of the fourteenth (a walk, an infield out, and Greg Pryor’s pinch-hit single to left), and Quis, a winner in spite of himself, faced the deadline-hungry writers in the clubhouse in characteristic style: “My first inning was smooth, my second was stinky, my third—well, I wanted to make myself sick and throw up out there, but we got out of it somehow. I can’t complain about those dink hits in the thirteenth, because I made a real bad pitch to Grich and he hit it for the run. I was lucky. Morale would have hit bottom on this club if we’d lost.”

Two days later, before a big Sunday crowd, Quis came in in the top of the ninth to defend Mark Gubicza’s 3–0 lead and gave up a leadoff home run to the Angels’ Ruppert Jones—a long fly ball that just slipped over the fence in left. Then he retired the side—infield out, fly-ball out, strikeout. The Royals, having taken two out of three games in the set, stepped into third place, only three and a half games behind the Angels, and Quisenberry had his fourteenth save.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Quisenberry clearly wasn’t pitching very well, but the club was succeeding with him in the crucial short-man role, and no one—Quisenberry least of all—looked concerned, at least in public, about the slovenly, non-imperious nature of his recent work. The season still had a long way to go, to be sure, but something else was happening here, too—happening to me, I mean. Because I had come to know him better and had been so taken with his disarming and sometimes boyish ways—his jokes and his dogged modesty and youthful deep seriousness—he had become an amateur to me: a human, life-size figure in a business full of demi-gods, inhumanly talented athletes, and egocentric, self-fabricated public personalities. He was clearly at home in this world, yet he also seemed out of place in it, and I had begun to wonder how such a fellow could succeed in a business where failure is so quickly sought out and resolutely punished. How good a pitcher was he, anyway? It was time to go to some others and ask.

Dic Howser
(he is a calm, laid-back manager, with a light voice and reassuring, small-town-bank-president look to him):
Yes, I’m concerned about him this year, but I’m also concerned when Brett doesn’t hit or when Willie Wilson doesn’t get on base for us. But I’m not concerned in a big way. I look around the leagues and I see a lot of the top relief pitchers have problems from time to time. You can almost expect it. I still think he’s outstanding and he’s going to have a good year. With his control—well, you’d better go up there hackin’! I think he knows he has to have a good year in order for us to have a good year. His temperament is deceiving. I think he’s been more concerned by these off spells than I’ve been. I know how intense he is, how competitive. But even if he goes through three or four more bad stretches in a row I’m not going to get fancy and move him into the middle and put somebody else out there to finish up. I’ve got some confidence in the man. People asked me in the spring if I looked forward to forty or forty-five saves from him again, but that’s asking too much. A lot of guys would have a great year with twenty-five saves. We expect Quisenberrry to do better than that, but we don’t expect forty-five. We’re not that crazy.

Bob Boone
(he has been catching in the majors for fourteen years and, at thirty-seven—he will be thirty-eight in November
—
is among the oldest day-to-day regulars in the game today; he is articulate and intelligent, and still an artist behind the plate):
Watching Quisenberry over the years, I’ve come to think his greatest attribute is his control. If you’re batting against a guy with a super-sinker like that, you think about trying to get ahead in the count, so you can just take that pitch. But all the experienced hitters know by now that you really can’t do that—he won’t let you—so you say to yourself, “Well, I’m not going to let him get ahead of me,” and you start out swinging at something that’s his pitch. He’s tough. It’s a tough pitch to do much with, and the motion is different. It isn’t that you try to hit his pitches harder—that happens against a knuckleballer, like Phil Niekro: you’re always trying to hit him a mile, which doesn’t help. But it’s always hard to put the middle of your bat on Quisenberry’s sinker, even though you know about where it’s going to be. You’re likely to hit it foul, so there may be a tendency on the part of some hitters to try to hit it fair, and that takes them out of their normal swing. All this and he’s so durable that he can come at you almost every day. You have to have an amazing arm to be able to do that. The only way to handle him is to get ahead in the game, so you never get to see him.

Gary Blaylock
(at fifty-three, he is in his thirty-fifth year of baseball; he pitched for thirteen seasons in the minors and one in the majors—for the Cardinals and the Yankees in 1959; he became the Royals pitching coach last year, after nine years as a minor-league manager and eleven years as a scout):
With that delivery, he has less strain on his arm than most pitchers, because that underneath way is a natural movement for the arm. Anything overhead—what we think of as the natural way to pitch—is unnatural and puts a strain on the arm, so you get injuries. When you get in trouble pitching, the tendency is always to try to throw harder, and that’s when you begin to break down mechanically. That happened a little to him, earlier on. But he has the greatest temperament for this game I’ve ever seen, bar none. I’d heard about it before I came here, and it’s true. A relief man can stay sharper than most, because he’s out there so much, but it’s hard to stay tuned to that game situation through a whole season. Maybe it’s impossible.

John Wathan
(he has been catching for the Royals for ten years; now he sees spot duty—he loves to catch Sunday games—and pinch-hits; he has a strong chin and dark, curly hair, and an air of cheerful aggressiveness, the catcher’s look):
He’ll never get the Cy Young, because he doesn’t throw smoke and because of how he talks to people. He talks about his Peggy Lee fastball—you know that song of hers “Is That All There Is?”—and it sticks in people’s minds. What’s amazing is that he’s done what he’s done so often—about ninety percent of the time. Now people come and say, “Hey, What
happened?”
—as if anybody in this business could do it a hundred percent of the time. He’s a steady friend. I love his attitude. He’s like the kind of infielder in a game who thinks, Come on, hit the ball to me, when the going is tough out there. That’s the guy you want on your side. Plus he’s quick-witted. He never has a pat answer. I’ve heard him asked the same question a hundred times by different writers, and he never answers it twice the same way. You’ve heard all those quotes of his—the best ones are the ones he steals from me in the bullpen.

George Brett
(one of the great hitters of our time; he has been enjoying his best season in many years; he has clear blue eyes, and talks smoothly and without a hitch—just the way he hits):
I don’t think anybody in the league thinks he’s easy anymore. At first, he looked like a novelty and people were anxious to go up and get to swing at him. But a man like that, for right-handed hitters—well, I’m a left-handed batter and I’ve never swung against a left-handed pitcher like that in my
life.
So many guys have had problems with him that now they’re trying to go to right field against him, or whatever. You see power hitters trying to slash the ball to right. They’re going against their own programs. You saw what happened the other night—all those nubbers, and the hardest-hit ball is right at Frank White. That always happens—it’s weird. He does have a way of making things interesting out there. We’ll have a two-run lead and suddenly they’ve scored and they’re first-and-third, and then he’ll strike somebody out or get a lucky line drive to end it, and he’ll look at you like he’s saying, “Hey, I was just
kidding.”