Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (26 page)

“When he was younger, you were more concerned about him hitting a line drive in the gap or stealing a base than you were about him hitting a home run,” says Atlanta Braves veteran lefthander Tom Glavine, against whom Bonds, at week’s end, was 24 for 75 (.320) for his career. “He’s a different hitter now. In fact he’s a different hitter over the last five years than he was, say, when he first went to San Francisco [in 1993]. He went from a guy who would occasionally hit the mistake pitch for a home run to somebody who hits mistakes out all the time.”

No batter ever has made himself this good this late in his career. How did it happen? Most evident, the 6′2″, 228-pound Bonds filled out physically without losing any of the snap to one of the quickest batting strokes in the game. (He has repeatedly denied that he uses steroids and says his growth is attributable to his workout routine and nutritional supplements.) More subtly, Bonds’s development as a power hitter accelerated when baseball entered this post-Camden Yards age of long-ball worship and he learned to lift the ball.

His career can be delineated into three stages. In Stage 1, from 1986 through ’89, Bonds was a slasher who hit as many ground balls as he did fly balls. In Stage 2, from ’90 through ’97, Bonds was a consistent run producer who became a better home run hitter by getting the ball in the air more often. In those eight seasons his ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio fluctuated between 71:100 and 87:100. Not coincidentally, Stage 3 began in ’98, an expansion year best remembered for the McGwire-Sosa home run race, when an even bigger, smarter Bonds moved into the company of the alltime power hitters. Over this last stage his ground ball-to-fly ball ratio has decreased every full year: 63:100 (in ’98), 62:100, 57:100, 56:100. In other words, he now hits almost two flies for every grounder. This transformation would not be possible without Bonds’s putting more arc in his swing—he’s
looking
to go deep. With his added strength, many of those fly balls are sailing far beyond the fences of today’s cozy retroparks.

Further, in Stage 3 Bonds has crept closer to home plate, enabling him to pull pitches on the outside half of the plate with power rather than hitting line drives to the leftfield gap. The defensive shift most teams employ against him is also a Stage 3 development. “He’s so close to the plate, he can take a pitch away and turn on it,” Glavine says. “If you hit him on the hands, it’s almost a strike. Yet he’s so quick that he kills the inside pitch. You have to pitch him inside to keep him honest, but you’d better bury it way in because if you miss [over the plate], it’s gone.”

In Stage 1 Bonds hit 21 home runs per season; in Stage 2, 36. He is on pace to slug 48 homers this year—his average during Stage 3—which would give him 615 for his career at season’s end. With another 48-homer season next year he would pass Mays, who finished with 660. If he continues to maintain his Stage 3 rate, Bonds will pass Ruth (714) and Aaron (755) in 2005, the year he turns 41.

Is it possible for Bonds to maintain this production at such an advanced age? In his final season (1960) Williams, at 41, hit 29 homers—sixth in the American League—in a much less homer-friendly, much less muscular time. In ’72 Mays, at 41, hit eight homers and followed that with six the next year, his last. In ’75 Aaron, at 41, hit 12 homers and bowed out the next year with 10.

If Bonds has taught us anything, it’s that the arc of his career is like no other’s—especially not like Bob Coluccio’s.

Postscript: Today Bonds’s off-the-charts late-career power surge is to be questioned at least as much as it is admired. “How did he do it?” is a more haunting question now than it was then, given his leaked grand jury testimony about his use of steroids (unknowingly, he claimed), charges by a mistress that he used steroids, and a guilty plea by his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, to a charge of steroid distribution.

MARCH 31, 2003

In perhaps the best World Series game ever played, the Twins’
Jack Morris gave us one final glimpse of a dying breed:
a pitcher determined to finish what he started

J
ACK MORRIS AWOKE ON THE MORNING OF OCT
. 27, 1991, without a doubt in his mind. There was only one thing in his life that mattered that day, and he knew how it would turn out. The Minnesota Twins pitcher could not know that an offensive revolution was coming, fueled by the trend-setting coziness of Camden Yards, which would open in six months; the addition of two expansion teams a year after that; and the relentless quest for muscle enhancement, by any means necessary. He could not know that his way of pitching, in which a real ace had no need for a bullpen, was doomed.

No, all that mattered that day was the outcome of the seventh game of the most closely contested World Series ever. The Twins and the Atlanta Braves had played so many cliffhangers so deep into the night that one sleep disorder expert, in a Page One story in
The Atlanta Constitution
, warned of “a rise in car wrecks and work accidents” due to frazzled fans.

As Morris prepared breakfast for himself, his parents and his two boys, he knew exactly how the game would end. What bothered him was that his father, Arvid, and mother, Dona, who flew in from Michigan to stay with him during the Series, were not so certain. His father was too quiet. His eyes betrayed his anxiety.

Didn’t he
know
? Arvid was a rock, a left-brain master, a former troubleshooter for 3M labs in St. Paul. He had driven his sons, Tom and Jack, hard, throwing to them when they were two or three years old, much to Dona’s consternation. “People used to say, My gosh, how many hours do you spend with the boys?” Arvid says. “They showed a lot of ability, and we were going to work that and see if something might develop.” When the boys got a little older, dinner became conditional on how well they played: If they won a Little League game, Arvid bought them steak. If they lost, they got hamburger. Every drive home from the ball field included a lecture on how they could improve.

By the time the boys were in high school, Tom and Jack decided to confront Arvid. “Enough is enough,” Tom said to his father. “You need to back off.” Arvid eased up after that.

When Jack first earned big money in the game, in 1983, he asked his father, “How would you like to retire?” Arvid was 53. Jack bought his parents a lakeside home and a car.

Now, eight years later, with Game 7 upon them, Arvid was nervous, but Jack smiled and laughed. “Don’t worry, Dad,” he said. “We’re going to win the World Series.”

“I was amazed,” Arvid says. “He had never done anything like that before. It had always been a ‘Let the chips fall … ’ type thing with him.”

Arvid had not seen his son in the clubhouse the night before, after Twins centerfielder Kirby Puckett hit an 11th-inning home run—yet another traffic-alert game—to make Game 7 necessary. “He had this huge smile on his face,” Minnesota pitcher Kevin Tapani says of Morris, “as if he couldn’t wait for the next game to start, couldn’t wait to pitch that game.”

Nor did Arvid see his son plop into a chair in the press interview room that night, grab a microphone and, with a heavyweight’s bravado, bellow, “In the immortal words of the late, great Marvin Gaye, Let’s get it on!” Morris
knew
.

“I never had as much will to win a game as I did on that day,” says Morris. “I was in trouble many times during that game but didn’t realize it because I never once had a negative thought.”

Morris was right to be so confident. He pitched the game of his life, the game of his
generation
, the game neither his father nor his manager could have imagined. Game 7 became
his
game.

AS LONNIE SMITH, the Braves’ leadoff batter, stepped in to hit against Morris, he turned to have a word with catcher Brian Harper. They had played together briefly with the 1985 Cardinals and only four nights earlier had met at home plate in a bone-rattling collision.

“Lonnie looked at me, and I looked at him,” Harper says, “and you could tell we were both thinking the same thing: Wow, this is going to be something! These six games have been tremendous. And now one more….”

“Hey, have a good game,” Smith said.

“Good luck,” Harper said. “God bless you.”

“We knew it was going to be a war,” Harper says. “It was like two boxers tapping gloves before the fight.”

At 7:38 Central time—with 55,118 fans in the Metrodome screaming like a jet engine, the noise bouncing off the white Teflon roof and concrete walls—Morris threw his first pitch, an inside fastball to Smith. Home plate umpire Don Denkinger called it a ball. Morris glared at him. The third pitch, also a ball, brought the same silent, icy protest from Morris.

“I knew Jack,” Denkinger says, “and I never found too much that he
did
like. I had the utmost respect for him as a competitor. He was a guy who didn’t like to lose. Tim Tschida, another umpire, grew up in St. Paul. Jack played with Tim’s brothers, and he told me how Jack brought the ball to play. And if he didn’t like how the game was going, he’d go home and take the ball with him. And that would be the end of the game.”

Morris wore a mustache in the bushy, droopy style of the stock bad guy in an old Western. His face seemed petrified in a scowl. The press, which he might have hated even more than he did hitters, called him Black Jack and approached him as one would a live grenade. Sparky Anderson, his manager for 12 seasons in Detroit, called him Cactus Jack.

“He was the last of a breed,” Anderson says. “Somebody who actually comes to the park with
anger
to beat you. I never went near him when it was his day to pitch.”

Says Tapani, “We used to joke that Jack had low blood sugar. It was as if he hadn’t eaten in a while and his chemistry would change. If he lost a game, it was the end of the world. But if he was happy, he’d be buying drinks, telling stories and asking, ‘What can I do for you?’ What you saw was what you got with Jack. He hid nothing. Every once in a while with the media he’d say something that would make you cringe, make you say, ‘Did he really say that?’”

Once, in Detroit, a female reporter asked him a question in the Tigers’ clubhouse. “I don’t talk to women when I’m naked,” Morris snapped, “unless they’re on top of me or I’m on top of them.”

Morris channeled so much rage on the mound that it lingered with him in the clubhouse, like an engine that stays hot after it’s been turned off. “Show me a good loser,” Morris would say, “and I’ll show you a loser.”

Anger was a beast inside him, and baseball provoked the beast in 1986. Morris was a free agent that winter, a 21-game winner, 31 years old and one of the best pitchers in the game. And nobody wanted him. The owners conspired not to sign other teams’ free agents. Collusion. Morris wanted to sign with Minnesota, to come home to St. Paul, but learned quickly that that would not happen. “[Twins owner] Carl Pohlad was ready to sign me,” says Morris, “and then [G.M.] Andy [MacPhail] came in and said no.”

Morris and his agent, Dick Moss, flew to Tampa to meet with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Morris loved Steinbrenner’s cocksure attitude and was impressed when Steinbrenner asked him about some Yankees, including a young first baseman named Dan Pasqua. “This guy has ungodly power,” Morris said. “It’s just a matter of him getting it together.”

“I’m not sure,” Steinbrenner said. “I don’t think he’s got the heart you do. You’re my kind of guy. You’re just the kind of guy I need.”

Moss seized the opportunity and threw out numbers for a three-year deal. Suddenly Steinbrenner turned cool, saying that he needed to sign his own free agents, but Moss and Morris knew what was happening. “George,” Moss said, “you wouldn’t be the kind of person to have anybody tell you what to do, would you?”

Steinbrenner replied, “I swear on my mother’s grave nobody’s telling me what to do.”

Morris looked Steinbrenner square in the eyes and said to him, slowly and firmly, “Do not do that to your mom. She hears what you’re saying.”

“Steinbrenner,” Morris says, “lied to my face.”