The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (94 page)

But this slight is as nothing compared to the anonymity we have carelessly given to our receiver in the other, and far more lengthy, interludes of the game. Because he faces outward—I
think:
none of this seems certain—and because all our anticipation of the events to come (in this most anticipatory of sports) centers on the wide green-sward before us and on its swift, distant defenders, our awareness of the catcher is glancing and distracted; it is as if he were another spectator, bent low in order not to spoil our view, and although at times he, too, must cover ground quickly, he is more often waiting and seemingly out of it, like the rest of us. We fear or dote upon the batter, depending on which side is up; we laugh at pitchers a little, because of their contortions, but gasp at their speed and stuff; we think of infielders as kids or terriers, and outfielders are gazelles or bombardiers or demigods; but catchers are not so easy to place in our imagination. Without quite intending it, we have probably always patronized them a little. How many of us, I wonder, have entirely forgotten “the tools of ignorance,” that old sports-page epithet for the catcher’s impedimenta (it was coined in the nineteen-twenties by Muddy Ruel, a catcher with the Senators, who practiced law in the off-season). And think for a moment of the way the umpire watches the catcher as he goes about his housekeeping there behind the plate. Sometimes the arbiter has actually picked up the man’s cap and mask from the ground during the play just previous, and now he hands them over with an odd, uncharacteristic touch of politeness. Both of these men wear shin guards and chest protectors and masks, and although theirs is mostly an adversary relationship, they crouch in identical postures, inches apart (some umpires actually rest one hand on the catcher’s back or shoulder as the pitch is delivered), and together engage in the dusty and exhausting business down behind the batter, living and scrounging on the hard corners of the sport. For one game, that is. Tomorrow, the umpiring crew will rotate, as it does for each game, and the ump working behind home will be stationed out at third base—almost a day off for him—so that he can recover from such labors, but the same catcher most likely will still be down there bent double behind the batters.
Here y’are,
the ump’s courtly little gesture seems to say.
You poor bastard.

I thought a lot about catchers during the long winter off-season that is just now drawing to a close, and found for the first time that I was able to envision a couple of them at work at their trade, in the same way that, like most fans, I can easily bring back the mannerisms of a favorite batter—George Brett, Lou Piniella, Mike Schmidt—as he steps into the box and prepares for the pitch, or the unique pause and stare and windup motion of some pitcher—Steve Carlton, Rick Sutcliffe, Fernando Valenzuela—whose work I know by heart. Suddenly, this winter, I could envision Rick Dempsey, the dandy midsize Oriole receiver, coming up onto the balls of his feet in the crouch after delivering a sign, with his orange-daubed glove inviting an out-side-corner pitch to the batter. A base runner flies away from first with the pitcher’s first move, and the delivery is low and away, a very tough chance, but Dempsey is already in motion, to his right and forward—“cheating,” in catchers’ parlance—and he seizes the pitch with the back of the mitt nearly touching the dirt and his bare right hand almost simultaneously plucking the ball from the pocket. The catch drives the glove backward, but because Dempsey has anticipated so well, the force and direction of the pitch are simply translated into the beginnings of his rising pivot and the upcocking of his arm for the peg—a line has become an upswooping circle—and he steps eagerly but unhurriedly across the plate to start the throw to second.

Finding Dempsey in my mind’s eye in January was not quite startling, since he played so well in the course of the Orioles’ five-game victory over the Phillies in the World Series last fall (he won the Most Valuable Player award for the classic, in which he batted .385, with five extra-base hits, and, even more important, was the prime receiver during the Baltimore pitching staffs 1.60-ERA stifling of the National League champs), but some other catchers turned up in my hot-stove reveries as well. Bob Boone, for instance. Boone, who is thirty-six, now catches for the Angels, after a decade of notable defensive work with the Phillies. He is six feet two—a large man, although there is nothing hulking or overmuscled about him—but his movements behind the plate are gliding and water-smooth. He sets up with his left foot flat and the right foot back an inch or two, with its heel up, and once the sign is delivered he tucks his right hand behind his thigh—almost standard stuff, but if you keep your eyes on him you begin to pick up the easy body movement that slips him imperceptibly into place behind each arriving pitch and the silky way the ball is taken into the glove, without haste or grabbing. If something goes wrong—a pitch bounced into the dirt off to his right, say—his motion toward the ball is quickly extended, with the whole body swinging in the same arc as the pitch: the right knee goes into the dirt, with the leg tucked along the ground, while the glove is dropped straight down to dam off the opening below the crotch. No attempt is made to catch the pitch—catchers are endlessly trained in this, since it contravenes all baseball instinct—and the ball is simply allowed to bounce off his body. Boone locates it on the ground (his mask has flown off, spun away by an upward flick of his hand) and only then looks up to check the base runner; if he’s going, the play is in front of him. It’s an anxious, scattery set of moves, or should be by rights, but Boone makes them seem controlled and confident, as if the mistake had been reversed and turned into something risky for the other team. Nothing in these classic maneuvers is unique to Boone, except for the thoughtful elegance of their execution; he helps you appreciate the work.

Talking to catchers is even more fun than watching them, as I discovered last season, when I began to sense how little I knew about their dusty trade and sought out a few of them for enlightenment. They were surprised to be asked, it turned out, and then they seemed eager to dispel some of the peculiar anonymity that has surrounded such a public occupation: if you want an earful, go to a man in a highly technical profession who feels he is unappreciated. My instructors—almost a dozen of them in the end—came in different sizes and ages and uniforms and degrees of experience, and they were almost a random sample. Inevitably, I missed some of the best-known practitioners (including the celebrated Johnny Bench, who retired after the 1983 season; Montreal’s Gary Carter, who is paid well over a million dollars per annum for his work and is perhaps the leading candidate to succeed Bench as the No. 1 catcher; Lance Parrish, of the Tigers; Jim Sundberg, late of the Texas Rangers and now of the Brewers; and the testy Jerry Grote, who is out of baseball and living in Texas, after winding up an extended career with the Mets and three other clubs, during which he was thought of as perhaps the best handler of pitchers around), but the catchers I did talk to were so voluble and expressive in their responses that I did not come away with the feeling that any major theorems of their profession were closed to me. Indeed, their replies were so long and meaty that I realized along the way that I simply wouldn’t have time to take up
every
aspect of catching with them—blocking the plate, for instance, or the nasty little problem of catching and holding the knuckleball and the spitter, or the business of learning an extraordinary physical stoicism that allows the man behind the plate to disregard or play through the daily bruises and batterings that come with the job (most regular catchers experience pain of one form or another, and in one or several places on their bodies, right through the season), or the relative importance of the pre-game strategic review of the other team’s hitters, or the business of veiling your signals from enemy base runners, or the prevalence of low tricks like surreptitiously nicking or scuffing the ball in aid of your pitcher, and more. These themes would have to wait for remedial sessions. Bob Boone told me at one point that he thought it took about three hundred major-league games for a catcher to feel comfortable back there, and I realized that the best I could hope for as an outsider was a glimpse at such a body of skills.

I talked to my informants separately, beginning with extended colloquies around battings cages and in dugouts and clubhouses during the leisurely 1983 spring term in Arizona and Florida, and then coming back for some short refreshers whenever I ran into one of them during the regular season. In time, these interviews ran together in my mind and seemed to turn into one extended, almost non-stop conversation about catching, with the tanned, knotty-armed participants together in the same room, or perhaps ranged comfortably about on the airy porch of some ancient summer hotel, interrupting each other, nodding in recollection, doubling back to some previous tip or topic, laughing together, or shouting in sudden dissent. But they grew more serious as they went along. One of the surprising things about the catchers’ catcher-talk, I realized after a while, was how abstract it often was. Old names and games, famous innings and one-liners and celebrated goofs seemed to drop out of their conversation as they got deeper into it, as if the burden of anecdote might distract them (and me) from a proper appraisal of then-hard calling. Everything about catching, I decided somewhere along the way, is harder than it looks.

Terry Kennedy, the twenty-seven-year-old receiver for the San Diego Padres, is six feet four and weighs two hundred and twenty pounds—almost too big for a catcher. He is prized for his bat and his durability—in the past two seasons he played in a hundred and fifty-three and a hundred and forty-nine games (very high figures for a catcher) and batted in ninety-seven and ninety-eight runs. At one time, there was some thought of moving him out to play first base, until a year ago, when the Padres acquired a fellow named Steve Garvey in the free-agent market. Now Kennedy must stay behind the plate and work on his quickness—work to become smaller, almost.

“Throwing is where mobility matters,” he told me in Phoenix one afternoon. “I’m learning to cheat a little back there, with men on base. Once I determine where the pitch is, I’m starting up. You
have
to do that, with all the fast runners we’re seeing on the base paths. Coming up right is what throwing is all about. There’s a two-step or a one-step release. I start with a little jab-step with my right foot and go right forward. The important thing is to be true with that throw, so you try to keep your fingers on top of the ball. If they’re off to one side, the ball will banana on you”—sail or curve, that is—“as it goes out there. You can even throw a little from the side, as long as your fingers are on top.”

Kennedy’s home pro is Norm Sherry, the Padres’ pitching coach, who put in four years as a backup catcher with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Mets, sandwiched in the middle of sixteen seasons in the minors; he has managed at both levels (he was the Angels’ skipper for a term), but, with his dark glasses, his seamed and mahogany-tanned face, and his quick, thrusting way of talking, he suggests the quintessential infantry sergeant.

“Terry’s coming on and coming on,” Sherry told me. “It takes a long time to learn to call a game, but Terry was much more of a catcher in the second half of the season last year. He understood situations better. You can’t work on that kind of stuff in the spring, but I been pitching forty or fifty pitches to him every day—curves and fastballs and in the dirt—and he has to come up throwing. Young catchers today don’t have such good mechanics, because they all rely on this one-handed glove. If you take the pitch with one hand, you don’t have your throwin’ hand on the ball in good position when you start back. They look up and see the guy running and make any old kind of grab at the ball, and that’s where you get those errors. I try to get them to take the ball two-handed, and that also closes up the front shoulder, the way it should be to start your throw. So many of them are in
a panic
when they see somebody movin’ and they lose control of everything. Sometimes you see a man even knock his mask so it sort of half slides across his face. Then he can’t see anything, because he was in such a hurry. But if you just take that little half step in advance, you’ve done all the hurrying you need to do. You just have to stand up and take a good stride and throw it.

“So much of this started with Johnny Bench, you know, who became such a good catcher with that one-handed glove. All the young catchers started to follow him, to pick up that style. But not many guys are Johnny Bench. He had great big hands, and wherever he grabbed the ball he got seams. It was like Willie Mays and his basket catch—only a few could do it well.”

Months later, Joe Garagiola showed me a trick about seams. We were standing behind the batting cage together before the first World Series game in Baltimore last fall, and when Johnny Bench’s name came up—he had just closed out his distinguished seventeen-year career with the Cincinnati Reds: indisputably the greatest catcher of his era—Garagiola, after adding several accolades, suddenly echoed Norm Sherry’s little demurrer. In a way, he said, Bench had almost set back the art of catching, because of his own great skills. “You have to get that good grab on the ball,” Joe said in his quick, shill-sharp way, “and you can’t always do that if you’re hot-doggin’ with that mitt. You gotta get seams to throw straight. Here—get me a ball, somebody.” A ball was sneaked from the cage, and Garagiola, blazer and all, half crouched and suddenly became a catcher again. (He had a successful nine-year career at the position, mostly with the Cardinals, before taking up his second life, behind the microphone.) “Here’s what Branch Rickey made us do when we were just young catchers tryin’ to come up in the Cardinal system,” he said. “Take the pitch in two hands, with your bare hand closing it in there, and then
grab seams.
If you take hold of it this way”—he held the ball on one of its smooth white horseshoe-shaped sectors, with the red stitching on either side of his forefinger and middle finger—“you got no
idea
where it’s going to end up. But you can learn to shift it in your hand while your arm is comin’ up to start the peg. Just a little flip in the air and you can get seams. Look.”