The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (95 page)

He raised his hand quickly three or four times in a row and took a fresh grip on the ball as he did so. Each time, he had seams. He laughed in his famous, engaging way, and said, “Nights in spring training, Mr. Rickey made us each take a ball with us when we went to the movies and practice that in the theatre. Three or four catchers sittin’ in a row, grabbing seams!”

The “One-handed glove” that so many of my catching informants referred to is the contemporary lightweight mitt that everyone, including Little Leaguers, now employs behind the plate. Thanks to radical excisions of padding around the rim and thumb, it is much smaller than its lumpy, pillowlike progenitor, more resembling a quiche than a deep-dish Brown Betty. The glove comes with a prefab central pocket, but the crucial difference in feel is its amazing flexibility, attributable to a built-in central hinge, which follows the lateral line of one’s palm. The glove is still stiffer and more unwieldy than a first baseman’s mitt, to be sure, but if you catch a thrown ball in the pocket the glove will try to fold itself around the ball and hold it, thus simply extending the natural catching motion of a man’s hand. Catching with the old mitt, by contrast, was more like trying to stop a pitch with a dictionary; it didn’t hurt much, but you had to clap your right hand over the ball almost instantly in order to keep it in possession. Indeed, this technique of nab-and-grab was almost the hardest thing for a boy to learn about catching when I first tried it (and instantly gave it up), many years ago, and a mistimed clutch at the ball was often suddenly and horribly painful as well. The new glove turned up in the nineteen-sixties, and its first artisan was Randy Hundley, a smooth, lithe receiver with the Chicago Cubs. Its first and perhaps still its greatest artist, its Michelangelo, was Johnny Bench, whose extraordinary balance and quickness, coupled with the glove, allowed him to take everything one-handed and, moreover, to make every kind of catch back there look as effortless and natural as the gestures of a dancer. He made the lunging, manly old art look easy, which may explain why so many baseball people—including many of the catchers I talked to—seem to find it necessary to set Bench a little to one side when they speak of him: to mount him as a museum exhibit of catching, a paradigm locked away behind glass, and to examine it with appropriate murmurings of wonder and then walk away. “Bench was picture-perfect,” Ted Simmons said. “A marvellous mechanical catcher. There’s no better. In the light of all that praise, it’s very hard for any other catcher to be considered in that way.” Carlton Fisk said, “Bench did so many things almost perfectly that it almost seemed robotical. Everything was done so automatically that it didn’t seem to have much creativity to it.” Sometimes catchers can sound like authors.

For Bob Boone, the catcher’s front shoulder is the key to strong throwing. “You have to have that closed front side, just the way you do in hitting,” he told me. “When the arm goes through, the front shoulder opens up. Coming up to that position is basically a three-step movement, but some can skip all that and take just one step and throw. That takes a real strong arm. Parrish can do it. I went to it early in my career, because it was simple for me then, but I don’t think it’s the most effective. If your arm doesn’t get all the way through—if it never quite catches up to your body and you let the throw go from out
here—
you get that three-quarters, Thurman Munson throw. Thurman threw that way because he didn’t have a strong arm, and I’m sure he weighed that quick release against velocity and accuracy. But he didn’t have a choice, really. For me, that shift to get the shoulder into position is where the throw is made. Velocity is a gift—and most catchers in the majors have it—but quickness is in your feet.”

Boone speaks in a deliberate, considering sort of way. He is a thoughtful man, with a saturnine look to him that contrasts strikingly with his gentle, almost sleepy smile. He is a graduate of Stanford, where he majored in psychology (not much of a help to him in baseball, he confided—not even in dealing with umpires). During the negotiations arising from the 1981 baseball strike, he represented the National League for the Players Association. Possibly because of this union activity, he was not signed to a new contract by the Phillies the next season, and crossed leagues to join the Angels, where he enjoyed immediate success, winning a Gold Glove award (his third) for his defensive prowess, and handling the theretofore listless California mound staff in a manner that helped bring the club to the championship playoffs that fall. We talked in the visiting-team clubhouse during the middle innings of an Angels-Cubs spring game at Mesa, while he slowly took off his uniform (he had played the first four innings) and showered and dressed, waiting for his teammates to be done, waiting for another team bus. I didn’t think we covered much ground in our talk, but I was wrong about that; his modest, off-speed delivery fooled me. In the days and weeks that followed, I heard Boone-echoes in things that other catchers and coaches were telling me, and realized that I had already been put in the game, as it were, by what he had imparted.

One catcher’s attribute that Boone always seemed to come back to in our talk was consistency—doing hard things right again and again, doing them as a matter of course. “Everyone at the major-league level has talent,” he said at one point, “but the players who last are the ones who are consistent. People who can control themselves over one hundred and sixty-two games are rare, and that’s why the old idea of the starting nine has sort of gone out. It seems that a lot of players get into bad spells and have to have a rest. I think you have to prepare your
mind
to play a full season, and of course you have to train for it physically. I work a lot on flexibility. You have to be able to deal with pain, to the point where it doesn’t affect how you hit and catch and throw. That comes with time. You experience things and deal with them. I don’t look at the catcher’s job as one that’s going to tire me out more than other players get tired. Getting tired is just part of the season, so you prepare for that, too.”
*

In Sarasota, Dave Duncan was talking about the great recent upsurge of base-stealing in both leagues, and what the coaching staffs were doing to combat it. (Per-team base-stealing totals have risen dramatically in the past two decades, thanks in part to the individual exploits of motorers like Lou Brock, of the Cardinals, who at the age of thirty-five set a new one-season record with a hundred and eighteen stolen bases in 1974, and Rickey Henderson, of the Oakland A’s and then the Pittsburgh Pirates, set amazing new
team
stolen-base records in each league, in 1976 and 1977, with three hundred and forty-one and two hundred and sixty thefts, respectively. Back in the nineteen-forties and fifties, the major-league clubs averaged fewer than fifty stolen bases per year, with everyone waiting to stroll around the bases after a home run, but now National League teams average about a hundred and fifty swipes per summer, and the A.L. about forty or fifty fewer, with the difference probably attributable to the quicker, artificial-turf basepath carpets that predominate in the senior circuit.) Duncan, who is the pitching coach for the Chicago White Sox, caught for eleven years with Kansas City, Oakland, Cleveland, and Baltimore. He handled the hairy A’s flingers—Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers—during the first of Oakland’s three successive world-championship seasons, in the early nineteen-seventies: yes,
that
Dave Duncan. He is a slender, soft spoken gent with wide-spaced pale-blue eyes.

“Everyone’s
running, it seems,” he said. “And everything is being timed now. I don’t remember anybody putting a clock on a catcher when I was out there. Now there are three or four guys on the bench with stopwatches, and the first-base coach in the spring has a stop-watch, too. It’s gotten so you can figure in advance that you’ve got a chance against a particular base runner if
this
guy is pitching for you and
that
guy is behind the plate. We’ve all learned the figures. A good time for a catcher, from the moment of his catch until the moment his peg arrives at second, is around two seconds. If you find a catcher who can get it out there in one-nine or one-eight, that’s a quick release. Meanwhile, a man who takes an average lead and gets himself down to second in three-three is a good base runner. A tenth off makes him a real rabbit, and if you’re going to throw him out you’ve got to do everything right—hold him pretty close, a quick delivery from the mound, and then a pitch that the catcher can handle easily. A catcher with a good throwing arm—a Rick Dempsey, a Lance Parrish, a Mike Heath—is almost a necessity nowadays. Bob Boone is about the best there is at calling a good game and also throwing well. He’s very consistent, with good accuracy and great anticipation.”

I remembered at once. “With a Rickey Henderson or a Tim Raines or a Lou Brock on base,” Boone had told me, “you work at setting up the same way as always and at knowing what your own maximum speed is. If you try to go beyond that, you become erratic and you’re actually slower. It’s like a boxer throwing a jab. He wants to do it at his maximum all the time, but if he suddenly wants a little extra he’s much less—you can see it. Actually, it’s almost easier with a speedster—with a Rickey Henderson leading away out there—because you know he’s going to go. The other guys, the ones you don’t expect to run, are harder to keep up for, and you have to do that on every pitch, really, with a man on base. You tell yourself, ‘I’ve got a right-handed pitcher and he’s throwing a curveball here, so I have to be aware of my right side, ’cause that’s where it’s going. O.K.,
I’m prepared.’
”

In 1982, Boone was the only regular catcher in either league to throw out more than fifty percent of the opposition’s would-be base stealers; he got fifty-eight percent of them, and cut down Rickey Henderson six times out of thirteen. This is still not a dazzling success ratio, to be sure, and since it is demonstrable that athletes today are much quicker afoot than their predecessors, it seems certain that not even time-motion studies and smart catchers are going to keep base runners from sprinting off for second in ever-increasing numbers in the seasons just ahead. It has occurred to me that this phenomenon may represent the first breakdown of baseball’s old and beautiful distances: if ninety feet from base to base is no longer enough to keep a single or a base on balls from becoming an almost automatic double, then someone may have to go back to the drawing board at last in order to restore caution to the austere sport—and to cheer up catchers a little, too.

“I admire Bob Boone and this kid Tony Pefia, with the Pirates,” Tim McCarver said from across the room, so to speak; we were in St. Petersburg, where McCarver, now a Mets broadcaster, was preparing to do a Mets-Red Sox game. He played in four different decades, from the late fifties to the early eighties, mostly for the Cardinals (he was Bob Gibson’s favorite receiver), and he is humorous, snub-nosed, and cheerfully opinionated. “Pefia does so many things right already that he makes me
salivate,”
he said. “The Phillies let Bob Boone go because they said he couldn’t throw anymore—a terrible rap. So he goes over to the Angels and leads the league in throwing out runners and takes the Angels right to the doorstep of the World Series. He’s conscientious and he’s always in great shape, and his throwing is only a little part of it. I never could throw well, so I always thought calling a game was the biggest thing. That will never become a noted part of the game, because there are no stats for it, and the fans don’t care about it, and most of the scouts don’t know a whole lot about it, either. Even today, scouts and some managers will say, ‘He can really catch,’ when they mean ‘He can really throw.’ This is real bullshit, because throwing just isn’t a very important part of it, when you think about it. Gene Mauch is one of the few managers who really understood and appreciated catching. I always felt some resentment about not being appreciated, but that was balanced out by pitchers who knew what I was doing back there. Some of them didn’t appreciate me until the time came when they had to pitch to somebody else.” He laughed.

All right, forget about throwing. Think about catching the ball instead—seizing that imminent, inbound, sinking or riding, up-and-in or down-and-away, eighty-to-ninety-five-m.p.h. hardball, and doing it, moreover, in a way that might just turn the umpire’s call to your advantage. Terry Kennedy told me that sometimes you can take a pitch close to the inside edge of the plate (inside to a right-handed batter, that is) and slightly rotate your glove to the left at the last instant—he shifted his mitt so that the thumb moved from two o’clock to noon—and thus win a strike call from the ump. “But you can’t hold it there, to make the point,” he said. “They
hate
it if you keep the glove up there, and it’s almost an automatic ball.”

Milt May said that just catching the ball cleanly was a big help to the umpires, and led to better calls, while Tom Haller (we will meet these deponents in a minute) told me that Del Crandall, the celebrated Milwaukee Braves receiver of a quarter of a century ago, had taught him how to catch an away pitch, on the outside corner, with his glove parallel to the ground, and to take the ball in the webbing instead of in the pocket. “The ball could be an inch or two off the strike zone and he still might call it a strike, because the glove itself is still over the plate,” Haller said. “And a high pitch you can take with a little downward move sometimes. You teach a young catcher to take most pitches as close to the plate as possible, because the farther back you are, the more it can bend out of the strike zone. If your glove is back to where that pitch looks like a ball now, the crowd may even react to it, and then the ump thinks, Hell, I’m going to call that a ball after all.”

Bob Boone again: “There are a few little tricks of framing and catching the ball that might convince an umpire—shifting your body instead of your glove, or maybe the way you collapse your glove as you make the catch. But you don’t want to work on that umpire too much. More often, a catcher will take a strike away from the pitcher by catching it improperly—knocking it out of the strike zone, or moving the glove with the pitch so that it carries the ball out of the strike zone after the catch, and even if you roll your glove you might help the umpire to make up his mind the wrong way.”