Authors: Pat Jordan
Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics)
The Suitors of Spring
Also by Pat Jordan
Black Coach
A False Spring
Broken Patterns
After the Sundown
Chase the Game
The Cheat
Sports Illustrated Pitching: The Key to Excellence
a.k.a. Sheila Doyle: A Novel of Crime
a.k.a. Sheila Weinstein: A Novel of Crime
A Nice Tuesday
The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan
The Suitors of Spring
The Solitary Art of Pitching,
from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski
Pat Jordan
Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973 by Pat Jordan
All rights reserved
First Summer Game Books edition 2014
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This book was originally published by
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ISBN: 978-1-938545-27-6 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-938545-28-3 (ebook)
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Foreword
The following pieces are all profiles of baseball players, and coincidentally all the players are pitchers. Some, like Tom Seaver and Sam McDowell, are successful and famous in the major leagues today. Others, like Johnny Sain and Bo Belinsky, were once famous as pitchers but are now familiar for other reasons. Both Art DeFilippis and Steve Dalkowski are relatively unknown, although this anonymity makes them no less interesting.
Fame or obscurity had little bearing on the selections for this book. Rather, each man has a certain compelling distinctness of character. And each is, or was, a pitcher—an unintentional unifying thread I completely overlooked until it was brought to my attention by my editor, Peter Weed. He pointed out that practically all the profiles I had selected for inclusion in this “baseball book” were of pitchers. Perhaps this was only natural, for I had been a pitcher myself: a successful one as an amateur, then a failure as a professional, and finally an inactive hurler who turned to writing.
After graduating from high school in 1959, I signed a $40,000 bonus contract with the Milwaukee Braves, who promptly dispatched me to what Bo Belinsky calls “some witches’ monastery in Pancakesville, Georgia.” After four years in the monasteries of McCook, Waycross, Eau Claire, and Palatka, my career was as virginal and unviolated by success as the day it was born. And so, despairing, the Braves released me from my vows.
I spent the next ten years rationalizing and exorcising my failure by writing a book about my four-year pilgrimage through minor league baseball. The result, tentatively titled “The Days of Wine and Bonuses,” will be published in the summer of 1974. Its writing has not only been excellent therapy but has also led me to my present career, and even more directly, to this collection of profiles. As my editor said, it was only natural that when I began writing about athletes other than myself, I should turn to pitchers. I am still fascinated by the act of pitching, which Tom Seaver believes is an art; and by its practitioners, whom Sam McDowell believes are unique among athletes.
This book, however, is not primarily concerned with pitchers and pitching, although both figure prominently. Rather, it is devoted to a close scrutiny of men who were drawn to pitching and who are interesting because of a certain distinctness transcending their talent. Hopefully, each profile tells not only about each man but also about pitching, about baseball, and most importantly about Sport itself. Each of these pitchers is seeking his proper place in Sport, and its proper place in his life. Since Sport is a universal male experience, all men, whether they wish to or not, must likewise make their peace with it. For some, as for Tom Seaver, Sport becomes “the one thing in life that excites me.” For others, as for Bo Belinsky, Sport is “just a game for little boys.”
Pat Jordan
Contents
The Suitors of Spring
The bird dogs came first. They just appeared one spring day in your sophomore year of high school as if drawn by the odor of freshly cut out-field grass. On that day you knew for sure that your fastball, which had slowed considerably in the jump from a Little League to a high school mound, had once again begun to smoke like a burning pine. You knew also that your life would never be the same again. Baseball was no longer a game for you from that day forward. It was, instead, your career.
They were called bird dogs because they sniffed out talent, although the name does not do justice to the men. The bird dogs were kindly old men in plaid shirts and string ties. They owned taverns and hardware stores, and once had even played ball with Kiki Cuyler and Georgie Cutshaw. Now in their last years, they measured out the weekday afternoons at an endless succession of high school baseball games. They were always easy to spot, even from the mound, since few adults bothered to watch the meaningless games your coach let you pitch as a sophomore, and because they always stood directly behind the home-plate screen, as if they would not feel comfortable unless viewing the world through a maze of wire triangles.
Few of the bird dogs ever got paid a cent for their efforts, although once in a while one would be promised a $100 bonus if the boy he touted ever made the major leagues. But even if that boy did make it, by the time he did the bird dog usually would have died. That wasn’t why they went through the effort. They did it to pass time for one thing and because they loved the game for another—but most of all because they appreciated young talent. Just watching it develop was reward enough for old men.
One day in my sophomore year (1957) at Fairfield Prep I struck out 19 apprentice plumbers, bricklayers and carpenters from Bullard–Havens Technical High School. That night Johnny Barron, an aged Cincinnati bird dog, called at my house. When I answered the phone he asked to speak with my father and after that my mother, like some Victorian suitor seeking permission to court me—which in a way he was. Finally I took the receiver with trembling hands. His voice surprised me. It was battered and broken but completely at ease, as if he was talking to an old friend. And in his mind I guess we were old friends. Hadn’t he just seen me pitch?
Johnny took much for granted as we talked. He detailed my strengths and weaknesses with a familiarity that would have annoyed me if not for the warmth in his voice. He concluded his little talk by saying, “And when you do make the big leagues it will be your fastball that brings you there. It’s a marvelous fastball.”
It was a strange word to use, I thought, the kind of word one used in discussing a painting or statue or some other thing of beauty. He was a strange man, too, and I wondered how he knew such things. (As it turned out, he didn’t.)
“We can’t offer you a contract until you’re a senior,” he told me. “By that time most of the other clubs will be bidding a lot of money for you. I’ll be out of the picture by then. Our scouts and front-office people will have taken over. But I hope you’ll remember that I was the first scout to appreciate your gift. It will mean a lot to me.”
Although I was not sure what he wanted or why, I promised, and he hung up, satisfied. I seldom pitched a game that year without spotting his face somewhere in the sparse crowds, and often I would not feel comfortable on the mound until I did. When I signed in 1959, however, it was with the Braves, not with the Reds. But I still kept my promise and had the local paper carry a small article saying how Johnny Barron Sr. of Haddon Street, Bridgeport, Conn., had been the first scout to get in touch with me.
After the bird dogs, came the full-time scouts. They moved in like carpetbaggers in your junior and senior years to take advantage of the friendships cultivated by the bird dogs. By that time the bird dogs had drifted out of your life, like first lovers who could not bear to see the others.
The scouts were younger men, usually in their 50s, and their appreciation for talent was more professional than
esthetic. They were not unkind men, however, although they were certainly not so lovable as the bird dogs. But then again, when you got your first whiff of that big bonus cash, maybe you were not so lovable either. And just maybe it was a good thing that the bird dogs like Johnny Barron could not see you now.
Unlike the bird dogs, whose virtues were intrinsic to their natures, the scouts were men who embellished their natures. It wasn’t that they created virtues they did not possess; it was just that they overaccentuated the virtues they had until they became caricatures of themselves.
Jeff Jones, for example, was “sincere.” He was a large, egg-shaped New Englander with shrubs for eyebrows and an endearing stutter that could melt the hardest of hearts. Jeff did not toss his sincerity about like bruised fruit either; he deposited it where he knew it would do the most good—with the mother of a prospect.
“Why, Miz Jordan,” he would say, “dddon’t you worry about your bbboy! When he gggoes away to the minor leagues I’ll watch over him as if he were mmmy own son.”
And when Jeff did not look after you as well as he might have, it was understandable. Jeff Jones signed 15 sons a year and, after all, a father can only do so much.
Ray Garland was “flamboyant.” He was a sharp, dapper little man who had long ago become a master of the grand gesture. To this day I can remember Ray in only one pose. He is standing, unprotected, in a heavy drizzle that has drenched his camel’s hair overcoat the color of Gulden’s Mustard. His left arm is extended away from his body, his hand clutching an umbrella that is over the head of my mother, who is sitting dryly in her wicker chair, watching me pitch.
John Pollodoro was “enthusiastic.” He was a little Italian with poorly fitted false teeth. When John got excited his teeth started clicking faster than the words could escape from his mouth and he looked like an actor in a poorly dubbed foreign movie whose image was out of joint with its sound. One day in my junior year I saw him sit next to my girl friend (now my wife) in the deserted stands of a West Haven ball park. He was jabbering away like a machine gun, but my girl was just nodding primly and moving down the bench away from him until finally she and he were wedged into the far corner of the stands. After the game she told me she had been frightened of him. “When he found out I was your girl friend he even offered me a job,” she said. “I know what kind of job he was offering. My mother told me about such things.”
I told her she was mistaken, that Johnny was just trying to find some way he could get to me through her. “Be nice,” I said. “He could be buying our house someday.”
And finally there was the scout I’ll call Jack Brown. Jack had no essentially admirable qualities that he could exaggerate like the other scouts. He was just a likable, harmless old fellow whose face was so red it seemed always on the verge of spontaneous combustion. Jack was a drinker and often was in no condition to match wits with the sharper scouts, although maybe this worked to his advantage. Everyone felt sorry for him, and I’m not so sure he didn’t sign more than a few players because of sympathy.
One day in my senior year Jack drove me to a tryout camp outside of Boston. We arrived the night before and took a motel room on the outskirts of town. I went to bed immediately, but he said he would sit up a few minutes. He sat nervously in a chair by the window, every so often glancing over at me to see if I was asleep. When he thought I was, he withdrew a paper bag from his coat pocket and began taking long swigs from it. I watched him through half-closed eyes until I fell asleep.
When all the scouting is done, when all the dinners, half-kindnesses, half-truths are in the past, the hard bargaining begins. The fight for the cash. The scouts are brushed aside now, just as the bird dogs were a few years before. The farm directors, general managers and vice-presidents take over. They are younger, colder, bread-faced businessmen who were once accountants or timekeepers. They seem unable to speak to you directly, even when you’re in the same room with them. They always talk around you, to your parents, as if you were off on a long trip, maybe, or as if you did not really exist except as a talent somehow abstracted from the human being who possessed it.
But in the long run you never signed with a farm director or a vice-president or even the clubs they represented. In those days you signed a contract with a man, and the man was usually the scout who had made the deepest impression on you. It did not matter how insincere you felt their previous acts of kindness might have been, you could not entirely forget them. You knew even then that an older man cannot spend two years of his life courting a boy without a little of himself rubbing off in the bargain, until even he is not so sure how much his original motives have been blurred and how much this boy really means to him. And you begin to wonder if maybe Jeff Jones did not really wish he could protect you at McCook and Davenport and Palatka and all those places you end up; and maybe Ray Garland would have held that umbrella for your mother even if you had been a .220-hitting second baseman; and maybe Jack Brown didn’t want you to see him drink, not only because he wanted to sign you, but also because he wanted to protect you from a vice he thought you were too young to understand.
And if you never did make the big leagues, you did not feel badly that you let down the Braves or Yankees or some farm director. You felt badly because you had let down Jeff Jones or Ray Garland, as if your bonus money had been fished solely from their own shabby pockets.
I signed with Jeff Jones in 1959, when he was with the Braves; when I left baseball in 1962 because I lost my fastball, I seldom saw him or any of the other scouts again. Only Jack Brown used to pop up once in a while at a high school or American Legion game. I would see him behind home plate in the midst of a group of parents, rambling on in that indefinable drawl of his that could have been the faded remnants of a Southern past. And when his attention wandered from the action it invariably seemed to settle on his hatred of the free-agent draft. Jack did not really know how to hate, so when he came to the free-agent draft his tongue would knot in his mouth until he couldn’t speak, just sputter. He hated the free-agent draft because, as he said, “It’s taken all the heart out of scouting. It’s made everything automatic and meaningless.” And then he would fall sullen and silent.
It was difficult to see why Jack (and most of the other old-time scouts) hated something that made his job easier. The free-agent draft was initiated in 1965 to prevent the scouts and clubs from cutting each other’s throats in bidding wars over untried youngsters. To eliminate such wars, the major leagues made all free agents eligible for two drafts each year, one in June, the other in January. If the boy did not sign with the club that drafted him, he went back into the pool for the next draft. The process repeated itself until he either signed with a club that had drafted him, enrolled in a four-year college, in which case he could no longer be drafted until he was graduated, or had passed 21 or was no longer drafted.
At no point, however, was the boy free to bargain with any club other than the one that had drafted him. This kept his bonus demands within reason. The only thing the clubs had to do was make sure their offers were just tempting enough to convince a boy it was foolish to waste six months of his career until the next draft, especially since the second club might offer him an even smaller bonus than the first. Now, instead of prospects pulling in $175,000 bonuses like Rick Reichardt, the No. 1 pick in the country was lucky to get $70,000, and the fourth and fifth picks struggled to grab $30,000.
Jack Brown and the other scouts hated the draft not because they no longer had to spend large sums of money but because it made their occupations half-obsolete. Before the draft a scout’s job consisted of evaluating talent (it did not take much insight to know a fastball that sounds like ripping silk is big-league stuff) and convincing (
i.e.
, conning) the prospect to sign with the scout’s club. If teams offered the prospect roughly the same bonus, what made him pick one team over another? It was usually a scout and the impression he’d made on a boy. But that’s exactly what had become obsolete.
“It no longer mattered if the kid and his parents loved me,” said Brown. “If we didn’t draft him he couldn’t sign with us no matter what.”
I never understood just how much scouting—and maybe baseball—had lost because of the free-agent draft until I drove to Stamford, Conn., one day to watch an 18-year-old Stamford Catholic High School pitcher named Art DeFilippis. A husky left-hander with thick arms, DeFilippis had a smooth sidearm motion and a fastball that behaved like a screwball. In four years of pitching he had won 35 games, lost 2, struck out 451 batters in 248⅓ innings and allowed only 13 earned runs.
The Sporting News
ranked him as one of the top 12 prospects in the country, which made it likely he would be drafted in the first round. (He was eventually drafted second by the Washington Senators, which made him the 38th pick.)
It was not hard to spot Art DeFilippis’ father on that hot May afternoon as his son took the mound against Xavier High School of Middletown in a state tournament game. He was sitting in an aluminum deck chair on a high rise that runs above the first-base line. A rugged-looking, olive-skinned man with a thin gray mustache, he had a long green cigar clenched between his teeth. His pretty blonde daughter sat beside him, looking a little confused, as if not quite sure what to make of this fuss over her younger brother. Every so often she would look up and smile at the many friends who stooped to whisper in her father’s ear. Their question was always the same. “Any news from the scouts?”
“What do I know?” said Mr. DeFilippis in disgust. “I see them at every game. I say hello and they don’t even say a word to me. Look at them!” he said, gesturing with his cigar to the 16 or 17 older men clustered behind the home-plate screen. He said something in Italian and his friends laughed. His daughter watched the game as if she had not heard a thing.