High Heat (14 page)

Despite such technology constantly allowing him to be in the loop, always at the ready, on this evening in Durham the major leagues seem well over the horizon. Price agrees that perhaps he got a bit spoiled during his star turn with the Rays last fall. Of course, before that he burned through the minor leagues, going 12–1 at three levels in the Rays' minor-league system. He got used to doing things fast, being a young man in a hurry. The concept of slowing down, refining his changeup and slider, well, it can get a little old at times.

“In the majors, you never have to get up for a game,” Price says. “It's always just there, whether you're pitching or not. When you come to the park up in the majors, it's so much different. Hours before the game, there are already 20,000 fans there, the place is filling up. Being down here is just different. It's just different. That's about the only way I can explain it. I cannot wait to get back up [to Tampa].”

Any time Price takes the mound, a dozen or more scouts from rival teams monitor his every move. It's a kind of joke, really. The Rays aren't looking to trade their young phenom. But the curiosity about how good this kid could be extends well beyond the Tampa organization. So, the scouts have been there to witness when he's lost focus every now and then. They saw how his fastball rarely got out of the low 90s during a loss at Norfolk. How a left-handed hitter was somehow able to turn on one of the southpaw's offerings and drove it out of the ballpark. After a month at Durham, Price's record was a rather pedestrian 1–3, with a 3.92 ERA. Although the left-hander was averaging a strikeout an inning, at least one scout wasn't all that impressed. “The kid's got to toughen up,” he says. “That's what this level of baseball is all about. It all comes down to how much you want it.”

 

 

O
f course, that's what Crash is trying to get across to Nuke. Shelton later acknowledged that when he wrote about LaLoosh he was channeling the real-life Steve Dalkowski. Trying to wrap his mind around the question of whether the gift of such an arm “was an act of grace or just a cruel trick.”

Dalkowski's fastball rose markedly from the time it left his hand until the moment it crossed home plate. So much so that the more savvy catchers who caught him, beginning in high school and on throughout his roller-coaster ride in the Orioles' farm system, often told him to aim below the batter's knees, or even at home plate itself. It was the only way to keep the heat from riding too high in the strike zone.

“Even then I often had to jump to catch it,” says Len Pare, one of Dalkowski's high school catchers. “That fastball? I've never seen another one like it. He'd let it go and it would just rise and rise.”

What made the pitch even more amazing was that Dalkowski didn't have anything close to a classic windup. No high leg kick like Bob Feller or Satchel Paige, for example. Instead Dalkowski almost short-armed the ball with an abbreviated delivery, which only kept opposing batters all the more off-balance and shocked at what was too soon coming at them.

“His right leg rises a few inches off the ground. His left arm pulls back then flicks out from the side of his body like an attacking cobra,” Pat Jordan wrote in
The Suitors of Spring.
“There's a sharp crack as his wrist snaps the ball toward the plate. Then silence. The ball does not rip through the air like most fastballs, but seems to just reappear silently in the catcher's glove as if it had somehow decomposed and then recomposed itself without anyone having followed its progress.”

For a pitch that seemed to disappear and then reappear, Dalkowski's fastball was as light as a feather to snare. This comes from the guys who caught him. Cal Ripken Sr. claimed he could catch Dalkowski bare-handed, at least when he was sure what was coming. Getting the pitch near the plate, though, was often another story. For
a fastball that could often be easily corralled by a catcher's mitt, it caused mayhem when it sailed out of control.

“Ripken always said, ‘If the ball left his hand belt high, you just turn and run for the screen.' It was going to sail, in other words,” Steve Barber told John Eisenberg of the
Baltimore Sun
. “And if it left his hand looking like it was going to hit the ground, it was going to come in as a strike. But all his balls were so light, that was the amazing thing.”

Boog Powell added, “They'd get him to hold the ball across the seams, you know, to keep the ball down. If you throw a cross-seamer with the seams, it'll sink. They had him doing that and everything else, but it was still taking off. It was something to see.”

In 1958, Dalkowski began the season in the minors, at Knoxville, Tennessee. Soon he had the fans there ducking for cover, too, when three of his fastballs tore through the wire-mesh screen behind home plate.

“[The last one] went through the screen and hit a hotdog vendor in the butt and knocked him down,” Dalkowski says. “Boy, was he mad.”

One Knoxville dad told the fireballer he was no longer going to bring his young son to games Dalkowski started. He felt the left-hander set a poor example about how baseball was supposed to be played.

Of course, a lot of coaches at the minor-league level had bright ideas about how to harness Dalkowski's heater. One afternoon, before a night game, manager George Staller set up a square wooden target over the bullpen plate near right field and gave Dalkowski a bucket of balls. He was told to keep throwing until all the balls were inside the target.

“I shattered the bastard,” Dalkowski says. “Broke it in half. And it wasn't just plywood, either. They had a boy there who was supposed to bring the balls back and he ran away.”

When Dalkowski returned to the ballpark for that night's game, a crowd of ballplayers was gathered around a heap of splinters and chunks of wood—what was left of Staller's target.

Dalkowski played for three teams in the Orioles' system that season—Knoxville, Wilson (North Carolina), and Aberdeen (South Dakota). Each step was a demotion, and he didn't have a winning record at any of them. His ERA ranged from 7.93 to 12.21 to 6.39. In addition, at every stop his walk totals surpassed his strike out totals.

Early on, Billy DeMars, a former big-league shortstop who often managed the phenom, noticed that Dalkowski's plant foot often stayed on the pitching rubber well after he had released. Could this be the key to the phenom's wild streak? DeMars sincerely thought so. He believed he had found the Rosetta Stone. “Essentially he had no follow-through,” DeMars later told the
(New York) Daily News
. “It was unbelievable when you think about it. This kid was throwing 100 miles per hour with his arm alone.

“I told him, ‘Stevie, I'm gonna yell from the bench to let it go every time you don't follow through.' We would work on it and in the next start he walked only five batters and struck out 20. They took our pictures together in the local paper and I got quoted as saying he was the fastest pitcher I'd ever seen. I think that's how ‘the fastest ever' legend got started.”

Indeed, as the 1959 season got under way, Dalkowski showed promise of coming around. He pitched a no-hit, no-run game for Aberdeen, in which he tied a Northern League record with 21 strikeouts. But as soon as Dalkowski began to show signs of harnessing the gift, things fell apart. In the next game after the no-hitter, he walked the first eight batters he faced. His wild streak lasted for the next four games.

During those early years, he constantly crossed up the poor souls who had to catch him. One time it was Cal Ripken Sr., father of the Ironman. Ripken was definitely looking for something else when Dalkowski's rising fastball took off. The ball flew past Ripken's glove and hit the umpire flush in the face mask. The protective headgear shattered and the poor ump was carted off to the hospital.

“I've umpired for Koufax, Gibson, Drysdale, Maloney, Seaver, Marichal, and Gooden, and they could all bring it, but nobody could bring it like he could,” umpire Doug Harvey once said of
Dalkowski. “In one season, he broke my bar mask, split my shin guards, split the plastic trim on my chest protector and knocked me back 18 feet.”

Compounding the lack of any semblance of control was the company Dalkowski began to keep. Even though management warned him to steer clear of teammate Bo Belinsky, the two pitchers became fast friends. Soon they were both reassigned to Pensacola in the Alabama-Florida League. Not a good move. Belinsky was a ladies' man (he would go on to date actress Mamie Van Doren), who didn't keep regular hours.

“Bo wasn't really as bad as everyone thought,” Barber told Jordan. “He was very conscientious about getting eight hours of sleep a night. He just didn't get the eight when they wanted him to.”

Somehow the Orioles allowed Dalkowski and Belinsky to drive from Aberdeen, South Dakota, to their new assignment in Pensacola with a stop in Baltimore along the way. The leg to Baltimore alone took nearly a week, with the two wild-living pitchers spending several days in Chicago, hitting the strip clubs. Things went from bad to worse in Florida because that's when the pair hooked up with Barber, another hard-throwing pitcher who loved the good times.

“Bo and me were roommates in Pensacola,” Dalkowski explained to Jordan. “He was going out with a girl at the time. One day, he went on a road trip with the team—I stayed behind with a cold and there was this knock on the door. It was the sheriff and the girl's mother, looking for Bo. He never came back from the road trip.

“You know what I always wonder? Bo made the big leagues and he didn't throw hard. How come? It blows my mind sometimes.”

Indeed, Belinsky did make the majors, a journeyman at best. He played for five teams in eight years after breaking in with the Angels in 1962. By then Dalkowski was down to his last strike.

In 1960, Dalkowski was featured in
Time
magazine, which called him the fastest, wildest pitcher the game had ever seen. At 21, he was already a legend—often for all the wrong reasons. The Orioles tried to enforce a curfew on him to help curb his drunkenness, and his manager in Stockton, the long-suffering Billy DeMars, even took
him to a psychiatrist that practiced hypnotism. None of it worked. Dalkowski set a league record for walks at Stockton (262 in 170 innings). His wildness continued the next season at Kennewick, Washington (196 walks in 103 innings). In one minor-league game, he struck out 24, walked 18, hit four batters, and lost 8–4. In another memorable contest, he finished with a one-hitter, striking out 15, but he also walked 17 and lost 9–8.

Throughout it all, the occasional guy who connected with one of his fastballs never forgot it. In a Stockton-Reno game, Dalkowski was on the verge of recording his league record 20th strikeout. At the plate was a rookie, Bobby Cox, who would go on to be the Atlanta Braves manager. Cox had struck out in his previous four at bats, and Dalkowski soon had two strikes on him. But somehow Cox connected with the next pitch, driving it out of the ballpark for a game-winning, grand-slam homer. “It's something I'll never forget,” Cox says. “Hitting one off the likes of him.”

 

 

B
efore a night game in mid-May, at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, David Price and I are talking in the home dugout. Almost sheepishly he admits he has never heard of Steve Dalkowski—this old fireballer I'm so excited about. Price feigns interest when I tell him about that rising fastball, how Dalko was the real-life basis for Nuke LaLoosh in
Bull Durham
. But when I begin to talk about how Dalkowski fell in with the wrong crowd, allowing his gift to be corrupted by others, I begin to sound like another jaded adult.

Triple-A baseball remains the game's best version of purgatory. Rosters are populated by two types of players: ones ascending to the sport's highest level, the major leagues, and those on their way down, probably forever. In April 2009, the Bulls' roster included Adam Kennedy, who was once a cog on the St. Louis Cardinals and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Unlike topflight prospects like Price, Kennedy was fighting for another chance at the major leagues. (He soon got one after being traded to Oakland.) Target almost anybody on either team tonight, and the stakes are the same as they are in the
movie: Can a guy make the last step and reach the promised land of the major leagues? Sometimes who does and who doesn't can be pretty unfair. Just ask Crash Davis.

The Bulls moved into this new ballpark before the 1995 season. The new digs sit alongside Durham's state-of-the-art performing arts center and headquarters for one of the Triangle area's television stations. Out in left field lies “the Blue Monster,” a knockoff of the left field wall in Boston's Fenway Park. Atop it stands a billboard of an angry bull, standing upon a field of green grass. “Hit the Bull, Win a Steak,” says the inscription. “Hit the Grass, Win a Salad.” On this night, nobody comes close to either culinary offering.

Of course, the billboard is another nod to yesteryear. One like it stood in the old ballpark, where such major-league stars as Joe Morgan and Chipper Jones played. That can be a great thing about baseball. The way the past, present, even the future can be rolled into one night's experience, complete with Cracker Jack and cotton candy. Until steroids knocked the whole rig into the ditch, one could string Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds together into the same sentence, and most fans would know you were talking about the game's single-season home-run record, at one point the most cherished mark in sports. But for the guys playing Triple-A ball, history doesn't mean much, and maybe that's how it should be.

When he was growing up, David Price's first home didn't have a basketball hoop. So, by the age of three, he had dreamed up his own solitary game. With a plastic ball and bat, the youngest of three boys would hit the ball up onto the roof, often clear over the house, and then tear around to the other side to catch it. The game kept him happy for hours at a time.