High Heat (15 page)

“I've never seen a little kid be able to do that,” recalls Debbie Price, David's mother. “He could throw that little ball up with one hand and get both hands on the bat in time to smack it up in the air at that age. We were living in a one-story ranch home back then, so we're not talking about a huge place. Still, Dave could hit that ball so hard that it would carry quite a bit. He'd run around to the other side; I remember he had to unlatch the gate to get from one side to
the other side, too. Then he'd hit it back over again. The ball was one of those solid plastic ones and the bat was one of those thick red ones you'll still see in the stores.

“Our older two sons, who were both good athletes, wouldn't have been able to hit that ball until they were seven or eight years old. Here was Dave doing it by the age of three, so we knew this kid had something special here.”

Even though his stepbrother, Jackie, had won a football scholarship to Kentucky State and Price's middle brother, Damon, was a basketball star in high school, David's first love was baseball.

“We always had all kinds of balls around the house,” Debbie Price says, “but it was always that baseball that David gravitated toward. Typically, we'd be cleaning house on Saturdays and trying to catch up on some things. I remember having to set the timer in the kitchen and tell Dave, ‘OK, I've got to clean house for 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, we can go outside and I'll throw you the baseball.' When he was little all he wanted to do was throw and hit that baseball. When that timer went off, he was coming around that corner, looking for me, ready to go outside. We did that all Saturday.

“I played catch with him until he was age 11. By then I wouldn't throw with him anymore because he threw too hard. He was 13 when my husband stopped catching with him. He was always able to throw it a whole lot harder than you'd think a kid his age could.”

By the age of eight, Price was pitching to kids four years older than him. The buzz was the Price kid could bring the heat. “Since I was small, I always throw hard, harder than the other kids,” he says. “I guess it was always there. It's funny, I didn't really notice it that much, but other people sure did.”

Ironically, as Price made his way up the ranks, starring at Vanderbilt University, baseball became irrelevant to the African American community. In 2007, according to the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, the percentage of black players at the major-league level fell to 8.2 percent, an all-time low.

To understand how far baseball has come and how far the game still has to go at the grassroots level, especially among today's kids,
the game's next generation, I accept an invitation from Phil Pote to tour inner-city Los Angeles. Pote was a pitcher and outfielder for the Los Angeles State College of Applied Arts and Sciences, now California State University at Los Angeles, in the mid-1950s. After his playing days were over, he coached at several of the Los Angeles high schools. Pote went on to become a scout for the Seattle Mariners, beating the bushes for talent in a pickup with a camper shell that occasionally blew off as he barreled down the southern California freeways.

A generation ago, Los Angeles was home to such future major leaguers as Ozzie Smith, Eddie Murray, Reggie Smith, Darryl Strawberry, and Eric Davis. A single high school, Fremont High, produced 23 major leaguers. Today, though, few scouts and fewer college coaches travel the hard streets of Los Angeles to seek out ballplayers at such high schools as Locke, Crenshaw, Centennial, Fremont, and Dorsey.

“You'll still go there,” Pote says as we turn onto the freeway bound for Crenshaw High School. (I can't help glancing back at the camper shell to make sure it's still secure.) “But it's not a priority like it once was. In the old days, you didn't dare not go.”

Crenshaw's open-air campus bustles with activity this morning. Nearly 3,000 kids attend this school, and Darryl Strawberry still ranks as one of Crenshaw's most famous sports celebrities. In many ways, Strawberry's star-crossed career symbolizes the promise and heartbreak of L.A. ball. If a pittance of the fame or fortune that he garnered as a member of two world champions, the Mets and the Yankees, had come home to roost, Crenshaw and inner-city baseball would be the better for it.

“But it's almost unfair to hold Darryl to such comparisons, especially now,” says Willie West, the former coach of Crenshaw's prestigious basketball team. “With all the troubles Darryl has had, he's having a tough enough time taking care of himself, let alone trying to help us out.”

No doubt West was referring to Strawberry once owing almost $4.5 million in back taxes, alimony, and other debts. In recent years,
Strawberry has attended the occasional football game at Crenshaw, signing autographs in the stands. During the 1994 labor meltdown, he and Eric Davis, who were teammates on a Connie Mack team in inner-city L.A., worked out at their old high schools. Still, to many kids, the ballplayers are little more than riddles. The names might be familiar, but any real recognition has long since faded.

“The vast majority have no idea what they did, how good they were,” says Ken Maxey, Crenshaw High's ex-assistant athletic director. “Part of that may be the players. I suppose it's easy to blame them. But I think the whole problem goes deeper than that.”

John Young, who started several youth baseball programs in South Central L.A. during the late 1970s, says the game “lost a generation of players.”

“Anybody who scouted this area could see that,” he adds. “The gangs had taken over the parks. Kids in this city weren't getting a chance to play. The schools that used to turn out such great talent weren't generating much of anything.”

A short drive from Crenshaw lies Los Angeles's “Field of Dreams.” The state-of-the-art field cost nearly $500,000 to build and hosts games almost every afternoon and night. When Pote was a kid, this stretch of land was empty fields and sandlots. Kids rode their bikes across the open space and nicknamed the area “Devil's Dip.” Today, gazing out the van window, Pote surveys what has become the epicenter for baseball's revival in L.A. “It was worth the wait,” he says.

If baseball intends to keep young people as part of its fan base, it must embrace its roots, especially in the inner city. “That remains our biggest challenge,” says former National League President Leonard Coleman, who is actively involved in Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI), a Major League Baseball–sponsored program. “I look at cities, and I say we have to take baseball in those communities to the next level. We have to for this game to continue to grow.”

Price agrees and wonders if the game may have turned some kind of corner in the 2008 World Series. Months after the Philadelphia Phillies defeated the Tampa Bay Rays in the Fall Classic, a study revealed black participation in major-league baseball had increased to 10.2 percent.

“Right now in the African American community, baseball isn't deemed very cool,” Price says. “Certainly that's the case compared with basketball and football. That's why the World Series was great. I mean not just for me on a personal level, but for what it did for the game in the African American community. You had Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Carl Crawford, B. J. Upton—there was just a ton of guys out there. That's good for the game and showing fans. Many of the superstars on both teams were African American and that's great for how this game has to grow.”

Price made two appearances in the 2008 World Series, pitching in relief in Games Two and Five. Certainly it wasn't as heady as getting the final four outs to clinch the American League pennant (three of those outs came on strikeouts), but he was there, a part of it all. Those are the moments that he still thinks about, admittedly a bit too much, on evenings like this at Triple-A Durham.

In spring training, Price focused on winning a place in the Rays' starting rotation and was disappointed when that didn't pan out. Now, almost six weeks later, he wonders if he made a mistake. Perhaps he should have said he was willing to move to the bullpen and taken the same direction as Jonathan Papelbon of the Red Sox, who advocated to be the team's closer when many in the front office still saw his future in the rotation. “I could have been a good starting pitcher,” Papelbon explains. “But I can make the Hall of Fame as a closer.”

Price nods when he hears that statement. “I'm very blessed and I know that. God has given me a gift he doesn't give to a whole lot of people, especially from the left side,” he says, smiling. “As for what's best right now, I don't know. In spring training, I was focused on making the rotation, being a starter. Now I'd go back even if it meant coming out of the bullpen. I just want to get back up there.”

 

 

S
ometimes a change in scenery can mean everything in the world to a pitcher. Such was the case with Nolan Ryan. Moments after he was traded from the New York Mets to California, Angels general manager Harry Dalton called him on the phone. “You're the main
part of my first trade and I want it to be a good one,” Ryan remembers Dalton telling him. “You can be a big star with California, and we're going to give you every chance to be one. Here you will get a chance to pitch.”

After struggling to land a regular turn in the Mets' rotation, that was sweet music to Ryan's ears. So, in 1972, he headed west, to the Angels' spring training camp in Holtville, California. Although the ballclub was excited to have him on board, somebody forgot to tell coach Jimmie Reese to go easy on the newcomer.

Reese ordered Ryan to take infield practice and started peppering ground balls at him. This went on for a good 20 minutes, with Reese hitting them to Ryan's left and right, until the pitcher was ready to keel over. “One more ground ball would have done it,” Ryan remembers. “I was about spent.”

That's when pitching coach Tom Morgan called Ryan over to pitch batting practice. Although Ryan had barely escaped with his dignity, Reese's impromptu workout had made an impression. Ryan decided he needed to be in better shape, a commitment that continued throughout the remainder of his 27-year big-league career. In addition, he and Reese became fast friends, with Ryan regularly taking infield practice with the enthusiastic coach always ready to swing the fungo bat.

“There was no quit in that guy,” Reese said years later. “I could tell from the minute Nolan walked in the door, he was willing to do what it took to be a big winner in this game.”

In short order, Ryan had gotten Dalton's commitment from the front office and a primer in fitness from Reese. But arguably what helped to really turn his career around was his work with catcher Jeff Torborg.

I've often found catchers to be among the most intelligent guys in the game. Joe Torre, Cal Ripken Sr., and Mike Scioscia come immediately to mind. Years ago, when I was an editor with
Baseball Weekly,
I profiled all-star catcher Tony Pena as he caught three categories of pitchers—a rookie (Mike Gardiner), a journeyman (Greg Harris), and a superstar (Roger Clemens)—on consecutive nights
against the White Sox on Chicago's South Side. How Pena effectively assumed different personas, moving from a teacher in dealing with the rookie, to a drill sergeant with the journeyman, to a confidant with the staff ace, remains one of the best tutorials in business management I've ever seen.

In Torborg, Ryan found a guy who had caught Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax in the Dodgers' organization. At their initial workouts in Holtsville, Torborg told Ryan that he was rushing his delivery.

“I've always worked hard to get the ball up there,” Ryan replied. “I thought that was what helped account for my speed.”

“No, Nolan,” Torborg said. “When you rush your motion and you stride out too soon, your arm can't catch up and the ball gets released too soon. That's why you're wild. You're not wild side to side but wild high.”

So began almost daily sessions with Ryan throwing to Torborg that the Hall of Fame pitcher would later describe as “learning to pitch all over again.”

Those early days with the Angels were almost derailed by a players' strike. Torborg was the team's player representative and gathered the team, as best he could, for workouts at a playground down the road from Anaheim Stadium. That would be the first place his teammates really got a look at Ryan's live arm and, more importantly, where the refinement of his pitching motion progressed.

“When Nolan came to the Angels, he was already a legend,” Torborg says. “At least his arm, how hard he could throw, was. Whether he'd ever be a winning pitcher was the question.

“He was shy but he had this physical presence, and there was no doubting what a great arm he had. But Nolan hadn't had much success with the Mets and you could tell that was bothering him. Thinking back on it, I suppose I was a bit spoiled after catching stars like Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Bill Singer earlier in my career. Right away, though, I saw that Nolan had as good an arm as any of them. The problem was his mechanics weren't there. Not yet anyway.”

One of the first adjustments, and perhaps the pivotal one, that the Angels made with Ryan's delivery had to do with his lead leg and
foot. This was the left one he raised in the air as he went into his motion. Torborg noticed that as Ryan tried to throw harder, the left foot came up and then too far back in the windup phase. Instead of staying square to home plate, the left leg moved past the pitching rubber toward center field. That caused Ryan to lose balance and, as a result, control.

“Ideally, you like to see a pitcher bring that lead leg back no farther than the pitching rubber,” Torborg says. “Of course, every pitcher is different. But when Nolan brought that leg back past the rubber, it caused the top half of his body to open up. His control went downhill fast as he flew open in the rest of his delivery. So that's the first thing we started to work on.