High Heat (26 page)

“He didn't have to worry about brushing people back. They never dug in. They just wanted out of there. They'd swing at anything. Steve struck out tons of guys without throwing the ball over the plate.”

In the closing chapters of his professional career, Dalkowski came as close as he ever would to becoming a complete pitcher. In a remarkable piece of luck, he had hooked up with Earl Weaver, a manager who could actually help him. The two of them came together for the 1962 season in Elmira, New York, and for the first time, Dalkowski began to throw strikes. During one stretch, over 53 innings, he struck out 111 hitters and walked only 11.

Many considered it only a matter of time until Weaver was the head man at the parent club in Baltimore, which did happen in 1968. Under his direction, the Orioles won the American League pennant four times and the World Series once. Weaver wasn't afraid to speak his mind and was known for his rants against umpires as well as his own players. And deep down, Weaver had a profound respect for what a power arm could mean to a team, how a quality fastball could even turn a season around. Growing up, Weaver had seen Bob Feller pitch. He remembered being in awe of how fast the ball traveled to the plate. Later in his managing career, Weaver witnessed firsthand what Nolan Ryan could do. And when he first laid eyes on Dalkowski, he saw that in terms of pure speed, the unassuming left-hander was easily one of the best.

That season in Elmira, Weaver attacked with the tools of a social scientist the riddle of why Dalkowski couldn't throw strikes. Weaver learned that Dalkowski was the son of a blue-collar background. He listened to his young phenom tell the story about hitting that batter in Kingsport in his rookie season, how Dalkowski had visited the kid in the hospital and how that incident still depressed him. From others in the organization, Weaver learned about Dalkowski's adventures with the “Lost Boys”—Bo Belinsky and Steve Barber.

“By the time he got to me, Steve was in bad shape,” Weaver says. “He was well on his way to being an alcoholic. He'd lost track of who really could help him and who was just along for the ride.”

Tough love was heading Dalkowski's way and he sure didn't like it—at least at first. “He's one guy that I never really got along with,” Dalkowski says. “In fact, for a long time, I hated Earl.”

Weaver soon discovered that liquor and lousy friends weren't Dalkowski's only problems. That season in Elmira Weaver gave all his players the Stanford-Binet Intelligence tests. When the results came back, Dalkowski's score was the lowest on the team—an IQ of about 65.

“That meant we were going about it all wrong with him,” Weaver says. “We were telling him to hold the runners close, teaching him a changeup, how to throw out of the stretch. The problem was he couldn't process all that information. We were overloading him. Those tests showed that if you had something to teach 100 people, Steve would be the last to learn.”

In an effort to save the prospect's career, Weaver took his training in the opposite direction. He told Dalkowski to throw only two pitches—his fastball and slider—and simply concentrate on throwing the ball over the plate. Dalkowski went on to have his best year ever. In his final 57 innings of the 1962 season, the left-hander gave up one earned run, struck out 110 batters, and walked only 21.

“Maybe it was the slider,” Dalkowski later told Pat Jordan, a pitch that reaches the plate five to eight miles per hour slower than the fastball and usually breaks laterally and downward. “I began throwing a lot of sliders that year. I threw it as hard as my fastball and I could throw it for strikes. I'd just hit the black part of the plate with it when I was right. I struck out Ken Harrelson five times in one game and he said to me, ‘I don't believe it! I don't believe it!'”

As the final piece of the puzzle, Weaver worked up another technique to help with Dalkowski's control. The left-hander was under strict orders to take some heat off the fastball, and go with the slider some, until he got two strikes on the batter. Then Weaver would whistle from the dugout. That was Dalkowski's go-ahead that he could throw as hard as he wanted. Weaver remembers that Dalkowski loved to hear that whistle.

Despite the newfound success between the lines, Dalkowski's antics off the field continued to escalate. Once Andy Etchebarren, Dalkowski's catcher in Elmira, began riding him, telling Dalkowski that his fastball was overrated. Etchebarren motioned at the wooden
outfield fence and said that if Dalkowski's fastball was so good, why didn't he just throw it right through that fence? Dalkowski already owed his catcher $20, so for that amount and a few extra dollars the bet was made on the spot.

Etchebarren handed Dalkowski a ball. The fireballer stepped back and proceeded to throw it right through the wooden fence. It was a feat that harked back to the glory days of Amos Rusie.

Convinced that the ball must have hit a knot or that the fence wasn't very strong in the first place, Etchebarren tried to duplicate the feat. But his attempt only bounced off the wall, directly back at the two of them.

“But that's not my favorite one,” Etchebarren says, shaking his head, recalling another Dalkowski story. “No, that has to be about [Dalkowski] and the cop car. Poor Dalko—he tried to drink everything in sight.”

The tale involves Ray Youngdahl, another Orioles farmhand led astray, and another evening spent howling at the moon. Youngdahl joined Dalkowski at a bar one evening, eager to drown his sorrows after striking out four times with men on base. Youngdahl had a few drinks and then went outside and fell asleep in the backseat of his Cadillac. Come closing time, Dalkowski was once again three sheets to the wind. Somehow he was in possession of the car keys, so he stumbled outside, started the vehicle up, and began to drive home—with Youngdahl still asleep in the back.

Soon Dalkowski was sighted driving down the middle of the road by a policeman, and the cop pulled him over. Dalkowski didn't have a driver's license, so the cop told him to follow him back into town. By then Youngdahl was wide awake, even though he probably wished he wasn't. Because that's when Dalkowski put the car into reverse and bashed into the police cruiser.

Pat Gillick, who would later lead three teams to World Series championships (Toronto in 1992 and 1993, and Philadelphia in 2008), was a young pitcher in the Orioles' organization when Dalkowski came along.

“I first met him in spring training in 1960,” Gillick says. “The minors were already filled with stories about him. How he knocked somebody's
ear off and how he could throw a ball through just about anything. He had a great arm but unfortunately he was never able to harness that great fastball of his.

“His fastball was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It really rose as it left his hand. If you told him to aim the ball at home plate, that ball would cross the plate at the batter's shoulders. That was because of the tremendous backspin he could put on the ball.”

In Elmira, Weaver had Dalkowski bunked in a private home with several other Orioles pitching prospects, including Gillick. The fiery manager told the others to do what they could to keep Dalkowski in line. But that proved far more difficult than anybody, including Weaver, expected.

“It was very tough to have him make any kind of curfew, to toe the line in any way,” Gillick recalls. “Steve had a mind of his own. We know now that alcoholism ran in his family. He was certainly susceptible to the bottle. About all we could hope to do was keep him on the straight and narrow the night before he pitched.”

Despite having to play babysitter to the pitching phenom, Gillick insists nobody in the Orioles' camp was envious of Dalkowski's magic arm—wondering why such a gift was wasted on a guy with a propensity for hard liquor and fast times.

“I wasn't jealous of him. I don't think anybody really was,” Gillick says. “We were all rooting for him to make it to the majors. All you had to do was see how he threw—so hard, able to pitch all day—that if he had made the majors we'd be talking about him as one of the most dominant arms ever in the game. Even back then you saw what was at stake.”

Between Weaver's tough love and the support of teammates like Gillick, Dalkowski turned the corner pitching for Elmira. His final line there was 160 innings pitched, 192 strikeouts, 114 walks, and a 3.04 ERA. Better yet, in the second half of the season, he walked only 11 batters in 52 innings. Weaver remembers at bats where the hitters went three or four innings lucky to foul off a pitch. After years of being lost in the wilderness, Dalkowski suddenly had a future in the Orioles' organization.

In 1963, at spring training, he struck out 11 batters in 7 ⅔ innings. The myopic left-hander with thick glasses was slated to head north with the parent club as the Orioles' short-relief man. He was even fitted for a big-league uniform. Yet in his last spring appearance, on March 22, disaster struck.

Dalkowski scholar John-William Greenbaum says trouble had been coming from a long way off. Dalkowski's elbow started to bother him while he was pitching winter ball in Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Why a top prospect like Dalkowski wasn't examined and steps weren't taken at the first hint of arm trouble seems downright criminal today. By the time the left-hander reached spring training, Orioles teammates noticed that he didn't have the superhuman speed of past seasons. In fact, he was pulled for a March 17 game due to a sore arm.

But five days later, for a Grapefruit contest against the Yankees, Dalkowski was back on the mound. Everything started off beautifully that day. He fanned Roger Maris on three pitches. He struck out four in less than two innings. But when Dalkowski threw a slider to New York's Phil Linz, he felt something pop in his elbow. Despite the pain, Dalkowski, like countless pitchers before and after him, tried to carry on. Yet when he pitched to the next batter, the Yankees' Bobby Richardson, the ball flew to the screen behind home plate. With that Dalkowski came out of the game. A few days later, in Vero Beach, he tried to warm up but it was no good. The pain was still there.

“That was it for his great speed,” Greenbaum says. “If Steve was pitching today, he wouldn't have pitched in excess of 65 innings, from winter ball through spring training, with an injured elbow. They would have shut him down. It would have been different.”

When the Orioles broke camp, headed north for the start of the regular season, Dalkowski didn't go with them. Instead, he started the season in Rochester and couldn't win a game. From there he was demoted back to Elmira, but by then not even Weaver could help him. In what should have been his breakthrough season, Dalkowski won two games, throwing just 41 innings. His legendary fastball was gone.

“Damn, I can't believe that day in Miami,” Dalkowski later told
Inside Sports
magazine. “Why then, after all those years? I never had a sore arm. I think I know why. The night before I pitched against the Yankees I went out drinking. I met this broad and took her back to my room. Maybe that's where I lost it.

“She had a half-pint of vodka in her purse. The next morning I got up, and I was hung over. I don't know. I threw that first pitch to Richardson and the ball just took off and hit the screen.

“I think a higher power took it away from me when I had it all together. I'm not mad. It was my own fault.”

Sandy Koufax

—
THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN

 

 

 

 

 

I
f Steve Dalkowski had been injured a few decades later, undoubtedly science would have tried to rebuild his arm. When the surgery and rehab was over, perhaps he wouldn't have possessed the great velocity that seemed to be his birthright: a thunderbolt handed down from Zeus himself that became the gossip of minor-league ballparks nationwide. But he might have been able to take the mound again, thanks to another left-hander, Tommy John.

Halfway through the 1974 season, John was 13–3, only a few victories shy of his best season to that point in his career. On a Los Angeles Dodgers' pitching staff that included Andy Messersmith, Don Sutton, and Mike Marshall, then the top closer in the game, John didn't take a backseat to anybody. There was even talk of him enjoying a 30-win season. But all of that almost ended on one pitch to Montreal Expos first baseman Hal Breeden on July 17.

Even though Breeden would play only five years in the majors, a career .243 hitter, his was a face that John would always remember. “I threw him a sinker,” John says. “I'll never forget that pitch or Hal Breeden as long as I live.”

As soon as John let go of the ball, he says he felt a “crazy sensation” in his left elbow. For an instant, the joint felt like it was coming apart. Afterward John shook his arm, pretending it was nothing more
than a cramp. For the umpteenth time in his career, he told himself that pitchers sometimes have to pitch hurt.