High Heat (29 page)

In fact, the number of kids who specialize has grown to such proportions that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement a decade ago warning that serious health risks come with concentrating too much, too early on a single sport. “More injuries, more signs of psychological stress and more cases of early burnout” are the results, says Steven Anderson, the chair of the academy's committee on sports specialization in children. “The returns for this early investment of time and energy do not seem to justify the costs.”

According to the AAP, signs of overload include chronic injuries and illnesses, weight loss, sleep disturbances, and falling grades in school. When any of these problems present themselves, Anderson says, “the sport, the intensity, the source of motivation and the fun level need to be closely examined.”

At ASMI, Fleisig fields calls from concerned parents, and he often agrees with the AAP and other youth experts: Specializing too early in one sport doesn't make much sense when it comes to biomechanics.

“In generations past, when kids got tired they usually played a little more and then went home,” he says. “But now you have the guys
in the uniforms, the supervising adults, saying, ‘Oh, no, we have three more innings to pitch.' In generations past, little boys' bodies were calling the shots. Now we're listening to the adults, not the kids.”

Fleisig says that any rigorous sports activity produces “microtears” in the muscles, tendons, and ligaments. That's normal, and when we allow the body to rest it will repair itself.

“We're alive—we're not cars or bridges,” the research director adds. “The body has a great feedback system, the ability to repair itself. It works great, if we listen and pay attention.

“I tell people major-league baseball players don't play year-round. They play in a cycle—preseason, regular season, perhaps postseason, and then the off-season. But somewhere along the line, in this past generation, more kids have started to specialize in one sport and play it year-round. As a result, they are really stacking the deck for injury.”

Compare the experiences of today's pint-sized pitchers with the way Walter Johnson or Bob Feller was raised. In many modern-day households, the exceptional athlete is elevated to what author Mary Collins calls “performer status.” Weekends and after school tend to revolve around the star child athlete. These kids often don't have daily chores to do, as Johnson and Feller did.

“By Little League, the better kids are on select teams,” Nolan Ryan says. “What do we do with the kid who shows the ability and coordination and timing to pitch at an early age? We overthrow them. As a result, it used to be college kids, but now it is high school kids who've had Tommy John surgery.”

Although Feller had his own “field of dreams”—a backyard ball field he built with his father—neither he nor baseball was placed above the family's daily routine. While Sundays during the summer were spent playing ball at the Oakview ballpark, the rest of the week Feller and his sister, Marguerite, helped out around the farm, and Saturdays were spent going to town and selling “the grain, corn, hogs and livestock,” he says.

Sports psychologist Rick Wolff says in
Coaching Kids for Dummies
that “excelling in sports has become as much a part of the
American dream for parents as getting their kids into the best schools and living in the best neighborhoods.”

Certainly playing baseball for a living, reaching the major leagues, was a dream of Feller's from an early age. But he shakes his head when discussing the lengths kids and their parents will go in pursuit of an athletic scholarship or a professional contract a half century later.

“At some basic level, you have to keep it fun,” he says. “I mean that's why you play the game in the first place. That's what I did.”

Feller emphasizes that while baseball was always his first love, reluctantly agreeing that some would consider his father overindulgent for helping him build his own personal field, he adds that things were somehow different back then. Feller also played basketball at Van Meter High School. In fact, he was a starter. His sister was on the girls' basketball team and the state champion in table tennis.

“We had success, but it was a part of our regular life,” Feller says. “No matter how well I pitched or played, there were still chores to be done. I'd say it was the same with Walter Johnson, probably most players coming up until recent years. And you know, looking back on it, thank God for that farm work. I may have hated it at the time, but it made me strong. I could pitch all day after doing those chores.”

Fleisig nods as I tell him about Feller's upbringing. “He did different sports; his body had a chance to recover,” the ASMI research director says. “His was a more reasoned approach than what we see happening today. Somewhere the next Bob Feller or Nolan Ryan is growing up, but I doubt if he's playing baseball 12 months out of the year.”

 

 

A
nybody who followed baseball during the 1990s realizes that they were lied to. Nearly all of us covering the game during that period can probably look back on at least one moment or interview where we allowed the wool to be pulled over our eyes when it came to the steroids issue. Mine came in 1998, when I covered what was then billed as “The Great Home Run Chase” for
Baseball Weekly
. I
bought into much of the hoopla surrounding Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Once upon a time, the thread of epic home-run hitters—Babe Ruth, Hank Greenberg, Roger Maris, Hank Aaron—held together different eras of the game. Now the stain of performance-enhancing drugs extends from McGwire and Sosa to Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Manny Ramirez. For a long time, steroids and supplements were thought to benefit only hitters. It took a topflight fireballer—Roger Clemens—to prove otherwise.

In 1998, Clemens was enjoying a season for the ages with the Toronto Blue Jays. When I caught up with him late that summer he was well on his way to not only winning a record fifth Cy Young Award, but to capturing pitching's Triple Crown (victories, ERA, and strikeouts) for the second consecutive year as well. Despite his being almost 36 years old, scouts marveled that he was throwing harder than ever. His fastball, which was topping out at 92 miles per hour his last season in Boston, was close to the century mark on the radar gun.

It was an amazing turnaround from the start of the season. Eleven starts in, Clemens had gone 5–6, with an ERA of 3.50, and was still trying to win three games in a row, let alone repeat as Cy Young champion. But from the end of May through the rest of the season, Clemens went 15–0 in 22 starts with a 2.29 ERA. After failing to reach double figures in strikeouts in his first 11 starts, he reached that plateau 11 times afterward, averaging 11.02 strikeouts per every nine innings.

As the summer got hotter, so did the Rocket. During a stretch in late August he almost single-handedly led the Blue Jays back into wild-card contention, pitching three consecutive shutouts against Seattle, Kansas City, and Minnesota.

“Sometimes I stop and shake my head,” Clemens said after that third shutout. “I feel I've been in a zone. All the work I did in April, May, and June is paying off.”

What was actually paying off for Clemens was the regimen he was employing. According to the Mitchell Report and later detailed by Jeff Pearlman in
The Rocket That Fell to Earth,
Clemens had begun to shoot up with Winstrol, a synthetic anabolic steroid. That's the
same stuff sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for in the 1988 Summer Olympics. Down the road, baseball sluggers Rafael Palmeiro and Barry Bonds would be accused of using it. By the end of the season, Blue Jays strength and conditioning coach Brian McNamee was injecting Clemens with Winstrol every third day.

Of course, Clemens didn't mention that particular part of his fitness plan. Instead, he preferred to talk about his role as an elder statesman, a would-be Zen master to the promising Blue Jays hurlers, who included Pat Hentgen, Roy Halladay, and Chris Carpenter. Carpenter grew up in Raymond, New Hampshire, 40 minutes from Fenway Park. “Roger was my hero back then,” he told me at the time. “Now I get to watch him every day. How he prepares.”

Ah, the downside of hero worship. The epic season that enthralled us all was soon suspected to be tainted. As were many of the seasons that followed. More than a decade later, with Clemens still in denial about any involvement with steroids or human growth hormones, investigations indicated how improbable those Cy Young seasons were in Toronto. “The arc of Clemens' career is upside down,” wrote Eric Bradlow, Shane Jensen, Justin Wolfers, and Adi Wyner in the
New York Times
in 2008. “His performance declines as he enters his late 20s and improves into his mid-30s and 40s.”

Anybody who's seen
Damn Yankees
knows that ballplayers will make a pact with any devil to improve performance. It's nothing new. A century before Clemens, Pud Galvin drank a concoction of glycerin and ground-up animal testicles to give his fastball more staying power. “If there still be doubting Thomases who concede no virtue of the elixir,” the
Washington Post
reported in 1889, “they are respectfully referred to Galvin's record in yesterday's Boston-Pittsburgh game. It is the best proof yet furnished of the value of the discovery.”

Despite Galvin's and the
Post
's claims, there is no magic potion or elixir that will transform a pedestrian pitcher into a fireballer. But that hasn't stopped players from going to great, sometimes superstitious, sometimes dangerous and illegal, lengths to take their game to
the next level or, in the case of veterans, delay Father Time. Clemens managed to throw hard into his 40s, but that still wasn't even close to one of the greatest, most prolific fireballers of all time.

The incomparable Satchel Paige pitched well into his 50s, even though his exact age was always up for debate. A skinny kid growing up (“If I turned sideways, you couldn't see me”), Paige was still a beanpole when he began to star in the Negro Leagues. He would always be embarrassed by his skinny legs and often wore two pairs of socks to flesh out his lower silhouette. But Paige knew the value of being physically fit. He regularly warmed up by fielding bunts, shagging flies, taking infield at third base. He tried not to throw hard “until every muscle, every single one, was all loosened up.” On game days, which were pretty much most days when Paige was barnstorming, he took a hot bath after he woke and often a hotter one after the game.

Many of Paige's fitness tips would play as well today as they did three-quarters of a century ago. In his autobiography, Paige outlined his keys “for staying young.” Such tips included:

Phil Pote once asked Bob Feller, excluding himself, who was the fastest pitcher ever. Feller replied, “Satchel Paige.”

Feller and Paige barnstormed together during the 1940s and many came away believing that Paige's fastball was a touch quicker.

“[My] fastball looks like a change of pace alongside that little pistol bullet Satchel shoots up to the plate,” Dizzy Dean once wrote in
his newspaper column. “And I really know something about it because for four, five years I tour around at the end of the season with all-star teams and I see plenty of Old Satch.

“It's too bad those colored boys don't play in the big leagues because they sure got some great ballplayers.”

If the search for the fastest pitcher wasn't complicated enough, consider that several of the top hurlers ever to play the game were forbidden from appearing in the major leagues due to the color of their skin. They played in the old Negro Leagues, in what passed for baseball's parallel universe, underpublicized and too often unnoticed by much of the country, until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Paige was eventually afforded the opportunity to pitch at the game's highest level, making the big leagues in 1948 at the ripe old age of 42.

“Age is a question of mind over matter,” Paige once said. “If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.”

To this day, Paige remains the most famous pitcher to come out of the Negro Leagues (he struck out 21 major leaguers in one exhibition game) and he made the Hall of Fame in 1971 as the first Negro League inductee. Lost in his shadow, though, stand such other quality fireballers as Smokey Joe Williams, Leon Day, and Wilber “Bullet” Joe Rogan.

In an effort to recapture the past, Buck O'Neil once wrote up several scouting reports on the old Negro Leaguers. They now reside at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. O'Neil was a player and manager in the Negro Leagues, and in his later years he scouted for the Chicago Cubs and Kansas City Royals and was the star of Ken Burns's television series
Baseball
. The scouting reports O'Neil assembled are in his handwriting, on Royals letterhead, and they have become a tribute to what might have been.

For right-hander Leon Day, O'Neil notes that he would have been a “front-line starter” in the major leagues. “Everything quick,” O'Neil writes. “Strikeout pitcher. Very durable. Worked with three days rest. Played second base or left field between starts. Top athlete. Very desirable.”

O'Neil becomes more laudatory in his look back at Bullet Rogan. A pitcher with little or no windup, who came right at hitters, Rogan was maybe 5-foot-5, 155 pounds, proving that little guys could bring the heat well before Tim Lincecum and Billy Wagner.