High Heat (31 page)

Mike Maddux, who was brought in as the Rangers' pitching coach under the Ryan regime, often talks about “pitching with conviction,” which he defines as “acting wholeheartedly on what you believe in, what you know to be true.”

“The question is always, can you put it together?” Ryan says. “Over the years, I've seen a lot of kids who had unbelievably great arms but
never made much of it. They either got injured or were unable to master the principles of throwing. When you get to this level, the major leagues, there's not a lot of separation in the physical ability of players. It's the mental approach to the game that separates people.

“There are times that you need to will the ball over the plate. Those are situations where you have to throw strikes and it has to be in a certain location. You have to believe in yourself because the game is on the line. That's what separates people at the highest levels.”

Such traits and characteristics remain almost impossible to gauge and decipher, even by the best of scouts. Pure speed, on the other hand, is something tangible. And yet, judging speed has always been more complicated than taking simple measurements.

In 1997, Matt Anderson was that year's Stephen Strasburg. The pitching phenom regularly hit 100 miles per hour on the radar gun, and scouts charted his every start at Rice University. When word got back to Ryan, who had retired a few years earlier, he decided to check out the hard thrower, himself.

In person, it was clear Anderson did in fact have plenty of giddyup on his fastball. And at first Ryan was excited by what he saw on the mound. But then he noticed that just about every batter was able to foul off Anderson's famed fastball. Eager for a better look, Ryan left the seats behind home plate, where the radar guns were assembled, and walked over to the left field line. There he studied Anderson's delivery and determined that the phenom was opening up toward the plate too quickly. No matter how hard he threw, the batters were able to catch a good glimpse of his high heat. When a scout asked Ryan what he thought, looking for confirmation of Anderson's promise, the Hall of Famer stunned him by mentioning a flaw in the prospect's delivery.

“I'm not qualified to say if it's correctable or not,” Ryan said. “But it's a big concern of mine.”

The Detroit Tigers selected Anderson with the first pick in the 1997 amateur draft. After posting a 5–1 record the following season—a rookie year in which he struck out 44 in 44 innings—he blew out his shoulder in 2002 and would never be the same.

Most of the time science serves us well. Time and time again we're reassured by its ability to explain so much, to tie it all together with a fancy, empirical bow. But when things don't add up, when the deluge does arrive, we're reminded how much remains unfathomable. How the world can still surprise.

As the rain continues to fall outside Ryan's office, our conversation turns to epic fireballers, the fastest of the fast. For Ryan, the best ones had something more in their favor than correct elbow angle or significant leg stride. Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Bob Feller are among his favorites because they went beyond sheer ability. They “were willing to make the commitment,” he says.

Perhaps with that in mind, Ryan adds another name to his short list.

“Billy Wagner,” he says. “I think he threw as hard as anybody I've ever seen.”

 

 

I
n 2003, Wagner's fastball was clocked at 101 miles per hour at Turner Field in Atlanta. That made him one-tenth of a second faster than Ryan's 100.9 miles per hour, which was recorded in 1974. Of course, there's no real barometer for throwing the high heat. Radar guns weren't around when Johnson, Paige, or Feller played. And to this day, Major League Baseball doesn't recognize radar speeds as an official statistic. There's also little consensus among the game's statistical services—Elias Sports Bureau, STATS Inc, and the
Sporting News
. But what's just as interesting when it comes to pitchers like Wagner is another set of numbers—height and weight.

According to
The Baseball Encyclopedia,
the self-proclaimed “complete and definitive record of Major League Baseball,” Wagner is 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds. As they say in television, he looks a lot bigger on the screen. In another sport, Wagner's size would be a huge strike against any prospect and sometimes still is in the baseball world, where most scouts favor huge, strapping guys over punks any day. Yet if you can throw a baseball, hard, sooner or later, you'll probably get your chance.

“You see little guys who are capable of throwing cheese,” says right-hander Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants. “That stigma of being too small is always there, though, I suppose. Everybody still seems to love the big guy. But that doesn't mean us little guys can't bring it.”

After his junior year at the University of Washington, Lincecum stood 5-foot-9 and weighed 160 pounds. In large part that's why the first nine teams passed on him in the amateur draft. They did so even though Lincecum was a two-time Pac-10 pitcher of the year and had struck out more batters in conference play than Tom Seaver, Mark Prior, and Randy Johnson.

After joining the Giants' organization, Lincecum soon made it clear to the front office that the minor leagues were a waste of time. He pitched only 13 times down on the farm, allowing seven earned runs and striking out 104 batters. His fastball was consistently clocked in the high-90s. In May 2007, Lincecum got the call to join the big-league club and didn't miss a beat. He threw 30 quality starts in his first 40 games for the Giants. Since 1956, only six other pitchers have done that at the big-league level. Still, respect can be so elusive. On the road, team secretaries have to keep an eye out because more than one security guard has tried to run him out of the stadium. Lincecum looks more like a skateboard punk than the ace of his team's pitching staff.

“That's why somebody like Billy Wagner will always be somebody I look up to,” Lincecum says. “In the past few years, I've been catching up on the history of guys who could throw hard. I've seen footage of Feller. He had a higher leg kick than me. He was longer with his follow-through. My delivery is more like Sandy Koufax's. It's about the right weight transfer at the right time. I've got more of Luis Tiant, that hip roll, in me. But you're only talking slight differences there. Anybody who can throw hard can look at somebody else who throws hard and see the familiarities. It's kind of like we're talking the same language. That's why I can't figure out why so many scouts and baseball people mess up. If you can bring it, why worry about what a guy looks like, how he does it?”

If we were out on the playground, picking teams, Wagner would appear to have little in common with Ryan, Feller, Walter Johnson, or even such contemporary fireballers as Joel Zumaya, Ubaldo Jimenez, or David Price. But there's something about not only the way his fastball once crackled but also what he went through just to reach the pitching mound.

For his part, Wagner cannot fully explain why or how his fastball registered above 100 miles per hour 18 times during the 2005 season alone. He talks about it having something to do with heart with a large dollop of anger, and then agrees that a big part might have to do with how he grew up. That a rocky childhood can perhaps result in the gift of an epic fastball.

As he walks in from the bullpen, with the game on the line, you wonder: How can this little guy get anybody out? Billy Wagner is often listed at 5-foot-11, but he is easily an inch or two shorter. This has to be some kind of joke, right?

But then Wagner begins his warm-up throws. His windup is compact and quick, and the ball flies out of his hand, making a beeline for the plate. Throughout the warm-up, Wagner shows little emotion. Off the field, he invariably draws a crowd in the clubhouse, a team spokesman even though he pitches only a few innings at best in big games. Yet, on the mound, Wagner becomes a tight-lipped assassin—ready to take on the world all by himself.

With Wagner in mind, imagine a lineup, like they have at a police station, complete with height markers on the wall, of the hardest throwers in baseball history. At first glance, they would seem to have little in common. If we're gazing at the crew from the far side of the one-way glass, somebody like Walter Johnson, the famed “Big Train,” would tower over Wagner or the bespectacled Steve Dalkowski. Unlike in other sports, no prototypical model exists for being able to fire a baseball better than 100 miles per hour. All shapes and sizes are eligible, but only a few will ever be blessed. And many of those expected to live up to the assumed success and heightened demand that come hand in hand with the gift of firing a baseball with such velocity will wonder if it was indeed a curse in disguise. For it is one
thing to be able to throw hard. It can be quite another to throw the high heat consistently for strikes.

Wagner was the first legitimate fireballer in his prime that I ever saw in person. It was 1997 and the diminutive left-hander had just become the closer for the Houston Astros. Many considered him a short-term solution to the Astros' bullpen woes. After all, how long could this baby-faced kid last in one of the most demanding jobs in sports? It just so happens, a good long time. After all, he was armed with one of the most electric fastballs in the game. After nine years and 225 saves in Houston, Wagner went on to pitch for the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets.

Still, Wagner already knew that a career is often defined by a few key moments. “Either you do it or you don't,” he says. “The rest doesn't add up to anything unless you let it do that to you. I learned a long time ago not to let that happen to me.”

Many will remember Wagner for one night, at the old Astrodome, where he came in to pitch the ninth inning in front of the hometown crowd. Staked to a 2–1 lead, Wagner had to face the heart of the Florida Marlins' batting order. The previous season, Wagner's rookie year, the Marlins had lit him up for two home runs, including a game winner. If that wasn't enough to get the heart pumping, there was his previous outing, four days before. Against the Colorado Rockies, Wagner had allowed his first earned run of the season: a Ruthian blast by Vinny Castilla that fell well back in the left field bleachers.

Due up in the Marlins' half of the ninth inning that night was Bobby Bonilla, Moises Alou, and Jeff Conine. The later had homered the first time he ever faced Wagner. All were certainly capable of tying the game with one swing of the bat. That evening, as the crowd rose to its feet, Wagner paused briefly behind the mound, his face mostly hidden behind his black glove.

In this pause before the first pitch, Wagner often allows the old nightmares to again sweep over him, drawing out the realization that he deserved something better growing up. He remembers that period of his life when he was so mad at the world that throwing a baseball, over and over again, was his only escape from heartbreak. He
had no real home. He barely had adults interested in his life and what he could grow up to be. Gradually, he learned to channel that anger and frustration toward a higher purpose. So effectively, in fact, that now, in these quiet moments before he steps on the mound to pitch, we have to get ready to hurl science out the window. Because sometimes the presence of demons can elevate an average fastball into one of most dynamic pitches in baseball. And over the course of a major-league career such a gift can transform a kid once forgotten by family and friends into one of the best relievers in baseball.

“It's funny,” says Larry Dierker, his former manager. “With Billy, the bigger the situation, the bigger the crowd, the better he seems to like it. Most guys run from that kind of pressure. They're afraid of failure and the times when everything seems to be on the line. But for Billy, it almost seems like some kind of relief for him. It's like he's found something he's been waiting a long time for.”

Bonilla flicked his angry bat, ready to go. The Astrodome faithful roared, and Billy the Kid stepped onto the pitching slab, ready to draw. Closing out a ball game—even facing the four-five-six hitters—can be paradise compared to the hell that passed for Billy Wagner's childhood.

 

 

W
agner's parents divorced when he was five years old. For the next nine years, he was as wanted as an unpaid bill. Looking back on it, he says his parents' marriage was “a mismatch . . . doomed from the start.” There was never enough money. They argued, with the incidents escalating in the years after his father returned from a tour of Vietnam.

“Those were tough times,” says Yvonne Hall, Wagner's mother. “That doesn't change the fact that we had responsibilities, that we had children. But when a marriage starts to go bad, kids kind of get pushed to the side.”

After the split, Wagner and his younger sister, Chastity, bounced from relative to relative. Growing up, Wagner attended 15 different schools through junior high. Only an average student, he regularly
took his aggressions out on the field. The rougher the game, the more he liked it.

He broke his right arm playing football. As soon as it had healed, he promptly shattered it again, playing football. “I kind of got used to breaking things,” he says.

Wagner began life as a right-hander. Even today he still writes and eats with his right hand. But after he broke the arm and during a prolonged time in various casts, he began to throw left-handed. Balls, rocks, anything—it didn't matter. Wagner discovered that one of the few things in his life he could control was the accuracy and velocity of any available projectile. It felt good to throw hard.

Born in Tannersville, Virginia, Wagner was shuffled around southwestern Virginia, moving from his father's, to his mother's, and on to both sets of grandparents, before doing it all over again. His childhood reads like a map of battlefields from the Civil War—Lynchburg, Concord, Marion, Appomattox. “Back then the world was on my shoulders and I was mad at anybody who talked to me,” he says. “I wasn't so mad about being moved around. I just felt like my sister and I weren't getting a fair shake. That we weren't getting treated like we should be treated as kids.”