High Heat (33 page)

Even though so much in baseball is secret, House prides himself on being “a teacher first and everything else second.” After the workout, he overheard Johnson complaining about his wildness. In response, he invited Johnson to meet with him and Ryan the next day in the Rangers' bullpen.

House had spotted a flaw in Johnson's delivery. As the left-hander completed his follow-through, he wasn't driving toward the plate. At least not driving as hard as, say, Nolan Ryan. In fact, the winter before, through his work with the Bio-Kinetics Co., House had analyzed several pitchers' windups, including Johnson's. He remembered that Johnson's delivery was in so many different pieces, the different stages refusing to work together, that somebody such as Jim Abbott, who is seven inches shorter than Johnson, was almost a foot and half closer to home plate when he released the ball.

“It was a coaching moment,” House says. “Maybe Randy was more receptive because Nolan was there. I'm sure he had been given similar information before. But on that day we had a kid who was ready to listen.”

“Everybody said Nolan Ryan had a big influence,” Johnson says of his change in form, “but Tom House was the one who worked on my mechanics.”

Where Ryan helped was with the mental part of the game. He and Johnson then went over how to set up hitters. And more importantly,
Ryan told the hard-throwing but erratic southpaw not to worry about the walks. Control would come in time. He should go with his strength—the heat.

Johnson likes to compare himself with Ryan. The two rarely played on contenders and as a result, Johnson believes, hardly ever received fair shakes in Cy Young races. “A lot of people look at him as having all these individual accomplishments and being only a .500 pitcher,” says Johnson, who changed his number to Ryan's for a day when the Express retired. “But he was only on a .500 team or below. So, you can only go out there and do so much.”

 

 

O
f course, sometimes science can only do so much, as well. Despite the latest in testing and the best of intentions, a fireballer can be misunderstood. As a result, a career can be forever altered.

Almost from the beginning, James Rodney Richard was a formidable presence on the mound. In Vienna, Louisiana, where he grew up, Richard went an entire season of high school ball without allowing an earned run. By the time he reached the Houston Astros in 1971, he stood 6-foot-8, and his slider was faster than many pitchers' fastballs. He struck out 15 batters in his first National League start, tying Karl Spooner's record set in 1954. Richard went on to strike out 313 hitters in 1979. Many a hitter caught wind of that résumé, snuck a peek at Richard out on the mound, and considered himself pretty much out before he even stepped into the batter's box.

“When you've got a guy out there who throws the ball 98 miles per hour like James Rodney, the batters don't do too much joking around. It's all business,” Astros catcher Alan Ashby once told Cox News Service. “When a batter steps into the box against J.R., the comments don't vary much. Usually, they just look there and say, ‘Well, no chance this time.' And afterward, you just see the guys turn around slowly with this look of despair on their face, kind of an expression of helplessness. Against J.R., you see it all the time.”

Yet along the way, Richard was also called a loner, a problem player, and a malingerer. In the end he would become yet another
fireballer with a tragic closing act as his career, which began with so much promise, so much velocity, was derailed well before the intimidating right-hander had any chance at reaching the Hall of Fame.

Richard grew up in a farm family, one of six kids. The Richards ate the vegetables they grew, and after chores the boys played ball in the fields, with tennis balls and broom handles for bats. At Lincoln High School, Richard had several games for the ages, including pitching a no-hitter in which he also hit four home runs and drove in 10 runs. Signed by Houston, he struggled in the Astros' farm system for many of the same reasons Randy Johnson labored initially.

“Because of his size, J.R. had to work harder than most people,” Hub Kittle, the team's old pitching coach, told the
Houston Chronicle
. “Because he was so tall, we had to change his delivery in the very beginning. At first, he tried to come straight over the top—and he was just so tall, he didn't have any leverage.”

Despite his striking out 15 in his big-league debut, the Astros sent Richard down to the minors to gain more experience. So began an uneasy relationship between the player and ballclub, which would soon border upon the dysfunctional. By 1975, Richard had made the team for good and appeared ready to settle in as the team's ace. Richard, like Koufax nearly two decades earlier, had seemingly solved his control problem almost overnight. And he threw hard. So hard that his slider was in the low- to mid-90s, with a fastball that “topped 100, with gusts up to 104,” columnist Mickey Herskowitz wrote in the
Houston Chronicle
in 2004.

“So what does that make J.R. in his prime?” Herskowitz added. “We can answer that one easily. It made him Randy Johnson with a chest....

“J.R. was an intimidator who might have been bigger than the Hall of Fame. That is, whether or not he had the kind of years that land a player in Valhalla, he was going to be legend, the kind of pitcher the old-timers talk about as one of a class.”

Unfortunately, so much of that disappeared in a great hurry, leaving incriminations and finger-pointing in its wake. As the 1980 season
began, Richard was acknowledged by many to be the top pitcher on a deep staff that included Ryan. Even though he had pitched no fewer than 267 innings in any of the previous four seasons, Richard felt out of sorts that season.

His ailments ranged from an upset stomach to blurred vision to losing feeling in his fingers to a tired arm. A visit to Dr. Frank Jobe, who had performed the first ligament replacement, or Tommy John surgery, was arranged with no medical cause or injury found. There certainly didn't seem to be any preexisting condition as that season progressed. Only a few days before the doctor's visit, Richard had pitched two scoreless innings in the 1980 All-Star Game, in which he struck out Reggie Jackson. The Astros' team physician publicly advised Richard to get more sleep. Several of his teammates grumbled that Richard was a slacker. Richard didn't do himself any favors when he complained about Ryan's new contract. Richard was making $850,000 at the time, while the Astros had just made Ryan baseball's first $1-million man.

“Am I bitter? Yeah, you might say that,” Richard said at the time. “I think it's life in particular, baseball some—but life in general. I've been through a whole lot of things in my life, a little bit of everything. Prejudice. You name it, I've been looking at it.”

He was about to be looking at a whole lot more. Sixteen days after the Astros' doctor told him to get more sleep and cut down on his social life, Richard suffered a devastating stroke. On July 30, 1980, he was playing catch with teammate Wilbur Howard before a game at the Astrodome when he collapsed. Rushed to the hospital, he fought for his life while doctors removed a blood clot from his neck. Due to the stroke, Richard suffered paralysis to the left side of his body, including his arm. Through rehabilitation Richard would regain use of his arm and leg, moving well enough to attempt a return to the Astros, but he would never be the pitcher he once was.

Instead of getting a bronze plaque in Cooperstown, Richard became a cautionary tale for ballplayers of his era. Another reminder that being blessed with a rocket arm could be as much a curse as it was good fortune.

“They didn't believe J. R. Richard because they didn't want to,” Jim Palmer told the
Los Angeles Times
days after Richard left the hospital. “If you're J.R., you're 10–4 with a 1.89 ERA and you say you're hurt. They're in a pennant race and he's their top pitcher. . . . Obviously some people thought he was unhappy that Nolan Ryan was getting more money. People want to make all kinds of insinuations.”

Richard received a reported $1.2 million in a medical malpractice suit. But that wasn't enough to stabilize his life and to fill the void left by not playing baseball. His first marriage broke up, lousy investments were made, and in 1993 Richard was found by a
Houston Post
reporter living under an overpass, not too far from the Astrodome, where he once starred.

Richard eventually found a home for himself in south Houston, conducting baseball clinics and becoming a minister at the Now Testament Church. In 2004, before the All-Star Game in Houston, Richard signed 6,000 autographs in two hours. Unlike many of today's players, he reveled in the attention—delighted that people still remembered him.

“I don't have any velocity,” he said after
Sports Illustrated
asked how hard he could still throw, “but I can still throw strikes. You never forget how to pitch—it's like riding a bicycle.”

 

 

W
ell, maybe not. Sometimes throwing a baseball never quite becomes second nature, no matter how much science and psychology can be brought to the equation.

Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve Blass remains the classic example of somebody who came down with such a dramatic case of nerves, or the “yips,” that he couldn't throw a strike to save his life. As a result, Blass went from pitching two complete games in the 1971 World Series to disappearing from the playing ranks by the age of 32. To this day, Blass says, he has no idea what really happened to his form and delivery. “But I learned that life goes on,” he says. “It is what you make of it. I just feel fortunate to enjoy the success I had before it was taken away from me.”

Other players have been bitten by the yips bug. Because of it, for a time second baseman Steve Sax couldn't throw accurately to first. Dale Murphy had to shift his position from catcher because too many of his return throws to the pitcher ended up in center field. Mackey Sasser came down with the same mental block. But among the fireball community, the one everyone remembers is Mark Wohlers.

As the closer for the Atlanta Braves, he once clocked at 103 miles per hour. If in doubt, he went with the heat, in the mold of Goose Gossage, Jonathan Papelbon, and Billy Wagner.

The first sign of trouble appeared when Wohlers began to throw wildly to first base on routine fielding plays. In the Braves' dugout, pitching coach Leo Mazzone told manager Bobby Cox that they better hope such wildness didn't carry over to Wohlers's pitches to home plate. Soon enough, though, Wohlers started to walk batters. Then some of his deliveries were flying past the catcher, sailing all the way to the screen. Overnight he had morphed into the second coming of Steve Dalkowski.

Ironically, Wohlers's wild streak only affected his fastball. His slider and split-finger fastball remained accurate enough. But soon hitters realized that the right-hander couldn't throw strikes with his lightning-quick fastball anymore and began to sit on the slower stuff. After saving 97 games in three seasons, Wohlers was sent down to the minors in 1998. Despite a comeback bid with the team's Triple-A affiliate in Richmond, sessions with therapists, and the efforts of a personal trainer, he was never the force he once was. When asked what went wrong, Wohlers told the
New York Times
, “I wish I knew.”

 

 

E
ven though science failed to forecast the emergence of Wagner and Lincecum and couldn't put Richard back on the mound, ballclubs nevertheless still attempt to quantify the gift and mystique of the fastball.

By Memorial Day 2009, David Price was back up with the Tampa Bay Rays—this time he hoped for good—and made his season debut against the Cleveland Indians. He came out firing. Scouts said his
first dozen or so pitches were all four-seam fastballs, in the 94- to 98-mile-per-hour range. But when the Indians' Jamey Carroll drew a leadoff walk, followed by Grady Sizemore's flare hit down the left field line, Price was facing two men on base with none out.

He then began to mix in his hard slider, clocked at 86 to 88 miles per hour. This was the pitch Price lost for a time down in Durham because he was working so much on his changeup. Using the slider to set up the fastball, he struck out Victor Martinez, Jhonny Peralta, and then Shin-Soo Choo. For a brief moment, the sky appeared to be the limit for the 23-year-old phenom.

In the second inning, though, things went downhill in a hurry. Staked to a 5–0 lead, Price walked the leadoff batter on four pitches. From then on, he fell behind too many hitters. By the time he was lifted with one out in the fourth inning, he had already thrown 90 pitches.

“I didn't have a feel for anything,” Price told the Associated Press afterward. “I've got to do a better job than that. I was averaging 10 pitches an out. That's not good enough.”

In his next start, the left-hander struck out 11 and recorded his first major-league victory of the season against the Minnesota Twins. He followed that with two no-decisions against the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Angels. On June 16, in his fifth start, Price managed to make it into the seventh inning but was on the losing end of a 5–3 loss to the Colorado Rockies.

Sports Illustrated
's Tom Verducci wrote that Price “may have the stuff of an ace, but the Rays' left-hander is a long way from being an ace.” At the same age (two months shy of turning 24), Price's progress paled when compared to that of somebody like CC Sabathia of the New York Yankees. Price had a single victory and had never thrown 110 pitches or more in a game. In comparison, Sabathia already had 45 victories and 29 110-pitch games by that point in his career.

Rays manager Joe Maddon maintained that the organization was waiting for “a moment of epiphany” when it came to Price. After that switch goes on, “he'll be [the next] Sandy Koufax.”