High Heat (34 page)

Although Maddon wanted Price to go deep into ball games, the young left-hander rarely got past the sixth inning during this initial run through the league. The culprit? Perhaps pitch counts.

Tampa Bay, of course, has a lot riding on Price's long-term success. As a result, like many pitching prospects, he's allowed to throw only 100 pitches or so a game.

“It's a different era,” Phil Pote says. “Quite honestly there's a lot more money involved, and nobody's too interested in talking about the ramifications of it all.”

I don't understand what Pote means by “the ramifications of it all.”

“OK, think this through with me now, partner,” Pote replies. “Say somebody like David Price is pitching today and there's a 90-pitch count on him and, god forbid, he ends up getting hurt and he throws 89 pitches; everybody is probably OK with it. At least how it happened. He didn't exceed the predetermined pitch counts.”

“All right.”

“But if somebody like David Price throws 91 pitches, somebody's going to ask the pitching coach, the manager, what's going on.” Pote continues, “That's just the way it works. You have agents, general managers, ownership, trainers involved. Everybody is in this thing. Is it right or is it wrong? The answer is, it's just different.”

As a result, for many teams pitch counts have become standard operating procedure. Except down in Texas. The same week Price was lifted after 4 ⅓ innings and 105 pitches against the Angels, Nolan Ryan sent a directive throughout the Rangers' organization: From this day forward, pitch counts were banned.

“He wants us to toughen up,” says Texas ace Kevin Millwood, “go deeper in ball games. He knows there's no reason we should be using five or more pitchers to pick up the victory”

If anything, Ryan was trying to lead by example, in a retroactive fashion. As the
Philadelphia Daily News
pointed out, Ryan threw 5,684 pitches in 333 ⅔ innings in 1974, his seventh full season in the majors. He averaged 135 pitches a game and went on to play another 19 seasons in the big leagues. But not even that number represents the limits the human body can come close to enduring. In a
throwback to the heyday of Pud Galvin and Amos Rusie, the Red Sox Luis Tiant threw an incredible 163 pitches in winning Game Four of the 1975 World Series.

ASMI's Glenn Fleisig says pitch counts are necessary at the youth levels, but pitchers at the minor- and major-league levels “shouldn't have strict pitch counts. They have coaches who should know what to look for, as opposed to Little League.

“You have to remember pitch counts weren't around 15 years ago. Now the pendulum may be swinging back. There's an awareness that these guidelines don't need to be set in stone. Most people coming to me now ask, ‘Don't you think [professional pitchers] have been babied too much?'”

In reaction to the ban, Bill James recently told
Sports Illustrated
that “what Ryan is doing is the clearest and boldest example of challenging the conventional wisdom from within the system that I've seen in years, and I'm applauding it.”

Sitting behind his mahogany desk, the late-morning sky finally clearing beyond his office window, Ryan doesn't look like a revolutionary or rabble-rouser.

“I'm just trying to bring what I've learned back to the game,” he says. “What I was taught worked pretty well in my day. Can it work again? I believe so.”

 

 

A
fter nearly making the Baltimore Orioles' major-league roster in 1963, only to suffer a serious elbow injury just before heading north with the parent club, Steve Dalkowski was never the same. Even though he went on to post only his second winning record, playing for Elmira, Stockton, and Columbus, the velocity was gone.

At Stockton, Dalkowski went 8–4, and that's where Phil Pote, who was just beginning his career as a big-league scout, caught up with him. But after all the buzz, all the talk, Pote came away disappointed.

“What I saw didn't match the legend I had heard so much about,” Pote says. “He was still throwing hard, or at least trying to. But I
couldn't help feeling that I had been cheated somehow. I never saw his best stuff.”

The following season, 1965, Dalkowski struggled in spring training and the Orioles shipped him to Tri-Cities (Pasco, Washington), one of the lowest rungs in their system. Dalkowski's arm still hurt and his fastball came in on a straight line, no longer rising to the heavens as it neared home plate. He wasn't able to blow the ball by hitters anymore. Even though Tri-Cities manager Cal Ripken Sr. would become one of the standard-bearers for Dalkowski's legend, he could only take so much of the left-hander's antics. After Dalkowski hit a bar that the club had deemed off-limits, his career with the Orioles' organization was over.

“I was the one who released him [from Tri-Cities],” Ripken later told Pat Jordan. “Yet there's not a soul in the world who didn't like him, including me. He just didn't give himself a chance.

“Why, in spring of 1965, he was sent from the Triple-A camp in Daytona [Florida] to the minor-league camp in Thomasville, Georgia, and it took him seven days to make a few-hour trip. Harry Dalton got pissed off, and was going to release him, but I told him I'd take Steve with me to Tri-Cities. I told him he had to be in bed early the night before he pitched. That lasted two weeks and then he drifted the other way.”

After being released by the Orioles, Dalkowski signed with the California Angels and reported to their minor-league team in San Jose. He pitched only six games there, though, going 2–3. The Angels sent him to Mazatlán of the Mexican League in 1965. After being assigned back to the Mexican League for the 1966 winter season, he retired from baseball.

At loose ends, Dalkowski began to work the fields of the San Joaquin Valley in California. Places like Lodi, Fresno, and Bakersfield. He became one of the few gringos, and the only Polish one, among the migrant workers. And during this time he developed a new addiction to cheap wine—the kind of hooch that goes for pocket change and can be spiked with additives and ether. White port was Dalkowski's favorite. In order to keep up the pace in the
fields he often placed a bottle at the end of the next row that needed picking.

“The guys there all picked fruit and drank wine, so I tried it and got hooked on it,” he later told the
Sporting News
. “The wine they drink isn't like dinner wine. It's got a lot of chemicals. It can kill you.”

Dalkowski chopped cotton, dug potatoes, and picked oranges, apricots, and lemons. He married a woman from Stockton. After they split up two years later, he met his second wife, Virginia Greenwood, while picking oranges in Bakersfield. But none of it had the chance to stick, not as long as Dalkowski kept drinking himself to death. He was arrested more times for disorderly conduct than anybody could count. He was sentenced to time on a road crew several times and was ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. For years, the Baseball Assistance Team, which helps former players who have fallen on hard times, tried to reach out to Dalkowski. This was how he lived for nearly a quarter century—until he finally touched bottom.

In 1991, the authorities recommended that Dalkowski go into alcoholic rehab. But during processing he ran away and ended up living on the streets of Los Angeles. “At that point we thought we had no hope of ever finding him again,” says his sister, Pat Cain, who still lived in the family's hometown of New Britain, Connecticut. “He had fallen in with the derelicts and they stick together. We thought the next we'd hear of him was when he turned up dead somewhere.”

On Christmas Eve 1992, Dalkowski walked into a laundromat in Los Angeles and began talking to a family there. They soon realized that he didn't have much money and was living on the streets. The family convinced Dalkowski to come home with them. In a few days, Pat Cain received word—her big brother was still alive. Soon he reunited with his second wife, Virginia Greenwood, and they moved to Oklahoma City, trying for a fresh start. But within months Virginia suffered a stroke and died in early 1994.

“That's when I knew I had to get Stevie back home,” Cain says. “It was his only chance. He ended up in the hospital in Oklahoma City due to his drinking. I started to work with them to get him back here,
back to New Britain. That finally happened in March 1994. That's when he came home for good.”

Dalkowski moved into the Walnut Hill Care Center, near where he used to play his high school ball.

“When we brought him home from Oklahoma City, the doctors told us not to get our hopes up,” Cain says. “They said he probably didn't have much time left and if you looked at him, tried to talk to him, you'd understand why. Steve wasn't in very good shape.”

Slowly, though, Dalkowski showed signs of turning the corner. One evening he started to blurt out the answers to a sports trivia game the family was playing. Bill Huber, his old coach, took him to Sunday services at the local Methodist church until Dalkowski refused to go one week. His mind had cleared enough for him to remember he had grown up Catholic.

Less than a decade after returning home, Dalkowski found himself at a place in life he thought he would never reach—the pitching mound in Baltimore. Granted, much had changed since Dalkowski was a phenom in the Orioles' system. Home for the big-league club was no longer cozy Memorial Stadium but the retro redbrick of Camden Yards. On September 7, 2003, before an Orioles game against the Seattle Mariners, Dalkowski threw out the ceremonial first pitch. His friends Boog Powell and Pat Gillick were in attendance.

“I bounced it,” Dalkowski says, still embarrassed by the miscue. Yet nobody else in attendance that day cared.

“He was back on the pitching mound,” Gillick recalls. “Back where he belonged.”

 

 

F
ive and a half years later, in the sweet afterglow of the first warm day of spring, Dalkowski arrives at the St. George Church's social center in New Britain. He's come for the town's Sports Hall of Fame Annual Induction Dinner. Dressed in a mock turtleneck, gray pants, and dark blazer, he enters the room, taking slow steps, with his sister by his side. Without much fanfare, they find a table in the back row of the banquet room, one of the 27 under golden chandeliers that have
been trimmed out in linen tablecloths and enough food, plates, and utensils to feed a small army. Although Dalkowski and his sister don't move too far from the table they've selected, soon word spreads that the pitching legend has made an appearance, and old friends begin to gather around. Most of them have known Dalkowski for ages. At Pat's urging, several of them sit down, and the conversation—a rehash of the good old days, a remembrance that makes things larger than life—soon bubbles forth.

In recent years, New Britain has struggled. In 2007, the median household income was $36,681—barely half the state average. Yet the institutions of community, church, and family remain strong and vibrant in the town of 71,000.

“Stevie couldn't have done this, just sat around and talked, a few years ago,” Pat Cain says, smiling. “Every year he gets a little bit better when it comes to memory. This town, his friends—I really believe coming back to New Britain has saved him.”

At the table, Dalkowski has been joined by Len Pare, John Arduini, and Bob Barrows. All of them grew up on New Britain's west side and played Little League ball.

“I was on the Red Sox,” Dalkowski says.

“Me, too,” Barrows says. “I caught you and everybody else, too.”

“I know,” nods Dalkowski, who now sports a closely cropped gray beard. Gone are the thick glasses and the youthful countenance that was all smiles in posed minor-league photographs. “I remember. How could I forget the guys who caught me?”

“Same goes for us,” says Pare, who once had his finger broken catching a Dalkowski heater.

“I know, I know,” Dalkowski says in a soft voice.

Pat Cain asks Arduini what Little League team he was on.

“The Dodgers,” he says, bringing the conversation to a brief halt.

“The Dodgers?” Dalkowski repeats as if it's the most ridiculous notion he's ever heard.

“I thought we were all on the same team in '50,” Barrows says. “The Red Sox.”

“Most of the time we were,” Arduini says, “except for that first year. Then I was on the Dodgers.”

For a moment, nobody says a word. They contemplate that even in New Britain, a place that prides itself on its sports, to the point that several speakers who step to the podium this evening will call it the best sports city in all of New England, things weren't always quite the way everyone remembers them to be.

“Well, that's OK,” Dalkowski begins.

“That's right,” Barrows adds. “You were with us soon enough.”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you,” Arduini says.

Throughout the evening, people drop by Dalkowski's table to say a few words. When it's my turn, I ask him what advice he would give to young pitchers.

“Throw strikes,” he replies. “And run. That's good for the legs, you know.”

Then Dalkowski pauses, ready to deliver the punch line. “And don't drink,” he adds, smiling.

Yes, alcohol and great expectations nearly killed arguably the hardest thrower ever. Yet on this spring evening, among this band of brothers, such troubled times seem a long time ago. A few weeks after the 2009 banquet, Dalkowski turned 70 years old. Many in the baseball world believed that he had died years ago. But here he is, talking baseball with the friends he's known since childhood.

“New Britain never forgets its own,” says coach Bill Huber, dropping by the table to shake hands with his old star. “I'm happy he's back. I'm happy this town has again reached out to him.”