Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics) (4 page)

This game is also important to Woody Huyke, although not in the same way. Woody will never play in the major leagues no matter what. But if he can contribute in some small way to the development of a prospect like Bruce Kison, if he can guide him out of this sore arm by making sure he warms up properly, by calling the right pitches, by making Bruce twist his elbow a little less strenuously on a curveball, then maybe Woody Huyke will have a job in baseball after his playing days are over.

Elwood Bernard Huyke was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1937. He was raised in nearby Morovis, where his mother taught school for 41 years and his father worked for the government for 21 years. Although his father had played sandlot and college baseball, he had misgivings about his son going directly into professional baseball out of high school, so he convinced Woody to enroll at the College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts in Mayagüez. After two years Woody transfered to Inter American University in San Germán where he became a biology major in the hope of someday becoming a doctor.

In his junior year in 1958 Woody was selected to compete in the Central American Games in Venezuela. He batted .408 in that tournament and attracted the attention of a number of major league scouts. He was eventually signed by Pete Zorrilla of the New York Giants to a $225-a-month contract. In the spring of 1959 Woody left school for spring training in the States, but before he left he promised his father that he would return the following fall to finish college.

After spring training Woody played only one month in Artesia, N.M., before the Giants’ farm director, Fresco Thompson, told him he was being given his unconditional release.

“I begged him to find someplace for me to play,” says Woody, “because I had already decided that baseball would be my career. He said there wasn’t anyplace to send me. I pleaded with him every day for almost a week and finally, just to shut me up, he said okay, and sent me to Hastings, Nebr., of the Class D Rookie League.”

Woody, who played third base at the time, hit well from his first day in Hastings, and his manager, Leo Schroll, started him every game. “Leo was a funny guy,” says Woody. “He made all his players go to church on Sunday or else he’d fine them $25. But the minute he got on the baseball field he would swear left and right. At the time I didn’t believe athletes drank beer, much less swore, so I thought it was terrible. One day he started swearing at me because I had made an error at third—I was a real butcher then—and I didn’t think it was right so in front of all the guys I told him he shouldn’t swear like that. It wasn’t nice. He just looked at me as if he couldn’t believe it. I still get a Christmas card from Leo and his wife, so I guess he didn’t mind. She always signs it ‘Ma.’”

In Hastings Woody lived at a hotel that charged a dollar a day for a bed and had a knotted rope out the window labeled “fire escape.” Because the Hastings ball park had no facilities for the players to dress, Woody dressed in the hotel each day and walked two miles through town to the park. The first time he arrived at Elmira this year and discovered the same conditions he said, “I thought those days were behind me.”

Woody was Hastings’ best home-run hitter and eventually tied two other players for the league title with 12. During one stretch he hit five home runs in four days against the league-leading McCook Braves’ pitching staff. He then went to Kearney where he hit a home run his first time up off a stocky right-handed pitcher named Jim Bouton.

“It was a knuckleball,” says Woody. “Even then Jim was fooling with it. I never saw him again until 1966, and you know, even though he was a star he remembered me. I didn’t think he would. But still, I don’t think he should have written that book of his. Baseball is an institution. Ballplayers have to protect it. For the good of the game you’ve got to omit some things.”

Woody had the best hitting year of his minor league career in 1959. He batted .311 with 12 home runs and 50 RBI in only 62 games. He never again hit as many as 12 home runs despite the fact that he played in as many as 113 games a season.

“In 1959 I thought I could hit anyone,” he says today. “I don’t know what happened along the way, but 12 years later I don’t hit so well. What am I hitting now, .230? A few weeks ago I was hitting good and then I hurt my shoulder. When I got back in a groove again I busted my finger. Now I don’t feel good at the plate. But that’s the way my whole career has gone, always injuries that have stopped me.”

When Bruce Kison finishes his warm-ups, he and Huyke walk back to the dugout as the Elmira Royals take the field. Woody throws his arm around Bruce’s shoulder and talks softly into his ear. Bruce nods. In the dugout Bruce dries his face with a towel and Woody gets a Darvon pill from his trainer and a fresh supply of Bazooka bubble gum. The bubble gum is to keep his mouth moist during the game, and the Darvon pill is to kill any pain he feels from a chronically sore arm. He has taken a Darvon pill every playing day of his life since 1964.

It is about 8
p.m.
when Huyke trots out to catch Bruce Kison’s first warm-up pitch in the bottom of the first inning. There is a loud click and the Elmira lights go on around the park. It is twilight and considerably cooler now. There are about 400 fans in the stands. Bruce, who towers on the high pitcher’s mound, begins his warm-ups deliberately. Just as he throws his last pitch and Woody fires it down to second base, a woman behind the visitors’ dugout says, “Look at that pitcher! He looks so young—like a little boy.”

Bruce Kison was born in 1950 in Pasco, Wash. Pasco is one of the tri-cities of Pasco, Kennewick and Richland, which sit on the point where the Snake River empties into the Columbia. All three towns are rich farming communities, although there is also an Atomic Energy works that produces plutonium for nuclear reactors. Bruce’s father dabbled a bit in farming, as did many Pasco families, but for most of his working years he sold hardware supplies. Bruce’s relatives, however, were full-time farmers—wheat, alfalfa, corn, cattle—and each season Bruce worked on those farms as a boy.

“I hauled hay, cut cucumbers, picked tomatoes, everything,” he says, “until I thought my back would break in two. I used to sweat something terrible in the sun. And all the while I was picking up and down the rows, I used to daydream about some day becoming a major league baseball player, just to keep my mind off the pain in my back.”

When Bruce was ten years old he discovered that he could throw a baseball harder than most boys his age, so he switched permanently from the outfield to the pitcher’s mound. “By the time I was 12 I had pitched several nohitters in Little League—like a million other guys, I guess. In one game I struck out all 15 batters (a five-inning game) although there were a few hits sandwiched around those strikeouts. Ever since then the possibility that someday I might be able to pitch a ‘Perfect Game’ is always in the back of my mind when I take the mound. It’s a game in which I strike out every batter I face on three straight pitches. But I guess that’s every pitcher’s dream, isn’t it?”

Bruce had moderate success in such teen-age organizations as the Pony and Colt leagues, but it wasn’t until 1966, when he played under Al Daniels at Pasco High School, that he showed any signs of becoming a professional prospect.

“At that time I was about 6-4 and 150 pounds,” he says. “I was so awkward that I got cut from my high school basketball team, which had to be the first time any 6-4 kid got cut from basketball. I wasn’t only awkward physically, but also mentally, and it was Daniels who toughened me up in both categories. Daniels was a former minor-leaguer who tried to run his high school team with the same toughness and discipline he would a pro team. Most of the players and parents thought the boys weren’t ready for this. I personally thought it helped me a lot. For instance, once I had two strikes and no balls on a batter and Daniels told me to waste a pitch. I threw it down the middle and the batter hit a double. Daniels was furious and yanked me right out of the game. Sitting on the bench at the time, I didn’t know what to make of it. But now, looking back, I realize Daniels taught me what I could expect from pro ball.”

Bruce opened his senior year with successive no-hit games and finished with a third no-hitter. That summer of 1968 he was drafted (not very high) by the Pirates and was signed by scout Babe Barberis to what Bruce calls “a sizable bonus contract, although I’d rather not say exactly how much.”

Before he would sign his contract, Bruce made sure the Pirates included a stipulation that allowed him to finish his spring semester in college each year before joining a minor league club in early June. At first the Pirates balked at such a deal, but finally they acquiesced under the assumption that any time they wanted Kison to drop out of school for a semester they could easily convince him it would be to his best interests. Before he left for his first assignment in the summer of 1968, Bruce enrolled at Columbia Basin Junior College for the fall term, although he eventually switched to Manatee Junior College in Bradenton, Fla., in the spring of 1969. This was done so he could participate in spring training while still attending college, since the Pirates trained at Bradenton.

“I wanted to make sure I got a chance to go to college,” says Bruce. “You see so many guys who drop out for one reason or another. And what do they have left when their baseball days are done? Nothing! I’m determined that won’t happen to me.”

After signing, Bruce was immediately sent to Bradenton in the Rookie Gulf Coast League. “When I got there I couldn’t believe how many guys were in Pittsburgh uniforms. There must have been a hundred. There were a lot of Spanish guys, too, the first I’d ever seen. They were always off together yakking away so that no one could understand them. It seemed that everyone belonged to some clique or other, except me. I was too shy to bother with anyone except my pitching coach, Harvey Haddix. There were 25 pitchers in camp and they were supposed to have only 12 by the end of the season. It was like a pressure cooker. It was always boiling hot and everyone was running around trying to cut each other’s throat so as not to get released. You’d make friends with a guy one day and the next day he’d be gone. You’d begin to wonder when it would be your turn. After a few days down there I began to think I’d be cut. In a situation like that you grow up pretty quickly. You learn to evaluate yourself and your talent honestly, or else. In the end there were only 12 pitchers left. I was one of them.”

Bruce pitched in 10 games at Bradenton, 9 of them in relief. He won 2, lost 1, posted a 2.25 ERA and managed nine strikeouts in 24 innings. He described his modest success simply by saying, “I got some people out. On the day I left for Pasco, Harvey Haddix came over to me and said I was one of the boys he considered a prospect. I said thanks, but on the way home I wondered if he didn’t say that to a lot of guys. By the time I returned to Pasco I thought I was a real stud around town. I told everyone I was going to give baseball two, maybe three years, and then if I wasn’t in the bigs I’d quit. But now I’ve already been in two years and I’m going to find it hard to quit if I’m in Double A or Triple A next year. I guess I’ll stick it out a little longer, maybe five years. But I definitely won’t stay in as long as Woody has. I can’t understand how a guy like him, with his intelligence and almost a college degree, can hang on like he does. If I’m not going anywhere in three more years I’ll quit and go back home. I’ll finish college and maybe become a teacher and a coach. This baseball is a nice game and all that, but not in the minor leagues. If I was in Woody’s shoes I would have quit a long time ago and become a doctor. But I guess that isn’t for me to say—everyone has to live his own life.”

In early June 1969, after attending Manatee Junior College, Bruce was assigned to Geneva, N.Y., of the New York–Penn League. The Pirates had tried to get Bruce to drop out of college for a semester so he could report to Geneva at the beginning of the season in May. He refused. Bruce was 5–2 at Geneva, with a 3.16 ERA and 77 strikeouts in 94 innings. As he put on a little weight, 10 pounds, he began throwing much harder, so that by the spring of 1970 he was assigned to the Pirates’ Class A team at Salem, Va., in the tough Carolina League. He was 3–1 with an 0.82 ERA after five games, and was promptly called up to Waterbury in June. When Bruce arrived in Waterbury he watched a few Eastern League games and then decided that it wasn’t such a tough league after all. “Any good high school pitcher can win in this league,” he said, “as long as he throws the ball over the plate.” He proved he was as good as his word by pitching a two-hit shutout in his first start. He followed with another shutout against league-leading Reading (also a two-hitter), then lost a pair of close games, 3–0 and 3–2. He was 4–4, with a 2.25 ERA and 43 strikeouts in 60 innings, by the time he took the mound against Elmira.

“I wasn’t the same pitcher at Waterbury I was at Geneva in 1969,” he says. “At that time I was still worried about being released. One day my roommate, Steve McFarland, was let go, and it really shook me up. I thought he was a pretty fair ballplayer. But by the time I got to Waterbury things like that no longer bothered me. I knew I was beyond that stage. I’m established now, and all I have to worry about is my career and how soon I get to the majors. Harding Peterson, our farm director, told me a few days ago that I was one of the organization’s top prospects. But you can’t rely on that stuff. The front office never gives you too much information because they’re afraid you might get the idea you’re too good.”

A few days before the Waterbury Pirates left for Elmira, Harding Peterson, a tanned, ruggedly handsome man who looks like a representative from a Billy Graham Crusade, arrived in Waterbury to look over his organization’s talent. The night he arrived, Red Davis held a clubhouse meeting. He told his players that Mr. Peterson did not like to see his players come to the ball park in dungarees or Bermuda shorts. After the meeting Woody Huyke shook his head and said to Bruce Kison, “You gotta dress up for the man, you know.” Kison looked at him and replied, “That’s a lot of bush league crap.”