Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics) (8 page)

With the bases still loaded and the count 1 and 2 on the batter, Woody Huyke flashes two fingers to Bruce Kison. Bruce flicks his glove and Woody immediately counters with a single finger. Bruce nods. Woody moves to the outside corner of the plate, but again Bruce flicks his glove. Woody straightens up slightly and moves back to the inside corner where he again places his glove underneath the batter’s chin. Bruce throws and again the batter, hunched slightly forward expecting a curveball, hits the dirt. This time he does not get up so quickly, but looks back at Huyke and then out at Kison as if confused about something, as if some unwritten rule has just been broken and he wasn’t informed.

Now with two strikes and two balls on the batter Bruce goes into his motion. The ball again is headed for the batter’s body, waist-high, and the batter jerks slightly away from the plate as the ball breaks sharply in the opposite direction over the outside corner. It is a called third strike. The batter stands there flat-footed as Woody rolls the ball out to the pitcher’s mound, which has just been speedily vacated by Bruce Kison. As Woody jogs back to his chair he is shaking his head and saying, “That Bruce is tough. Man, he’s too tough for me!

“You know, I like that kid,” says Woody. “He’s got guts and confidence, like I used to have. When he’s on that mound he battles your ass all the way. See the way he walks, head up, like he’s ten feet tall! He’s not afraid of anyone. He only gets bad when a couple of guys get hits off him. He doesn’t think anyone should ever hit him. I tell him not to worry, that if a guy hits a home run off him he hits it off me, too, because I called the pitch. I told him he can’t expect to pitch a perfect game all the time. He says he knows it but then, when he gives up a few hits, he wants to throw at everybody. It’s dangerous for a pitcher like him because his fastball tails in to a right-handed hitter. If he throws at a guy’s head and the guy moves his head back six inches the ball will still hit him because it tails that much. He’s never seen a guy’s career ruined by a beanball, but I have. It’s a terrible thing. But he’s learning to control himself. He trusts me now, and usually goes along with what I call. Still, he’s not afraid to shake me off, which is good, because next year when I won’t be catching him he’ll have to think for himself. Now when Bruce throws at a batter it isn’t to get even, it’s because he has an idea. That’s what makes him different from most young pitchers. He always has an idea when he’s on the mound. He’s a lot smarter than most guys in this game. That’s why he’s always talking about going to college. Maybe that’s good and maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. Maybe he’s got too many alternatives and he should concentrate only on baseball or else he won’t make it.”

“I like Woody,” says Bruce Kison. “And I respect him. He knows a lot of baseball and he’s helped me a lot. But I still can’t understand what he’s doing here. When I first came to Waterbury I was shocked at the number of older guys, like Woody, who were just hanging on. They started calling me “Sweetie” and “Punk,” and at first I didn’t like it, but now I don’t mind. I get along good with them, although I never let myself get too close because you never know when you’ll have to push one of them for a job. I don’t have much to say to their wives either. I feel kind of uncomfortable around them. I mean, what am I supposed to say? I can’t understand why they’re here. What kind of life is this for a woman, traveling around the country like a gypsy? And the fans! I don’t bother with them either. Some of the older guys like Woody go out of their way to be nice to them because they want some friends here if they ever have to come back. I don’t plan on ever coming back to Waterbury. . . . Oh, I guess that’s not quite true. I might come back for a year if I had to. But I could never make a career of playing in towns like this. Me, a 33-year-old relief pitcher in the minors! I’d have to say no to that. But I have trouble focusing a few months ahead in my life, much less two or three years.”

In the top of the seventh inning with the score still tied 0–0, Waterbury loads the bases with two outs. Woody Huyke steps into the batter’s box. He chokes up on his thick-handle bat and hunches over the plate. His feet are close together and he holds the bat close to his chest. His practice swings are nothing more than little push strokes emanating from his chest outward. His stance and swing have changed considerably since Hastings, Nebr., 12 years ago. He used to stand spread-legged, with a long, thin-handle bat cocked far back by his shoulder so that it would generate the maximum power when he swung.

Woody works the pitcher to a 3 and 2 count, then fouls off three straight pitches with little half-chops. He is thinking that if only he can wear this pitcher down with enough foul balls he can work him for a walk, which will force in the go-ahead run. But finally the pitcher throws a fifth straight strike and Woody is forced to swing. He hits a high foul ball behind the plate. Without even waiting to see if it will be caught, Woody walks back to the dugout, drops his bat and begins buckling on his shin guards. The ball is gloved by the Elmira catcher to retire the side.

“Man, one of these days I’m gonna kill a cloud,” says Woody to the fans. “I don’t understand it. I swing just like Ted Williams said. I read his book from cover to cover and he said to swing up, so I swing up. I don’t understand it.” Woody is smiling now as he finishes clipping on his chest protector and grabs his mask. “Maybe it’s because I’m not Ted Williams. Huh? You think that could be it?” and he walks back to the plate to catch Kison’s warm-ups.

In the bottom of the seventh the first Elmira batter lays down a perfect bunt. Woody pounces on the ball and throws out the runner. Then he picks up the bat and hands it to the Elmira bat boy. The second batter grounds out to third base. The third batter works Bruce to a 2 and 2 count before he strikes out on a tailing fastball. Woody rolls the ball out to the mound and comes jogging back to his chair, smiling. “Extra innings, man, we’re gonna get them now. I just feel it. You know I can feel it when we’re gonna get them. No kidding. I love it. What else could I do that I love so much, you know what I mean? This is a beautiful ball game.”

In the top of the eighth of this regularly scheduled seven-inning game, Waterbury scores a run on a walk, a stolen base, an error and a sacrifice fly. In the bottom of the eighth, Bruce Kison retires the side on seven pitches to preserve his fifth victory of the year against four losses. As he walks off the mound he meets Woody Huyke, smiling, at the dugout and they shake hands. Woody says, “Bruce, I had a dream I would catch two shutouts today. No kidding! I dreamt it last night.”

The End of Innocence

Bruce Kison, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 6-foot, 5-inch, baby-faced pitcher, is hunched over the steering wheel of his green Volkswagen, his knees jacked up around his ears, his eyes glassy and wide, his pink face pressed close to the windshield and splashed with the greenish lights and shadows shooting past his car. He is traveling through the bowels of the Squirrel Hill Tunnel at over 80 miles per hour in pursuit of a police escort that he has lost but whose sirens are echoing off the walls around him. “I never speeded before,” says Kison as he slides Santana’s recording of
Black Magic Woman
into his stereo tape deck. The music is barely audible over the strung-out whine of his car’s engine and the sirens. Kison begins to sing—“Black magic woman/change your evil ways”—just as his car is about to smash into the rear end of a blue Galaxie. Without missing a note or stabbing the breaks, Kison jerks the steering wheel to the left. There is a shriek, the smell of burning rubber, and the Volkswagen—tottering on two right wheels—shoots into the left lane, simultaneously cutting off a white Cadillac whose driver nails his palm to his horn. Without looking back, Kison ticks his left hand out the window and extends the middle finger from a clenched fist. With his right hand he raises the volume of his stereo until it is full blast. The steering wheel is cradled between his knees. The Cadillac’s driver keeps his palm on his horn. Kison, his left hand still showing displeasure, the steering wheel still cradled between his knees, nails
his
palm to
his
horn. He sings louder. “
Black magic woman/change your evil ways
.” The sirens grow closer, piercing the night. The walls of the tunnel quake, rumble, seem about to fissure, and it all so terrifies drivers up ahead that they swerve into the right lane and stop in order to avoid this possessed little Volkswagen hurtling through the Squirrel Hill Tunnel like some misshapen, misguided missile whose pilot, gone mad, is now, at precisely 8:03
p.m.
, Sunday, Oct. 17, 1971, thirty-three minutes late for his wedding.

A few hours earlier, Kison, naked except for a towel around his waist, had stood by his stall in the visiting team’s locker room of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium and contemplated the chaos about him. The room was packed almost to a standstill with writers, photographers, baseball executives, well-wishers and players all celebrating the Pirates just-completed World Series victory over the Baltimore Orioles. A battery of television cameras stood planted in the center of the room, their cables slung low overhead like black clotheslines. People ducked under them as they moved about the room congratulating one another. The cameras were aimed at a brilliantly lighted platform where Roberto Clemente, Steve Blass and Danny Murtaugh were being interviewed by a sleek, nervous-looking Sandy Koufax. Behind them on the same platform, players jostled for position to be next interviewed. Photographers wandered the room with cameras held high overhead. They poised frequently at the edge of a group of writers and flashed their cameras down at the sweaty, grinning faces being interviewed. The reporters moved from player to player in a pack, pressing their subjects against their lockers and, with furious scribbles, recording for posterity such comments as: “You can’t take anything away from the Orioles. They’re a helluva team”; “Yes, I certainly do think the best team won”; “This is the greatest buncha guys I’ve ever been with. The greatest, know what I mean?”

Those players not being interviewed or photographed, particularly those whose contributions to this celebration were negligible, celebrated the most exuberantly. They shrieked and slapped at open palms. They hugged and kissed and tousled one anothers’ hair, and, inevitably, when the champagne arrived, they sprayed it at anyone and everyone within range. Standing by his stall, Kison said to a friend, “I told you to wear old clothes in case we won. You’d better put your coat in my locker. They don’t care who they spray with that stuff.” He shook his head and added, “Boy, it sure seems an awful waste. I’d rather drink it.” He took a bottle from a nearby case and offered it first to his friend. While his friend sipped, Kison said, “This has got to be the most exciting day of my life. Imagine! Winning a World Series and getting married on the same day!”

While his teammates celebrated, Kison dressed quickly and slipped out of the room. He followed a police escort through a cheering crowd, across Oriole Avenue, behind a brick high school and into an open field where a police helicopter was waiting to take him and his best man, Bob Moose, to Friendship Airport. At the airport they would be met by Jack Piatt, a friend of Pirate broadcaster Bob Prince and the president of Jetcraft Incorporated, an executive air travel company. Piatt had arranged the loan of his needle-nose Lear Jet to fly himself, Kison, Moose, and his wife Alberta, who was eight months pregnant, directly to Pittsburgh in time for Kison’s scheduled 7:30
p.m.
wedding to Ann Marie Orlando, a 21-year-old student nurse, at the Churchill Country Club. It was already 6:30
p.m.
by the time Bob Moose reached the helicopter. He was weaving unsteadily. His gray baseball uniform was drenched with champagne and his black Pirates’ cap with the gold peak was resting on his head at a jaunty Howdy Doody angle.

With much clattering of blades, the helicopter rose slowly and noisily. It hovered about 20 feet off the ground and then began backing away until a man below flapped his arms. The nose of the helicopter dipped sharply, its tail rising and drifting slightly to the right, and then it began moving forward, its whirling blades blowing the tall field grasses flat against the ground until they looked white in the late afternoon sun. Kison stretched out his legs as far as he could in the cramped compartment, and while Bob Moose sang, he said, “You know, I’ve never been in one of these things before.” The helicopter continued to rise above telephone wires, trees, houses until it was high over a scooped-out Memorial Stadium. It circled the stadium once, twice, each time rising higher, before finally spinning free of the stadium’s orbit and moving in a straight line over a cemetery below. Along the way, its plexiglass windows vibrating, the helicopter frequently faded to the left and right on gusts of wind, but still continued to move forward at a faint right angle and with an agonizing but relentless slowness that was carrying it toward a reddish-orange sunset only partly shrouded by a dark cloud.

The flight to Pittsburgh lasted 22 minutes. During that flight Jack Piatt, an immaculately dressed man with graying hair, opened a small bar and poured his party drinks. He offered a toast to Kison’s wedding. Then, grinning, he leaned forward and asked Kison what was happening back in the Pirates’ locker room.

“Nothing much,” said Kison.

For the remainder of the flight Piatt extolled the virtues of his Lear Jet. “It only costs $800,000,” he said, as he poured another drink for himself, Kison, Mrs. Moose and her husband, who was falling asleep against her shoulder. “It can climb at 6000 feet per minute and it cruises at 525 miles per hour. There’s no sense of flight in one of these babies.” Piatt sat back and added, “You ought to get one, Bruce. It’s the only way to go.” Outside, the plane hung silent and motionless over a field of cloud. The sky above the clouds was a pale, diminishing blue that was bleached almost white as it approached the sun off to the left of the plane. The sun was huge and round and white. It seemed devoid of heat but gave off only shafts of light that hit the tips of the left wing and exploded into a thousand silver slivers that so blinded the plane’s occupants they were forced to draw the curtains and darken the cabin.

When the plane landed at 7:14
p.m.
, Piatt made a certain production of checking his watch. He shook his head emphatically and said, “God Bless Jetcraft!” Kison, unsure of the proper response, thanked Piatt for the use of his jet. Then he, Mrs. Moose and her husband, who was becoming more awake, hired a battered yellow taxicab for the drive to Three Rivers Stadium, where they would pick up their cars and be escorted to the Churchill Country Club. On the way to the stadium they passed an endless stream of cars and pedestrians moving toward the airport to greet the Pirates, who would arrive later. Most of those walking on the side of newly excavated Highway 60 were teen-agers. They carried hand-painted signs and Bucs’ pennants. They held hands. They sang. They waved to passersby and generally looked like a peaceful remnant of Woodstock Nation, somehow lost in time and place; they certainly gave no hint of the violence they would later unleash on their city.

As the cab approached the city limits it moved more slowly in the thickening traffic. From the back seat, Bob Moose ordered the driver to “charge right through any red lights! We got an important man here.” The driver, sucking a cut finger, looked in his rear-view mirror at the man in the soaked baseball uniform and shook his head. Nor did the driver seem willing to “floor it” as Moose repeatedly suggested. Finally they came to a stretch of open road and the driver pressed his foot more heavily on the accelerator.

“Heh, man! Cut that out!” said Kison from beside him. “We got a woman with child back here! So what if I’m a few minutes late? They can’t start without me, can they?” Then he slid down in his seat, folded his hands behind his head and said to no one in particular, “It still hasn’t hit me yet. I mean, everything that’s happening to me.”

In the summer of 1970 Bruce Kison, a native of Pasco, Wash., was struggling along with a sore arm and a 4–4 record with the Waterbury Pirates of the Double A Eastern League when he was inadvertently picked by
Sports Illustrated
as the subject for an article on minor league life. From the moment of his first interview to the end of the season he did not lose another game for Waterbury. The following summer, after being sidelined most of the spring with an infected tendon in his pitching hand, Kison won 10 of 11 starts with the Charleston Charlies of the Triple A International League before he was called to Pittsburgh after the All-Star break. The Bucs, at the time, had been making a shambles of their division. Suddenly their pitching talent, never too thick when healthy, found itself stretched to transparency by an injury to the arm (and not the mouth, as most Buc fans had prayed) of their ace, Dock Ellis. Kison was pressed into service immediately. He won his first two starts, the second a two-hit shutout. He was 4–2 after a month of starts before he ran into a streak of bad luck, during which time he pitched creditably enough but was only registered losses or no decisions. He finished the regular season with a 6–5 record and a 3.41 ERA, amid talk that as a 6-5, 170 pound side-armer he needed more stamina and another pitch before he would become a winner in the majors.

Because of his slight tailspin at the end of the season, Kison did not expect to see much, if any, service during the National League playoffs between the Bucs and the Giants. He watched from the safety of the bullpen as the Bucs won two of the first three games despite less-than-inspired pitching from their aces, Ellis and Steve Blass. When Blass failed to last for a second time in the fourth game, Kison was called in with the score tied at 5 apiece in the third inning. It was obvious to most that manager Danny Murtaugh wanted to save such veteran relievers as Dave Giusti for the crucial later innings, and that he intended Kison as only a stopgap performer who, hopefully, could manage three outs before he would be pinch-hit for in the next inning. But Kison so handily dispatched the heavy-hitting Giants that Murtaugh, sensing a new character was being written into his scenario, did not pinch-hit for him in the fourth inning. Nor did Murtaugh seem particularly upset when his skinny rookie extinguished a Buc threat with a routine ground ball. Murtaugh’s flexibility paid off, as Kison meticulously fleshed out his role with one scoreless inning after another.

When Kison finally exited in the seventh in favor of Giusti (a squat, somber-looking man in marked contrast to Kison’s stretched-out, pink-faced innocence), he had created for himself a role of almost heroic proportions. Throwing mostly rising and screwballing fastballs and a small but quick slider, he had limited the Giants to two hits and no runs in 4⅔ innings and had received credit for the Bucs’ pennant-clinching victory. What impressed most people about his performance was that it seemed unexpectedly cool and professional coming from a rookie who, uncharacteristically, seemed not the least impressed either by the circumstances in which he now found himself (besieged by writers) or the batters he had just faced. (In fact, he had so intimidated 40-year-old Willie Mays, who ran for shelter whenever one of Kison’s fastballs came swooping in on his aged body, that one sportswriter prayed openly for his beloved Mays to retire and spare him the sight of any future humiliations at the hands of such an upstart.) It was assumed by fans and writers alike that Kison’s apparent coolness both on the mound and in post-game interviews was really nothing but the naïve facade of an awestricken youth. This assumption sprang, in part, from Kison’s manner (he is quiet to the point of taciturnity); but mostly from his deceptive appearance. At 21, Kison looks 15. He has a gawky adolescent’s body, all arms and legs and little torso. His face is long and fine-boned and dusted with a peachlike fuzz. It is dominated by eyes so wide and blue as to appear unblinking, stunned, possessors of a three-dimensional quality distinctive to those animals, like gazelles, who seem always one twitch from flight. Yet Kison isn’t timid or stunned. Nor does he possess an unfathoming innocence akin to Billy Budd’s. He is simply a direct if slightly unfinished young man, whose parts are well formed if too few. His directness owes only a small debt to innocence, however, and more to an instinct so blunt as to be at times brutal. He does or says nothing that is superfluous, and, in fact, seems as straight and simple and obvious as the age in which he lives is circuitous and convoluted and unfathomable.

When the World Series began in Baltimore few people expected Kison to play a prominent part in its resolution. His performance in the playoffs was viewed as the aberration of a novice that owed more to luck and propitious circumstances (which in all likelihood would not be repeated this year) than to any talent he might possess. He remained, in the eyes of most people, a baby-faced rookie on whom one could not rely in such a pressurized situation as the Great American Classic. (Oddly enough, Kison was only one year younger than another first-year pitcher, Vida Blue, of whom people expected a great deal more than he delivered in a similar situation.) Heroics in World Series play were the private reserve of such steely-eyed veterans as Dock Ellis, and were certainly not the domain for a youth, who, it seemed, divested himself of his beard each morning with the aid of only a hot towel. Even Kison admitted he did not expect to see much action in the Series. He was even apologetic for the good fortune that had brought him into an event which some of his teammates, like Bob Veale, had had to work eight years to reach. And Veale, a nine-year veteran who had fallen out of favor with the Bucs’ management, would probably see as little service as Kison.