Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [81]
Every time this slugger faced me, I fed him that low pitch he favored. Or, at least, that’s what the batter thought he was getting. In reality, I was just groundhogging the man, throwing him hard sinkers that rolled toward the plate fat and sassy. It probably looked to him as if some artisan had tattooed a HIT ME sign in neon across the horsehide. Afterward he swore to everyone that the pitch darted right through his wheelhouse. But as he swung, that sucker just kept burrowing out of his zone. He could do nothing else but top the ball to my second baseman for an easy out.
During his next at bat, he looked for that same ball down and in. He didn’t realize I had already adjusted to his bat speed. The pitch did arrive in on him, but belt high at his hands, a little quicker than he expected. He could not possibly get the sweet spot of his bat on that ball. Crack! Nothing but a slow two-hopper back to the mound. Another quick out.
High-ball lovers saw choked-off sinkers down the middle, pitches they couldn’t elevate. With the better hitters, I took a touch off the fastball to catch them swinging with their weight leaning forward. Pop-up city. If a batter wanted the ball in, he got a cutter buzzing the bat handle out of his hands.
Funny thing about that pitch. When I played in the majors, I didn’t have enough velocity to throw it with any confidence. But in 1995, Montreal Expos team doctor Larry Coughlin performed an operation that shortened the tendons in my left shoulder and increased my arm strength. So now I could break a bat in two when the ball collided with the right spot.
If someone wanted the ball outside, my pitch acted as the proverbial carrot, just barely within reach. Unless a hitter owned retractable arms, he would cue that ball off the end of the bat down to the third baseman. Should he pull it, our shortstop got a chance to show off his throwing arm.
I came at both lineups with different speeds, never full bore, putting each pitch in a place where they could hit it but seldom smack it square. And while I worked the strike zone, I also played with the hitters’ egos, exploited their anxieties. No one had to explain the deal to me. I arrived on this field as the “pro from Dover,” the former big-leaguer. I knew what each of these hitters wanted from this game more than any win: the chance to go home and tell everyone how they had cracked a long ball off that loony left-hander who had once played with the Red Sox. So I threw slop-drop curves they thought they could yakatow into the seats. They flailed at those pitches with back-breaking swings that produced nothing more than big can of corns to the centerfielder.
Everyone in Doubleday Field thought I was pitching. Nope. I was shelling out three-card monte on the diamond, working this flim-flam so well that at one point I recorded eight consecutive outs on two pitches. Or at least it seemed that way, the at bats flew by so fast. I threw about 320 pitches in the sixty-four innings I worked over the weekend. Sounds like a lot, huh? But when you do the math, you can see I paced myself, rarely exceeding seven pitches in any one inning. More than once it took only three tosses to retire the side.
I played God in every game, the ultimate puppet master manipulating the strings, and the feeling of power, damn near omnipotence, intoxicated me. I was never good enough to experience that on the major-league level. My one rule was not to bully any opponent, not to take advantage of their amateurish skills by burying them with breaking balls. No pleasure in that. If a team fell too far behind, I let up and allowed it to score a few runs to get back into the game. Yet I always left the winning run up for grabs. A team had to earn it. The idea was to make sure everyone had fun. Nevertheless, if I thought you acted a