Battle Station
Randy Johnson, ace of the
Seattle Mariners, is the most thrilling, harrowing pitcher in baseball. He's a
left-hander who puts the sinister back in "sinistral." He's 6 feet 10 inches
tall, gaunt, with long scraggly hair, a rough complexion, humorless
eyes--altogether a bit too much of that hitchhiker look. As if throwing the
ball 98 miles per hour isn't wicked enough, he does it with a wild, whipping,
sidearm motion, which makes left-handed batters want to dive out of the box and
head back to the dugout even as the ball is crossing the plate. For many
hitters, the best strategy for facing Johnson is simple: Stay on the bench.
My
brother and I watched Johnson one afternoon recently at Camden Yards, home of
the Baltimore Orioles. We could barely take our eyes off him.
We didn't notice the catcher.
The catcher (I learned days
later, when I decided to research the subject) was Dan Wilson. He is actually
one of the better catchers in the game. But needless to say, he is not a star.
He's no Johnny Bench. He's not even an Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez. It is hard to be
a star when you are a catcher, especially when there's the real thing, the
glamour boy, the icon, just 60 feet 6 inches away on the mound.
The
catcher has the least glamorous, most difficult, and most self-sacrificing job
in the game. He has to do everything--call pitches, throw out base-stealers,
reposition infielders, chase down foul balls, calm pitchers, doctor the ball,
establish a rapport with the umpire so he calls a big strike zone, chase bunts,
run down toward first base to back up the throw from shortstop and, worst of
all, guard home plate even if it means getting bowled over by charging
opponents. Ray Fosse never really recovered from the separated shoulder he got
when Pete Rose decided to slam into him at home plate during the 1970 All-Star
game. Rose set the all-time record for base hits while playing various infield
positions, while Fosse became known only as the guy who got smashed.
Acatcher's life is Hobbesian. Bill Dickey,
catcher on the great Yankee teams during the '30s, once got leveled by a base
runner even though the guy could have slid into home far ahead of the ball.
Dickey marched over to the dugout and punched the offender in the face, earning
a month's suspension and a thousand-buck fine. Catching pioneer and Hall of
Famer Roger Bresnahan invented the shinguards and the helmet just after the
turn of the century, when he got tired of getting whonked constantly--at one
point some writers in New York City reported that Bresnahan had died after a
particularly vicious fastball off his noggin. (According to Thomas Owens'
Great Catchers , Bresnahan worked in the off-season as a private
detective--a catcher's mind is never at rest, it seems.)
A catcher
is something of a baseball martyr. Catchers are almost invariably slow of foot
simply from years of squatting, the leg muscles shortening with time.
Statistically catchers rarely put up huge career totals in home runs or RBIs
because no one can catch a season's worth of games (162). Catching 130 is the
stuff of an iron man. Eventually, catchers who can still hit retire to first
base, a position for the fat, the stiff, the lame, and the halt.
The catcher sees everything--he's in the center of the
action. Yet he is not really seen . The geometry of the game conspires to
hide him. He must wear a mask. He must wear pads and shinguards. He is obscured
by his posture--a squat--and the big mitt he must position in front of himself.
He's more of a concept than an actual person. The catcher is merely implicit--a
presumption of the game, like the scorekeeper or the grounds crew. The catcher
is right there in the thick of the action, but no more interesting than the
chalk lines that delineate the batter's box.
The catcher is a blue-collar
worker in a game of millionaires. He wears a steel mask over a helmet whose
bill points backward, a style that invariably makes even the most hardened,
mature catcher seem oddly juvenile, a man who failed to grow up. All that hard
work and he just looks silly.
A baseball
catcher has a nickname: The backstop. He might as well be an inert mass. Yet of
course it is he, not the pitcher, who is the field general. Because the pitcher
stands tall, in full view, he cannot send a signal to the catcher as to what
pitch will come next. It is the catcher, low to the ground, with that shadowy
zone around his groin, who must call the pitch. The catcher also gives signals
to the infielders, letting them know what to do in case of a double steal, or
what to do if a runner at first tries to steal when there's also a runner at
third. Because the catcher calls the game, he must know the hitting abilities
and weaknesses of every opposing batter. The catcher is essentially the
quarterback of baseball, only without the huge endorsement contracts.
Chris Hoiles, starting catcher for the Orioles,
told me one day in the locker room, "We're usually the dirtiest guys on the
field and the sweatiest guys on the field. We stink all the time."
He said his gear gets really
raunchy. It's no fun to strap that stuff on when the thermometer hits the upper
90s. And that squatting he does--it's as uncomfortable as it looks. Meanwhile
he says of the pitcher: "All the eyes are on him. All the recognition goes to
him." There's no whine in his voice. This is just reality. He knows that when a
pitcher throws a no-hitter the catcher is lucky to get in the photograph in the
next day's paper.
Hoiles is a big slab of a
man, now 33, a veteran but not a star. The rap on him is that he can't throw
out base runners. "The thing that impresses fans with catchers is arm
strength," says Orioles bench coach Andy Etchebarren.
Hoiles admits he never had a
strong arm. He is otherwise steady on defense and can hit home runs. He became
a catcher because he grew up in Bowling Green, Ohio, in the era when Johnny
Bench ruled the Reds down in Cincinnati. Meeting Bench was one of the greatest
moments of his life.
"I
absolutely love the position," he says. "You're right in the middle of the
action. You're the one that has to make a lot of decisions. There's a lot of
prestige in the position."
He means prestige in terms of the team. It doesn't carry
that far beyond the dugout, though. The catcher has always been a somewhat
overlooked position. Even Yogi Berra, a Hall of Famer, was never the great hero
of the Yankees--he labored in the shadow of greater stars like Mickey Mantle
and Whitey Ford. In my lifetime Johnny Bench has been the singular superstar of
the position (he was once on the cover of Time magazine). There have
been plenty of worthy catchers--Carlton Fisk, Bob Boone--but the ones that
became most famous are those who went into broadcasting, such as Tim McCarver,
Joe Garagiola, and Bob Uecker. Mike Piazza of the Los Angeles Dodgers is the
snazziest young catcher and could be Cooperstown bound. (Lately I have been
inexplicably tempted to use "Cooperstown bound" when talking about each and
every baseball player--e.g., "Nice single there by Cooperstown-bound Aaron
Ledesma.")
In the Hall of Fame there are
only 11 catchers, eight from this century--fewer than one catcher per decade.
That compares with, for example, 21 right fielders and 56 pitchers. Every
position in baseball has more representatives in the Hall, with the sole
exception of .
There is, in fact, a crisis
of sorts in the catcher position. No one wants to play it anymore. Kids refuse
to catch.
"There's
not a whole lot of them out there," says Etchebarren.
Lenny Webster, the Orioles backup catcher, said
he started playing the position because no one else would do it.
"You get beat up a lot," he
says. "There are times when you have to block balls and they're not always
going to hit that chest protector."
Many of
the top catchers these days are immigrants--once again filling jobs that
native-born Americans are reluctant to do.
Baseball has never been allowed by the intelligentsia to be
simply a game played with a ball--it must always be a metaphor for something
grander, like democracy, the re-creation of the Garden of Eden, the rights of
the individual vs. the needs of the collective, or whatever. In this annoying
tradition, let me suggest that the plight of the catcher is symbolic of a dire
trend in American society--call it the decatcherization of daily life. We just
don't get dirty like we used to. We don't sweat. We finesse our way out of
trouble, using the checkbook, rather than choose a brutal collision and trust
that we will hang on to the ball.
We refuse to live
uncomfortably, and in so doing lose all sorts of knowledge that can only come
with the grit of hands-on labor. The problem with so many jobs in today's
economy is not that they pay poorly but that they are vaporous, the mere
manipulation of words and symbols and concepts. Michael Pollan, the writer and
magazine editor, writes in A Place of My Own about how he had become so
disconnected with the physical world that he finally decided to hammer together
a writing hut in his backyard, a desperate attempt to make contact with real
objects.
The affluent classes are more
comfortable than ever--we can barely, dimly imagine the world, just two
generations ago, when millions of Americans cherished the Sears Roebuck catalog
for its utility as toilet paper. It is now considered normal to travel several
blocks or even miles to find a place that charges more than a dollar for a cup
of coffee. But what great coffee! We cherish our comfort, our good food, our
friendly beverages. In summer we condition our air so that we will not
sweat--except when we go to the gym, where we pay someone money so that we can
use our muscles. We are outfielders now. We laze about in the grassy fields of
life. We wonder if someone will hit us the ball.
