Part 12 (1/2)

The training period made it clear that nothing had altered with him (he walked twenty-five men in fourteen innings in exhibition play), and when the club went north he was left in Bradenton for further work. He joined the team in Chicago on April 16, and entered a game against the Cubs the next afternoon, taking over in the fourth inning, with the Pirates down by 104. He pitched five innings, and gave up eight runs (three of them unearned), five hits, and seven bases on b.a.l.l.s. The Cubs batted around against him in the first inning he pitched, and in the sixth he gave up back-to-back home runs. His statistics for the game, including an ERA of 9.00, were also his major-league figures for the year, because late in April the Pirates sent him down to the Charleston (West Virginia) Charlies, their farm team in the Cla.s.s AAA International League. Bla.s.s did not argue about the decision; in fact, as a veteran with more than eight years' service in the majors, he had to agree to the demotion before the parent club could send him down. He felt that the Pirates and Joe Brown had been extraordinarily patient and sympathetic in dealing with a baffling and apparently irremediable problem. They had also been generous, refusing to cut his salary by the full twenty percent permissible in extending a major-league contract. (His pay, which had been ninety thousand dollars in 1973, was cut to seventy-five thousand for the next season, and then to sixty-three thousand this spring.) In any case, Bla.s.s wanted to go. He needed continuous game experience if he was ever to break out of it, and he knew he no longer belonged with a big-league club.

The distance between the minors and the majors, always measurable in light-years, is probably greater today than ever before, and for a man making the leap in the wrong direction the feeling must be sickening. Bla.s.s tries to pa.s.s off the experience lightly (he is apparently incapable of self-pity), but one can guess what must have been required of him to summon up even a sc.r.a.p of the kind of hope and aggressive self-confidence that are prerequisites, at every level, of a successful athletic performance. He and Karen rented an apartment in Charleston, and the whole family moved down when the school year ended; David and Chris enjoyed the informal atmosphere around the ball park, where they were permitted to s.h.a.g flies in batting practice. ”It wasn't so bad,” Bla.s.s told me.

But it was. The manager of the Charlies, Steve Demeter, put Bla.s.s in the regular starting rotation, but he fared no better against minor-leaguers than he had in the big time. In a very brief time, his earned-run average and his bases-on-b.a.l.l.s record were the worst in the league. Bla.s.s got along well with his teammates, but there were other problems. The mystery of Steve Bla.s.s's decline was old stuff by now in most big-league-city newspapers, but as soon as he was sent down, there was a fresh wave of attention from the national press and the networks; and sportswriters for newspapers in Memphis and Rochester and Richmond and the other International League cities looked on his arrival in town as a G.o.d-given feature story. Invariably, they asked him how much money he was earning as a player; then they asked if he thought he was worth it.

The Charlies did a lot of traveling by bus. One day, the team made an eight-hour trip from Charleston to Toledo, where they played a night game. At eleven that same night, they reboarded the bus and drove to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for their next date, arriving at about nine in the morning. Bla.s.s had started the game in Toledo, and he was so disgusted with his performance that he got back on the bus without having showered or taken off his uniform. ”We'd stop at an all-night restaurant every now and then, and I'd walk in with a two-day beard and my old Charleston Charlies uniform on, looking like go-to-h.e.l.l,” Bla.s.s said. ”It was pretty funny to see people looking at me. I had some books along, and we had plenty of wine and beer on the bus, so the time went by somehow.” He paused and then shook his head. ”G.o.d, that was an awful trip,” he said.

By early August, Bla.s.s's record with Charleston was two and nine, and 9.74. He had had enough. With Joe Brown's permission, he left the Charlies and flew West to consult Dr. Bill Harrison, of Davis, California. Dr. Harrison is an optometrist who has helped develop a system of ”optome-therapy,” designed to encourage athletes to concentrate on the immediate physical task at hand-hitting a ball, throwing a strike-by visualizing the act in advance; his firm was once retained by the Kansas City Royals baseball team, and his patients have included a number of professional golfers and football players. Bla.s.s spent four days with him, and then rejoined the Pirates, this time as a batting-practice pitcher. He says now that he was very interested in Dr. Harrison's theories but that they just didn't seem to help him much.

In truth, nothing helped. Bla.s.s knew that his case was desperate. He was almost alone now with his problem-a baseball castaway-and he had reached the point where he was willing to try practically anything. Under the guidance of pitching coach Don Osborn, he attempted some unusual experiments. He tried pitching from the outfield, with the sweeping motion of a fielder making a long peg. He tried pitching while kneeling on the mound. He tried pitching with his left foot tucked up behind his right knee until the last possible second of his delivery. Slow-motion films of his delivery were studied and compared with films taken during some of his best games of the past; much of his motion, it was noticed, seemed extraneous, but he had thrown exactly the same way at his peak. Bla.s.s went back and corrected minute details, to no avail.

The frustrating, bewildering part of it all was that while working alone with a catcher Bla.s.s continued to throw as well as he ever had; his fastball was alive, and his slider and curve shaved the corners of the plate. But the moment a batter stood in against him he became a different pitcher, especially when throwing a fastball-a pitcher apparently afraid of seriously injuring somebody. As a result, he was of very little use to the Pirates even in batting practice.

Don Osborn, a gentle man in his mid-sixties, says, ”Steve's problem was mental. He had mechanical difficulties, with some underlying mental cause. I don't think anybody will ever understand his decline. We tried everything-I didn't know anything else to do. I feel real bad about it. Steve had a lot of guts to stay out there as long as he did. You know, old men don't dream much, but just the other night I had this dream that Steve Bla.s.s was all over his troubles and could pitch again. I said, 'He's ready, we can use him!' Funny ...”

It was probably at this time that Bla.s.s consulted a psychiatrist. He does not talk about it-in part out of a natural reticence but also because the Pirate front office, in an effort to protect his privacy, turned away inquiries into this area by Pittsburgh writers and persistently refused to comment on whether any such therapy was undertaken. It is clear, however, that Bla.s.s does not believe he gained any profound insights into possible unconscious causes of his difficulties. Earlier in the same summer, he also experimented briefly with transcendental meditation. He entered the program at the suggestion of Joe Brown, who also enrolled Dave Giusti, Willie Stargell, pitcher Bruce Kison, and himself in the group. Bla.s.s repeated mantras and meditated twice a day for about two months; he found that it relaxed him, but it did not seem to have much application to his pitching. Innumerable other remedies were proposed by friends and strangers. Like anyone in hard straits, he was deluged with unsolicited therapies, overnight cures, naturopathies, exorcisms, theologies, and amulets, many of which arrived by mail. Bla.s.s refuses to make jokes about these nostrums. ”Anyone who takes the trouble to write a man who is suffering deserves to be thanked,” he told me.

Most painful of all, perhaps, was the fact that the men who most sympathized with his incurable professional difficulties were least able to help. The Pirates were again engaged in a close and exhausting pennant race fought out over the last six weeks of the season; they moved into first place for good only two days before the end, won their half-pennant, and then were eliminated by the Dodgers in a four-game champions.h.i.+p playoff. Steve Bla.s.s was with the team through this stretch, but he took no part in the campaign, and by now he was almost silent in the clubhouse. He had become an extra wheel. ”It must have been h.e.l.l for him,” Dave Giusti says. ”I mean real h.e.l.l. I never could have stood it.”

When Bla.s.s is asked about this last summer of his baseball career, he will only say that it was ”kind of a difficult time” or ”not the most fun I've had.” In extended conversations about himself, he often gives an impression of an armored blandness that suggests a failure of emotion; this apparent insensitivity about himself contrasts almost shockingly with his subtle concern for the feelings of his teammates and his friends and his family, and even of strangers. ”My overriding philosophy is to have a regard for others,” he once told me. ”I don't want to put myself over other people.” He takes pride in the fact that his outward, day-to-day demeanor altered very little through his long ordeal. ”A person lives on,” he said more than once, smiling. ”The sun will come up tomorrow.” Most of all, perhaps, he sustained his self-regard by not taking out his terrible frustrations on Karen and the boys. ”A ballplayer learns very early that he can't bring the game home with him every night,” he said once. ”Especially when there are young people growing up there. I'm real proud of the fact that this thing hasn't bothered us at home. David and Chris have come through it all in fine shape. I think Karen and I are closer than ever because of this.”

Karen once said to me, ”Day to day, he hasn't changed. Just the other morning, he was out working on the lawn, and a couple of the neighbors' children came over to see him. Young kids-maybe three or four years old. Then I looked out a few minutes later, and there was a whole bunch of them yelling and rolling around on the gra.s.s with him, like puppies. He's always been that way. Steve has worked at being a man and being a father and a husband. It's something he has always felt very strongly about, and I have to give him all the credit in the world. Sometimes I think I got to hate the frustration and pain of this more than he did. He always found something to hold on to-a couple of good pitches that day, some little thing he had noticed. But I couldn't always share that, and I didn't have his ability to keep things under control.”

I asked if maintaining this superhuman calm might not have damaged Steve in some way, or even added to his problems.

”I don't know,” she said. ”Sometimes in the evening-once in a great while-we'd be sitting together, and we'd have a couple of drinks and he would relax enough to start to talk. He would tell me about it, and get angry and hurt. Then he'd let it come out, and yell and scream and pound on things. And I felt that even this might not be enough for him. He would never do such a thing outside. Never.” She paused, and then she said, ”I think he directed his anger toward making the situation livable here at home. I've had my own ideas about Steve's pitching, about the mystery, but they haven't made much difference. You can't force your ideas on somebody, especially when he is doing what he thinks he has to do. Steve's a very private person.”

Steve Bla.s.s stayed home last winter. He tried not to think much about baseball, and he didn't work on his pitching. He and Karen had agreed that the family would go back to Bradenton for spring training, and that he would give it one more try. One day in January, he went over to the field house at the University of Pittsburgh and joined some other Pirates there for a workout. He threw well. Tony Bartirome, the Pirate trainer, who is a close friend of Steve's, thought he was pitching as well as he ever had. He told Joe Brown that Steve's problems might be over. When spring training came, however, nothing had altered. Bla.s.s threw adequately in brief streaks, but very badly against most batters. He hit Willie Stargell and Manny Sanguillen in batting practice; both players told him to forget it. They urged him to cut loose with the fastball.

Joe Brown had told Bla.s.s that the end of the line might be approaching. Bla.s.s agreed. The Pirate organization had been extraordinarily patient, but it was, after all, in the business of baseball.

On March 24, Steve Bla.s.s started the second game of a doubleheader against the White Sox at Bradenton. For three innings, he escaped serious difficulty. He gave up two runs in the second, but he seemed to throw without much tension, and he even struck out Bill Melton, the Chicago third baseman, with a fastball. Like the other Pirates, Dave Giusti was watching with apprehensive interest. ”I really thought he was on his way,” he told me. ”I was encouraged. Then, in the fourth, there were a couple of bases on b.a.l.l.s and maybe a bad call by the ump on a close pitch, and suddenly there was a complete reversal. He was a different man out there.”

Bla.s.s walked eight men in the fourth inning and gave up eight runs. He threw fifty-one pitches, but only seventeen of them were strikes. Some of his pitches were close to the strike zone, but most were not. He worked the count to 32 on Carlos May, and then threw the next pitch behind him. The booing from the fans, at first scattered and uncomfortable, grew louder. Danny Murtaugh waited, but Bla.s.s could not get the third out. Finally, Murtaugh came out very slowly to the mound and told Bla.s.s that he was taking him out of the game; Dave Giusti came in to relieve his old roommate. Murtaugh, a peaceable man, then charged the home-plate umpire and cursed him for the bad call, and was thrown out of the game. Play resumed. Bla.s.s put on his warm-up jacket and trotted to the outfield to run his wind sprints. Roland Hemond, the general manager of the White Sox, was at Bradenton that day, and he said, ”It was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen in baseball.”

Three days later, the Pirates held a press conference to announce that they had requested waivers from the other National League clubs, with the purpose of giving Bla.s.s his unconditional release. Bla.s.s flew out to California to see Dr. Bill Harrison once more, and also to visit a hypnotist, Arthur Ellen, who has worked with several major-league players, and has apparently helped some of them, including Dodger pitcher Don Sutton, remarkably. Bla.s.s made the trip mostly because he had promised Maury Wills, who is now a base-running consultant to several teams, that he would not quit the game until he had seen Mr. Ellen.

Bla.s.s then returned to Bradenton and worked for several days with the Pirates' minor-league pitching coach, Larry Sherry, on some pitching mechanics. He made brief appearances in two games against Pirate farmhands, and threw well. He struck out some players with his fastball. After the second game, he showered and got into his Volkswagen and started north to join his family, who had returned to Pittsburgh. It was a good trip, because it gave him time to sort things out, and somewhere along the way he decided to give it up. The six-day waiver period had expired, and none of the other clubs had claimed him. He was encouraged about his pitching, but he had been encouraged before. This time, the fastball had been much better, and at least he could hold on to that; maybe the problem had been mechanical all along. If he came back now, however, it would have to be at the minor-league level, and even if he made it back to the majors, he could expect only three or four more years before his effectiveness would decline because of age and he would have to start thinking about retirement. At least that problem could be solved now. He didn't want to subject Karen to more of the struggle. It was time to get out.

Of all the mysteries that surround the Steve Bla.s.s story, perhaps the most mysterious is the fact that his collapse is unique. There is no other player in recent baseball history-at least none with Bla.s.s's record and credentials-who has lost his form in such a sudden and devastating fas.h.i.+on and been totally unable to recover. The players and coaches and fans I talked to about Steve Bla.s.s brought up a few other names, but then they quickly realized that the cases were not really the same. Some of them mentioned Rex Barney, a Dodger fastball pitcher of the nineteen forties, who quit baseball while still a young man because of his uncontrollable wildness; Barney, however, had only one good year, and it is fair to say he never did have his great stuff under control. d.i.c.k Radatz, a very tall relief pitcher with the Red Sox a decade ago, had four good years, and then grew increasingly wild and ineffective. (He is said to have once thrown twenty-seven consecutive b.a.l.l.s in a spring-training game.) His decline, however, was partially attributable to his failure to stay in shape. Von McDaniel, a younger brother of Lindy McDaniel, arrived suddenly as a pitcher with the Cardinals, and disappeared just as quickly, but two years' pitching hardly qualifies as a record. There have been hundreds of s.h.i.+ningly promising rookie pitchers and sluggers who, for one reason or another, could not do their thing once they got up to the big time. Bla.s.s's story is different. It should also be understood that his was not at all the somewhat commonplace experience of an established and well-paid major-league star who suffers through one or two mediocre seasons. Tom Seaver went through such a slump last summer. But Seaver's problems were only relatively serious (his record for 1974 was 1111), and were at least partly explicable (he had a sore hip), and he has now returned to form. Bla.s.s, once his difficulties commenced, was helpless. Finally, of course, one must accept the possibility that a great many players may have suffered exactly the same sort of falling off as Bla.s.s for exactly the same reasons (whatever they may be) but were able to solve the problem and continue their athletic careers. Sudden and terrible batting and pitching slumps are mysterious while they last; the moment they end, they tend to be forgotten.

What happened to Steve Bla.s.s? n.o.body knows, but some speculation is permissible-indeed, is perhaps demanded of anyone who is even faintly aware of the qualities of Steve Bla.s.s and the depths of his suffering. Professional sports have a powerful hold on us because they display and glorify remarkable physical capacities, and because the artificial demands of games played for very high rewards produce vivid responses. But sometimes, of course, what is happening on the field seems to speak to something deeper within us; we stop cheering and look on in uneasy silence, for the man out there is no longer just another great athlete, an idealized hero, but only a man-only ourself. We are no longer at a game. The enormous alterations of professional sport in the past three decades, especially the prodigious inflation of franchises and salaries, have made it evident even to the most thoughtless fan that the play he has come to see is serious indeed, and that the heart of the game is not physical but financial. Sport is no longer a release from the harsh everyday American business world but its continuation and apotheosis. Those of us (fans and players alike) who return to the ball park in the belief that the game and the rules are unchanged-merely a continuation of what we have known and loved in the past-are deluding ourselves, perhaps foolishly, perhaps tragically.

Bla.s.s once told me that there were ”at least seventeen” theories about the reason for his failure. A few of them are bromides: He was too nice a guy. He became smug and was no longer hungry. He lost the will to win. His pitching motion, so jittery and uncla.s.sical, at last let him down for good. His eyesight went bad. (Bla.s.s is myopic, and wears gla.s.ses while watching television and driving. He has never worn gla.s.ses when pitching, which meant that Pirate catchers had to flash him signals with hand gestures rather than with finger waggles; however, he saw well enough to win when he was winning, and his vision has not altered in recent years.) The other, more serious theories are sometimes presented alone, sometimes in conjunction with others. Answers here become more gingerly.

He was afraid of injury-afraid of being struck by a line drive.

Bla.s.s was injured three times while on the mound. He cracked a thumb while fielding a grounder in 1966. He was struck on the right forearm by a ball hit by Joe Torre in 1970, and spent a month on the disabled list. While trying for his twentieth victory in his last start in 1972, he was. .h.i.t on the point of the elbow of his pitching arm by a line drive struck by the Mets' John Milner; he had to leave the game, but a few days later he pitched that first playoff game for the Pirates and won it handily. (Bla.s.s's brother-in-law, John Lamb, suffered a fractured skull when hit by a line drive in spring training in 1971, and it was more than a year before he recovered, but Bla.s.s's real pitching triumphs all came after that.) He was afraid of injuring someone-hitting a batter with a fastball.

Bla.s.s did hit a number of players in his career, of course, but he never caused anyone to go on the disabled list or, for that matter, to miss even one day's work. He told me he did not enjoy brus.h.i.+ng back hitters but had done so when it was obviously called for. The only real criticism of Bla.s.s I ever heard from his teammates was that he would not always ”protect” them by retaliating against enemy hitters after somebody had been knocked down. During his decline, he was plainly unable to throw the fastball effectively to batters-especially to Pirate batters in practice. He says he hated the idea of hitting and possibly sidelining one of his teammates, but he is convinced that this anxiety was the result of his control problems rather than the cause.

He was seriously affected by the death of Roberto Clemente.

There is no doubt but that the sudden taking away of their most famous and vivid star affected all the Pirates, including Steve Bla.s.s. He and Clemente had not been particularly close, but Bla.s.s was among the members of the team who flew at once to Puerto Rico for the funeral services, where Bla.s.s delivered a eulogy in behalf of the club. The departure of a superstar leaves an almost visible empty place on a successful team, and the leaders next in line-who in this case would certainly include Steve Bla.s.s-feel the inescapable burden of trying to fill the gap. A Clemente, however, can never be replaced. Bla.s.s never pitched well in the majors after Clemente's death. This argument is a difficult one, and is probably impossible to resolve. There are Oedipal elements here, of course, that are attractive to those who incline in such a direction.

He fell into a slump, which led to an irreparable loss of confidence.

This is circular, and perhaps more a description of symptoms than of the disability itself. However, it is a fact that a professional athlete-and most especially a baseball player-faces a much more difficult task in attempting to regain lost form than an ailing businessman, say, or even a troubled artist; no matter how painful his case has been, the good will of his a.s.sociates or the vagaries of critical judgment matter not at all when he tries to return. All that matters is his performance, which will be measured, with utter coldness, by the stats. This is one reason that athletes are paid so well, and one reason that fear of failure-the unspeakable ”choking”-is their deepest and most private anxiety. Steve Bla.s.s pa.s.sed over my questions about whether he had ever felt this kind of fear when on the mound. ”I don't think pitchers, by their nature, allow themselves to think that way,” he said. ”To be successful, you turn that kind of thought away.” On the other hand, he often said that two or three successive well-pitched games probably would have been all he needed to dissipate the severe tension that affected his performances once things began to go badly for him. They never came.

The remaining pieces of evidence (if, indeed, they have any part in the mystery) have been recounted here. Bla.s.s is a modest man, both in temperament and in background, and his success and fame were quite sudden and, to some degree, unexpected. His salary at the beginning of 1971-the year of his two great Series wins-was forty thousand dollars; two years later it was ninety thousand, and there were World Series and playoff checks on top of that. Bla.s.s was never thought of as one of the great pitchers of his time, but in the late sixties and early seventies he was probably the most consistent starter on the Pirate staff; it was, in fact, a staff without stars. On many other teams, he would have been no more than the second- or third-best starter, and his responsibilities, real and imagined, would have been less acute.

I took some of these hard questions to Bla.s.s's colleagues. Danny Murtaugh and Bill Virdon (who is now the Yankees' pilot) both expressed their admiration for Bla.s.s but said they had no idea what had happened to him. They seemed a bit brusque about it, but then I realized, of course, that ballplayers are forever disappearing from big-league dugouts; the manager's concern is with those who remain-with today's lineup. ”I don't know the answer,” Bill Virdon told me in the Yankee clubhouse. ”If I did, I'd go get Steve to pitch for me. He sure won a lot of big games for us on the Pirates.”

Joe Brown said, ”I've tried to keep my distance and not to guess too much about what happened. I'm not a student of pitching and I'm not a psychologist. You can tell a man what to do, but you can't make him do it. Steve is an outstanding man, and you hate to quit on him. In this business, you bet on character. Big-league baseball isn't easy, yet you can stand it when things are going your way. But Steve Bla.s.s never had a good day in baseball after this thing hit him.”

Bla.s.s's best friends in baseball are Tony Bartirome, Dave Giusti, and Nelson King (who, along with Bob Prince, was part of the highly regarded radio-and-television team that covered the Pirate games).

Tony Bartirome (He is forty-three years old, dark-haired, extremely neat in appearance. He was an infielder before he became a trainer, and played one season in the majors-with the Pirates, in 1952): ”Steve is unique physically. He has the arm of a twenty-year-old. Not only did he never have a sore arm but he never had any of the stiffness and pain that most pitchers feel on the day after a game. He was always the same, day after day. You know, it's very important for a trainer to know the state of mind and the feelings of his players. What a player is thinking is about eighty percent of it. The really strange thing is that after this trouble started, Steve never showed any feelings about his pitching. In the old days, he used to get mad at himself after a bad showing, and sometimes he threw things around in the clubhouse. But after this began, when he was taken out of a game he only gave the impression that he was happy to be out of there-relieved that he no longer had to face it that day. Somehow, he didn't show any emotion at all. Maybe it was like his never having a sore arm. He never talked in any detail about his different treatments-the psychiatry and all. I think he felt he didn't need any of that-that at any moment he'd be back where he was, the Bla.s.s of old, and that it all was up to him to make that happen.”

Dave Giusti (He is one of the great relief pitchers in baseball. He earned a BA and an MA in physical education at Syracuse. He is thirty-five-dark hair, piercing brown eyes, and a quiet manner): ”Steve has the perfect build for a pitcher-lean and strong. He is remarkably open to all kinds of people, but I think he has closed his mind to his inner self. There are central areas you can't infringe on with him. There is no doubt that during the past two years he didn't react to a bad performance the way he used to, and you have to wonder why he couldn't apply his compet.i.tiveness to his problem. Karen used to bawl out me and Tony for not being tougher on him, for not doing more. Maybe I should have come right out and said he seemed to have lost his will to fight, but it's hard to shock somebody, to keep bearing in on him. You're afraid to lose a friend, and you want to go easy on him because he is your friend.

”Last year, I went through something like Steve's crisis. The first half of the season, I was atrocious, and I lost all my confidence, especially in my fastball. The fastball is my best pitch, but I'd get right to the top of my delivery and then something would take over, and I'd know even before I released the ball that it wasn't going to be in the strike zone. I began worrying about making big money and not performing. I worried about not contributing to the team. I worried about being traded. I thought it might be the end for me. I didn't know how to solve my problem, but I knew I had to solve it. In the end, it was talking to people that did it. I talked to everybody, but mostly to Joe Brown and Danny and my wife. Then, at some point, I turned the corner. But it was talking that did it, and my point is that Steve can't talk to people that way. Or won't.

”Listen, it's tough out there. It's hard. Once you start maintaining a plateau, you've got to be absolutely sure what your goals are.”

Nellie King (A former pitcher with the Pirates. He is friendly and informal, with an attractive smile. He is very tall-six-six. Forty-seven years old): ”Right after that terrible game in Atlanta, Steve told me that it had felt as if the whole world was pressing down on him while he was out there. But then he suddenly shut up about it, and he never talked that way again. He covered it all up. I think there are things weighing on him, and I think he may be so angry inside that he's afraid to throw the ball. He's afraid he might kill somebody. It's only nickel psychology, but I think there's a lost kid in Steve. I remembered that after the '71 Series he said, 'I didn't think I was as good as this.' He seemed truly surprised at what he'd done. The child in him is a great thing-we've all loved it-and maybe he was suddenly afraid he was losing it. It was being forced out of him.

”Being good up here is so tough-people have no idea. It gets much worse when you have to repeat it: 'We know you're great. Now go and do that again for me.' So much money and so many people depend on you. Pretty soon you're trying so hard that you can't function.”

I ventured to repeat Nellie King's guesses about the mystery to Steve Bla.s.s and asked him what he thought.

”That's pretty heavy,” he said after a moment. ”I guess I don't have a tendency to go into things in much depth. I'm a surface reactor. I tend to take things not too seriously. I really think that's one of the things that's helped me in baseball.”

A smile suddenly burst from him.

”There's one possibility n.o.body has brought up,” he said. ”I don't think anybody's ever said that maybe I just lost my control. Maybe your control is something that can just go. It's no big thing, but suddenly it's gone.” He paused, and then he laughed in a self-deprecating way. ”Maybe that's what I'd like to believe,” he said.

On my last morning with Steve Bla.s.s, we sat in his family room and played an imaginary ball game together-half an inning of baseball. It had occurred to me that in spite of his enforced and now permanent exile from the game, he still possessed a rare body of precise and hard-won pitching information. He still knew most of the hitters in his league, and probably as well as any other pitcher around, he knew what to pitch to them in a given situation. I had always wanted to hear a pitcher say exactly what he would throw next and why, and now I invited Bla.s.s to throw against the Cincinnati Reds, the toughest lineup of hitters anywhere. I would call the b.a.l.l.s and strikes and hits. I promised he would have no control problems.

He agreed at once. He poured himself another cup of coffee and lit up a Garcia y Vega. He was wearing slacks and a T-s.h.i.+rt and an old sweater (he had a golfing date later that day), and he looked very young.

”OK,” he said. ”Pete Rose is leading off-right? First of all, I'm going to try to keep him off base if I can, because they have so many tough hitters coming up. They can bury you before you even get started. I'm going to try to throw strikes and not get too fine. I'll start him off with a slider away. He has a tendency to go up the middle and I'll try to keep it a bit away.”

Rose, I decided, didn't offer. It was ball one.

”Now I'll throw him a sinking fastball, and still try to work him out that way. The sinking fastball tends to tail off just a little.”