Part 17 (1/2)

I talked to my informants separately, beginning with extended colloquies around battings cages and in dugouts and clubhouses during the leisurely 1983 spring term in Arizona and Florida, and then coming back for some short refreshers whenever I ran into one of them during the regular season. In time, these interviews ran together in my mind and seemed to turn into one extended, almost non-stop conversation about catching, with the tanned, knotty-armed partic.i.p.ants together in the same room, or perhaps ranged comfortably about on the airy porch of some ancient summer hotel, interrupting each other, nodding in recollection, doubling back to some previous tip or topic, laughing together, or shouting in sudden dissent. But they grew more serious as they went along. One of the surprising things about the catchers' catcher-talk, I realized after a while, was how abstract it often was. Old names and games, famous innings and one-liners and celebrated goofs seemed to drop out of their conversation as they got deeper into it, as if the burden of anecdote might distract them (and me) from a proper appraisal of then-hard calling. Everything about catching, I decided somewhere along the way, is harder than it looks.

Terry Kennedy, the twenty-seven-year-old receiver for the San Diego Padres, is six feet four and weighs two hundred and twenty pounds-almost too big for a catcher. He is prized for his bat and his durability-in the past two seasons he played in a hundred and fifty-three and a hundred and forty-nine games (very high figures for a catcher) and batted in ninety-seven and ninety-eight runs. At one time, there was some thought of moving him out to play first base, until a year ago, when the Padres acquired a fellow named Steve Garvey in the free-agent market. Now Kennedy must stay behind the plate and work on his quickness-work to become smaller, almost.

”Throwing is where mobility matters,” he told me in Phoenix one afternoon. ”I'm learning to cheat a little back there, with men on base. Once I determine where the pitch is, I'm starting up. You have to do that, with all the fast runners we're seeing on the base paths. Coming up right is what throwing is all about. There's a two-step or a one-step release. I start with a little jab-step with my right foot and go right forward. The important thing is to be true with that throw, so you try to keep your fingers on top of the ball. If they're off to one side, the ball will banana on you”-sail or curve, that is-”as it goes out there. You can even throw a little from the side, as long as your fingers are on top.”

Kennedy's home pro is Norm Sherry, the Padres' pitching coach, who put in four years as a backup catcher with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Mets, sandwiched in the middle of sixteen seasons in the minors; he has managed at both levels (he was the Angels' skipper for a term), but, with his dark gla.s.ses, his seamed and mahogany-tanned face, and his quick, thrusting way of talking, he suggests the quintessential infantry sergeant.

”Terry's coming on and coming on,” Sherry told me. ”It takes a long time to learn to call a game, but Terry was much more of a catcher in the second half of the season last year. He understood situations better. You can't work on that kind of stuff in the spring, but I been pitching forty or fifty pitches to him every day-curves and fastb.a.l.l.s and in the dirt-and he has to come up throwing. Young catchers today don't have such good mechanics, because they all rely on this one-handed glove. If you take the pitch with one hand, you don't have your throwin' hand on the ball in good position when you start back. They look up and see the guy running and make any old kind of grab at the ball, and that's where you get those errors. I try to get them to take the ball two-handed, and that also closes up the front shoulder, the way it should be to start your throw. So many of them are in a panic when they see somebody movin' and they lose control of everything. Sometimes you see a man even knock his mask so it sort of half slides across his face. Then he can't see anything, because he was in such a hurry. But if you just take that little half step in advance, you've done all the hurrying you need to do. You just have to stand up and take a good stride and throw it.

”So much of this started with Johnny Bench, you know, who became such a good catcher with that one-handed glove. All the young catchers started to follow him, to pick up that style. But not many guys are Johnny Bench. He had great big hands, and wherever he grabbed the ball he got seams. It was like Willie Mays and his basket catch-only a few could do it well.”

Months later, Joe Garagiola showed me a trick about seams. We were standing behind the batting cage together before the first World Series game in Baltimore last fall, and when Johnny Bench's name came up-he had just closed out his distinguished seventeen-year career with the Cincinnati Reds: indisputably the greatest catcher of his era-Garagiola, after adding several accolades, suddenly echoed Norm Sherry's little demurrer. In a way, he said, Bench had almost set back the art of catching, because of his own great skills. ”You have to get that good grab on the ball,” Joe said in his quick, s.h.i.+ll-sharp way, ”and you can't always do that if you're hot-d.o.g.g.i.n' with that mitt. You gotta get seams to throw straight. Here-get me a ball, somebody.” A ball was sneaked from the cage, and Garagiola, blazer and all, half crouched and suddenly became a catcher again. (He had a successful nine-year career at the position, mostly with the Cardinals, before taking up his second life, behind the microphone.) ”Here's what Branch Rickey made us do when we were just young catchers tryin' to come up in the Cardinal system,” he said. ”Take the pitch in two hands, with your bare hand closing it in there, and then grab seams. If you take hold of it this way”-he held the ball on one of its smooth white horseshoe-shaped sectors, with the red st.i.tching on either side of his forefinger and middle finger-”you got no idea where it's going to end up. But you can learn to s.h.i.+ft it in your hand while your arm is comin' up to start the peg. Just a little flip in the air and you can get seams. Look.”

He raised his hand quickly three or four times in a row and took a fresh grip on the ball as he did so. Each time, he had seams. He laughed in his famous, engaging way, and said, ”Nights in spring training, Mr. Rickey made us each take a ball with us when we went to the movies and practice that in the theatre. Three or four catchers sittin' in a row, grabbing seams!”

The ”One-handed glove” that so many of my catching informants referred to is the contemporary lightweight mitt that everyone, including Little Leaguers, now employs behind the plate. Thanks to radical excisions of padding around the rim and thumb, it is much smaller than its lumpy, pillowlike progenitor, more resembling a quiche than a deep-dish Brown Betty. The glove comes with a prefab central pocket, but the crucial difference in feel is its amazing flexibility, attributable to a built-in central hinge, which follows the lateral line of one's palm. The glove is still stiffer and more unwieldy than a first baseman's mitt, to be sure, but if you catch a thrown ball in the pocket the glove will try to fold itself around the ball and hold it, thus simply extending the natural catching motion of a man's hand. Catching with the old mitt, by contrast, was more like trying to stop a pitch with a dictionary; it didn't hurt much, but you had to clap your right hand over the ball almost instantly in order to keep it in possession. Indeed, this technique of nab-and-grab was almost the hardest thing for a boy to learn about catching when I first tried it (and instantly gave it up), many years ago, and a mistimed clutch at the ball was often suddenly and horribly painful as well. The new glove turned up in the nineteen-sixties, and its first artisan was Randy Hundley, a smooth, lithe receiver with the Chicago Cubs. Its first and perhaps still its greatest artist, its Michelangelo, was Johnny Bench, whose extraordinary balance and quickness, coupled with the glove, allowed him to take everything one-handed and, moreover, to make every kind of catch back there look as effortless and natural as the gestures of a dancer. He made the lunging, manly old art look easy, which may explain why so many baseball people-including many of the catchers I talked to-seem to find it necessary to set Bench a little to one side when they speak of him: to mount him as a museum exhibit of catching, a paradigm locked away behind gla.s.s, and to examine it with appropriate murmurings of wonder and then walk away. ”Bench was picture-perfect,” Ted Simmons said. ”A marvellous mechanical catcher. There's no better. In the light of all that praise, it's very hard for any other catcher to be considered in that way.” Carlton Fisk said, ”Bench did so many things almost perfectly that it almost seemed robotical. Everything was done so automatically that it didn't seem to have much creativity to it.” Sometimes catchers can sound like authors.

For Bob Boone, the catcher's front shoulder is the key to strong throwing. ”You have to have that closed front side, just the way you do in hitting,” he told me. ”When the arm goes through, the front shoulder opens up. Coming up to that position is basically a three-step movement, but some can skip all that and take just one step and throw. That takes a real strong arm. Parrish can do it. I went to it early in my career, because it was simple for me then, but I don't think it's the most effective. If your arm doesn't get all the way through-if it never quite catches up to your body and you let the throw go from out here-you get that three-quarters, Thurman Munson throw. Thurman threw that way because he didn't have a strong arm, and I'm sure he weighed that quick release against velocity and accuracy. But he didn't have a choice, really. For me, that s.h.i.+ft to get the shoulder into position is where the throw is made. Velocity is a gift-and most catchers in the majors have it-but quickness is in your feet.”

Boone speaks in a deliberate, considering sort of way. He is a thoughtful man, with a saturnine look to him that contrasts strikingly with his gentle, almost sleepy smile. He is a graduate of Stanford, where he majored in psychology (not much of a help to him in baseball, he confided-not even in dealing with umpires). During the negotiations arising from the 1981 baseball strike, he represented the National League for the Players a.s.sociation. Possibly because of this union activity, he was not signed to a new contract by the Phillies the next season, and crossed leagues to join the Angels, where he enjoyed immediate success, winning a Gold Glove award (his third) for his defensive prowess, and handling the theretofore listless California mound staff in a manner that helped bring the club to the champions.h.i.+p playoffs that fall. We talked in the visiting-team clubhouse during the middle innings of an Angels-Cubs spring game at Mesa, while he slowly took off his uniform (he had played the first four innings) and showered and dressed, waiting for his teammates to be done, waiting for another team bus. I didn't think we covered much ground in our talk, but I was wrong about that; his modest, off-speed delivery fooled me. In the days and weeks that followed, I heard Boone-echoes in things that other catchers and coaches were telling me, and realized that I had already been put in the game, as it were, by what he had imparted.

One catcher's attribute that Boone always seemed to come back to in our talk was consistency-doing hard things right again and again, doing them as a matter of course. ”Everyone at the major-league level has talent,” he said at one point, ”but the players who last are the ones who are consistent. People who can control themselves over one hundred and sixty-two games are rare, and that's why the old idea of the starting nine has sort of gone out. It seems that a lot of players get into bad spells and have to have a rest. I think you have to prepare your mind to play a full season, and of course you have to train for it physically. I work a lot on flexibility. You have to be able to deal with pain, to the point where it doesn't affect how you hit and catch and throw. That comes with time. You experience things and deal with them. I don't look at the catcher's job as one that's going to tire me out more than other players get tired. Getting tired is just part of the season, so you prepare for that, too.”*

In Sarasota, Dave Duncan was talking about the great recent upsurge of base-stealing in both leagues, and what the coaching staffs were doing to combat it. (Per-team base-stealing totals have risen dramatically in the past two decades, thanks in part to the individual exploits of motorers like Lou Brock, of the Cardinals, who at the age of thirty-five set a new one-season record with a hundred and eighteen stolen bases in 1974, and Rickey Henderson, of the Oakland A's and then the Pittsburgh Pirates, set amazing new team stolen-base records in each league, in 1976 and 1977, with three hundred and forty-one and two hundred and sixty thefts, respectively. Back in the nineteen-forties and fifties, the major-league clubs averaged fewer than fifty stolen bases per year, with everyone waiting to stroll around the bases after a home run, but now National League teams average about a hundred and fifty swipes per summer, and the A.L. about forty or fifty fewer, with the difference probably attributable to the quicker, artificial-turf basepath carpets that predominate in the senior circuit.) Duncan, who is the pitching coach for the Chicago White Sox, caught for eleven years with Kansas City, Oakland, Cleveland, and Baltimore. He handled the hairy A's flingers-Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers-during the first of Oakland's three successive world-champions.h.i.+p seasons, in the early nineteen-seventies: yes, that Dave Duncan. He is a slender, soft spoken gent with wide-s.p.a.ced pale-blue eyes.

”Everyone's running, it seems,” he said. ”And everything is being timed now. I don't remember anybody putting a clock on a catcher when I was out there. Now there are three or four guys on the bench with stopwatches, and the first-base coach in the spring has a stop-watch, too. It's gotten so you can figure in advance that you've got a chance against a particular base runner if this guy is pitching for you and that guy is behind the plate. We've all learned the figures. A good time for a catcher, from the moment of his catch until the moment his peg arrives at second, is around two seconds. If you find a catcher who can get it out there in one-nine or one-eight, that's a quick release. Meanwhile, a man who takes an average lead and gets himself down to second in three-three is a good base runner. A tenth off makes him a real rabbit, and if you're going to throw him out you've got to do everything right-hold him pretty close, a quick delivery from the mound, and then a pitch that the catcher can handle easily. A catcher with a good throwing arm-a Rick Dempsey, a Lance Parrish, a Mike Heath-is almost a necessity nowadays. Bob Boone is about the best there is at calling a good game and also throwing well. He's very consistent, with good accuracy and great antic.i.p.ation.”

I remembered at once. ”With a Rickey Henderson or a Tim Raines or a Lou Brock on base,” Boone had told me, ”you work at setting up the same way as always and at knowing what your own maximum speed is. If you try to go beyond that, you become erratic and you're actually slower. It's like a boxer throwing a jab. He wants to do it at his maximum all the time, but if he suddenly wants a little extra he's much less-you can see it. Actually, it's almost easier with a speedster-with a Rickey Henderson leading away out there-because you know he's going to go. The other guys, the ones you don't expect to run, are harder to keep up for, and you have to do that on every pitch, really, with a man on base. You tell yourself, 'I've got a right-handed pitcher and he's throwing a curveball here, so I have to be aware of my right side, 'cause that's where it's going. O.K., I'm prepared.'”

In 1982, Boone was the only regular catcher in either league to throw out more than fifty percent of the opposition's would-be base stealers; he got fifty-eight percent of them, and cut down Rickey Henderson six times out of thirteen. This is still not a dazzling success ratio, to be sure, and since it is demonstrable that athletes today are much quicker afoot than their predecessors, it seems certain that not even time-motion studies and smart catchers are going to keep base runners from sprinting off for second in ever-increasing numbers in the seasons just ahead. It has occurred to me that this phenomenon may represent the first breakdown of baseball's old and beautiful distances: if ninety feet from base to base is no longer enough to keep a single or a base on b.a.l.l.s from becoming an almost automatic double, then someone may have to go back to the drawing board at last in order to restore caution to the austere sport-and to cheer up catchers a little, too.

”I admire Bob Boone and this kid Tony Pefia, with the Pirates,” Tim McCarver said from across the room, so to speak; we were in St. Petersburg, where McCarver, now a Mets broadcaster, was preparing to do a Mets-Red Sox game. He played in four different decades, from the late fifties to the early eighties, mostly for the Cardinals (he was Bob Gibson's favorite receiver), and he is humorous, snub-nosed, and cheerfully opinionated. ”Pefia does so many things right already that he makes me salivate,” he said. ”The Phillies let Bob Boone go because they said he couldn't throw anymore-a terrible rap. So he goes over to the Angels and leads the league in throwing out runners and takes the Angels right to the doorstep of the World Series. He's conscientious and he's always in great shape, and his throwing is only a little part of it. I never could throw well, so I always thought calling a game was the biggest thing. That will never become a noted part of the game, because there are no stats for it, and the fans don't care about it, and most of the scouts don't know a whole lot about it, either. Even today, scouts and some managers will say, 'He can really catch,' when they mean 'He can really throw.' This is real bulls.h.i.+t, because throwing just isn't a very important part of it, when you think about it. Gene Mauch is one of the few managers who really understood and appreciated catching. I always felt some resentment about not being appreciated, but that was balanced out by pitchers who knew what I was doing back there. Some of them didn't appreciate me until the time came when they had to pitch to somebody else.” He laughed.

All right, forget about throwing. Think about catching the ball instead-seizing that imminent, inbound, sinking or riding, up-and-in or down-and-away, eighty-to-ninety-five-m.p.h. hardball, and doing it, moreover, in a way that might just turn the umpire's call to your advantage. Terry Kennedy told me that sometimes you can take a pitch close to the inside edge of the plate (inside to a right-handed batter, that is) and slightly rotate your glove to the left at the last instant-he s.h.i.+fted his mitt so that the thumb moved from two o'clock to noon-and thus win a strike call from the ump. ”But you can't hold it there, to make the point,” he said. ”They hate it if you keep the glove up there, and it's almost an automatic ball.”

Milt May said that just catching the ball cleanly was a big help to the umpires, and led to better calls, while Tom Haller (we will meet these deponents in a minute) told me that Del Crandall, the celebrated Milwaukee Braves receiver of a quarter of a century ago, had taught him how to catch an away pitch, on the outside corner, with his glove parallel to the ground, and to take the ball in the webbing instead of in the pocket. ”The ball could be an inch or two off the strike zone and he still might call it a strike, because the glove itself is still over the plate,” Haller said. ”And a high pitch you can take with a little downward move sometimes. You teach a young catcher to take most pitches as close to the plate as possible, because the farther back you are, the more it can bend out of the strike zone. If your glove is back to where that pitch looks like a ball now, the crowd may even react to it, and then the ump thinks, h.e.l.l, I'm going to call that a ball after all.”

Bob Boone again: ”There are a few little tricks of framing and catching the ball that might convince an umpire-s.h.i.+fting your body instead of your glove, or maybe the way you collapse your glove as you make the catch. But you don't want to work on that umpire too much. More often, a catcher will take a strike away from the pitcher by catching it improperly-knocking it out of the strike zone, or moving the glove with the pitch so that it carries the ball out of the strike zone after the catch, and even if you roll your glove you might help the umpire to make up his mind the wrong way.”

He left the umpires for a moment and segued into the problems of setting up for the pitcher-presenting the best sort of target for each pitch. ”Some pitchers want to throw to your whole body, and not just the glove,” he said. ”Then if you want the pitch outside, on that far corner, you have to get yourself on out there in a way that the batter won't notice. There's an art in that-it takes time to learn it. You slide over at the last second-and it's much harder to do that against a batter with an open stance, of course: somebody like Rod Carew, on our club-and you also try to get a little closer, which makes it that much tougher for him to spot you. There are some guys who can always seem to sense where you are, no matter what you do. And of course there are a few peekers, too.”

I said that he sounded disapproving.

”Well, you tell them to cut it out,” Boone said. ”But if it goes on you can just say a word to your pitcher. Then you set up outside and he throws inside. That usually stops it right away, and if the batter says anything about it you just say, 'Hey, you were looking.'”

But let's finish the introductions. I remember Milt May when he was a blond, promising rookie receiver with the Pittsburgh Pirates, almost fifteen years ago. Now much of his hair has gone, and he is on the down side of a respectable, journeyman sort of career that has taken him by turns to the Astros, Tigers, White Sox, Giants, and-early last season-back to the Pirates again, where he is now a backup to the effulgent Pena. I talked to him in Arizona last spring, while he was still a Giant. Milt May, incidentally, is the son of Pinky May, an infielder with the Phillies around the Second World War. Oddly enough, Terry Kennedy is the son of Bob Kennedy, who was a major-league infielder-outfielder and later on served in various capacities, as coach, manager, and front-office executive, with, among other clubs, the Cubs, Cardinals, and Astros; and Bob Boone's pop, Ray Boone, was a well-known American League shortstop and third baseman in his day. Maybe not so oddly: perhaps years of serious baseball talk at the family breakfast table adds a secret something-a dab of sagacity, say-to the Wheaties and thus turns out good catchers down the line.

Tom Haller put in a dozen years at catch for the Giants and Dodgers and Tigers. Now he runs the baseball side of things for the Giants, as V.P. for Baseball Operations. The other catchers in our group, who are leaning forward in the chairs a little restlessly over there as they wait to be heard from, are probably more familiar. The long lanky one is Carlton Fisk, and the intense fellow, smoking a cigarette, is Ted Simmons. In a minute, you guys-all right?

Surprisingly, there was more agreement about umpires among the panelists than about anything else. Grudging respect was what I heard for the most part, and then, after the conversation had run in that direction for a few minutes, even the grudgingness seemed to drop away. Ted Simmons, the Milwaukee Brewers veteran, described the catcher-umpire relations.h.i.+p in social terms. ”It's like meeting people at a c.o.c.ktail party,” he said. ”Some you like and some you can't stand, but you know you have to be at least polite with everybody in order to keep things going.”

”You can beef about pitches, but you always do it when you're walking back toward the plate from the mound-after a play maybe,” Haller put in. ”You don't turn around and do it, you know. Young catchers are always being tested by the umps, and they have to learn to take some bad calls and not say anything. Catchers who are moaning and b.i.t.c.hing all the time really can hurt their team, but there's such a thing as being too quiet, too. You hear an umpire say, 'Oh, he's a good catcher-you never hear a word of complaint out of him,' but to me that's a catcher who isn't sticking up for his team out there.”

”I don't mess with umpires,” young Terry Kennedy said. ”Let 'em sleep. They say, 'The ball missed the corner,' and I say unwaveringly, 'No, it hit the corner,' but I'm quiet about it.” He laughed, almost helplessly.

Carlton Fisk: ”Any game where there's a lot of situational friction-all that yelling and screaming-it can suddenly be very hard on your team. Young umps and young catchers are both new kids on the block, trying to establish themselves, but in time the respect appears, and it can grow. After a while, a good umpire knows you're not going to give him a hard time, and you start to feel he won't squeeze you too much back there. I got along real well with Bill Haller”-he's Tom Haller's older brother-”who just retired. The same for Richie Garcia and Dave Phillips and Steve Palermo. I get along with Ken Kaiser, who can't get along with a lot of players. He umpired with me in the minor leagues, so we go back a long way together. With most of them, it's strictly professional-a 'How's it going?' and then you get on with the game.”

Tom Haller: ”Al Barlick was the best ball-and-strike umpire I ever worked with. He took a lot of pride in that. Others-well, Dusty Boggess was on the way out, I think, when I was coming up, and one day I'd been getting on him back there and I said something he didn't like. The next pitch was right down the middle and I'd hardly caught it when he yelled 'Baw-ell!' In time, I learned. As I got older, I began to appreciate how good most of them were.”

Bob Boone: ”The umpire has to be himself, so I try to be as honest with him as I can. You're not going to fool a major-league umpire for long. If one of them asks me about a borderline pitch that went for us-a called strike, I mean-he may do it a couple of pitches later: 'What did you think about that pitch?' and I'll tell him, even if I'm saying 'Well, I thought it was a little outside' or 'I thought it was a little high.' That way, he knows if I make a gripe on a pitch later on I'm not trying to steal anything from him.”

Milt May: ”They respect your opinion because they know you respect them. Some days, I'm not seein' the ball too well, and after the hitter's gone I might ask, 'Say, where was that second pitch? Did you think it was high enough?'-or whatever. I think the instant replays have made the umps look good, because it's turned out they're right so much of the time. Only a catcher who's down there with them can know how hard it is. They don't know what pitch is comin'-whether it's meant to be a slider or a sinker, or what. That ball is travelling and doin' different things, and maybe one half inch of it is going to catch the black. If there's a hundred and forty pitches in a game, fifty of them are b.a.l.l.s and fifty are strikes, and the other forty are so close-well, dad-gone, somebody's going to be mad.”

Carlton Fisk: ”If I know an umpire's preferences, that gives me some borders to aim at. Some are notorious high-ball umps, and others have a very low strike zone. If you have a high-strike umpire and your pitcher is a sinkerball specialist, you might remind the umpire early in the game: 'Hey, this guy's keepin' the ball down real good the last few games-he's pitching real well.' That puts him on notice. And if your pitcher is the kind that's around the strike zone all the time he'll always get more calls from the umpire.”

Tom Haller: ”Umpires tend to be good at what a pitcher is good at because they antic.i.p.ate that pitch.”

Bob Boone: ”When you change leagues, the way I did, you have to learn the new umpires' strike zones, and when you can argue and when you can't. Paul Runge has a low strike zone-he's going to make you swing that bat when you're up there. He's got a little bigger plate than some, but he's very consistent. You certainly can't change him. Lee Weyer has an extremely wide strike zone. Everyone knows it, and the catchers sort of count on it. Others have a smaller strike zone, and they're known as. .h.i.tters' umpires.” (Both Runge and Weyer are National League umps, and later on, after this part of our conversation, I realize that Boone, a diplomat, has not discussed his umpire preferences in the American League, where he now goes to work.) Milt May: ”You come to appreciate a pitcher who's always around the plate, because he's helping himself with that ump so much. He might miss the black by an inch sometimes, but the umpire will ring it up right away, because he's come to expect strikes from him. It's only natural.”

Bob Boone: ”The real negotiation isn't between the catcher and the umpire-it's between the pitcher and the umpire. The pitcher has to show that he can put the ball where he wants it and move it around. If he establishes that he knows where the ball is going, and that he's not just lucking out on the corners, the umpires will be a lot more forgiving with him than they will with the man who's all over the place and suddenly comes in with something close. A good pitcher-a Tommy John, who lives on the corners-sets up a rhythm with the umpire, and anything he throws will get a good long look. That's what control is all about.”

Milt May: ”The only thing that gets me upset is having two or three pitches in the same spot that are called strikes, and then you come back to that spot and the umpire misses it, just when you most needed that strike. But-well, I'd hate to call about twenty of those pitches myself.”

Bob Boone: ”When I'm back there, I want my umpire to call his very best game ever. That's the ideal.”

Every catcher exudes stability and competence-there's something about putting on the chest protector and strapping on those s.h.i.+n guards that suggests a neighborhood grocer rolling up the steel storefront shutters and then setting out the merchandise to start the day-but Milt May seemed a little different from the other professionals I consulted. For some reason, I kept thinking that he and I could have played on the same team. I am much older than he is, and I never even lettered in baseball, so this was a dream of some sort. May and I talked during a Giants morning practice in Scottsdale, and he apologized to me each time he had to break off and go take his hacks in the batting cage. He was thirty-two, but he looked a bit older-or perhaps only wearier. Established catchers take on a thickness in their thighs and a careworn slope around the shoulders. Or possibly we only imagine that, from thinking about all those bent-over innings and hours-many thousands of them in the end. But May sounded young and even chirpy when he talked baseball, and up close his face was almost boyish. He hadn't shaved yet that day, and the stubble along his chin was red-gold in the morning suns.h.i.+ne. At one point, he said, ”I think I'm like some other catchers-if I hadn't been able to catch I probably wouldn't have been able to make it to the big leagues at all. Maybe you can't run, but if you've got good hands and don't mind the work you can play. Not too many people want to do it.” A bit later in the day, I noticed that when May flipped off his mask behind the plate his on-backward cap pushed his ears out a little on either side of his head. Then I understood my dream. Milt May is the kind of kid who always got to catch back when I played on pickup teams as a boy. He was big and slow, and he looked sort of funny out there, but he didn't mind the b.u.mps and the work and the dirt, because that way he got to play. None of the rest of us wanted the job, and most of us couldn't have done it anyway.

That afternoon, Tom Haller and I sat on folding chairs in a front-row box in the little wooden stadium in Scottsdale and took in an early-March game between his Giants and the Seattle Mariners. Haller is a large, pleasant man, with an Irish-touched face, and a perfect companion at a game-silent for good long stretches but then quick to point out a telling little detail on the field or to bring up some play or player from the past, for comparison. He was watching his own rookies and stars out there, of course, but he had generous things to say about the young Mariner receiver, Orlando Mercado, who somehow folded himself down to about the height of a croquet wicket while taking a pitch.

”These kids we're seeing today-this one, and that Pefia that the Pirates have-are lower than anybody I used to play with,” he said in his light, faintly hoa.r.s.e voice. ”Maybe they're better athletes than they used to be-more agile, and all. I still wish they'd move the top half of their bodies more when they're after the ball. That glove has made everybody lazy. You just stick out your hand.”