Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 2, 1990 TAG: 9005020478
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans Associate Editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But with the game's "labor dispute" jeopardizing spring training, not to mention the regular season, my heart wasn't in it.
The column degenerated into a couple of swipes at football (a gross endeavor that ought to go the way of bull-baiting) and a discussion of basketball's several, but oh-so-fleeting, merits.
But baseball's here; let's try again. Spring training was delayed but not destroyed. The regular season opened a mere week later than scheduled.
It could've been worse. There's even this mild benefit: a breath of new life in that vanishing but entertaining species known as the doubleheader, because of the need to reschedule games lost from the first week.
It couldn't be much worse, though, for my K.C. Royals, the team I adopted some years ago for reasons both parochial and aesthetic.
The Royals, supposedly a contender after free-agent overspending during the winter, stood Tuesday at 6-12, dead last in the American League West.
Summer weather, one hopes, will restore the juices of such ancient heroes as second baseman Frank White, catcher Bob Boone and first baseman George Brett. White and Brett, who've spent their entire careers in the Royals' employ, are pushing 40. Boone, remarkably for a catcher of his quality, is three years past 40.
Today's meditation, however, is occasioned by the retirement Sunday at age 37 of a fourth player, relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry.
Quiz, who pitched most of his career with the Royals, is living proof that you don't have to be a great athlete, or even look like one, to do well in major-league baseball.
Quiz probably won't go to the Hall of Fame, but he was a genuine star. Five times he led the American League in saves; five times he was named Fireman of the Year.
Yet Quiz couldn't throw very hard or run very fast, and I suspect he was spared great embarrassment at the plate only by the grace of the designated-hitter rule.
He looked every inch the non-athlete, too: short-bodied, stoop-shouldered, round-faced.
But Quiz had brains.
As it became evident during a mediocre minor-league apprenticeship that his playing days were numbered, Quiz made an honest evaluation of the situation and did something about it. He learned to throw the ball underhand.
For nearly a decade, till left-handers started hitting him hard a couple of years ago, he won fame, fortune and ball games by throwing submarine sinkers that (a) stayed in or very near the strike zone and (b) looked to batters to be great pitches to hit but weren't. Beautiful swings, perfectly timed, would yield . . . another bouncer to short.
It worked because Quiz and his managers, mainly the late Dick Howser, were smart enough to see how it worked. Keep your infield defense alert. Use Quiz for only the last inning or two to nail down a victory; you don't want hitters to get used to his delivery. And let the hitters hit.
If they were hitting grounders, which was most of the time, Quiz was doing his job - even if games were lost now and then because run-yielding 'tweeners got through. The percentages still were with you.
It's hard to imagine baseball's dimmer bulbs - the name of George Steinbrenner comes to mind - displaying such forbearance.
If "`forbearance" is a noun more easily associated with baseball than with America's other major sports, another is "individualism."
You could tell Quiz without a scorecard, on or off the field.
On the field, his down-under style and non-athletic build set him apart.
Off the field, it was a self-deprecating humor and apparently ready accessibility that made him a favorite - judging by how much they quoted him, anyway - of sportswriters.
In any given issue of The Sporting News, you could figure the chances no worse than even that Quiz would be quoted by someone somewhere in the paper. In the baseball issue this year of Sports Illustrated, there was Quiz again, leading readers on a tour of big-league bullpens.
Another quotable (and intelligent, though many fans didn't know it) ballplayer was Yogi Berra. But where Berra specialized in unintended solecism, Quiz tended toward the abstractly analytical.
"I have seen the future," he once said out of the blue, "and it is much like the present, only more so."
Think about it.
On second thought, maybe it's better not to.
by CNB