Blass earns win over 'disease'

By Joe Starkey
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/
Sunday, July 6, 2008

July 03, 1972
Photographed by: Neil Leifer

It scares me. Scares the hell out of me. You have no idea how frustrating it is. You don't know where you're going to throw the ball. You're afraid you might hurt someone. You know you're embarrassing yourself, but you can't do anything about it. You're helpless.

Those words appeared in the April 15, 1974, issue of Sports Illustrated, three days before a 32nd birthday Steve Blass probably didn't feel like celebrating.

At the time, Blass was mired in one of the more confounding falls from grace in sports history. He was an ace pitcher who swiftly and inexplicably lost the ability to pitch.

Imagine a great novelist waking up one day to find he no longer could form a sentence, or an opera singer, perfectly healthy in her prime, losing her voice.

Imagine the terror and bewilderment.

How does one come to terms with such a thing?

"I don't know if I could have handled it," says Blass' former teammate and close friend Dave Giusti.

"I could not have done it," says former Pirates pitcher Kent Tekulve, who saw Blass hit a low point in the minor leagues. "It would have destroyed me."

The man who had stifled the powerful Baltimore Orioles in the 1971 World Series and finished second in Cy Young Award voting in 1972 soon would be fighting for his baseball life with a minor-league outfit called the Charleston Charlies.

And nobody knew why.

Blass and the Pirates first appeared on my radar screen in 1971, as I watched the World Series with my father in Buffalo, N.Y., on a small black-and-white television set. I was only 6, but the sight of Nelson Briles falling off the mound from the momentum of his pitches never left my mind. The image of a jubilant Blass leaping into Bob Robertson's arms after the final out of Game 7 found a permanent home in my psyche, as well.

Later, Blass' baffling demise would capture my imagination. I'd always wanted to explore this unsolved mystery. On Wednesday morning at a King's Restaurant in the South Hills, I got the chance.

In talking with others and from my own limited interactions with Blass, a popular Pirates broadcaster for the past 22 years, I knew him to be a good-natured sort who apparently had not let the ordeal embitter him.

I wondered how that was possible, and I wondered if he'd ever found a satisfactory explanation for what happened 35 years ago.

I also wondered what lay beneath the wit that so easily defused inquiries about his long-ago nightmare.

What's going on in there?

The poster boy for wildness

"Underneath, very privately and very personally, is a feeling I got cheated," Blass said. "I never had a sore arm. I knew how to pitch. I loved throwing the baseball, loved making it do things. I thought I could pitch until I was 40-something years old. Nobody enjoyed it more than I did."

It seems every time somebody endures a mystifying slump, Blass gets a phone call. San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito is the latest example of a player said to have contracted an affliction commonly referred to as "Steve Blass Disease."

That is unfair for a World Series hero with a 103-76 career record and 896 strikeouts, seventh in Pirates history. But that is life. Blass deals with it.

"I should have an 800-number," he said. "When Rick Ankiel kind of imploded in a playoff game (in 2000, pitching for St. Louis), I'm sitting there watching with my wife and I said, 'Well, Karen, what's the over-under, about five minutes?' Three minutes later, a reporter called."

Blass, 66, finds it funny that people look to him for answers. He didn't have any in 1973. He doesn't have any now.

Yet, despite the lingering pain, he has achieved a workable peace with his past. There's a story behind that, but before we go there, let's dive into the nightmare.

Blass was 19-8 with a 2.49 ERA in 1972. He started the deciding Game 5 of the NL Championship Series against Cincinnati and pitched well but received a no-decision in a crushing loss decided on reliever Bob Moose's wild pitch. A few months later, the great Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash.

Some have wondered if either of those events had a carryover affect on Blass. He insists not. He remembers having an unusually good spring training in 1973.

Before long, though, the wildness set in. Blass began to hit batters and walk them with alarming frequency.

"It was very difficult to watch," recalled teammate Al Oliver.

Short of visiting a palm reader, Blass tried everything. He had his eyes and arm checked. Good-luck charms and suggestions rolled in from everywhere. He remembers receiving more than 50 letters per week. Nearly all were positive, if not helpful. One well-meaning man wrote, I'm a hunter from Virginia, and I realized whenever my aim is off, my underwear is too tight.

"I laughed like hell and showed it to my teammates," Blass said, "and went out and bought looser underwear."

Virdon's support

In July, with the Pirates in a pennant race, manager Bill Virdon mercifully pulled Blass from the rotation. Blass would finish the season with a 3-9 record, a 9.85 ERA and as many walks (84) in 88 innings as he'd issued in 249 a year earlier.

Retired and living in Springfield, Mo., Virdon recalled Blass "working his tail off," to no avail.

"You give an individual like that every opportunity," Virdon said. "If he goes through a period like that, you let him wait it out and try again. Steve tried everything."

Even though Blass went to the Florida Instructional League that winter, things got worse in the spring of '74. His final spring training numbers told a sordid tale: 20 innings, 22 runs, 33 walks, seven wild pitches, 10 hit batsmen.

Wrigley Field marked the site of Blass' final major-league appearance, April 17, 1974. It did not go well. In five innings of relief, the right-hander walked seven and surrendered five hits and five earned runs.

Next stop: Charleston, W. Va., home of the Charlies, the Pirates' then Triple-A farm club.

Nobody can say for sure when Blass hit bottom, but the following scene probably would suffice. Tekulve, then a prospect with the Charlies (along with a kid named Tony La Russa), describes it.

"It's hotter than (heck) in Charleston, West Virginia, in this old, small ballpark, where you had the railroad tracks behind right field and dugouts the size of little bumpers," Tekulve said. "It's July, it's 95 degrees, Steve's pitching, and it's the same thing -- all over the place.

"In the second inning, the manager takes him out, and Steve sits down. He's got the towel around his neck, dripping sweat. He's sitting in the middle of us in this little bitty dugout, his head down, none of us knowing what to say to this guy who's won a hundred big-league games.

"Well, he finally lifts his head, looks down to the left, looks down to the right, then looks up at the field and mutters the immortal words, 'Almost heaven, my (butt).' "

Another time, Blass decided to drink a bottle of wine in the afternoon and then throw batting practice - and it worked.

"I thought, 'Well, that's one solution; I could be an alcoholic pitcher,' " he said. "But I don't think that was going to work."

To hear his former teammates tell it, Blass' self-deprecating humor, his caring for others and his open heart all were attributes he retained through his ordeal and has maintained ever since.

Finally, a breakthrough

Virdon sees Blass at a Pirates fantasy camp for adults every winter at Pirate City in Bradenton, Fla.

"We would be lost if we didn't have him," Virdon says. "He keeps everyone in stitches the whole time. I don't know if they'd ever come back if he wasn't there."

Bradenton also is the place where Blass finally faced his demons, at age 58. It happened in spring training of 1999, thanks to a chance meeting with a psychologist from Taos, N.M., named Richard Crowley.

Crowley was looking for struggling pitcher Mark Wohlers when he ran into Blass.

"He said, 'What's your name?' " Blass recalled. "I said, 'Steve Blass,' and he said, 'My God, you're the one I should be talking to.' He talked a lot about replacing negatives with positives. The more I talked to him, the more positive I felt."

Crowley urged Blass to pick up a ball and face a batter, something Blass had not done since he walked away from the game in the spring of 1975 at the age of 34.

Blass accepted the challenge. He started by playing catch with fellow broadcaster Bob Walk. A few days later, as the sun rose over Bradenton early one morning, Blass stepped onto a mound for the first time in 24 years. He launched into his windup as former minor-league catcher and Pirates Triple-A manager Trent Jewett crouched behind the plate.

Nobody else was there.

"It was an honor," recalled Jewett. "I'm glad he trusted me enough to be able to go out there with him and find some things out about himself."

Blass parlayed that outing into throwing to a live batter - Crowley - a few days later. It went well. They decided the next step would be to face a particularly mouthy fantasy camp participant.

Much to his surprise, Blass couldn't sleep the night before, just like 28 years earlier as he walked the streets of Baltimore the morning of his Game 7 four-hitter.

"Here I was, 58, throwing at a fantasy camp, and I was very nervous, very apprehensive," Blass said. "Well, the first pitch I threw was all right; the second pitch was all right. Then I blew the ball by him and said, 'Let me stay out here for a while.' "

The significance of that event could not be understated. Blass felt good about throwing a baseball. He felt like a kid again. Every year since, he has fired up the arm for fantasy camp.

"That has made him as happy as anything that's happened in the past 30 years," Giusti said.

A real role model

Blass plays a lot of golf these days, dotes over his grandchildren and calls Pirates home games. He considers himself a lucky man.

"I would challenge a lot of athletes to go through what I did," he said. "It didn't destroy me."

Before we parted, it occurred to me that his saga provides an excellent example of how to deal with life's unexpected, often unexplainable hits - the ones we all take from time to time.

Heck, Blass could teach a course on the subject. He'd talk about trying everything in your power to try to rectify the situation and about accepting help if it happened to come your way.

You might not beat Steve Blass Disease, but you can learn to live with.

Consider what Blass told People magazine when it traveled to Charleston in 1974 to do a story on the pitcher who couldn't pitch anymore.

"While I am upset about my pitching, it's more important to work at being a human being," he said. "Whenever I get too worried, I remind myself that I've had a fulfilling career. And I remember what someone told me: There are about 800 million Chinese who could care less if I never get another batter out."


Joe Starkey is a sports writer for the Tribune-Review. He can be reached at jstarkey@tribweb.com.