His old bedroom is a nursery for the grandkids, the boyhood poster of the division champion St. Louis Cardinals replaced by a sign that reads “Grandma and Grandpa’s house–hugs and kisses free.”
There are still the framed photographs of him pitching for his junior college baseball team and what passes for a mini-shrine to the Buehrles’ third child in the living room with photos of him in his current White Sox uniform. But those, his dad says, probably will have to be stashed away the next time he visits so as not to embarrass him.
And, frankly, this house is not so much occupied anymore by Mark Buehrle’s parents, as they are commonly known, as it is by Paw-paw and Me-maw.
It is a home where love and faith and perspective flow equally, where one of the best left-handers in baseball is Uncle Mark, the guy on the floor playing horsy with McKenzie, Victoria and Dylan, complete with neighing noises, while everyone else is finishing up Christmas dinner.
It is in this cozy community just west of the Missouri River, which also qualifies as the second largest city in the St. Louis area, where John and Pat Buehrle raised their four children and where, for the three Buehrle boys, life consisted of Boy Scouts, Little League and church, not necessarily in that order.
It was yes sir, no sir, please and thank you.
“Even now, if one of them answers `Yeah,’ I say `What was that?’ and they say yes sir,” John laughed.
“Like most boys, they’ll put their baseball cap on when they wake up, but when you get to this dinner table, I don’t even have to say a word. One of them will have his head down, eating and they’ll just reach up and take it off. They’ll say, `I can feel you looking at me.'”
It was also the house where the neighborhood kids gathered to play football in the back yard, where boys from single-parent homes looked to John as scoutmaster, Little League coach and father figure, where Mark Buehrle grew up to become not merely one of the most gifted pitchers in baseball but a 26-year-old husband-to-be who is happiest surrounded by those he loves, preferably in the middle of the woods.
A modest proposal
It was there, on a deer stand among the 1,100 acres of property Buehrle purchased two years ago in northwest Missouri, where he asked Jamie Streck to be his wife. Well, actually what he said on bended knee was, “I love a woman in camouflage.”
And she told him, after laughing that he fulfilled her prediction and actually proposed on a deer stand, that she loved him right back. Because who else but Mark, the boy she didn’t even know back in high school because she was a way-cooler 2 years older, so thoroughly would understand true romance?
“It was completely his personality and how him and I are,” she said. “I don’t care about flashy stuff. When we hang out, we go ride four-wheelers.”
Buehrle explained that after the two picked out the ring together, he couldn’t very well have planned a weekend trip to say, Hawaii, because then she would have known something was up.
“So I put it in my pants and went out there and it was a joke but it really wasn’t,” he said. “A lot of people said, `Man, you’re a redneck for proposing in a tree stand.’ I was like, `I like to be out in the country, I like to hunt.’ If people want to say I’m a redneck, whatever, I don’t care. That’s my nature.”
Last week, he made a half-hearted attempt at going against his nature and purchased a diamond watch for himself.
“He doesn’t even want to wear it,” Streck said. “He wanted it, but now he’s like, `This is really not me,’ and it feels weird like he’s trying to be flashy.”
It is a growing paradox that as Buehrle (9-1) continues to distinguish himself– he’s among the top three in the majors in innings pitched (116), ERA (2.48), home ERA (1.75), longest winning streak (eight), winning percentage (.900) and complete games (two) after notching his ninth victory last week–he still does so in relative obscurity.
Perhaps even more impressive is that he has made 43 straight starts in which he has pitched at least six innings, the longest streak in the majors since Curt Schilling did it with Philadelphia in 1998-99.
“I think it’s about time he got a little more recognition because this isn’t the first year he has done this,” Sox pitching coach Don Cooper said. “Maybe it’s because we haven’t really won that he has been overlooked, but inside our clubhouse, he certainly isn’t.”
Not that Buehrle is complaining.
“I don’t know if a lot of people don’t believe me, but if I could somehow set something up where I could talk to the media just one day a week after I pitch, I’d love to do that,” he said almost apologetically.
“I almost try to dodge coming out here. People like [Paul] Konerko, they talk every day. I have nothing to talk about. I talk after I pitch and any time between that, I get myself in trouble if I say anything.”
Spittin’ image
Hence, the recent but already famous spitball comments, made when Buehrle was asked about another pitcher getting caught with pine tar in his glove. When Buehrle implicated an unnamed veteran pitcher “on the North Side” and reporters assumed it was Greg Maddux, the Cubs pitcher was asked about the so-called accusation.
“It wasn’t me,” Maddux cracked. “Who’s Mark Buehrle?”
Buehrle, say those who know him best, wouldn’t be malicious to a jigger in the woods, and when it comes to the media, he is more nervous than anything else.
“He did [an ESPN show] in spring training,” Streck said, “and afterward he’s like, `My body went completely numb. I couldn’t tell you one word that I said.’ He’s very, very shy when it comes to that kind of stuff.”
When he comes home in the off-season, said Steve Berra, one of his closest friends and great nephew of Hall of Famer Yogi Berra , “the Cardinals are usually still in it and we’ll go to a game and he’ll have his head down. But he’s still only recognized by the really hard-core people. It still amazes me more people don’t recognize him.”
In suburban Lemont, where he and Streck live during the season, people are starting to stare a little more, but only a little.
“When I go to the grocery store, you can see the look like, `I think that’s him but what’s he doing out here in Homer Glen?'” Buehrle said.
It would be easy to conclude Buehrle’s humility must be traced to his baseball roots, characterized most notably by his getting cut from the freshman and sophomore baseball teams at Francis Howell North High School, a clear injustice that has its head coach Bob Dunahue still sputtering.
The 5-foot-4-inch Buehrle, however, assumed he simply wasn’t good enough and quietly returned to playing summer baseball with the rest of the guys who didn’t make the team. In fact, Dunahue says, he was well aware of Buehrle’s superb control even then and was angry when he learned days later that the volunteer freshman coach had taken it upon himself to cut him.
When Buehrle was cut again the next year in an apparent administrative mistake after Dunahue said he specifically told the coach he was to make the team, Dunahue went ballistic.
Unable to put Buehrle on the team days later because he already was playing on a summer-league team, Dunahue got into an argument with the school’s assistant superintendent, who just happened to be the father of the coach who cut Buehrle.
“I fired that coach and I almost got fired because of it,” Dunahue said, pulling up a lawn chair next to the St. Charles field where he had just helped conduct a baseball clinic on a scorching hot morning last week. “I was a very unhappy camper. Now, I make all the final cuts myself. We call it the `Buehrle Rule.'”
The lesson learned, however, is not so much how never to let that happen again as how a young Mark Buehrle responded.
“To Mark’s credit,” Dunahue says, “four days before tryouts his junior year, I saw him in the hall and told him to make sure he came out and he just said, `Coach, I’m there.’ I said, `That’s good because I just want you to know shame on me for what has happened in the past.’ He just kind of smiled. God, I love him. He’s really special.”
Can’t quit
Back home, Buehrle admits he almost changed his mind.
“I pretty much gave up on high school baseball,” he said. “You figure your freshman and sophomore years are your two easiest years to make it and varsity is the hardest team to make. I was like, `I didn’t make the two easiest teams, how can I make the hardest team?,’ so I really didn’t want to go back out.”
He was in his room doing his homework, his father recalled, when he convinced him otherwise.
“He was disappointed and embarrassed,” John Buehrle said.
“Not making the team hurt but I told him, `Buddy, that’s life. Life is often disappointment and hurt, but if you take that disappointment and turn it around into something positive, you can learn from it. Your mother and I didn’t raise any quitters and we’re not starting now. It’s your decision, but if you quit now, you’ll just be quitting on yourself.'”
It also should be noted John Buehrle never did call the coach to complain.
“I wanted so badly to ask him about it, but the reason I didn’t was because I don’t know how I would’ve responded or if I would have accepted his answer and I knew Bob knew what he was doing. I trusted him,” the senior Buehrle said.
While Buehrle and his family consider Mark a late bloomer, there were signs that he had special talents. At a school carnival when he was not yet 2, the toddler amazed onlookers with his aim while throwing beanbags through cutouts on a clown poster.
“It seems to me we were asked more than once to please leave,” John Buehrle chuckles. “We’d be walking out with armloads of stuffed animals and people would look over and here’s this little dude standing there.”
With no one among John or Pat’s family considered an exceptional athlete, the question of where Mark’s skills emerged from remains a mystery. But clearly, his passion for the game had much to do with it.
“For as long as I can remember, whenever we’d go around and say what we wanted to be when we grew up, Mark would always say a baseball player,” said Jason Buehrle, Mark’s older brother by 2 years.
“You’d say, `No, seriously, what do you really want to be?’ and he’d always say `I want to play baseball.’ That was the job he wanted to do for a living and he was very serious about it.”
Like their older brother Mike, Jason Buehrle said he “kicks himself” that he didn’t go out for baseball in high school and at least give the game the same effort his little brother did.
But he relishes wearing his White Sox cap around town despite the jeers he receives from Cardinals fans, is still fiercely protective and fiercely proud of his younger brother and says matter-of-factly, “Somebody has to sit here in town and drive this concrete truck. That’s what I was meant to do and this is what Mark was meant to do.”
Scouts impressed
Yet even as a senior in high school, Buehrle was not his team’s ace. He still hadn’t topped 80 m.p.h. with his fastball and drew almost no attention from recruiters until Dunahue called his friend Dave Oster, the baseball coach at Jefferson (Junior) College in Hillsboro, Mo., and coincidentally, an associate scout for the White Sox.
“The first month or two my freshman year in college, we went to Southwest Missouri State for a little mini-tournament,” Buehrle recalled. “I threw a couple of innings and when I came out, there were a couple major-league scouts that handed me some information cards they wanted filled out with your name and number, and I almost wanted to laugh. Is this a joke? Someone is playing a joke on me, right?
“After that it kind of just turned into a couple of scouts would come to the game, then a couple more and then you’d look back there and there were a couple more. Once more and more scouts came out, it was like, `Well, I guess I have something they’re looking at because they keep coming out and taking a peek at me.'”
When he returned home for visits, people took double-takes at the kid his college teammate and one of his best friends Chris Scharnhorst said “was about half the size of everyone else.
“I would tell people back home, `You’d better watch out, Mark is really getting good’ and nobody really believed us,” Scharnhorst said. “His growth spurts were ridiculous. He just flew by me. I think he was always gifted but all of a sudden, he got the body where he could use it.”
When the White Sox selected the 6-foot-2-inch Buehrle in the 38th round after his second year at Jefferson, Dunahue recalls John and Pat Buehrle telling him they were trying to get him to sign for $56,000.
“I said that’s the biggest mistake you could make,” Dunahue said. “I said, `Ask for six figures. That’s an investment and then they have to give him a look-see.’ They called me back and said, `We got $187,000.’ I’m thinking, `Where’s my cut?'”
Buehrle signed a three-year deal for $18 million guaranteed in 2003 and almost is assured of an incentive bump from $6 million to $8 million next season. Even with an option for 2007 at $9.5 million, the big payday likely is to come.
Until recently, his expenditures have been fairly modest: a new home, the property in Missouri, a BMW last year.
“He was literally like a kid in a candy store when he got that car,” Streck said. “It wasn’t like it was no big deal. He doesn’t look at it like that.”
Buehrle has pledged money for field renovations at Jefferson College, surprised his kid sister Amy with a Nissan Altima and gave his brothers and father new four-wheelers, each time urging them outside by asking them to take out the trash.
“I’m like, `You throw a ball 90 m.p.h. and you can’t carry the pizza boxes yourself?'” Streck said. “Then I walked out and screamed and started crying, and he had the biggest smile on his face.”
Just one of the guys
When he returns to St. Charles, where he owns a modest ranch house minutes from his parents’ home, Buehrle’s first stop is to Jack-in-the-Box. Then he will hang out at his brother’s and friends’ “beer-league” softball games.
He says he has issued an official warning:
“I tell friends back home, `If I change, I want you to come up and just smack me in my head.’ I’m serious. If I start getting cocky or letting the money make me think, Oh, I’m a big leaguer, I joke around with it sometimes and we’ll say stuff playing around, but I go home and I don’t feel I should be treated special because of who I am. I go home and I’m just one of the guys hanging out.”
He is a man, more than anything, deeply committed to those he loves. Before each start, Buehrle superstitiously scratches out a cross in the dirt behind him on the mound, then tosses the resin bag squarely in the middle.
It is his way of honoring his maternal grandfather Paul Deidiker, who instilled in the Buehrle boys their love of the outdoors and died five years ago from injuries suffered in a car accident, and his Uncle Larry, who was killed when his tractor flipped over 10 years ago.
Buehrle still is shaken somewhat by the massive heart attack his father, then 51, suffered in January 2000.
“He died,” Buehrle said bluntly. “He was a flat line [twice], and they brought him back to life. It was tough going through it. We pretty much thought we lost our dad.”
John Buehrle now has a pacemaker. He retired last March after 29 years from his job as water systems manager for St. Charles–he was also a paramedic for 15 years–and now, his family says, his greatest pleasure is spending time on Mark’s property.
“We used to say, `Dad, when are you going up to the property?’ Now, it’s like `Dad, when are you coming home?’ because he’ll go up for two weeks and stay up there,” Buehrle said. “He’s cutting grass, putting up stands, a lot of stuff that doesn’t even need to be done, a lot of stuff he shouldn’t be doing. But at least we have him retired and he’s up there enjoying himself.”
The land is clearly Buehrle’s joy, as much for himself as for those close to him.
“He asked me what I wanted for Christmas last year,” Jason Buehrle said. “I told him, `You don’t need to give me anything for the rest of my life as long as I can go there and hunt.’ It’s anything I’ve ever dreamed of.”
“It’s God’s country,” their father said.
What the future holds
Buehrle pines for the day when he and Jamie, who are to be married Dec. 2, become parents and he can bring his son into the clubhouse.
“I see guys come in here with kids old enough to realize what’s going on and I want that to happen,” he said. “I want to, hopefully, have a boy and have him come in the clubhouse and shag during BP, just the stuff when he gets older that he can remember, `I was in the clubhouse with my dad.'”
He says Streck gives him a hard time about wanting a boy so badly and insists “girls are great too” and that he also wants a daughter.
“But I’ll do whatever it takes, read whatever it says you have to do, to have a boy first,” he laughed. “I, obviously, want a healthy kid, but I want to have a boy first so he can protect the younger ones.”
Amy Buehrle can attest to that. Close to all three older brothers, it was Mark, two years her senior, who always seemed to be the one to comfort her most, whether it was for a skinned knee in kickball or a family crisis.
“I remember when my mom’s grandma died, I was 5 or 6 and my mom had to go to California for the funeral,” she recalled. “I remember sitting on my dad’s lap crying because I missed my mom and my older brothers were like, `She’s coming back, get over it,’ but Mark was like, `Don’t worry, Amy, she’ll be home soon, it’s OK.'”
Years later, when John Buehrle had his heart attack and Amy called her brothers at the Pizza Hut where all four of the siblings worked, it was Mark who told her not to drive, that they would come get her. And, racing with her brothers to the hospital, it was Mark who had his arm around her in the front seat telling her they would all get through it together.
“He’s just a down-to-earth, goofy, loving brother,” Amy says. “And I wouldn’t trade him for anything.”
Cardinal sin
Buehrle set off a near-frenzy a few years ago when he joked to Tony La Russa at a banquet that he wouldn’t mind coming home to play for the Cardinals. Another interview in which he was asked to don a Cardinals hat and made to look like it was his idea did not help.
“I’ve had people on this team and other teams say `I’d think the same thing,'” Buehrle said. “If you’re from L.A. or Ohio, you grow up watching those teams and wanting to play for them, but I’m the one who came out and said it.
“I guess the way it was taken was like I hate Chicago and I want to get out. I just said if one day the White Sox don’t want me or it’s getting toward the end of my career and I have one or two years left, I’d love to come home and play for the Cardinals. And I’m still going to stick to it.
“That’s not saying I want to get out of here, it has nothing to do with that. I’m here, I’m going to honor my contract and I’ve always said hopefully I can sign another one and stay here. The White Sox gave me a chance to play professional baseball and if they’re going to give me the chance to keep on playing for this team, I’m going to stay here.
“But if it’s one of those things where if I get old, they don’t want me and kind of move me on my way and if the Cardinals want me and I get a chance, I’d love to play there.”
A keeper
And the Buehrles would love to have him, although no one on the White Sox is moving Buehrle on his way just yet.
“Sports has enough egos to fill the gossip columns,” said Sox general manager Ken Williams, who told former GM Ron Schueler he would stake his reputation on Buehrle before bringing him up from the minors after only 36 games. “It’s not often a guy remains the same. If anything, he has become more humble and more of a team guy. He’s a pleasure to be around and it’s refreshing to have a guy like that on board.”
For now, Buehrle’s relatives have to be content with visits to Chicago and watching the Sox on television.
Jason Buehrle’s daughter Victoria, who will be 2 next month, has taken to running around the house whenever there is any baseball game on television, pointing to the screen and saying “Uncle Mark.”
And if it’s really Uncle Mark?
“Then she’ll walk up to the TV,” Jason said, “and kiss him.”
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misaacson@tribune.com
