I’m the pitching coach in Triple A for the Houston Astros.
When I got let go? (1) It’s like anything else. We thought we were doing a good job, but we weren’t winning the way our owner felt we should be, so he decided to make a change in the middle of the year.
I was pulling for the Astros. (2) A lot of those guys, I had coached already. I was hoping they would do real well.
I take pride in everybody I coach, regardless of how far they go.
What I tell everybody is all you can do is become the best you can become, and for most of them it’s not going to be good enough to be in the big leagues. Being good enough to pitch in the big leagues on a regular and consistent basis is a pretty special deal.
If you look in the Hall of Fame, the best pitchers lost over 40 percent of their games.
I’m not a big fan of radar guns, other than if it’s for my information. I think kids grow up in the era of trying to throw harder and harder rather than learning how to pitch. In my era and others before that, when kids grew up, all you’d concentrate on was getting people out the best way you knew how. That’s more a way of learning how to play the game rather than just thinking you’re going to blow fastballs by everybody. I’ve seen major-league hitters who can hit a 100-m.p.h. fastball, so what do you do then?
When I first walked into the Cubs’clubhouse in 1971, Ernie Banks walks in and Ron Santo, Beckert and Billy Williams and Hundley and all those guys, Fergie Jenkins — guys I’ve been watching the previous seven or eight years. Then all of a sudden I’m here playing with them.
When it’s only your fourth game in the big leagues and you do something like that, (3) it was something special and something unbelievable and you have to pinch yourself and think, “Did I really just do that?”
It was a knuckle-curveball. It was just a different way of throwing a curveball. I was trying to throw a knuckleball when I was 14 after watching Hoyt Wilhelm pitch on TV. Never could. Without benefit of having anyone show me, common sense tells you that to throw a knuckleball, you put your knuckles down on the ball. Then I heard him say, “Then push it out.” So, when I put my knuckles down on the ball and pushed it out and threw it, it had a forward rotation on it. The more I threw it, the better I got with it, and the rest is history.
You actually put your fingertips on the seams when you throw a knuckleball.
The things I remember over the 3 1/2 years I was there (4) were the three manager changes, the four pitching coach changes. I was still a young kid, trying to do my best. It was a little bit chaotic, I thought.
When I played in the early ’70s, you’d have games in August or early September where there might be 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 people in the stands. You don’t have those games anymore. Looks to me like pretty much every game is sold out.
A bittersweet year was 1981, when we won the World Series. (5) But that was also the year when we had had that 51-day, 52-day strike, which kind of tainted it a little bit. It was the year of Fernando. (6) Everybody remembers Fernando starting the year 8-0, but nobody remembers me starting the season 7-0.
I got it (7) from Tommy Lasorda — after I left Chicago — in the Dominican Republic on New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Eve is not one of my favorite holidays. I’m pretty laid-back anyway, and we’re in his apartment in Santo Domingo, and he’d had a bunch of us American ballplayers over for dinner and just to get together on New Year’s Eve. When the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, everybody else started jumping up and down and I’m sitting there playing solitaire, and he looked at me and said, “Well, ain’t he happy.” From that moment forward, that’s what he started calling me.
When you’re 55 years old, you’ve learned a lot. I don’t know if there’s any one piece of advice. Do the best you can.
(1)-By the Astros in 2004.
(2)-In the World Series against the White Sox.
(3)-Throw a no-hitter for the Cubs in 1971.
(4)-With the Cubs.
(5)-When the Dodgers beat the Yankees.
(6)-Dodgers rookie pitching star Fernando Valenzuela.
(7)-His nickname “Happy.”
