10
That loss to the Orioles to end the 1971 season would be my last game in a Cleveland uniform. Paul had grown weary of and frustrated with my drunken escapades and bailing me out of jail. If he had revealed that I continued to suffer from shoulder issues, he would certainly not exact a great return for a pitcher perceived as injured property. So he kept it a secret to potential trade partners. League rules stated explicitly that one team could not trade damaged goods to another unless it put into writing an acceptance of liability. I learned later that the Giants knew nothing of my injury.
By the end of that tumultuous year I was simply happy to get away from Paul. I also felt driven to gain a better understanding beyond my shoulder problems of why I struggled so mightily on the mound that season. Moreover I knew something else was wrong with me. So I delved deeper into my coursework in psychology, looking for answers that did not exist because my coursework did not address addiction. I remained years away from the realization that I was indeed an addict and that what I suffered from was a disease.
Sports psychology had aided me in building confidence in my pitching. It had the potential to bolster my levels of accountability and responsibility but my drinking thwarted that opportunity while ruining my health. Much of my motivation was to gain attention. And when I arrived in San Francisco I had a new group of teammates to try to impress. So rather than focus solely on making an impression through my pitching, I sought to do so with inebriated antics. I recall one incident with my teammates in a San Diego bar that featured a swimming pool behind glass. Pretty “mermaids” were splashing around in the pool. I was already smashed from drinking on the plane from Los Angeles so I jumped in and began swimming with the young ladies. My fellow players got quite a kick out of my exploits. I had captured their attention. Mission accomplished. My drinking was only controlled enough to keep me sober on the mound. Other than that, I was unrestrained.
A surface view indicated I remained valuable. I was a six-time All-Star. I had just turned twenty-eight years old. I was still among the hardest throwers in baseball. My poor 1971 season could be chalked up to various legitimate frustrations, such as being victimized by the team in contract dealings and an annual lack of run support. What other organizations did not realize during an era in which they could more easily hide player issues was that I was quickly deteriorating into the worst drunkard in the sport. Paul knew it. He was not about to reveal that reality in trade talks. Paul could not have swindled San Francisco general manager Horace Stoneham out of soon-to-be Cy Young Award winner Gaylord Perry and viable starting shortstop Frank Duffy by blurting out, “Oh, by the way, McDowell is a boozer prone to barroom brawling.”
Perhaps I should have known a trade was coming but I had no idea until San Francisco manager Charlie Fox, with whom I had gained a friendship during spring trainings in Arizona, called to inform me. I was happy to get away from Paul and I understood that the Giants organization had a fine reputation, but though I was not at this point in my life thinking through many things, it did occur to me that being so distant from my family had its drawbacks. If I had really given it significant consideration I might have recognized that I needed to dramatically alter my lifestyle. What happened instead would send my career and marriage spiraling out of control.
And what I claimed publicly after the trade can be summed up in five words: me and my big mouth. I had no genuine reaction to the deal that sent me from Cleveland to San Francisco—my personality disorders prevented me from experiencing genuine feelings about anything practical. So instead of simply telling the media I would work to perform my best with the Giants, I allowed my uncontrolled yap to claim that I was thrilled with the move and that I was going to take them to the pennant. Given my mental and physical condition at the time, that was a boast I could not back up. My emotions affected me as well. I was devastated by the trade. I loved Cleveland and hated Paul the way a petulant child might hate a parent who punishes him.
I was justified in expecting much more run support from my new team. But that proved to be true only because the 1972 Indians remained one of the weakest hitting clubs in baseball. The once-explosive Giants had faded. The immortal Willie Mays was on his last legs and Hall of Fame slugger Willie McCovey was also aging, resulting in offense mediocrity.
Not that it would have mattered. The out-of-control Sam McDowell of 1972 could not lead any team to a pennant. There had been some doubt the previous year about whether my alcoholism adversely influenced my performance but all doubt was quickly removed soon after my arrival in San Francisco. Alcoholism reared its ugly head even before my first spring training with the Giants. I was scheduled to arrive in Arizona a month early to act in a commercial, a commitment that promised me a new car. I showed up on the set drunk and got arrested then received the star treatment from the police, who let me go. I got plastered and arrested a couple months later during spring training.
Fear also played a role in my disintegration from All-Star to struggling starter. I was scared to death from the moment the trade was announced. The Giants viewed me as a savior. They could not have predicted the depths to which I had fallen. They only knew me from spring-training games and All-Star competitions when I was at my peak. The 1–2 pitching punch of Gaylord Perry and Juan Marichal had been among the best in the sport. Now Perry was gone and Marichal had begun sliding ineffectively toward the end of his career. I was pegged as the ace of the staff. The pressure on an alcoholic such as me was unbelievable and I was in no condition to rise to the occasion. I proved to be the least-reliable performer in the starting rotation.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I was getting smashed every night in San Francisco. But both my drinking and drunkenness escalated significantly. I was becoming inebriated most of the time I drank. The effects proved far more damaging to my effectiveness on the mound than it had in the past. It exacerbated my fears, self-doubt, and defensiveness. Pitchers must perform confidently, intelligently, aggressively. I was not drunk on the mound but my alcoholic lifestyle prevented me from achieving the level of focus necessary to succeed consistently.
Not that I bombed out immediately either. But even during spring training I noticed a higher degree of pain in my shoulder. I felt it every day. Often after a few weeks any discomfort that I had not worked out over the winter dissipated. Not in 1972. Moreover, that was the year of the first player strike that launched an era of battles between players and owners that lasted nearly a quarter-century. We found an amateur field to work out on during the work stoppage, which lasted about a week into the regular season. But there was no organization, no management, no trainers. I threw batting practice and did my running but there was no calisthenics, stretching, or any routine that pitchers ritualistically practice preparing for the year.
One incident from the strike remains vivid in my memory. All the players who neither lived in San Francisco nor had been joined by their families stayed in a motel south of Candlestick Park. One day we all drove over to the stadium to pick up our equipment but it was locked up. Suddenly we noticed Mays breaking the window of a door to get into the locker room for his stuff. Little did he know that someone had seen him and called the police. But the moment the police arrived to see the great Willie Mays, they left.
Despite the pain I launched my National League stint by winning my first five decisions. Granted, my strikeout totals were down and I was not exactly knocking off the beasts of the world—four of the victims were lowly San Diego, Philadelphia (twice), and Montreal. But I had walked just 15 batters in 52 innings and lowered my earned run average to 2.57 on May 10. And I was overcoming an issue that I had feared would affect me in home games: frigid temperatures and winds. It was so darn cold at Candlestick. I do not recall any game for which I did not wear long underwear even in the middle of the summer but especially at night.
By mid-May I had begun to collapse. A disturbing trend developed. The same Sam McDowell who twice allowed the fewest hits per inning in the American League was now allowing nearly one hit per inning and striking out significantly fewer hitters. I was no longer missing bats or inducing weak contact. Over the next two months I compiled a 3–7 record and 5.52 ERA, numbers that I had not been plagued with since I was twenty-year-old in 1963 and had not yet learned how to pitch.
I knew how to pitch in 1972 but internal and external forces were preventing me from turning that knowledge into an advantage. I could use my lack of familiarity with National League hitters as an excuse but that would be a lie. Had I been in a better place mentally and emotionally I could have more effectively learned their weaknesses. Rather than pitching aggressively and confidently, I was on the defensive. My physical state also played a role. My shoulder injury began to flare up again. It worsened a bit with each outing. It was causing significant pain by the second month of the season.
That became such a problem that Fox began stretching out my starts to give me an extra day or two off. I could sometimes pitch about seven effective innings in that scenario. I even finished the year with back-to-back wins. But the Sam McDowell who averaged more than thirteen complete games a year from 1964 to 1970 managed just four in 1972 and none after June 14.
Indeed, the struggles were not all my fault. The shoulder ailment that I had hoped would fully heal during the offseason began to throb again, leading to an addiction to pain pills. And the injury, of course, took a toll on my stuff. I was throwing neither as hard nor with as much bite on my curve or slider. Five consecutive poor starts in late June and July that resulted in three losses and two no-decisions with which my walk totals began to rise proved to be the last straw. I was placed on the disabled list and remained there for nearly seven weeks. I pitched better upon my return but to this day I consider my first season in San Francisco a waste. It would become the defining reality of the rest of my career.
Fox suspected by then the Indians had traded him damaged goods—not because of my drinking but rather my shoulder. But if he did not fully understand that my problems extended beyond the mound, he certainly did when a drunken Sam was arrested at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport early in spring training the following year and charged with public intoxication. When I was pinched the cops also confiscated a bottle of pain pills they found in my possession. The police report stated I was being combative, using vulgar language, and refusing to cooperate when it was requested that I call a friend to take me home.
All true. I have been asked by those who do not understand the various stages and intricacies of alcoholism why mine often resulted in belligerent behavior and barroom brawls. What I did not know at the time but learned during my recovery is that an alcoholic or drug addict will go through different phases depending on the part of the brain most affected by the substance. Among those phases are sadness, silence, euphoria, sleepiness, anger, and feelings of being in love with any skirt in the bar. There are four levels of drunkenness before death. The first two are an attempt to remain fully functional and unnoticed. In the last two stages, the addict cannot control his or her inebriation level or conduct. There is at that point no predicting what kind of behavior will be exhibited at any time in the addict’s drunken state. I lived through all the phases of intoxication and behavior. I was not always an angry drunk who acted out on that rage. But as my alcoholism became more pronounced and I became less able to control my behavior, the number of violent incidents increased.
The Giants regretted trading for me. Fox knew that Perry had won the Cy Young Award with Cleveland. The media and fans were criticizing the organization for making the deal. San Francisco had descended from Western Division champion in 1971 to a team with one of the worst records in the National League. I could not accept all the blame. Several other players, including Bobby Bonds and Marichal after Mays was traded to the Mets, did not perform as well as they had in the past. But Fox became alarmed upon learning of my arrest in Phoenix and my abuse of painkillers. He asked me privately about the latter and I replied that the shoulder injury and resulting pain necessitated the pill consumption.
All anyone could do at that point was hope for a better 1973 season. But I knew how it felt when my shoulder and arm were fine. I remembered vividly the feeling I had when I was comfortable challenging hitters. But that physical sensation and mindset on the mound had disappeared, never to return.
Fat chance I was going to rebound to any semblance of my peak. I was a mess and not just as a pitcher. Anyone who thinks living in a city such as San Francisco lured me into more deviant behavior has another thing coming. It would not have mattered where I played. My family could not join me until the kids were out of school and then they returned home a couple of months later, which left me to my own devices on the road and back in San Francisco.
Perhaps the primary reason the Giants were willing to trade Perry for me was the age difference. General manager Horace Stoneham made that claim to the media after concluding the deal. After all, I was four years younger. But there is chronological age and body age. I recall Paul defending the swap, claiming that the addition of shortstop Frank Duffy along with Perry put it over the top. It was also suggested that Perry had a younger body than mine and that his career would outlast mine. I might have resented such a comparison at the time but it proved accurate. Perry won a Cy Young Award with San Diego in 1978 and was still pitching in 1983, eight years after I had put the finishing touches on the destruction of my career.
It nearly ended two years earlier. Persistent neck and arm pain, possibly exacerbated by a change in my delivery due to the shoulder injury, motivated me to contemplate retirement in spring training 1973. Isometric exercises suggested by a doctor improved my condition enough to keep me active. But Fox had lost faith in me as a starter and moved me to the bullpen. That new role and old emotional problems combined to worsen my already lousy control. I pitched decently in spot starts but could not find the plate in relief. I walked nearly a batter per inning early in the year and again got battered when I did throw strikes. The result was a 9.00 ERA after five outings.
I found my groove in May and even earned a couple saves but the Giants had not intentionally dealt for an ailing, deteriorating, inconsistent reliever. They had traded for what they’d hoped would be a stud starter and those hopes had been dashed. So in June they sent me packing to the Big Apple. They could not even exact a player from the Yankees. All they could get for me was $50,000 in a straight cash deal.
Purchase a narcissistic alcoholic with a penchant for carousing in bars to play in the city that never sleeps? And in the midst of a pennant race? Not the perfect plan. The Yankees were finally realistically seeking their first American League or division title in nine years. And they needed to bolster their starting pitching. I was fine with returning to a rotation but in no condition to fulfill their needs for a long period. My promising start in pinstripes did not last long.