6
During the first four years of my career I listened to everybody and anybody who had a theory on pitching and tried to do everything they told me, which was impossible and confusing. From that point forward I was determined to learn on my own by asking questions and studying. I talked to catchers and hitters I respected. I gained knowledge by watching how pitchers set up and retired certain batters by changing speeds and location. I noted batting stances and how pitchers exploited weaknesses. I discussed the science of hitting and pitching. I examined release points and how they affected break. I analyzed which pitches hitters swung at and which they laid off. I studied where they stood in the box and if they moved based on various counts.
Prime example: When I watched Mickey Mantle during batting practice I noticed, despite the great hitter he was, he had a little circular space inside and just above his hands that he would loop under the pitch with his bat. Once I started pitching him there with my fastball I had a little advantage. But if I got it out away from him or even down, forget it. I was doomed. This was different from our scouting report. Each team has a specialist who charts opposing hitters and maintains a record of pitchers faced. They also notice different speeds from opposing hitters and what the reaction was. The chart would show what the hitter did with a curveball, a changeup, or a slider. With the reports and my stuff I could get away with many areas and types of pitches others could not. Thus my strikeouts of the Mick.
I could not take advantage of everything I discovered immediately, but most importantly I was taking personal responsibility for my craft and career for the first time. Portland skipper Johnny Lipon, who later managed me in Cleveland, vowed to let me figure out my own pitch selection. I could have hugged him for that. His approach was like a breath of fresh air. He sat me down the first day and told me that he was simply going to leave me alone and allow me to take the mound every fourth day.
He indeed left me to my devices, unlike Tebbetts and the major league coaches who told me when to sneeze and cough. They had ingrained in me the notion that my stuff was so good that I could thrive throwing the ball anywhere over the plate. That is not pitching. Lipon gave me confidence by insisting that I had no control problem. He would discuss the art of pitching with me after games and suggest what I had done wrong from the viewpoint of a hitter. But he never called a pitch.
I did have a control problem psychologically before 1964. But I began learning to control my emotions, which allowed me to gain control on the mound both literally and figuratively. The results were phenomenal. I embarked on one of the greatest runs in the history of minor league baseball. My newfound knowledge bred confidence, which I learned through the study of psychology can only be achieved by accomplishing something planned and worthwhile. My anger bred determination. My talent bred dominance. I won all eight decisions with Portland and compiled a ridiculous 1.18 ERA. I struck out 102 batters in 76 innings. I threw three consecutive shutouts, including a no-hitter. And most shocking was that I walked just twenty-four—amazing indeed considering my seven-walks-per-nine-innings ratio over my first three professional seasons.
That success empowered me. After I had won my seventh straight start I received a call from Indians general manager Gabe Paul, who congratulated me and told me to hop on a plane to Los Angeles the next morning because I was to start against the Angels. I am certain he expected me to jump for joy. But instead I asked him if Tebbetts was going to continue calling my pitches when he returned (he had suffered a heart attack in early April and would not be back until July). Paul gave me the same “Don’t act like that” line he uttered when I was demoted so I told him to forget bringing me back until my freedom on the mound was guaranteed. Paul threatened again to bury me in the minors and hung up the phone.
I was not trying to be vengeful. I had learned from experience that I could succeed on my own rather than perform like a robot under the control of my manager. I was not pretending to be a know-it-all. Rather, I found some of the secrets to success and did not want to lose them all by battling Birdie. Soon I was on a plane to Hawaii for another start and another dominant victory.
That latest notch in my belt was only one ace up my sleeve. I was keenly aware that Paul could not keep me in the minors all season because under major league rules he would then make me eligible for a draft in which any team could pick me up for nothing. And considering I was still just twenty-one and finally blossoming, the chances of the Indians letting me leave were nil. Paul called again and promised that Tebbetts would no longer call my pitches. That was all I needed to hear. I was on the next flight to the nation’s capital, where the team was facing the Senators. My career was about to take off.
I arrived back in the Show white-hot and stayed that way. I beat Washington in relief, striking out six in just three-and-a-third innings, then joined the rotation. All was not perfect—my walk ratio increased as major league hitters proved more adept at laying off pitches out of the zone, and I still did not feel confident enough to challenge the best with fastballs. But the determination to succeed and the lessons learned with Portland allowed me to remain on a roll. I struck out fourteen in a complete-game victory over the White Sox in my first start back, then followed it up with a defeat of the Senators and a shutout against Kansas City. I did not win again for nearly two months but that was far more a reflection of meager run support than my effectiveness. I pitched well in 11 of the first 12 outings after my promotion, at which point I owned a 2.68 ERA and 87 strikeouts in 77 innings.
Then Birdie began to chirp again. One poor effort in Yankee Stadium against the perennial American League champions set him off. He decided in the third inning to send pitch signals to catcher Johnny Romano from the dugout. I was infuriated—again. He removed me from the game in the sixth inning then continued to call my pitches during a terrible start against Baltimore. His interference was messing with my head on the mound and negatively affecting my performance. It was a game sadly in which I had some of my best stuff ever and it was all thrown away by Tebbetts’s interference.
He was again stifling my growth. That stuck in my craw well into the 1966 season. After a start against the Orioles that year I marched to the clubhouse to complain about Tebbetts. Reporter Russell Schneider asked me later if I had demanded his ouster and I denied it. But by that time the choice was clear. Tebbetts was eventually fired, and I was told that my ultimatum played a critical role.
The difference in the Sam McDowell of 1964 was that I had matured enough to channel my anger into positive energy. I rebounded to pitch well in August and finished with a sizzling September in which I won all six decisions, including two against the Yankees during which I allowed no earned runs.
I could have taken that momentum and launched myself into a Hall of Fame career. I boasted as much pure talent as any pitcher of my generation. I had just turned twenty-two. Yeah, I still lacked control. But so did another left-hander by the name of Sandy Koufax when he was that age. Koufax did not find his groove until he was twenty-five. And walks did not preclude Nolan Ryan from skyrocketing to superstardom. He led the league eight times in that dubious department and allowed more free passes than any pitcher in baseball history, yet his bust sits proudly in Cooperstown. Ryan had the stuff to overcome base runners. So did I—and I had better control. Granted, poor run support would prevent me from maximizing my win total. But my vow to take personal responsibility for my career precluded making excuses.
Only I could stop Sam McDowell. And I did. I had already planted the seeds of personal destruction.
It was 1963. We were in Chicago and I accompanied friend and teammate Gary Bell along with Barry Latman to the Jim Diamond Steakhouse for dinner. We were celebrating a victory. Baseball players in my era and beyond embraced a drinking culture. But I had never traveled down that road until that night. Bell ordered a drink, so I ordered the same drink. He downed another one, so did I. Every time Bell called for more I did the same. I did not like the taste. It burned my throat. But Bell was a popular player, and I embraced the notion of being one of the boys. So after he left and went back to the hotel to rest, I continued down Michigan Avenue and visited all the bars on the way back to the hotel.
I enjoyed the effects of alcohol. The buzz made my happy and peaceful. The loneliness and depression that had permeated my very being since childhood dissipated. I had succeeded in my desire to feel like a normal person. I knew nothing about the chemical changes that occurred in me when alcohol reached the stomach and intestines and flowed directly into the blood system. That was an eye-opening education I received two decades later. When I drank I went from a continuing malaise to instantly feeling giddy, happy, accepted. I felt like one of the crowd. What I perceived as positive effects, of course, were merely temporary. But that only served to strengthen my desire to drink. My obsessive-compulsive personality eventually resulted in a struggle to moderate when I did partake.
The impact on my life and career was immeasurable. I did not believe at the time it adversely influenced my pitching—my 1964 epiphany was right around the corner, I would a year later embark on arguably my finest season, and I had emerged with a plan that I believed would stop drunkenness from affecting my mental state on the mound. Little did I understand at any point before I drank myself out of baseball how devastating alcoholism was to my livelihood. My roller-coaster career of dizzying heights and dismal lows had scarcely begun.
My marriage and my very life were soon to be endangered. The temporary departure of Carol motivated my suicide attempt. One can only imagine the ramifications if the Indians and the general public had learned that I had tried to take my life. The trauma of being demoted to Portland a few months later cannot compare to that of an attempted suicide but it was certainly easier to change the approach to my career than to alter my entire lifestyle, no matter how harmful. I felt occasional drunkenness would not weaken my performances on the mound as long as I was sober as I prepared for my next start and while I was pitching. There is some logic to that. Heck, Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis claimed he threw a no-hitter in 1970 while tripping on LSD (though I have my doubts, even though he reaffirmed it years later as a teammate with the Pirates, because he craved attention even more than I did). All I was doing was getting drunk on occasion several days before I took the mound.
There were exceptions but even those cemented the contention I made in my own mind that I could mix some boozing in with my career. One night while pitching for Portland in 1964 I accompanied power-hitting catcher Duke Sims (who has remained a close friend years after catching me with the Indians) on a late-night drinking binge that had me back at the hotel around 3:30 am. Not much time for sleep—I had to get up four hours later for an 11 a.m. game. As I was eating breakfast I noticed Lipon coming down the steps so I placed a newspaper in front of my face so he could not tell I had been out almost all night. The upshot is that I threw a no-hitter that day. Then I returned to the hotel, plopped into bed, and stayed there until the next morning. I slept twelve straight hours.
I never returned to the minor leagues after my breakthrough in 1964. But I also never returned to the minor leagues of drinking. By that time I had begun boozing more frequently. I had started down the path followed by all alcoholics and it would continue throughout my career, increasing the number of times I would drink and the regularity of my drunkenness. From 1964 to 1967 I drank about twice a month. I had yet to become an angry drunkard, a man who engaged in fistfights in bars and had to be bailed out of jail by his wife or employer.
Though I did not yet recognize my alcoholic personality, I was not drinking often enough or untimely enough to adversely influence my pitching physically. In fact, though I compiled a wonderful 1.81 ERA in 1968 and managed my only 20-win season in 1970, it can be argued that 1965 was my finest year. I recorded the best ERA in the American League at 2.18 and struck out 325 batters, the most in the league since Indians legend Bob Feller fanned 348 in 1946 and the second-highest total since 1904. The difference is that Feller compiled his total in 371 innings. I did it in 273, which means from a pure statistical standpoint I would have struck out 441 had I remained on the mound as long as Bullet Bob did that year. Only two American League pitchers (Nolan Ryan and Gerrit Cole) have topped 325 since. I earned the first of six All-Star Game berths and would have sported a better than 17–11 record had the offense, which was unusually strong for an Indians club of that decade, not scored only 32 runs in my combined defeats.
Hitters marveled at my stuff. I was still only twenty-two years old, and nearly the entire season I was being likened to Sandy Koufax—that both of us were southpaws strengthened the comparison. I not only boasted what has been timed as the third-fastest fastball in major league history but my newfound awareness and dedication to the science of pitching allowed me to effectively mix in my curveball, slider, and changeup. And though I still led the league in walks, my control had improved to the point to which I could locate pitches within the strike zone well enough to consistently miss bats. And now I understood the importance of placing deliveries that forced ground-ball outs or double plays instead of trying to strike out everyone.
I eventually planned what I had perceived as a clever schedule for my bouts with the booze. I would drink heavily two nights after my starts then embrace a policy of total abstinence two nights before my next one so I could most effectively prepare. I figured I was clean and unaffected. And indeed I was performing well. It was a matter of denial. My drinking and drunken behavior worsened with time as it always will do with every addict. But at this point in my career I embraced the associated emotions and feelings. It made me feel happy. I was still fifteen years away from learning how alcohol was negatively impacting my brain.
Playing major league baseball provided me with an opportunity to drink and carouse without interference from Carol, which was tremendously unfair to her. There were no cell phones back then for her to call to check up on me. I could frequent the bars after road games—traveling from city to city afforded me the chance to experience plenty of variety among the establishments I visited.
During the summer I rented a house in the eastside suburb of Cleveland Heights from a doctor. I brought my family there once Debbie (then Tim when he was old enough) were out of school. When classes were in session I stayed at a downtown hotel that gave me a special rate. That is when my carousing would start up again. It was no wonder Carol left me on about five or six occasions. What is a wonder is that she continued to come back. She did because she loved me, which is quite a testament to her given the fact she was married to a man who did not know the definition of love and was incapable of genuinely reciprocating.
In 1965 my lifestyle gave me a sense of freedom, of doing my own thing. That feeling had grown stronger on the mound as well. My epiphany in Portland in 1964 had translated well at the major league level. I was still learning the scientific approach to my craft but I was finally taking responsibility for gaining information about opposing hitters then figuring out sequencing in pitch selection and ideal location. I could not always hit my targets, hence the bouts with wildness that plagued me more during some games and seasons than others. But I boasted the pure velocity on my fastball and movement on my breaking pitches to usually survive imperfect location. It was eye-opening for me to try to place a fastball in a certain spot and actually succeed.
My negative personality traits still prevented me from gaining a sense of joy in my achievements. I would never throughout my career embrace a strong belief in myself. But I was no longer handicapped by just raring back and firing my fastball or curve without any focus. My improved confidence and performance would continue throughout the 1960s and 1970. Thereafter my drinking problem became so pronounced that it affected my concentration, leading to an explosion in my walk totals and destroying my effectiveness.
Not until well after retirement and recovery in the 1980s could I take pride in or feel any satisfaction with my baseball accomplishments. Among the most memorable was my first All-Star Game appearance in 1965. I anticipated giving way to veterans and watching from the bullpen, so it came as a surprise when I was summoned into the game and pitched two innings. I took the loss but performed well. I even struck out Pete Rose and Frank Robinson (both of whom would be in the Hall of Fame had the former not gambled his certain inclusion away) and retired Pittsburgh hometown hero Roberto Clemente on a groundout.
Whether it was All-Star Game competition during which I called my own pitches or regular season battles when managers continued through 1967 to dictate my selections from the dugout, my stuff and location were challenged by the greatest hitters in the world. One mistake against sluggers such as Roger Maris, Al Kaline, Harmon Killebrew, Boog Powell, or Frank Howard and any pitcher was watching his offering sail into the bleachers.
Perhaps the most feared slugger in the American League during his day was Mickey Mantle. I barely knew who he was as an amateur player despite his superstardom as I did not follow professional baseball. He became my hero after I watched him perform with the perennially pennant-winning Yankees and learned about his greatness as a hitter during my early days as a major leaguer. So you can imagine how a man who lived for challenges felt facing Mantle when he stepped into the batter’s box.
Perhaps the most memorable showdown in my career occurred on July 24, 1965. It was a Saturday afternoon at Cleveland Stadium. A rare throng of nearly fifty thousand filled the stands. And I fanned Mantle three times in a 3–0 complete-game victory. I boasted serious heat that day—one of those strikeouts of the Mick was on four straight fastballs. I understood from studying Mantle that my most effective approach was pitching him up and in. That is where I fired my heaters and he swung underneath them. Ah, the science of pitching! Two years earlier he might have sent one of my offerings to the moon. But now I was a pitcher, not a thrower.
The next day Mantle gave me the ultimate compliment as an insult. By this time in my career I had begun to collect autographs of all the great players and I certainly yearned for that of Mickey. I asked their clubhouse manager if Mantle would autograph a photo for me. He certainly did not have a short memory. He penned the words, “Fuck you, SOB… Mickey Mantle.” My teammates got quite a kick out of it when I showed it to them. Pissing off Mantle was indeed quite flattering.
Little could anyone outside the sport have imagined that Mantle and I had more in common than baseball. His alcoholism was far more pronounced at that time in our careers than mine. And he never fully recovered. It destroyed him physically and eventually played a role in his early demise. He came to terms with it too late to save his life. The same almost happened to me. I am alive now because I finally arrested the disease—there is no cure.
It had just begun to take hold in 1965. In many ways that season set the tone for the rest of my career both personally and professionally. It was my first full year in the major leagues so it launched a lifestyle that became consistently more dangerous to me and my marriage as time marched on. It also contributed to a pattern of inconsistency as a pitcher that plagued me until I retired, more so in some years than others and certainly becoming far more pronounced as my alcoholic escapades became more frequent.
Run support—or generally the lack thereof from the Indians in the 1960s—greatly impacted my win-loss record and prevented me from winning twenty games in any season before 1970. Heck, I sported a 1.81 earned run average in 1968 yet compiled a 15–14 mark. But I sometimes crafted mediocre outings. I mostly dominated, but when I struggled I could not recover because my problems on the mound mostly affected my control and no pitcher is long for any game in which he walks batter after batter.
I began the 1965 season on a downer mostly because I took for granted that all would continue from the previous year. I was able to recognize my mental laziness and get myself back into form. I finished my first three starts with a 9.00 ERA and 11 walks in 14 innings. The eventual American League champion Twins knocked me out in the first inning. Then I found my groove and stayed in it. I did not allow more than three earned runs in any of my twenty-two outings from mid-May to early August and struck out at least ten batters in 10 of 19 starts during that stretch. My control deserted me in late summer, leading to a rise in my loss total and ERA but I finished strong.
The frequency of my struggles rose over the next two seasons and coincided with the growing number of philosophical clashes I had with Indians manager Birdie Tebbetts, who continued to insist on calling my pitches. I did not reach my peak as a pitcher until Alvin Dark arrived and allowed me to control my own destiny on the mound in 1968. One can only imagine what a still-young and sober Sam would have achieved in the years to come.