It’s No Break for Baseball Families in Spring Training

Under a bright afternoon sun, California Angels pitcher Ken Forsch walked across the well-kept grass toward one of the swimming pools at the 1,120-acre Mission Hills Country Club.

The trim 6-foot-4 pitcher had just finished a spring-training workout in nearby Palm Springs and had driven with teammate Geoff Zahn to the condominiums their families are renting while the Angels train for the coming baseball season. Forsch found his wife, Jonnye, and Peggi Zahn reclining on chairs beside the pool beneath the rugged Santa Rosa Mountains. He asked Peggi Zahn if she had decided to keep the injured cat she had found on a road a week earlier.

Mildly Allergic

When Peggi Zahn said yes, Forsch told her that on the way home, Geoff Zahn, who is mildly allergic to cats, had said jokingly that he was going to tape the cat to the ceiling.

Laughter.

Then Forsch said he had suggested a name for the cat, which had stayed at a veterinary clinic for a week. “Bucks,” he said, referring to the size of the veterinarian’s bill.

More laughter.

“Geoff suggested another name,” Forsch reported, “but you can’t call it out late at night in the neighborhood.”

Laughter again.

Laughter comes easily to families of established players during spring training, even if, like Forsch, 38, they missed most of last season with a dislocated shoulder and have suffered twinges of pain in their pitching elbow this spring.

With his team’s season opener only eight nights away, Forsch’s shoulder is strong, his elbow seems to be healing and his spot with the Angels appears secure.

After a 14-year major league career he has also built financial security, and he and Zahn, a 10-year veteran, can afford to rent extremely comfortable spring-training accommodations for their families.

The Forsches’ condominium, for example, has two bedrooms and is brightly illuminated by a skylight in a cathedral ceiling.

Fireplaces heat the master bedroom and living room, and in the living room a mauve sofa, love seat and chair are grouped around a coffee table of the same color.

Two eight-pound weights lie on the living room rug, and a shelf beneath the television equipment contains cassettes of John Wayne in “Big Jake,” Gary Cooper in “The Westerner” and Errol Flynn in “Dodge City,” some of the Westerns that Ken Forsch loves.

Two Golf Courses

The Country Club’s 749 other condominiums are similarly designed. Priced from $211,500 to $372,500, they are surrounded by neatly trimmed grass and trees and two 18-hole golf courses.

The busy shopping centers, restaurants and movies of downtown Palm Springs are just a few minutes away.

“It’s a relaxed atmosphere for us,” Peggi Zahn, 36, said at poolside. “This is sort of a last respite before it all begins.

“You get excited about the season. You’re glad to get under way. But once it gets going, there’s that intensity. There’s that feeling that this is business. Fun and games are over.

“You’ve got to go out and do the job, and there’s always the fear of injury like the horrible thing that Ken went through last year.”

Not that life for a player’s wife is one big siesta in the sun.

Jonnye Forsch recalls that two years after her husband was traded from the Houston Astros to California, she sat down on the couch in her Anaheim Hills living room and could barely get up for three months.

“My little girl had to make her own breakfast,” she said. “If I could get in the car and go down to the store I had a great day. I sat on the couch, and I hurt.”

Jonnye Forsch, 39, who grew up in Austin, Tex., and spent 10 years in Houston when Forsch pitched for the Astros, said she suffered from severe depression after her move to California in 1981.

It took more than a year of counseling to overcome a disruption of life style and the loss of contact with family and friends.

“I left a network of loving relationships where I felt comfortable, and I didn’t have it out here. . . . So I just went under.”

Relationships were so important to Jonnye Forsch that when she saw Richard Nixon in Angels owner Gene Autry’s box during the 1979 American League playoffs, she decided that Autry must be a kind man.

Nixon “was getting a deluge of (negative) reaction to what he had done (during Watergate),” she said, and when the Astros prepared to trade her husband to San Francisco or California, she told him to go to California.

Forsch said he chose the Angels because they offered an extended contract and San Francisco didn’t.

When he arrived in Anaheim, he became close friends with Zahn, a pitcher of the same age who was also joining the Angels for the first time after becoming a free agent at Minnesota.

The Forsches and the Zahns bought homes close to each other in the Anaheim Hills and have rented condominiums near each other the last three springs.

The luxury of a spring-training condominium was only a dream when Forsch and Zahn first reached the major leagues and earned minimum salaries in the early 1970s.

“You went for economy in those days,” Jonnye Forsch said. Nice accommodations and fine dining are easier now, but there is still work involved in spring training. Both wives are pampering their husbands so that they can concentrate on baseball.

Jonnye Forsch said that she prefers to eat out, but that her husband, who travels several months a year, likes to eat at home.

“I’m being real nice to Ken because he’s had such a hard time (with his injury in 1984),” she said recently while molding hamburgers for a barbecue.

She also cares for their daughter Stephanie, 11, whose year-around school is on a three-week holiday, just as Peggi Zahn looks after 5-year-old daughter Matti, who won’t attend school until September.

Many wives, especially the mates of younger players, attend most of the team’s games during spring. Jonnye Forsch goes to two or three and a comparatively small number during the season.

“Maybe it’s because I’m married to a pitcher,” she said. “He only appears every five days. . . .

“We go (are busy) all day. I have a house to run. I have a little girl to take care of. I have animals. I have a husband. We have a lot of out-of-town company.

“And then you start all over again and go to the ball game at night. And I just found from experience that I don’t have the energy. . . .

“I think baseball’s wonderful. I love the popcorn and the hot dogs and the fans. I get a little bored with it about the seventh inning. I think nine innings is a little long.”