He Never Gets Wound Up Out on the Mound

The thing about Jerry Reuss as a pitcher is, you can never tell from looking at him whether he has just given up a bases-loaded home run or has struck out the side. He doesn’t look bored, exactly, just sort of bemused. As if it were happening to someone else.

The pitches are served up with the kind of deadpan detachment of a croupier at a casino, as if the outcome were of minimal concern to the player. His attitude seems to be, “You win a few, you lose a few.” He doesn’t greet success or failure with a shrug altogether, but neither does he show an excess of emotion.

He is the archetypical veteran pitcher, the kind who would be grizzled on the sports pages, if only he had graying hair.

He is tall, blond and blue-eyed, so fair as to look bleached and so slender as to look like a flagpole. In another life he might have been a Potsdamer Guard or a hussar in the Austrian cavalry. The ballplayers, in their casual cruelty, call him Q-Tip.

His pitching is methodical, mechanical and analytical, as he is, never emotional. He approaches the job of pitching the way a plumber might approach a leak. He probes for weaknesses, exploits them, solves them. It is as impersonal as fixing a sink.

He is a mechanic. His hours are 7 in the morning to 9:30 at night; his fees are reasonable, and all his work is guaranteed. Watching him pitch a game is like watching a guy make a watch. Every piece fits.

He never seems to get angry, excited or, sometimes, even particularly interested. You almost imagine him whipping out an order sheet and giving estimates. “This guy I’ll strike out. This guy will hit to short. This guy might get a single. I would estimate I can get this job done in 2 hours and 10 minutes, maximum, with no more than seven hits or two runs. Sign here.”

Nothing in baseball surprises him. He has pitched in 484 major league games, nearly 3,000 innings. He has thrown probably 30,000 pitches. He knows he is probably never going to get to the Hall of Fame, although he has outdueled some who will. He is four no-hitters behind Nolan Ryan but one no-hitter ahead of such immortals as Grover Cleveland Alexander, Lefty Grove, Mordecai Brown and Dizzy Dean, all of whom never had any.

He is the consummate professional. He gets people out--which is what pitching is all about. His 178 victories put him in an echelon of consistency not many pitchers achieve. There are pitchers at Cooperstown with fewer.

He is not only right around the plate, he is right around the clubhouse, the hotel, the dugout, the cage. No one ever had to hold any planes for Jerry Reuss. He’s never missed the national anthem or the team bus.

He gives up the ball without a fuss when he doesn’t have his stuff. For him, pitching is not so much an art as a craft. It responds to refining, to product control like any other industry.

“When I first came here (to the Dodgers), I was a high-fastball pitcher,” recounts Reuss. “I threw the ball for strikeouts. And I had a bunch of them, nearly 180 every year. Then, I noticed I also had a lot of walks, well over 100 every year.

“It was inefficient. I had seven guys standing around me with nothing to do. I was throwing 150 pitches by the seventh inning. I would get 9 strikeouts and 50 foul balls.

“I thought, ‘Hey! If I throw low fastballs, these guys are going to beat them in the ground, and everybody gets in the game. I can get out of some innings on three pitches, instead of 20.’ ”

Jerry Reuss became a full professional that day. The velocity of his pitches didn’t change, just the philosophy. A new calmness, a new confidence took over. Reuss became a dealer out on that mound. He was the house, he had the percentage. The deck was with him. Like every good gambler, he never blamed the cards, just the player.

“When you’re young, you figure nobody should hit good pitches,” he said. “When you settle down, you realize even poor hitters occasionally hit good pitches. Then, you realize the times good hitters don’t hit bad pitches, and it evens out. How many times you let go of a pitch you wish you had back, you say, ‘Oh-oh, there goes a gopher ball!’--and the hitter pops it up.

“You learn to make the hitter hit your pitch--the one he’s not looking for, the one he can’t hit. You do that, the hitter’s overmatched.”

When Jerry Reuss first came to the Dodgers, he was not the contemplative, unflappable pro he became. He used to try to blow hitters down. That’s so tough to do that his former employers, the Pittsburgh Pirates, wondered if he wouldn’t be better off in a capacity known as long relief. It is a kind of complicated rear-guard action in which you attempt to hold the line, to keep a fallback from becoming a rout and keep the game close till the real hero, the stopper, the short-relief man can take over.

It was kind of a demeaning task for a guy who had won 18 games two seasons before, but baseball is a copycat sport.

“When I told the Dodgers, ‘Hey, I’m not a relief pitcher, I’m a starter!’ they said, ‘Yeah? Well how come Pittsburgh didn’t start ya?’ ” Reuss said.

Fortunately, Reuss got his chance when the staff grew thin at an All-Star break, and the new low-ball lefty turned the league into a congress of carpetbeaters, swept to an 18-6 record, threw a no-hitter, had an earned-run average of 2.52 and finished second in the Cy Young balloting.

He was almost the key in the world championship year, 1981, outdueling Nolan Ryan, no less, to put the team into the playoffs, and Ron Guidry to put the team into world championship position.

For the Dodgers, he’s a pro’s pro. To a pitcher, he’s a pitcher. To the hitters, he’s a ground ball to third, or a low strike.

To Reuss, it’s a living.