6-4, 230-Pound Bob James : A Heavy-Handed Ace in Chicago’s Bullpen

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a major league manager. The opponent has loaded the bases with two outs in the ninth inning and you have the luxury of summoning any reliever in baseball to protect a one-run lead.

Who would you select? Sutter? Quisenberry? Gossage? Moore?

How about Bob James?

You don’t know who Bob James is? Don’t worry. You will. Perhaps by the All-Star Game--if there is one.

American League teams already know enough about the hard-throwing right-hander with the scraggly beard to know they don’t like to see him on the mound. He is the White Sox’s No. 1 reliever and one of the primary reasons they are leading the West Division.

“Saying that you’re the No. 1 reliever is deceiving, because all the guys contribute,” James said last week at Anaheim Stadium. “I just happen to be the guy who gets the ball at the end of the game.”

Heleads the league with 16 saves--one fewer than his previous seven years combined. He has yielded only two earned runs in his last 24 innings and preserved six of the eight victories on Chicago’s last trip. In his last 12 appearances, he has recorded nine saves and two victories to help the White Sox take a 1 1/2-game lead over the California Angels.

“His composure is ice water out there and that’s what you want,” said Hall of Famer Don Drysdale, who does TV play by play for the White Sox and the ABC network. “What he’s done for the White Sox is like what Donnie Moore has done for the Angels. They have a guy down in the bullpen now who they haven’t had for quite a few years. . .a stopper. Without James, I don’t know where they would be.”

Said White Sox Manager Tony La Russa: “We’ve had a decent bullpen since I’ve been here. But, with Bob, our bullpen can compare with anybody’s in the league.”

A year ago, the Sox dropped to fifth place in the West after winning the division in 1983. They finished 14 games under .500 and 10 games out of first place. Veteran Ron Reed led the bullpen staff with 12 of a meager 32 saves.

Tom Seaver was deprived of six extra victories in 1984--and would have been a 300-game winner already--had the bullpen done its job in games Seaver left with the Sox ahead. This season, however, five of Seaver’s seven wins have been preserved by James, a hulking 6-4, 230-pounder who Chicago obtained from the Montreal Expos.

“To me, he’s been the main difference in our ballclub,” Seaver said last Friday night after James had saved Seaver’s 295th career victory. “He has the No. 1 attribute that a pitcher has to have, which is aggressiveness--especially out of the bullpen. He’s been terrific all year long.”

Except for last Tuesday night at Comiskey Park, when James entered a 3-1 game and issued a game-tying home run. Though the White Sox went on to win in 13 innings, it was the first time in 26 appearances that James had not finished the game.

“As much as James has picked us up this season, it was nice to pick him up,” La Russa said.

This is the first genuine opportunity James has had to become the mainstay of a big-league bullpen, after bouncing between Montreal, Detroit and the minors from 1978 to 1983. He spent his first full season in the majors last year with the Expos, who utilized him as a short reliever, the guy who usually set up relief specialist Jeff Reardon for the kill.

“I felt that I was being primed for a short relief job and, the way it turned out, the Expos did the right thing,” said James, who trails only Reardon in saves this season. “They gave me a lot of save opportunities to show the scouts that I could come in and close out a game.”

His work impressed two special-assignment scouts from the White Sox, Fred Shaffer and Jerry Krause, who passed the word to the White Sox brass. It wasn’t long before James was pitching in Comiskey Park, with a firm commitment from La Russa.

“It was a great opportunity for him,” said the manager, who phoned James a couple of weeks after the Dec. 7 trade to welcome him and spell out his responsibilities. “Here he was going to get the No. 1 shot and he was going to be on a ballclub that was going to be ahead enough for him to make hay.”

James, whose fastball has been clocked in the mid-90s, has stranded 15 of the 20 baserunners he has inherited this season. He is 3-2 with an earned run average of 2.12, has struck out 44 in 46 innings and has yielded three home runs.

Barring a players’ strike, he is on a pace that would shatter a club-record 30 saves by Ed Farmer in 1980. By the time he returned from Anaheim Stadium to Chicago on Monday, he had cemented his status as the White Sox’s bullpen ace.

“I’m as secure as I’ve ever been,” said James, 26, who contemplated quitting a couple of years ago at age 24 because his pro career hadn’t been progressing as quickly as he had hoped. “You can’t help but be secure. If Tony keeps giving me the ball and I keep throwing the ball over the plate, the saves are going to be there and everything is going to work out great.”

James, who has started only two major league games, was a catcher at Verdugo Hills until Coach Frank Ornelas converted him to a pitcher in his junior year. The following season, he threw two no-hitters.

Verdugo Hills was challenging for the East Valley League title in 1976 when a bout with chicken pox forced James to miss three starts. He contracted the disease from Wick’s younger brother, Dave. In the long run, it cost them the championship. They finished second in the league, a half-game behind Poly High.

“I should have realized that I’d never had them,” he said with a sheepish grin. “But I ended up going in the house and, sure enough, three days later, I broke out. I didn’t think I was going to get that sick from it.”

James eventually recovered to finish his senior year with a 7-3 record, 96 strikeouts in 57 innings and a 1.67 ERA. He pitched the Dons to a 7-0 playoff victory over El Camino Real in his last prep appearance and then he heard some startling news during the week of graduation rehearsal: He had been drafted.

“I was at my friend’s house swimming when I heard it,” recalled James. “We had the radio on and they went through it real fast. They said: ‘BobJamesdraftedNo.1byMontreal.’ I ran around going, ‘What’d he just say?’ ”

James had heard right. The Expos had selected him ninth overall, but they used him sparingly. They traded him to Detroit in 1982 for a player to be named, partly because James was slowed by a 1981 operation of the ulnar nerve in his pitching arm.

Almost immediately, Anderson ordered him to change his repertoire after a game at Yankee Stadium. James was handed the ball with a 7-5 lead, but Bobby Murcer hit a changeup off the end of the bat and the ball just cleared the short porch in right field for a home run.

From that point, Anderson apparently felt James needed to try something else to get hitters out.

“What he didn’t realize was that I pitched 2 innings, struck out five guys and that was the only hit I’d given up,” James said. “It could have just as easily been a ground ball or a strikeout to Murcer.”

Two days before a game in Boston, James said, Anderson told him to “lose” his changeup and start throwing screwballs. James had been using a screwball on the sidelines just to get his arm loose, and pitching coach Roger Craig thought he had a decent one.

“The next thing I know, they had me out on the mound trying to throw it,” James complained. “I thought that I was over the hump as far as learning how to pitch, and then the guy tells me to take away one of my most integral pitches and come up with another one.

“When a guy throws as hard as I do and Sparky Anderson’s got me out there trying to throw a screwball, that’s just ridiculous,” he added. “I’m the type of pitcher who’s not going to fool anybody. I’m going out there trying to blow people away. He was desperately trying to make me something I wasn’t, but I couldn’t say anything about it.”

Anderson, the only manager in history to win 100 or more games in a season in both leagues and the only one to win a World Series in both leagues, said by phone from Detroit that he doesn’t remember ever telling James to throw the screwball and junk the curve.

“I don’t even get involved with the pitchers,” he said. “My pitching coaches always handled all that. I’m sorry I didn’t teach him a good screwball.”

James could have reminded Anderson that his pitching coach, who came up with the screwball idea, had lost 24 games in 1962 and 22 games in 1963 for the original New York Mets.

“That was a fact that I didn’t know then,” James said, laughing, “but I wish I had.”

In that Boston game, he came in to face Rich Gedman. Catcher Lance Parrish wiggled his index finger to signal changeup. James remembered Anderson’s orders and shook Parrish off. Again he got the sign and again shook it off. Parrish repeated the sign, motioning toward the dugout that Anderson had called the pitch. Two changeups later Gedman was retired.

“He had my head so screwed up, I didn’t know what he wanted me to do,” James said of Anderson. “He told me to quit throwing my curve ball, which has become my big-out pitch this year. He wanted me to throw a straight fastball and a cut fastball and not really change speeds. I could throw strikes, but I had two pitches that were the same speed and they were getting hit.”

After only 12 appearances with the Tigers in 1982 and four in 1983, including a game against the Angels in which he allowed a grand slam by Daryl Sconiers and a home run by Doug DeCinces on consecutive pitches, he returned to Montreal--as the player to be named later in the original 1982 trade from Montreal to Detroit.

“I would like to have been able to fool longer with him, but at the time we were going bad,” Anderson pointed out. “We had him and (Juan) Berenguer, two young guys that were both wild, and we just had to have somebody who was further along. We would have liked to have him longer with us. There’s no question about his talent. Bob James could help any team.”

Reflecting back on Detroit, James said: “It’s too easy to make it sound like sour grapes, but Sparky was trying desperately to make a winner. They needed a stopper and they tried to make me that. But they were going about it the wrong way.”

The Expos put him back in Triple-A with Wichita before recalling him in July 1983, and the following season, he cooled his spikes in the Olympic Stadium bullpen as Reardon again piled up the important numbers.

“Being a setup man is a thankless job,” James said, “because you go out there in the same situation as a short reliever will, but you don’t get any of the credit.”

Now that the White Sox have given him the ball when it counts, he is making the most of his opportunity. And six seasons of utter frustration is being unleashed on the rest of the American League.

“I’m really happy for Bob,” Anderson said. “He’s an outstanding young man. He’s done super. It just took him time.”