Cincinnati a Cure-All for Parker

In 1977, when he was wearing out National League pitching, hitting a league-leading .338, getting 215 hits, 44 doubles and 21 home runs, the phrase most often used to describe Dave Parker was, “the black Ted Williams.” In fact, the way Dave was going, it was not inconceivable Williams could one day become the white Dave Parker.

Parker was a magnificent-looking specimen. He looked like .350 just standing still. He rose 6-5 or so in the air, he went about 225, all muscle, and you couldn’t get a fastball past him by mail. He did one thing better than Ted Williams. He ran. He stole 20 bases in 1978 and 1979. (Ted Williams stole only 24 in his whole career.)

He got even better in 1978. He slugged 30 home runs, drove in 117 runs, led the league in batting again with .334, hit 32 doubles and 12 triples and won the league MVP title in a landslide.

He helped put the Pirates in the World Series in ‘79, then helped them win it with a .345 hitting performance. He was on a clear track to Cooperstown. He was the first player to get a million dollars to play baseball, but with him, it looked like a bigger bargain than Alaska.

What happened then is that Dave Parker disappeared overnight. All of a sudden, he no longer resembled the Splendid Splinter coming up to bat. More like a Splendid Sausage. He no longer looked like .350 just standing there. He looked like a factory softball player. He had found a pitch he couldn’t handle--pizza-with-everything, crab Newburg, eggs Benedict. Parker was a pushover for anything with sauce on it. He went down swinging with a knife and fork.

Players in the opposite dugout began to refer to him as “Orson.” Fans were furious. “Hey, Parker, you ever hear of a salad?” they wondered. They asked if he wanted right field catered. They threw things at him--batteries, beer cans. Nothing fancy. Pittsburgh is a blue-collar town. As one heckler told the press one night, “We’d throw tomatoes, but we’d be afraid he’d eat them.” “Hey, Parker!” they’d yell. “Why don’t you eat the bat? Too.”

Parker, who was supposed to make the world forget Babe Ruth, began to remind it of him.

The injuries began. It was hard to tell whether the injuries began because of the added weight or the added weight began because of the injuries.

Baseball is not a grueling game physically. It’s not tennis. Or prizefighting. But neither can it be played sluggishly any more. You can’t stand out there burping all night long. The pitchers throw too hard. The ball comes off the synthetic turf too fast.

And the crowd gets too hostile. They trashed Parker’s Mercedes in a parking lot, they wrote letters demanding to know if he got paid by the pound. They blamed him for everything except imported steel. “Have another doughnut, Parker, the pennant’s already lost!” they jeered.

The averages slumped--.295, .258, .270. The homers dropped off, 17, 9, 6. The man who had played with a busted jaw in 1978 and busted up the league, anyway, couldn’t play when his jaw worked OK. He wasn’t a shadow of his former self. He was a blow-up of his former self.

Usually, when a guy gets a million dollars and slumps, it is said of him in baseball, “He wasn’t a hungry player anymore.” Well, in Parker’s case, he was still hungry, all right. He ate himself right into free agency.

When Cincinnati picked him up, Parker’s detractors wondered whether the deal included all the napkins he could use. But when he got to the Reds, a strange thing happened: The clock turned back five years. The other managers looked out there one day and wondered, “Who’s that in right field?”

It was a guy who looked like .350 just standing there. It was a 6-5, 225-pounder who was second in the league in RBIs, third in home runs and fifth in batting (.305). A guy who was third in the league in hits, third in slugging percentage and second in doubles. If he wasn’t a splendid splinter, he was at least a guy who looked as good in shorts as Jim Palmer. If the Cincinnati Reds win the pennant this year, not impossible, Dave Parker could get his second league MVP award.

It would be dramatic to say the Reds put Slugger Parker on a mountain in Tibet and hid the knives and forks or turned him over to Jack LaLanne. But Dave insists it was not a change of diet, it was a change of atmosphere.

“I eat the same things I did in Pittsburgh. I have the same habits. But that atmosphere was poisoned for me by the fans, the media and the whole town. I had injuries that affected my play more than my menus. I am happy over here in Cincinnati and I play like it,” Parker prefers to think.

For his fans, the relationship is inescapable: He weighs 25 pounds less and is hitting 25 points more. Now that he resembles Ted Williams on the way to the shower again, he resembles him on the way to Cooperstown, too.