For This Job, He’ll Stoop to Stand Tall

Suppose you saw the following ad in your friendly daily newspaper:

“Wanted! Energetic, experienced, steady young man, excellent health, references. Needed for hands-and-knees work seven nights a week. Protective equipment furnished by company. Will be expected to stop projectiles thrown him 100 to 200 times a night at velocities up to 100 m.p.h. from a distance of 60 1/2 feet with view occasionally obstructed by round wooden club 32 inches long swung along his line of vision.

“Position calls for periodic movements to posture of defense where bodies of highly conditioned athletes will be hurled at him in aggressive and threatening manner in attempt to dislodge him from thrown object or his senses, whichever comes first.

“Work is steady but in high-crime area where thefts are common and it will be part of his responsibility to subvert such stealing with prompt and accurate countermeasures, failure in which will result in job review by management.

“Applicant will also be expected to hit 90-m.p.h. curving objects through space with round bludgeon minimally suited to the purpose 3 times out of 10 or as close thereto as can be reasonably expected. Full medical care and prosthesis guaranteed where necessary. Bring resume.”

What would you do if you saw such an ad? Call the Better Business Bureau? Check with Health, Education, and Welfare? Have the advertiser brought up on charges of unfair labor practices?

Mike Scioscia would have thought it was the dream job of a lifetime. It sounded like 18 weeks in Tahiti as cruise director for a sorority to him.

What red-blooded American boy could resist the opportunity of spending half his life in a crouch or on his knees, weighted down with enough equipment to stop a train and with the heady likelihood he might lose one or all teeth in the course of the year, or certainly a ligament or two?

Most people would rather go down into a coal mine with an ice pick and a bad cough than catch in the National League. Most people would rather be caught in a mine cave-in or leaking lifeboat. As a career, it’s the baseball equivalent of elephant-washing.

Somebody’s got to do it. Somebody’s got to put out oil well fires, defuse bombs, walk high iron, stoke steel, or pick cotton.

And someone’s got to step in the way of a 240-pound runaway locomotive of a ballplayer crashing through a block to get to home plate.

Nobody does that any better than the Dodgers’ Mike Scioscia--and he has the concussions and torn ligaments to prove it.

Scioscia never wanted to be anything else. If they want him to block a plate, sweep out the trainer’s room, paint the dugout or fight bulls to be a big leaguer, Mike Scioscia will get a cape, broom, brush or rag and go to it.

“Look, I was slow, heavy. What was I going to be--a shortstop?,” he said. “If I wanted to be a big leaguer, I had one shot. My father made me a catcher. At the age of 10. I loved it. Broken noses, split fingers and all.”

Catchers historically in baseball have carried nicknames like Shanty, and Tub, even Hoss. But Scioscia is more linebacker-size--6-foot-2, 225 pounds. He can beat out outfield hits safely, but his base-stealing record is just better than the groundskeeper’s, eight in nine years.

Speed was never a concomitant to catching prowess in baseball’s view anyway for the simple reason that, after five or more years of squatting for a living, nobody had any. Jesse Owens would probably have been hard put to stay out of a double play after a season or so behind the plate. If Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat, a big league receiver is the Sultan of Squat.

The conditions conspire increasingly against the man in the iron mask. Artificial surfaces have decreased dramatically the time it takes for a base-stealing jack rabbit in cleats to go from one base to another. In Gabby Hartnett’s day, the catcher had slow, rock-strewn, pitted brown or grassy surfaces, and slow runners. Mike Scioscia has Vince Coleman.

If you only had to catch a thrown ball, the job would be complicated enough. The catcher has to decide what pitch will be thrown. And where. For him, the elephant is really dirty.

You sit in a dugout before a game and, 9 chances out of 10, you will see a ballplayer fingering a bat. Occasionally, a ball. Scioscia has a mitt. To a catcher, it is his life belt, the most important piece of equipment to his career.

Scioscia wears out a mitt every few months, sometimes three a year. Therefore, he keeps two backup mitts in relatively first-string order by tying baseballs in them, lubricating them and coddling them for the day they make the varsity and have to go in to replace the old, cracked, out-of-sync first-string glove.

Mitts are hinged now and have been for more than a decade, one of the few breaks the modern catcher gets. The hinged mitt has permitted the one-handed catching technique pioneered by Randy Hundley and Johnny Bench. That, in turn, has done away with the once tell-tale catcher’s badge of honor--fists that looked like bags of walnuts hanging off his arm from summers of foul tips slicing through fingernails, shattering knuckles, breaking fingers.

But this has nothing to do with the scar tissue you can’t see--on the interior of the knee, the abdomen, ankles. Catchers have the same occupational hazards as charladies and scrubwomen. They might as well come to work with a mop and pail, too.

In Scioscia’s case the pitfalls are compounded by his habit of playing the position like a linebacker. He leads the league in blocked plates--also in concussions (Jack Clark), torn ankles (Tom Browning), and dislocated kneecaps (Terry Francona). He is currently on the disabled list, thanks to the ankle injury. Compared to Scioscia, a waterfront dance hall bouncer has a night watchman’s job.

It is a sweatshop position. Stoop labor. Charles Dickens would have loved catchers. In another sense, they are the butlers of baseball. Or maybe the downstairs maids. But Mike Scioscia would answer the ad tomorrow. And be first in line at the shape-up.