Honeycutt Stays On to Earn His Pay

When Rick Honeycutt, the left-handed pitcher, came over to the Dodgers from the Texas Rangers in 1983, the town was ready for him--with bared fangs.

They had seen this act before in L.A: Pitcher with big reputation in the other league comes over to where they play real baseball and he suddenly can’t get anybody out.

There had been the celebrated signing of a pitcher named Dave Goltz who had been a 20-game winner with Minnesota. With the Dodgers, he was Dave Goat--7-11 and 2-7. His ERA was in the stratosphere. In 61 games, he pitched only two complete ones in two years.

Don Stanhouse had been an even bigger disaster. A relief pitcher picked up from Baltimore with a history of pitching out of bases-loaded jams, Stanhouse as a Dodger proved only capable of pitching into them.

He gave new meaning to the phrase comic relief. In 25 innings, Stanhouse gave up 30 hits, 4 home runs, 14 runs and 16 walks. For this, the Dodgers paid him more than half a million dollars a year. This was like paying a guy half a million to throw gasoline on forest fires. So the Dodgers paid him not to pitch.

Stanhouse, a puckish fellow, took to posing in his swimming pool in Las Vegas.

So, when Rick Honeycutt arrived in Dodger Stadium and began posting the kinds of numbers the team had grown to expect from American League expatriates--5.77 earned-run average, 46 hits, 26 runs and 13 walks in only 39 innings--the media representatives decided this was where they had come in. They took to referring to Rick as “Honeygoltz” and wondered how long it would be before this pitcher would be floating around on an inner tube and collecting money from management to stay as far away from Dodger Stadium as possible.

That was almost four years ago. But if you’re looking for Rick Honeycutt, don’t bother to check the watering holes between here and Las Vegas. Try the pitcher’s mound in Dodger Stadium. Rick will be there every fourth day. Between the first and seventh innings, that is. After that, try the shower.

With Honeycutt’s stuff, pitching is 90% cerebral. In the immortal words of Jim Lonborg, they should ice his head, not his elbow, after a game. His fastball, he admits, is a four-cylinder job he throws only 8-10 times a game and never for strikes. “I only show it to them,” he says. “I can’t throw it past anybody.”

A pitcher has to have the outlook of a guy selling vegetable peelers on street corners--or dealing three-card monte in a carnival--to get by with his assortment. Successful banjo hitters have to hit ‘em where they ain’t. Successful junk pitchers have to throw ‘em where they ain’t looking. Or they’ll hit ‘em where you cain’t find ‘em.

“It’s arm speed that deceives a hitter, not ball speed,” explains Honeycutt.

For this delicate battle of wits, you have to hope the hitter is only half armed. You need every edge you can get. For Honeycutt, once, this was the edge of a thumbtack he had concealed in a bandage in his glove. Discovered by the umpire--some say Bill Kunkel knew where to look because he had been an edge pitcher himself in his day--Rick was thrown out of baseball for 10 days.

Honeycutt doesn’t need any hardware on his side today but he thinks it would be nice if the home crowd was--for a change. Almost since his arrival here, he has been treated like an ant at a picnic. Or the Pope in the Kremlin. He had to pitch through hostility normally reserved for a kidnaping suspect. You didn’t have to hear it, you could feel it.

“It hurt because you can’t alibi or explain,” he said the other day at a Dodger Christmas party for youngsters.

Actually, Honeycutt arrived in town with a shoulder condition that made pitching at times the next best thing to getting a cattle prod in the clavicle.

“It was diagnosed by Dr. (Frank) Jobe as a degenerative arthritic condition and, after he operated on it, he told me it might take 14 to 18 months for complete recovery. I couldn’t throw naturally. I had to manufacture some deliveries but with Al Pena and Bobby Welch out that year, somebody had to take the ball. ’85 was the worst year of my life. You know, when your arm begins to hurt, you drop your delivery and it takes off velocity and spin.”

Taking velocity off Honeycutt’s fastball was like taking the wheels off a wrecked car.

In a situation like this, standard baseball practice calls for screaming to be traded and/or blaming your infield, the manager, the town, the fans, the press--or all of the above.

Honeycutt did none of the above. He pitched steadily, if unspectacularly, until there were times last season when he was the team’s most reliable pitcher.

“For one thing, I became secure enough to tell (pitching coach) Ron Perranoski when my shoulder was too sore even to start,” he recalls. “For another, I tried to recognize when it was tightening up in the late innings. Once, I told them I had to come out when I had a two-hit shutout against the Giants.”

As a result, he didn’t get any complete games in 28 starts but he did get plenty of wins, 11 against 9 losses, and plenty of quality innings that left a lot of games in position to be won. His 3.32 ERA compared favorably with Fernando Valenzuela’s 3.14, and his 11-9 record, although not of Cy Young dimensions, was respectable on a team that lost 89 games and led the league in errors with 181.

Most importantly, Honeycutt stuck it out. Stayed the course. He won’t be getting his paychecks poolside. He won’t be Honeygoltz. He’ll be Honeybunch. And maybe lead the Dodgers into the land of milk and Honeycutt.