Scott Isn’t Scary, but His Pitches Are

They write musical plays about what happened to Michael Warren Scott in the summer of 1986 in baseball.

In them, there’s this mediocre player whose career is going nowhere until one day he meets this stranger in the park--a guy who can light cigarettes merely by snapping his fingers and who tends to disappear periodically in a puff of smoke.

This stranger strikes a bargain with the player that he will make him, overnight, a superstar and lead him to the pennant and a Cy Young Award and sports immortality. All he wants in return is the player’s soul.

Well, how else do you explain what has happened to Mike Scott? The rest of baseball, particularly National League batters, would like to know.

Consider this: Mike Scott was the most harmless looking right-hander the league has seen for half a dozen years. Oh, he had this nice fastball, it sank a little bit, but the good hitters could sit on it because his ancillary pitches, a little funky slider and what passed for a breaking ball, had gopher written all over them.

Mike got so bad--he was 14-27 in four seasons with the Mets--that they traded him away to Houston for a .237-hitting utility outfielder named Danny Heep, and the prevailing opinion was, it could have been Uriah for all the Mets cared.

It wasn’t a trade, it was a heist. But no one knew it at the time. After two seasons at Houston, in which he was 15-17, the Astros concluded that Mike needed either a new pitch or a new profession.

Now, the official story is that Mike repaired to San Diego, where he consulted with that other swami of the occult, the genie of the split-fingered fastball, Roger (the ex-Dodger) Craig.

The word is, a simple exchange of information took place. Roger showed him how to throw a pitch that looks like a fastball, sounds like a fastball and acts like a fastball--but turns out to be 10 m.p.h. lower and half a foot to a foot lower.

Now, you can believe that story if you want to.

But in the light of what’s happened to Mike Scott since, you might want to follow the pitcher around at night and see what happens to him at midnight, or check whether he gives back a reflection in a mirror, if he has hoofs instead of feet and if his eyes turn red and his lips blue and if you can hear this faint chorus of “Whatever Lola Wants” whenever he walks by.

Because Mike is the last guy in the world you would expect to come up with a pitch nobody in baseball can hit. Mike is kind of this pale, soft-spoken, almost librarian-sort of person. He’s so near-sighted he couldn’t find the mound without his glasses.

He doesn’t have this blue-black beard or chew tobacco or cuss out everybody within earshot like most old-time great pitchers would do. Scott doesn’t scare anybody. But his pitches do, particularly this one that does things no pitch is ever supposed to do.

He didn’t just get good, he got all-time. As one writer observed: “He started pitching like Grover Cleveland Alexander. Before, he just pitched like Grover Cleveland.”

The league was horrified. As the ex-catcher, John Roseboro, used to say: “When a ball tends to curve and dip on its way to the plate, it may be illusion. When it disappears altogether, it may be illegal.”

The league couldn’t believe Mike Scott got this good overnight. Umpires took to describing his new serve as “the most unhittable pitch I’ve seen.” Hitters had more colorful descriptions for it. They wanted him frisked for Vaseline, thumb tacks, spit, sandpaper. Or a guy with a tail and pitchfork.

Mike very nearly put the Houston Astros in the World Series last year with it. On a team that had been picked to finish in the caboose of the league, the Houston Astros hit a week last September that was right out of the devil’s workshop.

First, pitcher Jim Deshaies struck out the first eight Dodgers to face him in one game, then two-hit them and shut them out.

The next night, Nolan Ryan took a no-hitter into the eighth inning and won a two-hit shutout.

The day after that, Mike Scott clinched the pennant with a no-hitter against the Giants.

That was the most awesome stretch of pitching by one staff most people had seen in decades--four hits and no runs in three games.

Will it carry on? Is old Mr. Scratch, Beelzebub, going to call in his markers? Will Mike Scott and his magic pitch that allowed him to lead the league in earned-run-average at 2.22, strikeouts with 306, innings-pitched with 275.1 and shutouts, 5 in a tie with teammate Bob Knepper, turn back into a 14-27 journeyman?

Can Mike go on being a guy who out-dueled Dwight Gooden in the first game of last year’s playoffs, 1-0, striking out 14, and then won Game 4 with a three-hitter, and doubtless would have won Game 7 had there been one.

Is what we have here a scenario for a new Broadway musical to be called “Damnmets?” Does the pitch have a strong odor of sulfur arising from it?

Mike Scott, who is playing this week in a golf tournament at Palm Springs, just laughs at the league’s fears.

“It was just something I was able to learn,” he says. “I took to the pitch right away. An ex-teammate, Enos Cabell, suggested I go down and see Roger Craig in San Diego and learn this pitch which had been so successful for some of Roger’s pitchers like Jack Morris, and I spent about two hours a day with Roger for 7 out of 10 days.

“It was like the pitch was made for me. The first time I threw it in a game, I couldn’t believe it. Guys were swinging at balls that bounced in the dirt. That never happened to me before. It was like my delivery was made for this pitch. The more I threw it, the better it got.

“People tend to forget I had a better record in 1985--18-8--right after I learned it.”

Maybe so, but what about the strikeouts--137 in 1985 to 306 in 1986, one of only four 300-strikeout years in league history?

“What I did in ’86 was junk the slider,” explains Scott. “It was only getting me in trouble. And I substituted the ‘cut’ fastball for it. This is a slightly different grip but the pitch still looks like a fastball, or a split-fingered fastball, only it doesn’t sink. It stays straight up in the strike zone, and the hitter doesn’t recognize it till too late.”

That, at least, is the party line. It was a pitch made in heaven. If you ask National League batters, they’re just about 360 degrees off. They know that where that pitch came from, there are no harps playing or choirs singing or saints smiling.