He Won’t Wait for Ball Four

It’s not easy being Dale Murphy. Just as it’s not easy being the Pope. It was probably not easy being Frank Merriwell. Lou Gehrig. Steve Garvey.

It’s not easy saying Heck! when you feel like screaming something stronger. It’s not easy smiling when you feel like kicking something. Or someone. It’s not easy not throwing things, not kicking helmets.

It’s not easy being 31 years old, 6 feet, 4 inches tall, good-looking, rich and admired and having to live up to it. It’s not easy being a living statue.

Dale D. Murphy carries it off about as well as anybody in the game ever has. You would imagine if St. Francis played baseball, this is what he would be like.

It’s not that Dale is too good to be true. He’s too good not to be true. Nobody could keep that up unless it was innate. Dale Murphy is what little kids think baseball stars are--and too often aren’t.

The game has survived the Black Sox, the 1984 Kansas City Royals, Arnold Rothstein and Bobo Holloman, but the National League must sit up at nights in terror they’ll get a call saying Dale Murphy got caught double-parked or fined for speeding.

If Dale Murphy has a fault, it’s that he won’t wait for a walk. He swings at bad pitches on occasion. If he didn’t, he’d be totally unbelievable. He’d be a guy who came walking out of a Captain America cartoon. Or a tabernacle choir.

He might be the last American hero. He’d be more so if he didn’t try to hit everything that didn’t hit him first.

A man with Dale’s credentials and numbers--back-to-back MVPs in 1982-83, Gold Glove five times in a row, league lead in home runs and RBIs twice--should walk 120 to 150 times a year. You know they’ll give him that many bad pitches to hit because the pitchers’ credo is “Don’t let a Dale Murphy (or a Henry Aaron, or a Willie Mays, or a fill-in-the-name-of-a-great-hitter) beat you in a game.”

It’s not exactly a sign of moral degeneracy to swing at bad pitches. In fact, it’s straight out of the work ethic not to leave your bat on your shoulder. If you’re Dale Murphy, it’s not easy to do that, either.

He’d better get used to it.

The Atlanta Braves had better get used to doing without Bob Horner this year, but Dale Murphy is the one who will have the most adjustments to make.

You see, Bob Horner represented half of the power in the Atlanta attack; the other half was Murphy. And the reality of baseball’s power pack is that it comes in twos. Like a race track entry, it’s 1 and 1A.

All the mighty power hitters of baseball history had a partner in, so to speak, crime. “Murderers’ Row” was anchored by Babe Ruth, but it is well to remember that Ruth batted No. 3 and had Lou Gehrig behind him.

Like cowboy movie heroes, every great homer hitter had his sidekick. Henry Aaron had Eddie Mathews for the great years. Ruth had Gehrig. Mickey Mantle had Roger Maris. Jimmie Foxx had Al Simmons. Hank Greenberg had Goose Goslin.

In more modern times, Wilver Stargell had Dave Parker--and Roberto Clemente. Willie Mays had Orlando Cepeda. Mike Schmidt had Greg Luzinski. Reggie Jackson had Sal Bando. Johnny Bench had Tony Perez--and George Foster. Frank Robinson had Boog Powell. And so on. The home run story comes in duplicate.

This is because a pitching ploy known as pitching around a dangerous hitter is as old as baseball itself.

This is a tactic in which you serve up unhittable non-strikes to superstar hitters who stand alone in the middle of a lineup. This is why Ted Williams walked 2,018 times in his career, which was interrupted twice by military service. It’s why Ruth was walked so many times and why he would have walked more without the presence of Gehrig.

When Bob Horner was in the lineup, Dale Murphy got good pitches to hit. When Bob Horner had an injured wrist most of the year, Murphy led the league in walks.

With Horner opting for free agency, Murphy may see more curveballs in the dirt this year than even Ruth in his prime.

Does this mean he turns into Eddie Stanky? Fidget around the batter’s box and take a lot of 3-and-1 pitches?

Dale Murphy looks concerned. “I’m aggressive at the plate. It’s my style,” he notes. “I’m a free swinger. If I go up there against, say, an Orel Hershiser, thinking, ‘I’m going to have to look his pitches over very carefully,’ I might be at his mercy. I’ll lose my rhythm.

“You might go up to bat with an ‘in-between’ mentality. You have a tendency to be not ready.

“You see, there’s already so much failure built into this game. Two out of four is outstanding success. Fifty percent. So, you have to wipe out the negative. You have to hope the pitchers make a mistake. When they do, you have to be ready to pounce.”

If they don’t, of course, the game will finally have discovered a character flaw in Dale Murphy at long last. He can be made to pop up ball four. He can be made to lunge at the high, outside fastball, or the split-fingered sinker out of the strike zone.

It’s depressing. It’s like finding out that St. Francis bet the horses, or Joan of Arc smoked, or Shakespeare couldn’t spell.

It just goes to show you, nobody’s perfect.