TRYING TO CATCH UP : Parrish Questions Decision to Leave Detroit, Tries to Recover From a Slow Start in Philadelphia

It is three hours before a night game between the Philadelphia Phillies and St. Louis Cardinals. Darren Daulton is scheduled to catch for the Phillies. Lance Parrish, the club’s more renowned catcher, sits at his locker and straps weights around his ankle, preparing for a workout.

The heavier weight is on his mind. He can’t shake the frustration caused by:

--A mid-June batting average of .212, 51 points below his career mark.

--Only 7 home runs and 30 runs batted in compared to the 22 homers and 62 RBIs compiled in a half-season with the Detroit Tigers last year.

--A Philadelphia pitching staff that is so slow in its delivery that Parrish, a six-time All-Star and winner of three Gold Gloves, is made to look as if he can’t even throw out the Philly Phanatic, the club mascot.

--A storm of abuse from the infamous Philadelphia partisans, prompting Parrish to keep his wife and children from attending games.

--A persistent feeling that he made a mistake in leaving Detroit as a free agent.

Does he regret it? He won’t say that, but he doesn’t have to.

“I can see the mistakes now,” he said. “I would do it differently now.

“I can see that Detroit was being fair and that I was being stubborn as to my value.

“I wasn’t taking into account that I had missed half of the season and that there was a legitimate question concerning my health.

“I mean, if I had to do it over I’m almost certain I’d go to arbitration with the Tigers, prove I was healthy, and start all over again.”

The hindsight haunts Parrish, but there is little he can do about it.

Having exercised his free agency, he can’t go that way again for five years.

Raised in the Tiger organization, a veteran of nine American League seasons, he is now married to the Phillies and the National League.

“I will make the best of the situation,” he said, adding that he is aware of the factors influencing his slow start, “but none of it makes it any easier to go through, any less frustrating. I mean, it would be much easier to accept if the team was doing well, but I also feel the responsibility for not having contributed.”

Family and friends have tried to tell Parrish that he was expecting too much, that after missing the second half of last season with a back problem that seemed to threaten his career, that after joining the Phillies three weeks after the start of spring training, he could not be expected to make a quick adjustment to a new team, league and home. Not amid the pressures of the Phillies’ own expectations.

“He’s a proud man,” new Manager Lee Elia said of Parrish. “He came here anticipating that he would immediately perform the way he always has.

“I still believe he will, but when you weigh the time he missed last year and in spring training against the adjustments required in coming to a new league, a new club and a new pitching staff, the projections weren’t fair.

“Maybe we all should have approached it from the standpoint that his immediate contributions would be in the area of experience and moxie and that his hitting would come.

“If the projections hadn’t been so awesome he would have fallen into a groove by now. But his numbers are too good not to expect him to find it eventually.”

Parrish’s numbers seemed to grow in conjunction with his physical maturity. He is 6 foot 3 and 220 pounds but seems larger, a tribute to the weightlifting program that he follows during the winter with the Angels’ Brian Downing.

Between 1982 and 1985, Parrish hit at least 27 homers a year and drove in at least 87 runs, recording career highs of 33 homers in 1984 and 114 RBIs in 1983. Then, last year:

“I was on the most productive pace of my career,” Parrish said, alluding to the 22 homers and 62 RBIs through 91 games. “I had just come out of the All-Star game, knew I was probably going to be a free agent at the end of the year, then bingo. It was very frustrating.”

Parrish had lived with the problem of a slipped disk for more than a year, but continued to play with it, causing damage to the nerves in his lower back.

It finally reached a point where he couldn’t walk more than a block or two without requiring rest, without a numbness in his legs, without the persistent feeling that someone had inserted a knife and was slowly twisting it.

“I went to the park one day and wasn’t able to throw or hit,” he said. “It was obvious I had to do something.’

Parrish’s season ended in July. Dr. Robert Watkins, a Los Angeles specialist, told him that with rest and exercise it was likely that he could avoid surgery and resume his career. Parrish began a program designed to strengthen his abdomen, taking the pressure off the muscles in his lower back. Among the requirements: 500 sit-ups a day.

“I could rectify my own doubts, but there wasn’t anything I could do about anyone else’s,” Parrish said.

It is hard to tell whether the clubs considered Parrish a gamble because there may not have been any interest even if he had not missed the second half, even if he had gone on to establish career highs for RBIs and home runs last year.

Amid the owners’ alleged collusion, Detroit teammate Jack Morris, the winningest pitcher of the ‘80s and also a free agent, offered his services to four teams last winter and was the victim of a shutout. Morris returned to the Tigers and had his salary raised from $850,000 to $1.85 million through arbitration.

For Parrish, waiting at his Yorba Linda home, Philadelphia ultimately made the only offer aside from the Tigers, who initially offered the same $800,000 Parrish made last year, then went to two years at $2.4 million.

At that point, however, Parrish said he had already indicated that he would not return to Detroit and did not choose to go back on his word.

“In reality, I should never have let it get that far,” he said. “Maybe I let my emotions run away, but we had been trying to work out a new contract for the better part of two years and I felt that I deserved a raise based on what they had given other people in the organization and on what I had contributed under the old contract. I mean, even though I had missed a half season, I had won the Silver Slugger Award at my position. I had played hurt. I had spent my entire career with the organization. I didn’t want to take a step backward.

“We had simply got off on the wrong foot early, and there was a tremendous amount of misunderstanding and lack of communications. It was a mess to go through because I also felt a tremendous sense of commitment to the players’ association to test the system. I was considered one of the players who could get the system back to what it had been. I felt a responsibility to the players who had gone out before me. I felt I was doing what I had to do, but in looking back I don’t know if I accomplished anything. I accepted less money and didn’t end the collusion.”

Only Parrish and Andre Dawson, among the major free agents, changed teams. Parrish signed with Philadelphia for $800,000 and recently received a $200,000 bonus for getting to within 30 days of the All-Star break without having been on the disabled list. He joined the Phillies March 13 after working out for much of the winter with the Angels’ Bob Boone and now feels that the time he missed in spring training, on the eve of the season, was more a detriment than the fact that he missed the entire second half of last season.

Basically, however, he has no explanation for the inability to find an offensive groove.

“Early in the season, I fought myself,” he said. “I was tight. I put pressure on myself to show them what I could do. I was going backward instead of forward. I was defeating myself. I’ve reached the point now where I try not to worry about it. I feel strong, my mechanics are sound. The right ingredients are there to get hot and stay hot, but so much of this game is mental. If you’re not completely confident and relaxed it can affect your performance. Somewhere along the line I’m not hitting on all cylinders and it’s going to take a while to click in. In the meantime, I keep reminding myself that I’m not a .215 hitter. I have to maintain confidence for my own sanity.”

Said Philadelphia outfielder Glenn Wilson, who named his second son Lance Michael in honor of his former Detroit teammate:

“Start with the fact that Lance played only a half-season last year and then faced a situation in which he had to keep asking himself, ‘Where am I going to play, am I going to play, is my back going to hold up?’ Now he has to adjust to a new team, new home, new umpires and new pitchers. Any time you switch leagues you want to do well fast or you start wondering if the league is just too tough for you. It’s worse if the team isn’t doing well and worse yet if you’re not. It’s like being sent back to first grade after graduating college.

“Lance needs time, that’s all. Next year will be like night and day for him. It was for me and I’m not half the hitter he is.

“Next year he’ll be head and shoulders above every catcher in the league.”

The Phillies, of course, hope it will happen before then. There’s a measure of impatience. Said a club official: “We went out on a limb to sign Lance Parrish and he’s yet to hit 10 balls hard.”

While the Phillies wait, they are trying to give Parrish the best of it, using him in what they feel are the right situations. He isn’t starting regularly, in other words, and doesn’t understand it.

“I could bank on it in Detroit--whether I was hitting or not,” he said. “Here I’m in a few days, out a few days. I knew when it happened early it was to give my back a rest. Now I guess I shouldn’t expect it to be different if I’m not producing.

“All I can do is go along with the program, but it tends to be frustrating. I mean, it’s one more adjustment I have to make.”

Elia has promised changes in one area of the program. He has demanded that the pitchers accelerate their deliveries. Parrish threw out only 7 of 52 base stealers under predecessor John Felske.

“Ninety five percent of the time it wasn’t his fault,” Elia said of Parrish. “If a catcher gets it to second base consistently in 1.9 or 2.0 (seconds), that’s good enough. We’ve explained to the pitchers that Lance can help them if they let him.”

Elia can’t do anything about the fans. Parrish will have to do that on his own. He has come to realize that the abuse is simply a reflection of their intense desire to win and probably no worse than he would have encountered elsewhere. His wife and children are again attending games.

“Lance and I probably talked about 50 times before he came here, but the one thing I forgot to tell him was how tough the fans can be,” Wilson said. “It’s just something you’ve got to handle. You’ve got to let the fans in Philly be your fire.

“When you play well they let you know it, as well.”

Parrish may yet hear that, but there is still a sense of melancholy, a sense of regret.

“If it’s there, it’s not so much from my standpoint as a player but rather from the standpoint of what I’ve had to drag my family through,” he said. “We had a good situation in Michigan, but I felt that I was doing the right thing in uprooting them.

“There were obviously a lot of things involved that I never thought about because I had always thought we were in Detroit to stay. We’ve since had to cope with a lot, but maybe things happen for a reason.

“It’s been one big learning process and I already think that I’ve experienced tremendous personal growth. This has definitely taught me to appreciate the good times, and I’m confident there will be more good times before it’s over.”