A Record That Really Means Squat

Mark McGwire is probably not going to break Roger Maris’ single-season home run record, and nobody is going to win 30 games for the first time in 20 years. But if all goes well, sometime in the next month a record that was set 40 years ago will be broken by a California Angel.

One night toward the end of the season, Bob Boone will strap on his catcher’s armor, settle in behind the plate and start to warm up a starting pitcher for the 1,919th time in his career.

That’s an awful lot of squats. Boonie will probably also be breaking a record held by a half-dozen charladies in a downtown office building. Not even Cinderella was on her knees as much as a major league catcher. It is the scrubwoman job of baseball. It is like serving high Mass seven days a week.

It used to be you could tell a catcher by his hands. They usually looked like a bag of walnuts. Foul tips and half swings had twisted and gnarled them to the point where Joe Garagiola once said if you shook hands with an old-time catcher, you needed a plumber to pry you apart.

Johnny Bench changed all that when he became a one-handed catcher and allowed the modern receiver to keep his meat hand out of the way of errant shots off the bat.

But nothing can relieve the other occupational hazard of the position. The catcher is the Sultan of Squat. Johnny Roseboro used to say that when he came into baseball, he was so fast, he used to steal home. After a few seasons on the hinges of his knees, he couldn’t steal a watch.

Catchers answer to the nicknames Shanty, Tank, Truck or Hoss. You have to be just faster than a glacier. But it’s a cerebral position. You don’t have to be able to conjugate Latin verbs or list the Popes, but you have to be able to read people. Pitching--and catching--a baseball game at its highest level can be a chess match. At its least, it’s cat and mouse.

Bob Boone is a psychology graduate, from Stanford, no less. If he could get a pitcher from Harvard with a good curve, they might have to be outlawed like the spitball.

Boone is unique among catchers. He’s like a fight manager. He doesn’t use we or even him in describing the act of pitching.

“I gave him a fastball,” Boone might say. Or, “I go to my best pitch in that situation.” Or, “It depends on what kind of stuff I have that day.”

Boone is like Doc Kearns. He doesn’t even split the billing. Kearns used to say when he managed Jack Dempsey, “I knocked him out in the third.”

Boone says: “I put down (the sign for) a fastball and got him looking.”

The public thinks catching is blocking the plate, hanging onto foul tips or foul pop-ups and throwing runners out at second. Boone disagrees.

“It’s an art form,” he says. “It’s two parts ability and one part instinct.”

Others think calling a game is all a matter of giving the hitter a pitch he doesn’t expect. Only the other day, Angel Manager Gene Mauch was quoted after a game in which pitcher Mike Witt had less than his best stuff as saying: “(Twin) hitters would have liked to turn around and hit Boone on the head. They’re thinking fastball, and he calls curve. They’re looking change, and he calls fastball. He was frustrating them.”

Again, Boone shakes his head.

“Sometimes you give the hitter exactly what he’s looking for. But you give it to him three inches away from where he wants it. It’s his pitch. Or so he thinks. You throw near their power. But not quite.

“If you threw Willie McCovey low and away, right where he wanted it, he would reach out and hit the ball 550 feet. But if you threw it three inches from his wheelhouse, he taps to the pitcher.

“But sometimes I’ll even give McCovey a single, but not the home run. You have to take the game situation into account, too.

“Any major league hitter can hit a 90-m.p.h. fastball. It depends on where it is. My job is to find a pitch I know the hitter can’t hit. Sometimes, a pitch will stay in a hitter’s mind for several years. I want it to.”

Baseball has a term for a pitch a hitter is waiting to ambush. They say, “He’s sitting on it,” as in, “He’s waiting in the bushes for it with a loaded shotgun.”

Boone likes the hitter in that frame of mind. He told a San Francisco reporter this year that he once had Angel pitcher Geoff Zahn throw 10 straight change-ups. A changeup is ordinarily a pitch you throw once every three innings.

“Zahn was beside himself,” Boone told the reporter. “He’d yell at me, ‘They’re sitting on it!’

“ ‘I want them to,’ I told him. ‘They were sitting on your changeup before you came to the ballpark.’ ”

Added Boone: “They never hit it.”

Boone probably won’t make the Hall of Fame. He should. A .251 average doesn’t inspire the writers but Al Lopez, the man whose 1,918 games-caught record Boone will break, made the Hall--he was voted in by the veterans’ committee, not the writers--with a .261 average.

But in Bob Boone’s career behind the plate, the teams he caught for have made the playoffs six times. The Philadelphia Phillies won the only World Series they ever won with Boone behind the plate.

For a guy who makes his living on his hands and knees, Boone’s worth to the firm is hard to overestimate.

And someday, somewhere, an old-time ballplayer is going to be reminiscing about a career and is going to say: “And, then, that Boone got me on an inside fastball.”

The listener will say: “Wait a minute! Boone was a catcher!”

And the old-timer will wither him with a look and say: “That’s what you think!”