PADRES 1988 : To Get Ahead, He Needs to Stay Back : McCullers’ Emergence as Stopper Will Depend on His Self-Control

It was Public Service Announcement Day at the Padres’ training camp. It was early morning, early March, and the place was positively crawling with cameras, cables, cue cards and common causes.

Mike jockeys armed with blank tapes, roster sheets and prepared questions were prowling the grounds picking off anybody wearing a uniform. On one of three practice fields, an anti-cruelty organization had treed Padre pitchers Lance McCullers, Eric Show and Greg Booker. Soon the cameras would be rolling.

And McCullers, the high-octane young reliever with the gas-pedal fastball, was pumped as he read excitedly from the prompter positioned behind the camera. The message was all about the importance of proper pet care.

In closing, McCullers told pet owners to be sure to consider having their animals “sprayed or neutered.”

WHOOPS!

Booker doubled over laughing. Show did a triple take. An assistant producer hurriedly checked the magic marker on the cue sheet to reassure herself that the message said “spayed,” not “sprayed.”

It did.

Once again, Lance McCullers had gotten ahead of himself.

He has the same trouble when he pitches poorly. If he is out of sync, his body will precede his arm. His fastball will straighten. He will get clobbered. Or, to use the vernacular of the players, he will get “lit.”

“I’ve always been the type of player where I want to run the ball to the plate instead of throwing the ball to the plate,” he says. “I get a little crazy sometimes.”

Same thing in golf. When he gets to the top of his backswing, the prospect of knocking the dimples off the ball causes him to rush his downswing.

In high school he played on the line rather than at quarterback because “I liked to hit people.” (His 10-words-or-fewer description of his football ability: “I was small, but I wasn’t quick.”)

When he sits down at a restaurant, his eyes immediately jump to the part of the menu where you find the words “prime” and “New York” and “filet” and “rib eye” and “porterhouse.” Vinaigrettes are for somebody else. He’s more into platters than palates; more into sirloin than sorbet.

Fortunately for the Padres, McCullers is solving his problems. Goodness knows what the repercussions would be for his earned-run average if McCullers still liked to “hit people.”

Last year, he led the team in saves with 16. He led the National League in relief innings with 123. And he showed enough promise to convince the Padres that they could deal aging stopper Goose Gossage to the Chicago Cubs for the run production of Keith Moreland.

Gossage was 36 last July. McCullers just turned 24.

McCullers weighed 217 pounds last spring. Padre Manager Larry Bowa told him to report to training camp this year at 205. So he ran a lot and rode a 10-speed bicycle in the off-season. He sized down the steaks he ordered. He played more golf and started shooting in the mid-80s. He showed up in Yuma at 201.

And he talked in a mature fashion about how getting ahead in his life’s work meant that he had to stay behind mechanically--to keep control. The Padres needed him to stay behind when they were ahead. When they got behind in the score, it didn’t matter if he got ahead. They wouldn’t need him then.

Got that?

Nobody understood better than Bowa, who spent 16 years as a major league player determined to prove that his competitive fire burned brighter than anybody else’s.

“Sometimes Lance just has to back off,” Bowa said. “When his juices start flowing, he wants to get it and throw it, get it and throw it, get it and throw it. He forgets sometimes about staying back. And when he rushes everything, his arm never catches up with his body. He’s got to regroup and take a big breath every now and then.”

But it is all very heady psychological stuff for a 24-year-old kid from Florida with barely two years of major league experience. Bowa and the quietly intense new pitching coach, Pat Dobson, spent the entire spring uploading McCullers’ pitching brain with reminders.

“There’s a happy medium,” Dobson said. “You want to be aggressive. But at the same time, if you’re too aggressive, your delivery blows apart.”

Now the season is upon Bowa, Dobson and the Padres. And it all boils down to this: Goose is gone. The Padres are going to give McCullers the ball this year. Maybe even more than last year, when he appeared in a staff-high 78 games.

If he succeeds, commercial endorsements will loom. All-Star game appearances. Guest shots with Bob Costas. The good people of Lutz (pronounced LOOTS), Fla., McCullers’ hometown, already have named a Little League diamond after him. Can a street be far behind?

If he fails . . . if his delivery blows apart . . . the Padres are likely to self-destruct.

There are no guarantees. Hoping that McCullers will be in 1988 what Gossage was in his late 20s and early 30s is a gamble. Dobson admits that just last year, “Lance was a guy who would throw nine pitches and strike out three guys in one inning and not be able to get anybody out the next.”

(Dobson would prefer that McCullers develop the ability to get batters to hit into inning-ending double plays. Says McCullers: “I’ll try. But when you get two strikes on a guy, that’s when you really want to put a guy away.”)

And then there was the matter of his contract. For the first two weeks of spring training, Jerry Kapstein, McCullers’ La Jolla-based agent, dickered with Padre management. By the end of the first week of March, they had compromised. The deal was $650,000 per year for two years. It was all a very sticky business.

Next time around, McCullers will be eligible for arbitration. Kapstein, representing relief pitcher Rollie Fingers in 1974, won the first arbitration case involving a relief pitcher in major league history. But this spring the Padres could have unilaterally renewed McCullers’ $125,000 1987 salary at a 20% reduction.

So maybe there was a reason McCullers said “sprayed” when he should have said “spayed.”

Pressure.

“I feel pressure,” McCullers says without hesitation. “Baseball is pressure. Anything you do in the public eye is pressure.”

And that’s the only way McCullers ever wanted it. Growing up in Lutz, on the outskirts of Tampa, he had always been able to overpower hitters. His father was a lawyer who also directed a successful Christmas tree business throughout the Southeast. His family was close. Life was good.

“But every time I got off to a big lead,” he says, “I became the worst pitcher in baseball. I could have a 6-1 lead and it would be 6-4 by the next inning.”

No pressure, no challenge. No challenge, no results. But it’s not really a problem for him anymore. Managers don’t need stoppers when they’re protecting big leads. And protecting big leads probably won’t be a major concern for Bowa this year anyway.

When McCullers was a boy, his father would pick him up after school and drive him over to Tampa, where the Reds came every spring. He idolized the Big Red Machine.

Soon it was 1985. Gossage was hurt. And McCullers, 21, suddenly found himself on the mound in a real live major league game against the Reds’ menacing Dave Parker. Parker turned on a McCullers fastball and unloaded a double. Next up was Tony Perez.

“I was so nervous, it was unreal,” McCullers says now. “Here was this guy I had watched while I was growing up. He had 1,600-some RBIs. It was like a dream.”

McCullers struck out Perez on a high inside fastball. By the end of the game, he had earned his first major league save. He celebrated with his family that night.

After three big league appearances, he had three big league saves. “Yes,” McCullers says, “it was a rush.” Which made it just that much harder to stay back.

He especially liked the idea of challenging the best with his best. It’s still a rush. But he has learned the hard way that it’s also crazy to expect to win every time. “These guys get paid big money to do what they’re doing,” he says. “And sometimes they’re gonna hit it no matter how hard you throw it or where you throw it or how much movement you have on it.”

“These are the best hitters in the world,” says Mike Marshall, the former Dodger reliever. “If they see your best stuff all the time, they’re gonna get you.”

Marshall, primarily a screwball pitcher, still holds the major league record for relief appearances during a season. In 1974, the Dodgers called his number 106 times during the regular season. Marshall responded with 21 saves and a 2.42 ERA in 208 innings.

McCullers shudders at those numbers. The scientific Marshall, now a college coach in Arkansas, says the way he threw a screwball was easier on his arm than the fastballs a power pitcher such as McCullers throws.

McCullers says the 78 appearances and 123 innings he amassed last year were “too much.”

“I was getting up and down a lot,” he says. “It took wear and tear on my arm. It made me tired. I didn’t throw the ball as consistently as I usually do. I’m just grateful my arm is still as strong as it is.”

Marshall agrees. “Anytime you get to 125 innings or more,” he says, “you’re pushing it.”

But Marshall, who also pitched in Minnesota and Montreal, says McCullers should count his blessings. San Diego, Los Angeles and Anaheim, he says, are the best places in baseball to be a relief pitcher. Reason 1: The colder the weather, the harder it is on a relief pitcher’s arm. Reason 2: The farther east the pitcher’s home time zone, the later it is on his body clock when he gets into a night game on the West Coast.

“I would dearly have loved to have pitched in San Diego,” Marshall says.

The hardest part of being a relief pitcher?

“Going out there when you don’t have your best stuff,” Marshall says. “There are days when you have to dance and skate and hope somebody grabs on to something.”

Days, Dobson says, “when you have to think about doing some other things on the mound besides punching (striking) guys out.”

“Hopefully,” McCullers says, “I’ll just get the innings (this year) when it really counts. But I don’t want to be abused.”

Much will depend on the effectiveness of left-handed reliever Mark Davis. The better Davis does against left-handed hitters, the more Bowa will be able to save McCullers for one- or two- hitter situations rather than one- or two- inning situations.

And the more that happens, the more McCullers will be able to save all that adrenaline for the most appropriate situations.

“Sure, it’s important that Lance do well,” says Tony Gwynn, the National League batting champion. “He’s the guy who can finish off a club. But I think it’s also important that we have other guys who can set him up. I don’t put all the burden on Lance’s shoulders. I put it on the bullpen’s shoulders.”

Gossage never had any problem with those burdens. By the time he left San Diego, he had problems with management and problems admitting his own mortality. But he was the Padre bullpen from 1984 to 1986 when he saved 25, 26 and 21 games, never appearing in more than 62 games a year.

When McCullers arrived in 1985, Gossage immediately made him his protege. It wasn’t long before teammates were calling McCullers “Baby Goose.” McCullers says he was flattered by the comparisons and disappointed by the Gossage trade. All parties agree that the worst thing McCullers can do is try to be Gossage.

“I don’t think Lance is that type of pitcher,” Gwynn says. “He throws hard, but he doesn’t throw as hard as Goose. He doesn’t have a slider like Goose.”

“He’s Lance McCullers and he’s gonna have to realize in his mind he’s not Goose Gossage,” Dobson says.

“Now it’s time for me to make my own name,” McCullers says. “It’s time for everyone to recognize me as me instead of Baby Goose.”

Kapstein thought he was looking at his brother, Dan, the first time he saw McCullers. “He was an absolute carbon-copy,” Kapstein says. “Same weight, same height. My mouth literally dropped open the first time I looked Lance in the eye.”

Northeastern’s Dan Kapstein tried out with the New England Patriots as a free-agent tight end in 1972. Part of the reason he didn’t make the team was a knee injury he sustained in high school. Until the injury, he also had been a major league baseball prospect.

Jerry Kapstein was working as a military judge in the navy before his tour of duty ended, allowing him to represent his brother. That’s how he got into agentry full time. Representing McCullers, he says, is like representing his brother all over again. “It’s a treat,” he says. “A bonus.

But, he adds, “I’ve watched him handle the valleys that go along with the peaks. This kid knows the road up the mountain is not a straight one.” And he’s learning there’s more than one way up the mountain.

Two years ago then-Padre manager Steve Boros declared: “I think Lance should become a dominant relief pitcher for us.”

Now that time has come.

Time for Lance McCullers to get ahead. Which means it’s time for him to stay back.