Now, Even His ERA Is Looking Good

Tim Leary would be Central Casting’s idea of a major league pitcher. You imagine Frank Merriwell looked like this. Movie star good looks, dimples, raven-black hair, green eyes, olive skin. You wonder why he bothered to learn to pitch. Why not to tango? Or act?

You wouldn’t figure God would give him a fastball, too. Six-three, 190 pounds. When he came out of college, the New York Mets rushed to sign him. They figured they had themselves another Seaver, a Tim Terrific.

The fastball sailed and hopped. The breaking ball broke and dropped. The change loitered. Who needed green eyes? A profile?

At first, he lived up to the billing--and the packaging. Signed out of UCLA for a six-figure bonus, Tim stood the Texas League on its haircut when he threw 6 shutouts in 11 complete games and struck out 138. He was MVP of the league.

His big league debut lasted two innings, but the hitters weren’t responsible, the weather was.

“It was a 41-degree day in April in Chicago,” Leary recalls. “I felt something give in my elbow.”

He not only couldn’t pitch with it, he almost couldn’t shave with it.

Ordinarily, when a prime prospect suffers a disabling injury, management summons the best medicine has to offer. Crack orthopedists are called in, and the patient is flown to Dr. Robert Kerlan’s clinic; operations are weighed and a program of scientific rehabilitation instituted.

But this was 1981, and baseball went on strike. Leary and his arm were on their own.

“I was stuck,” he remembers. “I didn’t quite know how to go about rehab so I had to go home and work out my own remedies.”

His own remedies were something less than state of the art, the result being that he started to learn to pitch without using the elbow. As any orthopedist--or veteran pitcher--could tell him, this led to problems elsewhere, and Leary came up with an inflamed nerve in his shoulder. He couldn’t pitch at all the next year.

He was never the same again for the Mets. He stumbled around for a season or so, bouncing between the Tidewater farm club in Virginia and Shea Stadium, without much luck either place. Some pitchers rely on their fastballs; Leary relied on his outfields. One visiting writer once cracked that his best pitch was “a single to right.”

His earned-run average looked more like his social security number, and the Mets traded him to Milwaukee in a four-team deal so complicated the player to be named later hasn’t shown up yet.

He pitched creditably in Milwaukee--12-12 with a team that finished next to last--but baseball tends to write you off when your parent club gives up on you.

“Great stuff--can’t win with it,” was the word on Tim. The baseball word for players like that is disappointment.

The Dodgers weren’t taking dead aim on Tim Leary when they traded for him in December of ’86. They were trying to get rid of Greg Brock. Leary and a journeyman minor leaguer, Tim Crews, were the best they could do. The Dodger trading philosophy historically has been, “When in doubt, take a pitcher.”

It the Dodgers were less than overwhelmed by their acquisition, however, the acquisition was ecstatic. Tim Leary felt as if he had just won the lottery. L.A. was home.

The season that followed made him wonder if he wouldn’t have been better off in Cleveland. He started 12 games and didn’t finish any of them. His record was 3-11. He gave up 15 home runs and 121 hits in 107 innings, and the Dodgers began to think his nickname should have been Boom Boom.

The Dodgers didn’t know whether to make him a starter, a reliever or a truck driver. He couldn’t get anybody out anyplace. Once when he was doing stretching exercises on the sideline, a reporter wanted to know what he was doing, and a teammate drawled, “He’s practicing to duck.”

Standard procedure for a veteran pitcher, after he has had a bad year and after he has blamed (1) the umpires, (2) the mound and (3) the club for using him (a) too little or (b) too much, is to go home and sulk all winter.

But Tim Leary did none of the above. He went in search of himself. He volunteered for winter ball.

Now, winter ball is not an option for most big leaguers, it’s a sentence. It’s a place where you send green rookies, marginal players and refugees from the disabled list.

But the club didn’t send Leary. It was his own idea.

“I had embarrassed myself,” he admits. “I was as shocked as anyone. I see players in this game just hanging on with almost no talent. I knew I could pitch as well as or better than lots of guys in this game. I knew I should get guys out. I knew I should find out why I wasn’t.”

He chose Mexican winter ball over Dominican because it was closer. “My wife was going to have a baby and I wanted to be there.”

The Mexican winter league is ordinarily an off-season grind of 20-hour bus rides over winding mountain roads, tacos at 2 o’clock in the morning, roofs that leak and showers that don’t.

Leary got one perk: He was allowed to commute. He could go home between starts. That meant a tri-weekly round trip from Pacific Palisades to Tijuana, Mexicali or points south and an Aeronaves flight to road games with only occasional hauls along the precipices to Culiacan or Hermosillo or Navajoa.

But he hung up a league record of 9-0 with an earned-run average of 1.24. He didn’t so much find his fastball as his confidence.

“They had good hitters down there,” he says. “It was triple-A-level play.”

Leary is 2-0 this young season. Fourteen games into it, he has won two-thirds as many games as he won all last year. He has struck out 20 batters in 19 innings and he shut out the San Diego Padres on 3 hits in his last start.

He is no longer just another pretty face. A couple of more wins and he’ll start looking to National League hitters like something that should be hanging off the bell at the cathedral of Notre Dame.