To Knepper, Perfect Pitch Is World Away From Strike Zone

How many ballplayers do you know, off-hand, who get ready for a game by listening to a guy singing, “Your tiny fingers are frozen”--in Italian? Or, perhaps, “They Call Me Mimi,” or “Now Command Me!” How about “Thy Lips Like Crimson Berries,” or the intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana?”

Ballplayers listen to Willie Nelson, right? Bruce Springsteen. Heavy metal. Hard rock. Earache music. The insistent rhythms of the mambo.

Not Bob Knepper. So far as he is concerned, the Boss is Giacomo Puccini. Knepper is, of all things, into grand opera. If Caruso didn’t sing it, Bob probably doesn’t listen to it. He doesn’t really care for anything written after 1900, except for maybe “Madame Butterfly.”

Or anything sung by Mario Lanza.

Bob listens to everything ever recorded by Mario Lanza. He has worn out sets of recordings of “Be My Love.” He has the complete scores of “Toast of New Orleans” and “The Great Caruso.” And if you walk by his house at night, you will think you have stumbled on a short-wave from a sidewalk cafe in Naples.

Bob Knepper is, at the moment, the best pitcher on what is probably the best staff in the National League, maybe the majors, the Houston Astros. He has a record of 7-1. He has struck out more than 1,300 batters in his career. Bob puts the ball where he wants it, not where you want it.

But he’d give it all up to sing “Carmen.” He’d rather be Luciano Pavarotti than a pitcher, rather sing in the Met than shut out the Mets.

It all began with Lanza. Knepper was only 5 years old when Mario Lanza died, but someone in the family had brought home a set of the movie tenor’s best records.

“Naughty Marietta” does not loom large in the lives of most young athletes growing up in the wine country of Northern California--or anywhere else. Victor Herbert does not figure prominently on locker-room boom boxes. “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” is not something they’re apt to warm up on in the steam room.

But for Bob Knepper, the whole new world of classical music was opened up because he fell in love with the grandiose bel canto of the operatic movie star who came off the streets of South Philly with the big voice and the bigger appetites. It is said that you listen to grand opera with your heart, not your ears. And the lush emotionality of Mario Lanza’s voice got through to the young Knepper.

Lots of modern players psych themselves up for big games with lavish doses of jazz, reggae. Armies go to war to the beats of Sousa or George M. Cohan. It is said Hitler needed the bombast of Wagner to fuel his own flagging nerve.

But it’s doubtful if any locker room or team bus ever echoed to the strains of “E Lucevan Le Stelle” before. “Una Furtiva Lagrima” has never been thought of as a theme for a pep rally before.

Ballplayers have tried every hype known to society to get themselves up for games. I have known some who chanted, who prayed, consulted horoscopes, read fortunes. But I never knew one who kept the quartet from “Rigoletto” handy, or got ready to pitch to the strains of “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice.”

“I can get goose pimples just hearing a great soprano or tenor,” says Knepper.

Is he hooted out of the dugout for his strange addiction? To most ballplayers, indeed, most people, grand opera is just a lot of fat ladies coughing in the key of C or dying of love for some gloomy old party riding around in open swans and wearing a helmet with horns. The only opera they listen to is soap.

To Knepper, they are missing out. “I tell them, ‘A hundred years from now, my music will still be played.’ Theirs won’t even be remembered.”

I thought it might be fun to bring the National League’s foremost expert on Mario Lanza together with the world’s foremost expert on Mario Lanza.

Terry Robinson, the health club entrepreneur was the most faithful old friend--toward the end, the only old friend--Mario Lanza ever had. A one-time boxer and body builder from Coney Island, a fifth runner-up in a Mr. America contest in Madison Square Garden once, Terry was the person who most often had to pick up the pieces in the tenor’s tempestuous career.

When the money and the movies and the hangers-on were gone, Terry was still there--to the extent that when Mario lay tragically dead at 38, a judge, almost unasked, awarded custody of the Lanza’s four children to “Uncle Terry.”

Knepper knew more about Terry Robinson than Terry knew about the Houston Astros. And the colloquy was an animated discussion of a man whose wild, stormy career left an indelible impression on a stylish left-handed pitcher who knew him only through his recordings and films.

“I sometimes think that Mario was ruined by Hollywood,” the pitcher who would rather be a singer told the man who knew Mario Lanza better than any living human being. “He should have taken that voice to the Metropolitan opera, not to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He should have studied in Europe, not Culver City.”

Terry reminded him: “But if he had never made those movies, if he did not become a popular star, a lot of people would never have heard of him. Including Bob Knepper.”

Knepper stops short of saying he would prefer a Lanza compact disc to a Cy Young Award, but he does say he would rather be in “La Boheme” than a World Series. For him, opera stars should be on bubble-gum cards.

When Terry gave him a bootleg album from one of Lanza’s early TV shows, he reacted as if he’d just been told he was going to start the All-Star game. “I now have every record he ever recorded,” he said, happily.

As he walked away, an eavesdropping spectator in the dugout boxes leaned over and said: “It’s amazing how a Mario Lanza can lead a young man like that to long-hair music.”

Knepper would beg to disagree. His is not long-hair anymore. Theirs is. His is practically crew-cut by comparison.