‘DO WHAT DOBBER SAYS’ : Padre Pitchers Find That Pat Dobson’s Advice Leads to Improvement

Pat Dobson in a Crisis, Part I:

The Padre season is four games old and already, four losses. They have just been beaten, 5-1, by the San Francisco Giants, the pitching staff has allowed a total of 22 runs in those four games and Manager Larry Bowa is blue in the face.

In a postgame meeting in his Candlestick Park office, Bowa accosts his pitching coach, Dobson.

“Dobber, Dobber, what are we going to do?” Bowa asked.

Dobson thought a second.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m going out and suck down a few oils.”

Pat Dobson in a Crisis, Part II:

A Friday night in New York, the Padres lead the Mets, 2-0, in the bottom of the seventh. But the Mets have a runner on first and Darryl Strawberry at the plate, and suddenly the 37,000 people in the stands are screaming at Padre pitcher Mark Grant. Out from the Padre dugout steps Dobson, slowly, distractedly, walking to the mound the way others walk down their driveway to pick up their morning paper.

When he finally reaches Grant, the conversation goes like this:

Dobson: “You know that guy up there with the bat? He’s got one thing on this mind. He wants to yank one. He’s dying to yank one way, way out of here. That’s all he’s looking to do. Yank one.”

Grant: “Uh, yeah, I know.”

Dobson: “Good.”

Grant proceeded to make certain Strawberry didn’t hit one out by hitting him first, on the foot. With runners on first and second, Mark Davis came in and retired Kevin McReynolds on a fly ball to end the inning, and the Padres became the first team this season to shut out the Mets, 2-0.

“Do what Dobber says,” Grant said later, recalling the conversation, “and it all falls into place.”

It has happened just that way this summer, not just for Grant but for the entire Padre staff. They have been captivated by a 46-year-old former big-league pitcher with a perpetual sneer who showed up this spring saying he had only two pitches left. One was humor. The other was honesty.

Pat Dobson walked funny. He talked funny, calling beer “oil” and curveballs “yellow hammers” and possessing so many names for a fastball, the pitchers would need a pocket thesaurus.

He poked fun of them in the dugouts before games. He sneaked cigarettes behind them in the stadium runways during games.

He worked so hard, salt from his sweat stained the bill of his cap white. He so wanted his pitchers not to worry about appearances or formalities that even when the Padres asked, he would not give up that cap.

The pitchers laughed, then they listened, and ultimately they have pitched their way to one of the biggest improvements in baseball. Even in a season in which the baseball is comatose again and average staff earned-run averages are nearly a point lower than last year, the Padres’ numbers have been remarkable.

After 55 games last year, they had a staff ERA of 5.01 with 75 homers and 219 walks allowed. They eventually led the National League in homers allowed and were second in walks.

After 55 games this year, they had an ERA of 3.98 with 44 homers and 170 walks allowed and did not lead the league in either category.

Dobson, who already has done something like this as pitching coach for the pennant-winning 1982 Milwaukee Brewers, likes those numbers. But he doesn’t necessarily see himself behind them. And as his players have discovered, Dobson won’t call it if he doesn’t see it.

“Part of the reason I took this job was that they were so bad last year, I figured they would listen to anybody. I didn’t figure it could be too tough,” said Dobson, who was hired away from his job as the Seattle Mariners’ minor league instructor this winter to replace Galen Cisco, who was fired. “And think about it: How could they walk that many guys again? How could they give up that many homers again? It was a no-lose situation.”

His players don’t quite agree.

“I have learned more from him than anybody else,” said Mark Grant, who, despite inconsistency, has matured in leaps.

“A great instructor, doesn’t look at the outcome of a game but whether you pitched intelligently or not,” said Mark Davis, whose career has spun around under Dobson and is headed for an All-Star game appearance.

And this from Eric Show, who has always been sort of his own pitching coach: “From the time I have known Pat Dobson, I have learned as much from him than from anybody else in that same period of time.”

As you might have guessed, Dobson and the high-thinking Show have a special relationship.

Said Show: “I think some of the things he says are on such a primitive id level, I have trouble understanding them.”

Said Dobson: “Ever noticed how Eric Show talks a lot and says nothing?”

Show gave his summation with a laugh, Dobson with a smirk. They can make fun of each other when few others can, because they can see each other as few others can. It’s the same way with the other nine pitchers. They and Dobson relate not as player and coach but as player and mirror.

A couple of years ago, between jobs, Dobson tried selling life insurance. But when prospective customers would seem the least bit uncertain of their desire to buy, he would say, “Fine, see ya later,” and get up off their couch and leave.

“I was the worst salesman in the world,” he said. “I can’t sell somebody something they don’t want. I can’t tell them my product is something it’s not.”

He has handled his pitchers in the same manner.

“He doesn’t want you to think some new pitching mechanic is right just because he tells you it is,” Davis said. “He wants you to realize it for yourself.”

So he shows them how it only makes sense that a low ball cannot be hit high for a home run. Shows them that if you throw a good changeup, the batter will be all changed up. Shows them that if you get the batter to hit the ball ahead of the runner, you have a better chance of keeping that runner from scoring.

He wanted to see pitches backed not with arm strength, but with thought. He calls them “quality pitches.”

That’s the way he survived for 11 big-league seasons and two World Series appearances with a career 3.54 ERA despite a 122-129 record. And that’s how he wants his pitchers to survive.

He says he doesn’t care if his guys are beaten, as long as they are beaten with quality pitches . This spring he used those two words even more than Larry Bowa used the words “Jimmy Jones.”

“What is so complicated about all this?” Dobson says. “Some of this stuff, I can’t believe these guys never heard of.”

So he has shown them, and, in doing so, the players have grown fond of what they see.

First, the walk. Because of a back problem, Dobson doesn’t so much walk as strut, ever slowly, ever coolly, motionless from his belt up.

“Weird walk. The man needs to work on his style,” Show said, smiling. “Takes him forever to get out to the mound.”

Dobson says there is another, grammatical reason for it.

“Sentences,” he said. “I use the time from the dugout to the mound to construct complete sentences so I can tell these guys what the hell I am thinking.”

Whatever, it is a walk that the new manager, Jack McKeon, trusts so much that he has assigned it to make every mound visit, even for pitching changes.

“No big deal,” Dobson said. “I’ll just get more exercise.”

Then there is what he says when he gets to the mound.

“Sometimes he doesn’t say anything right away,” Davis said. “He just kind of stands there and sighs, like, oh well.

“When all is blowing out around you, people screaming and a lot of noise, he gets you to relax.”

“That’s what I want,” Dobson said. “I want to leave them on the mound acting the same way I did when I got there.”

Then he speaks. For pitchers, this is sometimes the hardest part.

“You listen close to what he’s saying, and you can figure it out,” Jimmy Jones said. “But you’ve got to listen close.”

Call it a baseball rap. It was honed during a playing career that began with 7 1/2 years in the minor leagues. It was honed through enough stops in enough parts of the Western Hemisphere--12 cities from San Diego to Duluth to Syracuse, plus winters in the Dominican Republic--that Dobson could retire to become a United Nations headset.

“I don’t think I talk funny,’ Dobson said.

Oh yeah?

What do you call telling a pitcher, “If you slip him the cheese in the nitro zone, we’re talking a neck craner.”

(Translation: Throw the batter a fastball down the middle, and he will hit a long home run.)

How about when he says, “He had the great slide piece in the pen, but then came out with a bad cambio and gave up a bridge piece. Man must have white line-itis.”

(Translation: The pitcher was throwing a good slider in the bullpen, but once in the game he threw a bad changeup and allowed a homer, and maybe he’s one of those guys who can’t take his stuff across the foul line from the bullpen to the mound.)

“Man has a million metaphors,” Show said in obvious wonderment.

Dobson is even this way about his personal habits.

“I go through a couple of packs of heaters a day,” he says, “but more when I’m out oiling.”

He is referring to his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit--”I don’t inhale, so it’s all right”--that increases when he is drinking beer. If he were talking about drinking martinis instead of beer, that sentence would have contained the words “loudmouth soup.”

“In all my years in the game,” said Padre radio broadcaster Dave Campbell, who was Dobson’s roommate with the Padres in 1970, “he may be the funniest man I’ve met.”

As is usually the case, it stems from unfunny beginnings. Dobson was so buried in the minor leagues, he had to spend off-seasons working in a Westinghouse factory in Buffalo, N.Y, to pay the rent.

He has pitched an opening day in Fargo, N.D., in 28-degree weather with the field frozen solid. “Wouldn’t have been a problem,” Dobson said, “except I was a ground ball pitcher.”

He has pitched in the middle of summer in the middle of Alabama, where mosquito bites needed to be treated between innings and where a trip nearly came to an early end when a Cuban-born player named Mickey Mesa took the wheel of the team station wagon.

“Mickey never told us that he had never driven a car before in his life,” Dobson said. “I don’t know why or how we all didn’t die. Those days, I learned patience.”

Through another weird occurrence, he learned mind power.

After a tough year with triple-A Syracuse in 1965, he informed management of the parent club, the Detroit Tigers, that if he wasn’t traded, he would quit. A couple of days later, he was told he had been traded to the Cleveland Indians and would report to their triple-A team in Portland, Ore.

Viewing it as a new life, he won 12 games in the Pacific Coast League in 1966 and hoped for a big league shot the next season with the Indians. Sure enough, he got that shot. But you’ll never guess with whom.

During the winter, Tiger General Manager Jim Campbell called and said Dobson was being placed on Detroit’s major league roster. Dobson laughed. He thought it was an old friend playing a joke. According to Dobson, the conversation went like this:

Dobson: “Sorry, pal, I don’t play for the Tigers anymore.”

Campbell: “Sorry, Dobber, but yes, you do. You were never really traded. We just loaned you to Portland to clear your head.”

Dobson: “Never traded ?”

He made the big leagues that season, and it was smooth sailing toward two World Series appearances (Detroit 1968, Baltimore 1971) and a 20-win season (Baltimore 1971).

Well, almost smooth sailing.

His 1969 season ended with an injury so bizarre, so Dobson-esque, it’s no wonder he doesn’t want any pitcher talking about a sore arm.

There was a sudden outbreak of baby mice running around Tiger Stadium. One night before a game, one of them appeared in the dugout at the foot of outfielder Wayne Redmond.

Redmond was so frightened, he jumped out of his seat. When he landed, his cleat cut through Dobson’s right big toe, breaking it and putting him out for the final weeks of the season.

“I’m not so sure anything can happen to them (Padre pitchers) that hasn’t happened to me,” Dobson said with the trademark shrug.

Except maybe getting Dobson as pitching coach, which may be the best thing that’s happened to some of them yet.