McCaskill of Old Has Returned

A pitcher needs his arm the way a painter does. Without it, work is difficult, nigh on impossible, and, in fact, a case could be made that a pitcher needs his arm even more than a painter does, since a courageous few disabled artists have been known to function with brushes held by teeth or toes.

While it has been proven lately that physical limitations do not automatically terminate an athlete’s chances--the Angels’ No. 1 pick in a recent scholastic draft was a left-handed pitcher with no right hand--life would undoubtedly be simpler for a man who throws baseballs for a living if he had the unrestricted use of every limb. His career hinges on his hinges.

Nobody understands this better than a teammate. Maybe that’s why, when Kirk McCaskill of the Angels slips into an otherwise spotlessly white T-shirt after a hard day’s night, the black smudge on the left front of the shirt is actually an autograph, given to him by the guy who occupies the next locker down.

“To Kirk. My Idol,” it reads. “Dan Petry.”

And best wishes for your continued success and good health, as they say.

When bone chips were discovered in McCaskill’s valuable right arm last season after only 21 innings of work, Petry, if he had been with the Angels at the time, definitely was someone who could have empathized with McCaskill’s plight. The year before, while still in Detroit, the same thing happened to Petry, who, like McCaskill, until that point had established himself as one of the American League’s truly artistic pitchers.

When the three small chips were removed from Petry’s right elbow at a Columbus, Ga., clinic in June 1986, he was coming off seasons in which he won 15, 19, 18 and 15 games. Before McCaskill’s bone chips were surgically excised by the Angels’ team orthopedist last April 27, he had won 29 games in less than two full seasons.

Each pitcher wondered if this meant a farewell to arms. Each was assured that this was minor surgery, not necessarily career-threatening and clearly not life-threatening, yet that is always easy for somebody else to say.

“When your career hangs by those cords off your right side, it’s got to be a scary time,” Angel catcher Bob Boone said Thursday night, after McCaskill continued his rehabilitation with a sweet shutout of Detroit, for his fifth straight victory. “What Kirk had was relatively minor surgery, but you know the definition of minor surgery. Minor surgery is surgery that happens to someone else.”

McCaskill admits he was scared. Some of those bleak December afternoons, when he found himself in a virtually deserted Anaheim Stadium, lifting weights and doing isometrics with his slowly mending right arm, he wondered just how endangered his pitching career was. For the first time, he wondered if his other true love, pro hockey, might have been the safer route to take.

“That was the darkest time, this winter,” McCaskill said. “Coming in here to get physical therapy, stretching the elbow every day. There’s a lot of scar tissue in there. It was very scary for me, but every time I’ve talked to Dan Petry about it since the season began, he’s said: ‘Keep thinking about next year. Not just this year, but next year. Your arm is going to get stronger and stronger.’ That gave me hope.”

Petry, who came to the Angels in a December trade, got the use of his arm back, only to be felled by a sprained ankle. McCaskill, meanwhile, has gotten stronger and stronger to the point that he is California’s most effective starting pitcher, the only one with a winning record. Kirk has helped beam up the Angels from seventh to fourth in the standings--and, incidentally, this has become quite a good summer in Southland baseball for Kirks, what with Gibson and all. It wouldn’t shock anybody if that guy on the San Diego Padres wasn’t really named Kruk.

What McCaskill did was use his time off to become more of a thinking man’s pitcher. No longer does he try to fry the ball past the hitters with every pitch. He turned off some of the heat, and concentrated more on curves and location. He calls it “learning how to stay within myself,” which has become sort of the ‘80s buzz phrase for today’s thinking athlete.

“I think I’ve taken big steps in my career mentally,” McCaskill said.

Some guys go on the mentally disabled list from time to time. They get caught up trying to do what they cannot. They try to do too much, too soon. They overthin k or they underthink . Sometimes they think themselves right out baseball.

“I stopped trying to throw the ball harder than I’m capable of,” McCaskill said. “I used to rely a lot on imagery. Imagery and videotapes. I’d spend all my time trying to conjure up the perfect image of this pitch or that pitch, trying to envision exactly where a ball would go before I even threw it.

“Well, one day I just said, ‘I’m tired of talking about how I’m going to pitch and thinking of how I’m going to pitch. I’m just going to go out there and pitch.”’

When did this idea come to him?

“Believe it or not,” McCaskill said, almost sheepishly, “it was just before this current streak.”

We believe it. McCaskill is McCaskill again, the one we knew two summers ago, and it is nice to see him again. His arm is alive, he is only 25 years old and there is plenty of future ahead of him. “Don’t forget,” said his 40-year-old catcher, Boone, “he was just a baby two years ago, and he’s still just a baby.”

And baby is booming.