Baseball : Quantity of Pitchers, Not Just Quality, Hamper All-Star Hitters

If hitting has become a lost art in the All-Star game, one overlooked reason may be that the hitters are forced to face a different pitcher virtually every inning after the starting pitcher goes his two or three.

It hasn’t always been this way.

In fact, the evolution of the All-Star game has, in some ways, paralleled the evolution of relief pitching, which is not to say that only relievers are parading in from the All-Star bullpens.

The American and National leagues both used eight pitchers Tuesday, tying the All-Star record for pitchers used by one league. In the first of these 59 games, in 1933, each league used 3 pitchers. The AL used 3 in 1934 and just 2 in 1935.

“It’s tough to hit when you don’t get a second look at a pitcher,” New York Yankees’ first baseman Don Mattingly said after the American League’s 2-1 victory Tuesday night. “You’re always adjusting, never seeing the same thing twice.”

Consider:

--In the first 50 All-Star games, one of the two teams used 7 or more pitchers 8 times. The American and National Leagues have already matched that total in the 9 games of the 1980s.

--In the first 27 games, from 1933 through 1959, the leagues used 4 or fewer pitchers 34 times. In the next 23 games, through 1979, the two teams used 4 or fewer pitchers only 11 times. In the 9 games of the 1980s, neither team has used fewer than 5 pitchers.

Good hitters are facing a greater number of good pitchers.

Making it even tougher for hitters in the early innings are the prime time starts, resulting from baseball’s sellout to TV.

“You ain’t gonna hit what you can’t see,” Detroit Tigers’ Manager Sparky Anderson said at Anaheim Stadium the other night.

It took 13 innings before anyone could score last year in Oakland in a game that the National League won, 2-0. Thirteen pitchers worked in that one, 10 in 1984’s early evening game in San Francisco. The 1989 game will return to Anaheim Stadium, where the first twilight game was played in 1967. In that game, there were 17 strikeouts, an All-Star record.

Next year’s game will also be part of Orange County’s centennial celebration, a yearlong event. The game will cap a weeklong series of All-Star-oriented events that begin July 4 and include a Disneyland gala the night before the game.

It all figures to be more exciting than another American and National league pitching clinic to be staged under the guise of an All-Star game.

In rescuing the 1988 All-Star game from total ennui, Terry Steinbach also provided the best line.

Steinbach revealed that he has several incentive clauses in his contract with the Oakland Athletics. Did any of them reward him for making the All-Star team?

“No,” he said. “We wanted to keep them reachable and realistic.”

At Anaheim Stadium the other day, Sparky Anderson said this is the deepest and best pitching staff he has ever had.

“I’ve had four better staffs here than I had in Cincinnati, and this is easily the best staff I’ve had here,” he said. “I don’t have too many guys who ain’t going to pitch decent. We’re not going to score runs like some other people, but we’ll pitch it and catch it. We’ll stay in this thing.”

This thing, of course, being the race in the American League East.

“If you’re rating the staffs in baseball now,” Anderson said, “I’d put the (New York) Mets No. 1 and us and Milwaukee 2-3, either way you want.”

Sparky’s staff would seem to have the potential to improve considering Jack Morris and Walt Terrell are a combined and unlikely 10-17.

“Imagine Morris and Terrell doing that and the Tigers still in first place,” Oakland Athletics’ Manager Tony LaRussa said. “That’s a good sign for the Tigers in the second half. You can count on those guys winning a lot of games. If they get those two guys going, it would be too easy.”

Boston Red Sox Manager John McNamara walked into his Fenway Park office Thursday at 3 p.m., greeted members of the media by saying, “Well, gentlemen, looks like I survived another day,” then sat down to write out his lineup for that night’s game with the Kansas City Royals. An hour later, McNamara had been fired. He tore up the lineup card and flung it against a wall, saying his emotions in response to a firing are always the same:

Degradation, humiliation, embarrassment.

“I’m hurt because it happened and disappointed with the way it was handled,” he said. “They could have told me Monday or Tuesday. They had three days to let me know.”

Contributing to McNamara’s firing were the inexplicable inconsistency of a strong offense, the difficulty in determining whether to play or bench Jim Rice, the injuries to the pitching staff and the Wade Boggs palimony suit that divided the clubhouse.

The front office didn’t help. John Harrington, the corporate president, said in spring training that McNamara had to produce or else. The media conducted a daily death watch. In the end, Harrington and principal owner Jean Yawkey voted to fire McNamara and chief executive officer Haywood Sullivan voted against it.

Said Mike Greenwell, in his second full season with the Red Sox:

“I’m shocked by the way it was handled, but maybe this will get us back to playing the way we can. We needed a spark, a motivation. Every time we walked into the clubhouse, Mac’s situation was on our mind. They had to do something to clear that up.”

Added Bob Stanley, veteran relief pitcher:

“We haven’t been the same team since the World Series (which they lost to the New York Mets in 1986), but we didn’t want to see him fired. Maybe that put pressure on us to try too hard to win.”

Angel telecaster Joe Torre acknowledged that he was approached by a Boston scout recently and asked if he would be interested in managing the Red Sox if McNamara was fired. Torre said he answered affirmatively but has heard nothing since.

If owner George Steinbrenner’s stage-stealing spanking of the New York Yankees’ Dave Winfield, Rickey Henderson and Mattingly before the All-Star game seemed in character, Manager Lou Piniella’s ensuing scolding was not.

Piniella junked the Sweet Lou image in a team meeting that started the second half for the Yankees.

“When I first came back, I felt there was a lot of tension here,” Piniella said. “So I told them, ‘Have fun. Relax. Just play ball.’ But evidently that wasn’t enough.

“I make the rules. They’re there. They are not unrealistic by any stretch of the imagination. If they don’t adhere, it’s going to cost them money. I want players who show up on time and be ready to play hard. Unless that happens, there will be problems with me.”

One of the rules stemming, perhaps, from the urging of Steinbrenner and his illogical belief that Winfield has been spending too much time publicizing his book, will prohibit personal appearances on game days. Guilty players will be fined $500 for a first offense, $1,000 for a second and suspended for a third. Mark Belanger of the Major League Players Assn. said that the fines are illegal, that a club can’t tell a player where he can or can’t go before coming to the park.

Said Piniella: “The Players Assn. doesn’t make the rules in my clubhouse.”

Piniella’s cross-town counterpart, Met Manager Davey Johnson, opened the second half harboring similar concerns about his team’s attitude and approach.

The Mets were .500 over the final 46 games of the first half, failing to put a stranglehold on a division they should win easily.

“It seems like people have been sitting easy in the saddle lately,” Johnson said. “I don’t know if it’s complacency or what, but I’m going to make sure they have their minds on business.”

A good idea, implied pitcher Ron Darling.

“We seem to be able to lose our intensity with the best of them,” he said.

Johnson’s first move of the second half was to drop slumping catcher Gary Carter in the batting order. Carter, batting .237 through Thursday and without a home run since May 16, is now hitting seventh.

“Gary will think he should hit fourth until he dies. If it makes him mad, so be it,” Johnson said.

Said Carter: “I’m obviously not doing the job, but I’m going to change that. I struggled on the front nine. Now we’re on the back nine.”

There has been speculation that the youth-oriented Chicago Cubs might be willing to trade Rick Sutcliffe.

Greg Maddux said it would be a mistake.

“We’d probably drop two places in the standings if we trade him,” Maddux said. “He takes care of us. Whenever we have a problem pitching, we go to him. We all look up to him. We trust him.”

Hawthorne resident Tracy Jones was happy to be traded by the Cincinnati Reds to the Montreal Expos on Wednesday. An often-touted prospect with the Reds, Jones was never sure when he would play.

“This has got to be a better situation than the one in Cincinnati,” he said. “Even if (Expo Manager) Buck Rogers wants to come over every day and kick me in the mouth, it’s got to be a better situation.”