He Got His One Night in Spotlight : Warren’s Pro Career Went Downhill After 1983 No-Hitter With A’s

With two outs in the eighth inning, Mike Squires hit a long fly ball to right. Mike Davis, the Athletics’ right-fielder, turned his back on the ball as if to indicate it was over his head, but quickly turned around and caught the ball on the warning track.

“That ball would have been out if it had been a day game,” Mike Warren said. “But the night air is heavy in Oakland. There’s so much luck involved with something like this. So much of baseball is luck.”

He hardly knew the two men hugging him. Wayne Gross had played third base that night in September, Mike Heath was the catcher. They had their arms locked around him. Very soon, the entire Oakland A’s team would perform a mass embrace.

Mike Warren had just pitched a no-hitter against the Chicago White Sox. He pitched a no-hitter as a rookie, pitched it at the age of 22 and against a team that would win the American League West in 1983 by 20 games. He had been with the A’s a little more than a month, called up at the tail-end of a season in which the A’s would finish 14 games under .500 (74-88) and in fourth place.

By 1984, he was making the kind of money his father--the first baseman who gave it up for an 8-to-5 job--had dreamed his son would make.

Come 1988, Mike Warren was making $300 a month playing for a minor league team in Reno.

By June, he was back home in Garden Grove. He’d been on the wrong side of too many long-distance phone calls from his 2-year-old daughter, who just wanted her father to come home. His own father, the one who hit ground balls to him every day, had died.

And the pain in his right arm, the pain that started in 1986 when he threw a fastball on a chilly night in Omaha, Neb., remained.

Luck. Most of it bad.

To start the ninth, Jerry Hairston was sent in by Manager Tony La Russa to pinch-hit for shortstop Scott Fletcher. Hairston was hitting .295. He worked the count to 3-2, then Warren walked him when he missed with a curveball.

Asked what he thought of his chances of completing the no-hitter after walking Hairston, Warren said: “It was in the bag.”

“When he was 8 years old, he was telling everybody he was going to play pro ball,” said Jan Warren, Mike’s mother. “I said, ‘That’s nice, but not everybody can make it.’ He’d tell me, ‘Don’t worry about it Mom.’ ”

Warren had a cockiness about him that grew out of the innate ability to perform well in just about any physical activity.

“From the time he could walk, he was very well coordinated,” Jan said. “He’s always had extreme confidence in himself.”

That confidence was matched only by the confidence Don Warren, his father, had in Mike. Don grew up in Canada and California, playing a lot of baseball, mostly at first base. From what Mike has heard, his father was a pretty good ballplayer, someone who might have had a chance at something more after high school. But Don went to work after high school laying carpet. He had to.

“He had to get on with his life, he needed a job and the money,” Mike said. “Everyone doesn’t get their chance.”

When Don returned each day from work to his home in Fullerton, he and Mike would walk to the nearby elementary school where Don would hit Mike ground balls and pitch batting practice. It wasn’t always that simple. Many times Don had to, “track me down, going from house to house,” before they made the trek.

Mike remembers seeing his father return home each day, dripping sweat having, “worked his butt off,” for eight hours or more.

“I’d take one look at him and I knew I didn’t want to be a floor layer,” Warren said. “I’m sure it was his plan, too. He didn’t want his kid to have to work as hard as him.”

Mike and Don didn’t always get along. One point of contention was Mike’s hair, which was usually long. There were more than a few occasions when Don threatened to take a razor to Mike’s scalp while his son slept.

But it didn’t faze Mike. Cocky kids don’t flinch.

Greg Walker came up next. Walker had homered off Warren in Warren’s first big league appearance. Warren had been called up from double-A, pitched two games and was sent down to triple-A. Walker’s home run had won a game for the White Sox in the 10th inning.

This time, Walker flied to center. One out.

Warren didn’t start to pitch until he was a junior at Fullerton High School. There was no big transition. His coach, Gene Martin, handed him a ball one day and told him to start throwing.

“No one told me how,” he said. “I just picked it up as I went along.”

He watched and mimicked pitchers on TV. He wanted to be Nolan Ryan. What 16-year-old kid living in Orange County at the time didn’t? Warren, however, did a good enough impression to lead Fullerton to a Southern Section championship in 1978.

He was drafted in the 12th round by the Detroit Tigers. His record was 0-3 his first season, playing rookie-league ball in Bristol, Va. The next year, he was 3-6--with a 7.10 earned-run average--at class-A Lakeland, Fla., and was sent back to Bristol, where he was 2-7 with a 5.29 ERA.

He had never been an overpowering pitcher, but always managed to get people out with his curve. He once struck out 25 batters in a 13-inning game for Fullerton.

But his curve wasn’t fooling anyone anymore. The Tigers released him during the spring of 1981. Driving home from Florida, he stopped at the A’s training camp in Arizona and asked about getting a chance with them. They said they would call, and did, assigning him to Modesto, Oakland’s class-A affiliate.

But Warren knew Modesto meant more disappointment if he didn’t do something about his curve. Seeking advice from no one, he went about teaching himself to throw a better one.

“I just kept fooling with it,” he said. “I threw it over and over, until I got something I was comfortable with and that would work.”

He went 9-6 at Modesto and lowered his ERA to 4.17. He was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers organization in 1982 and went 4-0 with 3.27 ERA at Stockton. The A’s got him back and he finished 1982 by going 15-4 at Modesto with a 2.92 ERA.

In 1983, he went to the A’s double-A club in Albany where his record was 6-2 with a 3.25 ERA. He was told he was being called up after winning his sixth game.

“I said ‘All right, triple-A!’ ”

He wasn’t going to the triple-A club in Tacoma, he was being called up to the A’s. Oakland was looking for a reliever who could strike people out. Warren had struck out 108 batters at Modesto in 155 innings and 87 in 72 innings at Albany.

“They were looking for a stopper, but that wasn’t me,” Warren said. “I’m a starting pitcher. I have to start to be effective.”

His first major league appearance came against the White Sox. Brought in with the bases loaded, Warren’s first pitch was a 10-foot high fastball that sailed to the backstop. The White Sox touched him up for a couple more runs in the inning. But the A’s came back and tied the game in the bottom of the ninth. Walker then hit a home run in the 10th to win it.

His next appearance came against Toronto. He pitched 1 innings and yielded two runs.

It was at this point that Oakland broadcaster Lon Simmons muttered into the mike, “I’m afraid this young man doesn’t belong here.”

Apparently, Lon Simmons carries a lot of weight around the A’s front office. Warren was shipped out to Tacoma.

With fewer than 10,000 people looking on, Rudy Law came to the plate.

“Oakland fans are classic front - runners,” Warren said. “They were cheering that night, but there were a lot of nights when they would boo the hell out of me.”

Warren got Law in a hole, 0-2. He wasted one pitch, then struck him out on a curve. Two outs.

Warren struck out 17 Edmonton Trappers in his first triple-A start. He had a 6-3 record and was called back to the A’s on Aug. 14. He started out 0-2, then won four of his next five. His first major league victory came against the Yankees, whom he no-hit for five innings. He pitched a complete game against the Kansas City Royals, allowing two runs and five hits.

It was very hot in Kansas City that day.

“Seemed like 120 degrees.”

Throwing in the Kansas City bullpen before the game, an enclosed area that holds and echoes sound, Warren started to feel the groove.

“I felt like I had control,” he said. “I was on top of the ball, the pop from the catcher’s mitt was reverberating all over the place. It was great, I was getting pumped.”

The pump lasted until Sept. 29, when he took the mound against the White Sox. From the first pitch Warren said he knew he would do well.

“I was in the same groove,” he said.

He became one of only 13 rookies to have pitched a no-hitter, a group that includes Paul (Daffy) Dean, Sam Jones, Vida Blue and Burt Hooten. He stuck around the clubhouse for hours, answering question after question.

He rushed home to his hotel room to watch the highlights on the news. When those were over, he tried to get to sleep as fast as he could so, “I could wake up early and see the papers.”

The phone rang. It was his father. The phone rang again, it was Gene Martin, his former high school coach. Jan Warren had been at a concert and didn’t hear about it until she tuned in her car radio on the way home.

“I almost ran my car up a telephone pole,” she said.

There were only three games left in the season and Warren’s season was over. He finished 5-3.

“I thought I would have to pitch in winter ball,” he said. “But after this they told me, ‘It looks like you know what you’re doing.’ So I took the winter off.”

He started the next season 3-6, and soon found himself back in Tacoma.

“I didn’t think they stuck with me very long,” he said. “They didn’t let me pitch through the tough times. You have to learn to lose before you can learn to win. I think they were afraid that after the no-hitter I’d get down on myself.”

He finished at Tacoma with a 4-3 record.

“I was pretty unhappy,” he said.

Early in the morning of Oct. 15, 1984, Warren got a call telling him his father had died in car accident on the Riverside Freeway. At about 3 a.m., Don’s car slammed into a parked truck. Don was 52.

“He might have fallen asleep, he might have had a heart attack,” Mike said. “We’ll never know. I guess I don’t want to.”

Don and Mike were supposed to have had lunch that day to talk things over. Like any parent and child, they had had their problems, their run-ins.

“I was just getting to the point where I understood what my father went through and what he was about.”

But he never got the chance to tell him that.

Carlton Fisk had always done well against Oakland. He entered the game with 26 homers against A’s pitching. He had hit two that season. With the count 1-1, Warren threw Fisk a vicious curve to put him in a 1-2 hole. Warren threw another curveball that Fisk hit to left field. Rickey Henderson waited for the ball, then slapped his glove at the air as if he was shooing away a gnat. The ball was in his glove . It was 9:58 p.m. Gross and Heath got to Warren first, followed by the rest of the team. Bill King, A’s broadcaster, let out a big “Hoooly Toledo!”

During the winter of 1984, Warren met his wife Mary on a ski trip. Mary had hurt her leg on the trip and Mike would carry her up and down the stairs at Orange Coast College and sit with her during class.

Cute.

The 1985 season wasn’t. He spent most of it in Tacoma looking for that elusive groove. He didn’t find it. He thought a lot about his father. He thought about the no-hitter and where he was now.

“That season was a bust,” he said. “I could never get in control of myself or my pitches.”

The A’s released Warren after 1985. The Kansas City Royals invited him to their 1986 minor league camp in Sarasota, Fla., a camp he fondly remembers as, “hell.”

He couldn’t throw strikes, couldn’t get people out. He was hitting batters during batting practice. Still, he was sent to the Royals’ triple-A club in Omaha. All of a sudden, things turned around. He won five consecutive games and had a 25-inning stretch in which he didn’t walk a batter. By mid-May, Warren and Scott Bankhead were next in line to be called up to the big team.

Then, in the seventh inning of a game against the Buffalo Bisons, Warren threw a fastball and collapsed in a heap, holding his right elbow.

“It wasn’t a pop, it just felt like something was grabbing at me,” he said. “I didn’t think it was that serious. I thought I might miss my next start.”

The team doctors diagnosed it as a slight muscle strain and prescribed light weight training and rest. But whenever he tried to throw, the pain came back.

“I could get up to 80% and then the stinging would start,” Warren said.

A doctor in Georgia injected dye and took X-rays.

“They were just guessing,” Warren said.

He underwent surgery and doctors discovered an inflamed nerve and a bone spur. They told him he would be OK in a couple of months, that he would be as good as new by the spring of 1987.

Warren performed his rehabilitation regimen religiously, but whenever he tried to throw, the arm hurt. Finally he went to see Dr. Frank Jobe.

Jobe said Warren had stretched a ligament in his elbow. Ligaments don’t stretch back. Jobe performed the same surgery on Warren that had been credited with saving Tommy John’s career. He transplanted a ligament from Warren’s ankle into his arm and then told Warren to take 1987 off.

“I had been making $5,000 a month (in 1984), now I was collecting $900 a month on workman’s comp,” Warren said.

Mary was expecting their second child. Their first, Ashley, was 2. Mike went to work at his father-in-law’s statue and cast shop. He didn’t pick up a ball for eight months.

When this spring came, he begged the Brewers for a tryout, but that fell through. He ended up in Reno, playing for the Silver Sox, a California League team with no major league affiliation. He was pitching against 18- and 19-year-old kids, making barely enough money to survive.

“Taco Bell pays better,” Mary said.

Warren was taking home $260 a month. Luckily, a local couple allowed him to stay at their house. Temperatures got down in the 30s during night games. Players would buy wood at the local grocery store and light it in a dugout trash can just to stay warm.

“I got the feeling from talking to him that he felt a little degraded,” Jan said. “He knew what he could do, and what he’d done, and now he was at this.”

Crowds were rarely more than 200. What the crowd did see wasn’t always pretty. The Silver Sox were beaten, 30-2, early in the season.

“You heard a lot of guys say, ‘It’d sure be nice to be back home.’ ” Warren said.

Home came to Warren in the form of phone calls.

“We spent a lot of money on the phone,” Mary said. “Ashley would start crying and ask when he was going to come home. I wanted him home, too. When I talked to him I could tell he really felt worthless. But he’s not an 8-to-5 kind of guy, so he kept going for it.”

On June 1, he stopped going. His arm still aching--”It felt like shin splints up and down my arm”--he came home to rest, think and earn some money.

“I finally had to make the decision my dad had to make,” he said. “I had a family to provide for. If I was like Tommy John and had a ton of money in the bank, I could have kept trying. But this was different.”

So he came home and is now working as a medical technician. The only throwing he does is in the back yard with the family dog. He hasn’t found any grooves there. He says there’s a 50% chance he’ll try to get on a team next spring, but it’s obvious baseball has taken a lot out of him.

“Baseball has been good to me and bad,” he says, picking up Tyler, his 1 1/2-year-old son. “But even if I’ve had a bad time, I’ve had a chance that a lot of people won’t get.”

He raises Tyler in the air and laughs at the face the child makes.

“Now, this one, he’s going to be a player.”

Mary: “With a name like Ty, how could he miss?”

Mike: “Switch-hitting first baseman. He’ll be hitting them out, left and right. I’m going to work with him. He’s going to make it.”

With a little luck.