STRONG AND SILENT : Dodgers’ Tudor Is an Intense Competitor Who Likes to Let His Pitching Do the Talking

There is general agreement regarding his talent and tenacity as a pitcher, but little else. Even friends and acquaintances differ in their perspectives of John Tudor’s personality. That is no surprise, since he has been portrayed as:

--A perfectionist attempting to cope with life’s inherent imperfections.

--A private person struggling to swim in the fishbowl of a public career.

--A negative thinker pursuing positive results.

A paradox and contradiction? Tudor would seem to be that and more.

“I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I just don’t want to talk about myself. I don’t want to talk about what I am and what I’m not. I never have and I never will,” Tudor said in declining to be interviewed at Dodger Stadium the other day.

“I’m only concerned about doing my job,” he added. “Writers have written enough negative about me. I’ll answer questions--some questions, anyway--on nights that I pitch and try to be as honest as I can, though that’s where I’ve gotten in trouble in the past.”

The image-conscious Dodgers did not acquire Tudor to improve his tenuous relationship with the media.

He is here to replace left-hander Fernando Valenzuela in the rotation, to help sustain the Dodger lead in the National League West, to provide a toxin for the left-handed sting of clubs such as the New York Mets, whom Tudor will face tonight in his second start with the Dodgers.

He is not a savior, Tudor said after his first Dodger victory Wednesday against the Philadelphia Phillies. He is part of a team, and that seems to be more than a cliche to him, one reason the Dodgers were willing to deal Pedro Guerrero to the St. Louis Cardinals.

“I was in Philadelphia about a week ago to see him pitch,” scout Phil Regan said. “It was the night before, and John was sitting in the stands charting pitches, but it was as if he was in uniform, as if he was in the game, the way he was yelling for his teammates. I mean, that’s the kind of competitor he is.”

Which complements the kind of club Executive Vice President Fred Claire seems intent on building. If Kirk Gibson has provided a fire, now there is John Tudor among those pouring fuel.

“He has the kind of intensity that drives an athlete to higher ground,” Orel Hershiser said of Tudor.

Wrote Kevin Horrigan, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist, on the day of the trade:

“He was a gamer, and more. A hundred percent was never enough for John Thomas Tudor. His left shoulder went south on him in 1986, but he gutted it up for 13 victories. The New York Mets’ Barry Lyons crashed into him in the dugout early in 1987, but Tudor willed himself back early from the broken leg he suffered in that collision and pitched the Cardinals to another pennant.

“With the possible exception of Brian Sutter of the (St. Louis) Blues, I’ve never seen an athlete who wanted to win more than John Tudor does. He was magnificent, a surgeon in double-knit rompers, even when pitching in pain, even when pitching with the handicap of expecting disaster at every turn.”

Tudor compiled a 50-22 record and 2.58 earned-run average in his three-plus seasons with the Cardinals. His .694 winning percentage was the club’s highest for pitchers with 50 or more decisions.

Tudor prospered in the bigger park amid a better defense after the Cardinals acquired him from Pittsburgh late in 1984 as part of a trade that sent George Hendrick to the Pirates. Tudor finished 21-8 in 1985 after a 1-7 start, and he won 13 games in 1986, although he had a sore shoulder and the Cardinals suffered an offensive collapse.

Last season, he was 10-2 despite the broken leg, and this season, he came back from shoulder surgery in January to lead the league in ERA, maintaining his consistency despite the Cardinals’ anemic hitting. Tudor, who has a misleading 7-5 record, allowed only 10 earned runs in his first 12 games and emerged with a 4-2 record.

“He could have been 9-1; he could have been 10-0,” Manager Whitey Herzog said by phone. “He’s one of the best big-game pitchers I’ve ever seen, but he’s also more than that. I never managed a game that I didn’t think we could win with him pitching. I didn’t care if he was healthy or not. He would always take the ball. He would never give in. He’s just a hell of a competitor, one of the best I’ve ever seen.”

There is no disputing what Tudor can do with arm and mind, but how do you measure heart and guile? Tudor, whose fastball is only 80 m.p.h., does it with control and cunning, with curve, changeup and competitiveness.

During the 1985 World Series, Darryl Motley, then of the Kansas City Royals, said: “He’s the kind of pitcher you keep telling yourself you can hit. Then it’s all over and you’re 0 for 4.”

Said Hershiser: “He has command of three pitches, and he lives on the corner. When he misses, he misses off the corner. His mistakes are unhittable.”

Boston Red Sox Manager Joe Morgan, who was a coach and manager in that club’s farm system when Tudor was coming up through it, said the other day:

“Just to show you what kind of pitcher he is, he throws 128 pitches, 89 on the outside corner and another 20 on the inside.”

Then there is his intensity, the zeal to win. Tudor recently told Rick Hummel of the Post-Dispatch that he probably wants to win more than the next guy, that he abhors losing to the extent that he would put sandpaper in his glove if need be, that he would “seize any advantage” and not be embarrassed if he was discovered.

“I’m never satisfied. I always feel I can improve,” he said after Wednesday’s victory. “Start feeling satisfied and you start regressing.”

Tudor grew up in Peabody, Mass., and some have viewed his determination as simple Yankee stubbornness. Others call him a perfectionist who became determined as a 5-foot 9-inch, 140-pound high school senior who had to try harder. He had to do it again as a Red Sox prospect who always seemed to find left-handers Bob Ojeda and Bruce Hurst mentioned ahead of him, who always seemed to be on the outside looking in. Tudor survived Fenway Park, a reputed graveyard for left-handers, to win 13 games in 1982 and again in 1983, but he was traded to the Pirates for Mike Easler that winter.

Three Peabody residents, reached by phone, offered their opinions.

Said Tudor’s father, Mel, an engineer at General Electric, where his son Paul and daughter Carol also work: “John was always a goal-oriented kid who would do everything it took to reach that goal.”

Said John Bezemus, Tudor’s high school coach: “He was a late developer who always wanted to improve, always wanted to get better. He was always looking for that extra hour of work and was always his own greatest critic.”

Said Joe Blodgett, a high school teammate who is now a lawyer and close friend: “John is definitely a perfectionist, but when you’re not 6-5, when you can’t throw the ball 100 miles per hour, you almost have to be. You have to use guile and finesse.”

The Dodgers saw Tudor’s drive in his 11-hit, 7-2 victory over the Phillies. He was constantly talking to himself, pounding a fist into his glove. After the Phillies scored their two runs in the second inning, Tudor looked skyward, shook his head, kicked at the dirt on the mound, kicked at the dirt near the foul line, kicked at the dirt near the dugout, then flung his glove to the bench.

“He’s really hard on himself, the sign of a perfectionist,” Hershiser said. “He was swearing at himself all night. I wonder what he does when he pitches badly.”

His infrequent failures enhance what Tudor calls an innate pessimism that he refuses to term negativism. He acknowledged once that letting it out, admitting that he worries about “screwing up,” may make it easier on him. He also said that he does not think of failure when on the mound, that his competitive instincts take over. Yet, in leaving St. Louis, Tudor did not talk about his success. He dwelled on his losses in the seventh games of the “blown” World Series of 1985 and ’87.

“I tend to look at the negative things rather than the positive,” he told St. Louis writers. “I remember the times I hurt rather than the times I felt good.”

Wrote columnist Horrigan: “The Cardinals are losing one of the great negative thinkers of our era, a guy with a positive knack for finding the dark cloud behind every silver lining. It got to be a clubhouse joke. Tudes would pitch a two-hitter and the bus driver would get lost on the way back to the hotel and Tudor would gripe about the bus ride. The bus at spring training on a glorious day would pull into a muddy parking lot and someone would say, ‘What about that parking lot, Tudes?’ ”

Said his father: “I don’t think he could be as successful as he has if he was a negative thinker.”

Said his agent, Steve Freyer: “There’s an awful lot of New Englanders running around with a Calvinist guilt feeling. It’s indigenous to the area. It’s part of his upbringing. . . . ‘Whoa, something bad is going to happen now.’ No one can say it has affected his pitching.”

There have been times, however, when his behavior has been affected. Chased from a game against the Dodgers earlier this year, Tudor reached the dugout and stuffed his glove over the intruding eye of a television camera. He once ripped a microphone from the dugout wall in Atlanta and shredded his shirt after he left the field in San Diego. After he was removed from the seventh game of the 1985 World Series, Tudor cut his hand when he swung at an electric fan in the dugout. The announcement of that injury was greeted by applause in the press box. Tudor’s quest for privacy and his first encounter with pack journalism in that Series produced a bad feeling. After his 3-0 shutout of the Royals in Game 4, Tudor entered the clubhouse, found a crowd of reporters around his locker and said, “What’s it take to get a media pass, a driver’s license?”

When Gordon Edes of The Times asked why he was so condescending to reporters during postseason play at the risk of his own reputation, Tudor engaged in an exchange that culminated with him saying to Edes, “You want me to take a swing at you? Would that make it easier?”

Tudor called Edes after the World Series to apologize. He said he had gone through a series of interviews even before he reached the clubhouse and was frustrated at being deprived of sharing the moment with his teammates.

“I’m not a person who likes to talk about myself, and when I have to do it, I kind of resent it,” Tudor told Edes.

“Then, when you hear 45 questions about the same thing, it tries your patience.”

Of Tudor’s behavior in that Series, Sport Illustrated’s Curry Kirkpatrick wrote: “Spare all of us the perplexing Tudor--so near and graceful on the mound, so graceless, drab, sullen, even mean off it.”

Drab. Sullen. Dour. The image lingers, as does his reputation as a problem for the media. Tudor once told the Boston Globe: “I don’t mind being in the public eye, but I don’t think the public has to be in my eye.”

Arrogant? Indifferent? Friends insist that he is basically shy and protective of his privacy. Quiet and unassuming, his friend Blodgett said. “Probably the most misunderstood athlete in America,” he added.

Said agent Freyer: “Taciturn New Englander is acceptable, but sullen and drab are too harsh. John Tudor is a very intense, disciplined, self-contained person who takes his craft seriously. He may react negatively when he encounters people who, in his mind, have not done their homework or intrude on his time going into a game or coming out of one. He does not suffer fools gladly.”

Ricky Horton, a former Cardinal teammate, once called Tudor the most cynical player he had ever met, but Kip Ingle, the Cardinals’ public relations director, said Tudor participated in most of the club’s marketing ventures and remembers him as a gentleman who, after his loss to the Royals and the electric fan in Game 7 of the ’85 Series, got out of his seat on a packed team bus and asked Ingle’s wife if she cared to sit down.

“Some athletes always say yes to your requests and some say no, no matter what the cause,” Ingle said. “John, at least, always weighed it and handled it professionally, and you can’t ask more than that. He was always good with charities, always good with people he considered disadvantaged.”

Reporter Hummel, who covers the Cardinals for the Post-Dispatch and is the only St. Louis area writer to travel regularly with the team, said of Tudor: “I’d never accuse him of being charming, but I did find him cooperative. He never ducks you, and his competitiveness is such that he’s hardest on himself. I basically found him to be as honest a person as I’ve ever met, and I told him when he left that I appreciated that.”

There were times when General Manager Dal Maxvill did not appreciate Tudor’s honesty--times when Tudor criticized the Cardinals, such as when they traded Lonnie Smith for John Morris in 1985. Or when they rejected the opportunity to sign catcher Lance Parrish as a free agent and then traded three players for catcher Tony Pena. Or when they gave Pena a two-year extension at a time when Jack Clark was unsigned and headed for free agency. Tudor reportedly met with Maxvill once to apologize for some of his remarks, but there probably would have been more.

Last year, in the playoffs against the San Francisco Giants, Tudor said that Jeffrey Leonard was a jerk and that he wished that Busch Stadium organist Ernie Hays would play lively music of the type heard in Candlestick Park.

The perplexing and paradoxical Tudor is now wrapped in Dodger Blue. Will he stay beyond this season, after which he can demand a trade and become a free agent if the Dodgers fail to accommodate him and return, conceivably, to St. Louis? Will he stay beyond 1989, when his contract expires and he has said that he plans to retire?

Does the, yes, taciturn Tudor have any fun doing what he is doing?

“That’s a good question,” friend Blodgett said. “I think he enjoys his profession. I think he takes pride in his success, but you would never see it on his face. I know he considers it work, and that’s how he approaches it.”

Tudor, 34, has a degree in criminology from Georgia Southern, is an avid scuba diver and ice skater and will be married during the off-season. A number of factors will determine his future plans. Tinseltown would not seem to be his best environment, considering how much he enjoyed the ethics and life style of middle America.

“John would be a happy camper if he could do his job in anonymity,” agent Freyer said. “He’s not like Tommy (Lasorda). He doesn’t like the glare and the spotlight. He appreciates the recognition that comes with being a major league player, but, given his druthers, he’d rather play in a place where the media scrutiny is light. When the season is over, when he’s confronted with a decision as to where he’ll play next year, I don’t know what that decision will be. A lot can happen between now and then.”

A lot can definitely happen between now and his retirement date of October, 1989.

“I don’t know what to make of that,” Mel Tudor said. “I think he’s serious as he talks about it now, but I don’t think he’ll really have an answer until the time comes. On the other hand, John is generally solid on the things he says. He doesn’t talk frivolously.”

And sometimes he doesn’t talk at all.