He Prefers to Deceive the Hitters

If the San Francisco Giants get in the World Series--and that looks like the way to bet--the American League batters are not going to believe their good luck when they get a load of the pitches No. 48 is throwing up there. Batting practice stuff. Medium fastballs. Lobs. Gophers.

The batter’s eyes bug out. His heart leaps. He lunges into the pitch with a glad cry and gives it the full 360-degree home-run swing and waits confidently for it to clear the center-field fence so he can go into his home-run trot.

Only, there’s this dull thud! Like a watermelon falling off a moving truck. The ball lifts impotently in the air over second base or trickles harmlessly on the ground to the shortstop for a routine out.

The batter comes back to the bench with his teeth clenched and saliva dripping down his chin. He hurls his helmet in disgust, smashes his bat on the top of the stairs.

“He hasn’t got a thing,” he growls. “A nuthin’ ball! I shoulda killed it!”

And Rick Reuschel has done it again, gotten another batter lulled into thinking he was getting his pitch--when he was really getting Reuschel’s.

Rick Reuschel has been getting big league batters out “without a thing” for 18 years. It’s his stock in trade.

Reuschel is almost unfair. Guys who win 211 big league games, who turn Hall of Fame hitters into pop-ups, should look the part. They should be whipcord-lean. Their fastball should bristle and hop. You look at Dwight Gooden from the batter’s box and you know you’ve got trouble. You look at Rick Reuschel and you think you’re going four for four.

He looks more like an Irish cop or an operatic tenor than a National League pitcher. First of all, there’s that ample girth. If he weren’t so tall--he’s 6-feet-3--he’d be considered roly-poly. He doesn’t look particularly mean. He certainly doesn’t look hungry. At 240 pounds, Reuschel hasn’t often missed dinner. He would have to slim down to be considered rotund.

He’s not young. But at 39 last year, he won 19 games for the San Francisco Giants. This year, at 40, he has won 17.

He doesn’t so much throw the ball as kind of shotput it. He has this deceptively lazy motion. But he gets rid of the ball so fast, he’s the hardest pitcher to steal on in the league.

He can throw the ball in the 90-m.p.h. range if he wants to. He doesn’t always want to. He is like a guy living off the interest of his talent. Only occasionally does he dip into the capital. He’s not a junk pitcher. He can put spin on the ball but he also can bust it by you.

“He gives a clinic out there every time he pitches,” acknowledges his manager, Roger Craig, a former pitcher himself. “He has the same arm motion whether he’s throwing a 90-m.p.h. fastball or an 80-mile curveball.

“He has three fastballs he throws with the same delivery--one will be at 89 m.p.h, the others 85 and 82. The hitters almost break their arms trying to hold up on their swings. When the game gets tight and there are men on base, other pitchers get faster. Rick gets slower.”

Pitchers call it location, the art of being able to throw a baseball exactly where they want it. Reuschel does not totally rely on it.

“I don’t try to hit the corners,” he says. “I throw the ball down the middle of the plate, but I keep it down and sinking.”

He has started 514 big league games--and completed 105 of them. Which is extraordinary for a pitcher who was considered so washed up eight years ago that he was cut loose by the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs and wound up pitching in Quad Cities and Columbus and Honolulu in what was perceived as the twilight of his career.

Rick Reuschel has had a longer twilight than Norway in June. He was a 20-game winner with the Cubs back in the days when they were less a team than a comedy routine. He won 18 another year. But when he got traded to the Yankees in 1981, he came up with a rotator cuff injury.

“I had worn a hole in it,” he explains.

Eventually, the Yankees cut him adrift. The Cubs, for whom he won 129 games, re-signed him in 1983, sent him to Class A Quad Cities, then they cut him loose.

Reuschel, protesting his arm was as sound as ever, caught on with Pittsburgh. The Pirates sent him to Hawaii, where he proved it.

He had some good years at Pittsburgh, considering the quality of the team--last place two years, next-to-last the other. He had an earned-run-average of 2.27, which is Cy Young Award stuff.

Still, when the Giants traded for him in the middle of a pennant race in 1987, he was 38 and Giant fans were less than thrilled. He promptly threw three two-hitters in the title run that September. He walked one or none in 24 games that season. He won five games in the month he was with the Giants and played a big part in their stretch drive to the playoffs that year.

He has played a big part this year. He has an earned-run average of 2.64, a record of 17-7. He has won more games, pitched more innings and kept the team in the pennant race more than anyone else on the staff. He has won 41 games for the Giants in the little over two years he’s been with them.

He does it all with stuff that looks as easy to hit as Leon Spinks but is about as easy to hit as a lottery. He admits it’s his sheep’s-clothing fastball.

“I love to see those guys coming up to see how far they can hit it,” he says.

Also, the surprised looks on their faces when they make contact and not much happens.

“That’s my weapon,” Reuschel agrees. “What looks like the pitch of your dreams turns out to be a dirty trick.”

Says Craig: “He throws them a dead fish.”

It’s like a woman on stage who looks beautiful and desirable but, when she gets closer, you notice she’s wearing a wig, corset, store teeth and too much rouge. And you wonder what you ever saw in her.