Parker Performs His Masterpiece

The Oakland A’s didn’t even read them their rights. Just lined them up against the wall and began to kick butts.

It was a short, boring ballgame, as dull gray as the high fog that drifted over it from the bay. It was a two-scarf and earmuffs World Series. The Giants just went through the motions. They played the game as if they were double-parked. Oakland won it with a yawn.

When the mayor of Oakland proposed a friendly wager on the outcome of the Series, the mayor of San Francisco answered haughtily, “There’s nothing in Oakland I want.”

Oh?! How about Dave Stewart, Your Honor? In fact, how about Dave Parker?

Dave Parker is a guy who knows how to act out home runs. It’s an art form. You will recall the horror with which Frank Robinson once observed Pete Rose running out a home run--as if it were a ground ball to the hole he had to beat out. I think he even slid home.

Robinson was outraged by this appalling lack of theater. “Son,” he said. “Leave those home runs to those of us who know how to act them out.”

Dave Parker with a home run is like Gielgud with Hamlet, Cagney with a machine gun. He treats them with great bravura. His is the Academy Award, the Shakespeare of home run trots.

First of all, he just stands there. He is like a great actor gathering himself before the soliloquy. Then, he starts to move down the line, grandly, like Cleopatra’s barge down the Nile. He seizes the moment. You’d think he was in the middle of a ticker-tape parade. Babe Ruth used to have these little mincing steps, but Parker’s tour is grand opera.

Third basemen, for some reason, are always most offended by guys who know how to act this theater out. Fred Haney once hit a rare home run and which made him--lifetime--something like 700 career homers behind Ruth. But, as he passed the Babe on his way to the field, he crowed, “I’m gaining on you, big fellow. Watch out!” The next inning, Ruth hit another home run. As he huffed around third, he turned to Haney and asked, “How do we stand now, Kid?”

You will recall Dave Parker had some words with Toronto third baseman, Kelly Gruber, who thought Parker was milking his moment in the limelight like a ham actor in a road company melodrama. So, Parker hit another one. As he passed Gruber, he waved to him--like a Pope waving to the crowd off a balcony.

Dave Parker has had plenty of time to work on his home run scenes. He has hit 307 of the things. He knows every nuance of the role.

Some years ago, in a World Series against the Dodgers, Minnesota’s Harmon Killebrew hit a home run that disappeared into the palm trees in the back of the bullpen. Later, in the locker room, the Dodger catcher, John Roseboro, asked: “Does he always just stand there when he hits a home run?”

“When he hits ‘em where he hit that one, he does,” I told him. The Dodgers of that era, on the rare occasions they hit the ball at all, started to run like hell as soon as contact was made.

Parker, like Killebrew, can stand there and admire them--like a tourist in the Louvre getting his first look at the Mona Lisa.

You know, in golf, the instructors always tell you, “Keep your head down.” The pro, Jackie Burke, disagreed. “Look up when you hit a good one. It’s the only pleasure in the game,” he advised.

Parker subscribes to this theory. When you orbit one, you don’t put your head down and dig for second like a guy who just stole a pie. Some day, when you’re old and gray, you’ll lie there thinking of the delicious pleasure of watching a moon shot arching into the distant bleachers. It’s like remembering your first kiss, your first car.

Baseball is a game of failure. The best miss seven out of 10 times. Home runs are to be stored in the memory like roses in the family Bible. How can you do that if you hang your head in embarrassment?

I always thought Dave Parker was one of the greatest hitters I ever saw in the game. He was one of those guys who looked like a three-run home run just standing at the plate. He scared you just to look at him. Big (6-foot-5, 215 pounds) graceful, powerful, he was the nearest thing to Ted Williams to come along in his era. He batted over .300 five times in a row with Pittsburgh, he hit 25 to 30 homers annually, he found nothing particularly difficult about hitting a baseball.

He didn’t have any attitude baggage and he and the Pirates’ Willie Stargell were the nearest thing to Ruth-Gehrig you would find in their primes.

Parker ran into the old street corner of the athlete (and non-athlete)--drugs. He was part of the locker-room mess in Pittsburgh that rocked baseball in the early 80s.

He became overweight, sloppy, seemed on his way to ash-canning a career that seemed on a course to Cooperstown.

He saved himself just short of oblivion. He never lost his home run stroke and he shored up his tattered reputation by kicking the drug habit. He never did get back to being the triangular Adonis who had seemed on his way to a boxful of MVP awards, but he began to put in some All-Star seasons at Cincinnati.

Dave Parker is one of the few guys who seem to be having fun playing baseball. If he were any more relaxed, you’d have to wake him up. He never leaves the dugout with his jaw tensing, the veins standing out in his forehead. It’s like a day at the beach. Even a World Series where every chip is blue, every hole card an ace and every matchup is high noon at the OK Corral, Parker seems as sunny as a guy selling vacuum cleaners.

He is an important part of the skyline of the Oakland Athletics. If Canseco is the World Trade Center, Parker and Mark McGwire make the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building. Their shadow falls almost over the pitcher’s mound when they come up there with a bat on their shoulders.

Dave Parker got a pitch to hit in the third inning of Game 1 of the World Series Saturday night. It was a fastball up and in. Parker’s wheelhouse. His bat flashed. The ball set sail up in the lights.

There was no need to run. So, Dave didn’t. He started out like the Queen Mary under a tug. The cheers were music to his ears. The third baseman gave him no lip. It was a triumphant march. Verdi could have set it to music.

It didn’t win the game. It just served notice to the Giants they were overmatched. Parker wasn’t rubbing it in, he was acting it out.

He probably won’t get to play in San Francisco. In baseball’s cockamamie rules, a designated hitter does not get to strut his stuff (or trot his homers) in National League parks.

Too bad. The sight and sound of Dave Parker acting out his home runs is one of the joys of baseball. I mean, what’s the hurry? You want Babe Ruth to rush back into the dugout? You want Olivier to mumble the soliloquy? A sweet song to end? Homers, like fine wine and great art, are to be enjoyed--slowly and fully.