The Right Stuff in Baseball Does Not Include Pine Tar

It is a lingering mystery of baseball why a pitcher will turn up at the park dispensing good stuff one day but not another.

The pitcher is proven. He is trained. He grips the ball the same and, as a general rule, he throws it with the same motion.

What is the phenomenon of good stuff?

It is the contention of both Tom Seaver and Jim Palmer, accomplished artists in their time, that stuff is a product, partly, of the mind.

“It stems from concentration,” Seaver once explained. “And it happens that guys are concentrating better on certain days than on others. It has a lot to do with what problems a pitcher brings with him to the park. If he is distracted, even subconsciously, he throws the ball and finds it doesn’t do anything.”

One of the industry’s most formidable relief pitchers today, Mr. Jay Howell of the Dodgers, has studied the subject of stuff, with no firm conclusion.

“At times I liken it to golf,” he says. “Why will a great pro shoot 66 one day and 79 the next? Same body, same swing, same clubs, same course.

“I no longer try to unlock the mystery of stuff. When I am called to warm up, I start evaluating what I have that day. I throw the fastball. It doesn’t do anything. I say to myself, ‘You had better go with the breaking pitch.’ ”

“And if that doesn’t do anything either,” he is asked, “what do you do?”

“The first thing I do is tell myself I am not going to get anyone out with the stuff I have brought to the park that day. I am going to have to fake it, keeping the ball down, throwing to the hitters’ weak spots, dishing up pitches as risk-free as possible. Sometimes you get away with it; sometimes you don’t.”

It’s a statistical fact that Howell, laboring his last two years with the Dodgers, has gotten away with it admirably.

His earned run average in 1988 ran 2.08, a figure he reduced to a startling 1.58 in 1989, a year in which Jay saved 28 games, more than any other Dodger relief pitcher in the 100 years the club has functioned.

It is vulgar to introduce a commercial note to endeavors as spotless as sport, but Howell’s accomplishment last year is said to have earned him wages approximating a million, substantial pay for a son much of society wrote off the end of the 1988 season.

Jay, you’ll recall, was pitching relief for the Dodgers in the ’88 playoff with the Mets, when, all of a sudden, he gets a visit from the umpire.

To Jay, that was a neighborly gesture, except the umpire examines his glove and discovers, alas, a substance called pine tar.

Pine tar isn’t something one would drink with a peanut butter sandwich. It isn’t recommended as a shampoo. But what it does most effectively is create a gumminess enabling a pitcher to get a better grip on the ball.

In the light of what pitchers have been putting on baseballs during the 115 years of the majors, pine tar is baby powder.

But it doesn’t happen to be legal, and it is Jay’s misfortune to be cited in a playoff game, watched by millions.

The ump kicks him out, in midst of Jay’s performance, and the commissioner suspends him for three playoff games, a penalty reduced to two after a protest by manager Tom Lasorda, pleading with an eloquence one couldn’t buy for $2,500 an hour from a master trial lawyer.

“Did you feel such national embarrassment could ruin Howell?” Lasorda is asked.

“No one who knows Howell could feel that,” he answers. “He is one of those cool birds that nothing can ruffle. He has that classic bullpen temperament, the kind you have seen over the years with your Fireman Joe Pages, your Ron Perranoskis, your Jim Brewers, your Dennis Eckersleys. These are people not easily disturbed.”

Howell is surprised so much commotion was stirred over something hardly rated a hanging offense.

“It was the simplest kind of misdemeanor,” he reflects. “The commissioner at the time (the late Bart Giamatti) didn’t know much about pine tar. When I explained it to him, pointing out it didn’t do more for a pitcher than resin does, he eased back on the suspension. We became friends.”

The following season, Howell would respond to the catastrophic events of ’88 with his best work in a baseball existence that has found him shifting from the Reds to the Cubs to the Yankees to the A’s before nesting with the Dodgers.

If Jay is calm on the job, his attitude in life is equally steady.

“You have to be careful,” he says, “not to take baseball too seriously. It’s a business, but it’s also a recreational thing on which you don’t place an excessive amount of importance. A physical deformity is important. A bad disease is important. But getting my pink slip from baseball? I walk away without a blink.”

Jay made this point to Bart Giamatti, telling the Yale scholar that he wasn’t begging for clemency.

“Of all the crimes taking place against society,” Jay said to Bart, “use of pine tar isn’t anything you want to worry about.”

Jay could have strengthened his case by reminding the commissioner that when a guy is caught with pine tar, its street value isn’t even reported.