Marshall’s Met Tale Is a Pipp

I guess the most telling argument for the advisability of playing in pain is the Lou Gehrig story. Every schoolboy knows it. About when the New York Yankee first baseman, Wally Pipp, came down with a headache or a cold or some other minor infirmity and requested the day off from his chores at the stadium. Yankee Manager Miller Huggins put a young rookie in his place. Fellow named Lou Gehrig. Lou stayed there for 2,130 consecutive games or 14 seasons. Wally Pipp drifted out of the league and out of baseball. And his name became synonymous with a guy who got upstaged by an understudy and never got back in the cast.

Players learned to play hurt. The name Wally Pipp went into the language, symbolizing guys who didn’t have sense enough to say, “I feel fine, Skip,” even if they had a fever of 104 and chest pains.

Mrs. Lou Gehrig, herself, was later to claim there was really nothing seriously wrong with Wally Pipp that day except he wasn’t hitting and thought the day off might do him some good. So, he went to the race track.

I bring this up because another first baseman, Mike Marshall of the Mets, is probably beginning to get an idea what Wally Pipp felt like.

No one has ever been able to figure Mike Marshall out. A manager looks at him and all he can see is a pennant--6-feet-5, power to all fields. He has 25 home runs and 100 runs batted in written all over him.

The Dodgers sure thought he was going to be their next super star. Right after they signed him, he batted .373 and hit 34 home runs and knocked in 137 runs at Albuquerque.

You wouldn’t call Mike Marshall smooth. He just kind of surrounded the ball in the field, and he kind of clanked up to the plate like something that might need oil.

Still, a lot of people thought the Dodgers should have just handed him a mitt and the first baseman’s job when he came up and then forgot about it.

Instead, the Dodgers experimented with the Greg Brocks, Sid Breams, even Pedro Guerreros at first base. They tossed Mike Marshall out in right field, where he played creditably enough, but where he sometimes looked like a bear on roller skates. His throwing arm was strong, if adventurous.

But the real trouble with Mike Marshall was that you just couldn’t keep him in the lineup. He became Baseball’s Fabulous Invalid.

It wasn’t as if Mike had these nice, glamorous, real he-man injuries, things like a broken collarbone from crashing into a fence in pursuit of a line drive or a cracked rib from a fastball or a rotator cuff from a hard throw.

Marshall got these hard-to-diagnose, mysterious ailments, un-findable and, in some cases, untreatable. Back spasms, neck sprains.

Back spasms are usually something a player comes up with on nights Dwight Gooden is going to pitch. Marshall’s were a little less predictable. He came up with one once in the fourth game of the World Series, no less.

Then there was the time he took himself out of the lineup because of a--a little fanfare, please, professor--wart!

Now, wait just a darned minute! said Baseball. Give me that again?! Did you say “wart?”

Well, in Mike’s case, it was a little bit more complicated than that. It usually is. After all the clubhouse jokes telling him to stop playing with frogs, it developed that the “wart” was symptomatic of a nerve disorder. He needed an operation.

He needed an operation on his toes, too. Nerves had bunched up between the third and fourth toes of his left foot. While it was a very real injury, it didn’t sound that serious. Guerrero, who had moved to third base to make room for Marshall in the outfield, wanted to fight him. His other teammates, while more polite, were no more friendly. Marshall sat alone on trips, not exactly shunned but not exactly courted, either. He kept to himself. He couldn’t understand what the fuss was.

He hit the disabled list five times in four years. He occasionally skipped games or took himself out of the lineup after an inning in pain.

The Dodgers finally gave up. They packaged Marshall with Alejandro Pena and traded him to New York for Juan Samuel.

Marshall was agreeable. A new environment, a new lineup--and he wouldn’t have to face Gooden--ever.

Unfortunately, it was the same old back. Marshall came up to the manager a couple of weeks ago. He was hurting. Perhaps, if they put someone else in for the night--or until the pain went . . .

The Mets put Dave Magadan, their all-purpose infielder, on first base that night.

He’s still there. The Mets have spurted toward first place. With the club heading into the All-Star break, Dave Magadan is hitting .364 (to Marshall’s .241). He has three homers, seven doubles and three triples. But mostly, he has first base.

Marshall can’t understand it. “I have been doing my exercises at the gym religiously, working out and am in good shape. I’ve got to play,” he said as he sat in the Mets’ locker room the other afternoon.

He has demanded the Mets trade him. “When you ask for a trade, they either have to give it to you or you become a free agent at the end of the season,” Marshall said. “I have told them I want to be traded. But I don’t understand it.”

Pipp could explain it to him. Magadan might be there till the next century.