To a Different Drummer : Whether He Is Pitching or Performing With His Rock Band, White Sox’s McDowell Is Content Only When He Is the Best

His repertoire includes a fastball, a forkball and about 50 songs he has written as founder and lead singer-electric guitar player for what has been described as an alternative rock group called V.I.E.W.

The name, Jack McDowell says, is an acronym that came to him in his sleep and means nothing. The music, however, is more than a gimmick or the flip side of his personality.

It is part of what he is, part of his extended agenda, as in Extendagenda, the title of an album V.I.E.W. made last year for his own Quality Starts label. It gained wide exposure when V.I.E.W. toured about 15 college campuses in the South last winter with another group, The Smithereens.

“I write about personal experiences, evaluations and evolutions,” McDowell said. “In the long run, baseball is a hindrance because we’re looked on as a novelty. I don’t want to be a novelty. I take my music as seriously as my baseball.”

At 10-3 this year, 17-10 last year and 36-18 since the All-Star break of 1990, the 26-year-old right-hander from Van Nuys has become ace and workhorse of the Chicago White Sox rotation.

Known as “Black Jack” because of the color of both his jersey and his personality on the mound, McDowell stands 6 feet 5 and weighs 180 pounds. As former White Sox pitching coach Sammy Ellis, now with the Cubs, put it: “You don’t have to motivate Jack. His game face was inbred.”

McDowell will do nearly anything to win, which includes pitching farther inside than he should. A headhunter? McDowell denies it, but he relishes his role and responsibility.

“Everybody wants to be the best, and to be the best on your team is a start,” he said. “I’ve been pegged as that since the draft (of 1987, when he was Chicago’s No. 1 selection after his junior year at Stanford),

and I can’t think of anything that would be more frustrating than to not max out, to not make the most of your ability.

“Hopefully, you can take last year and pencil it in for me every year. If I stay healthy, I should pitch 230 to 240 innings and win 15 to 20 games. I could easily have won 20 last year.”

The Chicago bullpen blew five leads after McDowell left, which would have taken him to 22 victories. He led the American League with 35 starts and 15 complete games. He pitched 253 2/3 innings, struck out 191 and walked only 82, an average of 2.9 per nine innings.

Has he peaked? McDowell doesn’t believe so. He says the best is yet to come.

He does not, in his own words, throw cliches. He does not need song or verse to express what is on his mind.

He was only a rookie, for example, but he bristled when then-manager Jim Fregosi tampered with his pickoff move and insisted he throw a slider, a pitch he has since shelved.

He criticized the organization for sending him to the minors in ‘89, when he bottomed out emotionally, he said, and spent a night thinking about quitting as he slept in his car. It’s an experience captured in his song, “Tell Me Something,” which, in essence, is about trusting yourself.

He accused the team of playing scared down the stretch last year and derided league President Bobby Brown after drawing a three-day suspension and a $1,000 fine for his beanball brawl with Mark Whiten. He was at the heart of a potential player walkout when the club signed the seriously injured Bo Jackson for more than it would pay many of its young players. And he criticized co-owner Jerry Reinsdorf for 1) holding down the salaries of young players with his pay-for-performance scale and 2) ultimately forcing McDowell to arbitration last spring.

“Jack has never been much of a politician,” said his father, Jack Sr., a Van Nuys attorney. “He says what’s on his mind, lets it fall and moves on.”

Said Jack Jr.: “There’ve been plenty of times I bit my tongue, but there have been others when I felt a point needed to be made. Not everyone agreed with me when I said we were playing scared last year, but we had a team meeting because of it and the discussion helped. We came back to finish strong (with a 18-14 record in September).”

Said Ellis, his former pitching coach: “Jack is similar to a lot of great athletes in that there’s an inborn pride, confidence and arrogance. It’s one of his long suits. He said a lot of things that didn’t sit well with Jeff (then-manager Torborg) or a lot of us when we sent him out in ‘89, but I probably would have handled it the same way at his age. And it showed he cared, that he had some fire to him. If you’re going to war, that’s the kind of guy you want with you.”

It is not so much defiance as determination that has marked McDowell’s progress. He went from Notre Dame High in Van Nuys, where he was a baseball, football and basketball star, to Stanford, where he was 35-13 in three seasons and won the championship game in the ’87 College World Series; to Chicago, where Torborg and others met and more than once attempted to knock some of what Torborg called “that Stanford swagger” off him.

“It took me a while to learn what Jack was all about,” said Torborg, who now manages the New York Mets. “Once I had, I knew he was a player who would go through a wall for you. He’s got a lot of his own ideas and opinions on how things should be done, but no one wants to win more than Jack does.”

Said Robin Ventura, Chicago’s third baseman: “He’s mad from the first pitch until the last, and if he wasn’t I don’t think he’d be the pitcher he is.”

In the era of relief specialists and big money for starters who go six innings, McDowell has completed 22 of his last 67 starts, a measure of his competitiveness. He pitched a complete game in a 7-1 victory over the Cleveland Indians on Tuesday, overcoming 10 base runners.

McDowell doesn’t have the dominating stuff of Nolan Ryan or Roger Clemens, but his fastball is in the 88-92 m.p.h. range and he can throw the forkball two or three ways.

And when the going gets tough? Opponents batted .298 against him in his first trips through their lineups last year, but only .215 over the remaining innings, the widest differential in the league.

Ed Pebley, now Chicago’s West Coast scouting supervisor, said that even when McDowell was a high school and college pitcher, his tenacity and intensity were reminiscent of Don Drysdale’s.

“He didn’t back down from anyone,” Pebley said.

Added Gene Lamont, the new Chicago manager, “He’s as tough mentally as anyone I’ve ever been around. It was as cold as hell here in April and May, but Jack just blacked it out (and won his first seven decisions). He’s the type who doesn’t accept mediocrity in himself or others.”

Black Jack? Manager Tony La Russa of the Oakland Athletics described him in other ways after McDowell hit Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire with pitches during the same game.

“He just rears back and pops people and then stands out there with a smirk on his face,” La Russa said.

And Whiten, then with the Toronto Blue Jays, raced to the mound and added a black eye to Black Jack’s color scheme when forced to duck a pitch behind his head after John Olerud hit a home run.

McDowell sat in the Comiskey Park dugout the other day and said the statistics--eight hit batters in his last 355 innings--are not those of a headhunter.

“It’s a tough situation for any pitcher,” he said. “If you throw a great pitch outside that’s four inches off the plate, no one says anything. But throw a great pitch inside that’s four inches off the plate, and suddenly you’re throwing at them.

“If my reputation is that of a headhunter, fine, I can live with it. In some ways it may help me, though I don’t think a major league hitter is ever really intimidated. There’s also a real problem with that kind of reputation.

“If I screw up and hit a batter in the late innings of a tense game, the umpire may have a tendency to overreact on the basis of my reputation and I’m suddenly out of there. I mean, is that fair?”

McDowell added that he has never tried to be anyone or anything but himself, that he never idolized or copied other pitchers, that growing up in Van Nuys he preferred to play pepper in the back yard rather than listening to or attending games at nearby Dodger Stadium.

McDowell’s brothers, Jim, 34, and Jeff, 33, were middle infielders at USC in the late ‘70s, and Jim later became Jack’s baseball coach at Notre Dame High for three seasons.

“I was pretty intense and hotheaded then, but Jim gave me the freedom to be myself,” Jack said. “Some of my other coaches tried to hold that back in certain ways, and those teams weren’t as successful as we were in baseball.”

Jim McDowell said Jack was simply a born leader and superior athlete and competitor. Led by the two McDowells, Notre Dame won 27 consecutive games at one point in the pitcher-shortstop’s senior season.

“Jack was always one of the top dogs in high school and college, one of the guys people were always gunning to beat,” Jim McDowell said. “He was always in a competitive situation, and he always rose to the challenge. It just never seemed to faze him.”

If the coach understood that his brother needed some emotional leeway in the process, he also figured that Jack needed to replace a mediocre curve with another breaking pitch and recommended the forkball that Bruce Sutter was then popularizing. It became a significant factor in McDowell’s success.

“All I did was encourage him to experiment with it,” Jim McDowell said. “He has those long fingers, and I felt he had the right mechanics and delivery for it, but he developed it on his own.”

Now a financial analyst for a cablevision company, Jim McDowell later contributed in another way, helping his brother analyze tapes and reconstruct his mechanics and delivery in the aftermath of the difficult 1989 season.

Hip and arm injuries restricted McDowell to 20 minor league games that year and left him at times wondering if he would ever regain his previous effectiveness.

“That night I spent sleeping in the car was the bottom of the barrel,” he said.

In addition, he was bitter about having to prove himself in spring training after going 5-10 as a 1988 rookie, and for being asked to pitch through the injuries at triple-A Vancouver. He would rather have stayed in Florida to rehabilitate in extended spring training and eventually was sent back there after failing at Vancouver.

But McDowell hasn’t missed a White Sox start in the 2 1/2 years since 1989, and many in the organization say that season gave him a chance to rebuild himself physically and mentally.

Said Ellis, his former pitching coach: “Jack had arrived as something of the second coming in ’87 (he was 3-0 in four September starts with the White Sox after having made only six Class-A and double-A appearances after the draft), but in some ways ’89 might have been the best thing that happened to him.

“It never hurts to take a step back to see where you’re headed, to have the experience of getting up after being knocked down. It gave Jack the chance to do some soul searching, to put himself back together. It gave him the base for what’s followed.”

McDowell concedes only that 1989 did provide time for introspection and to become deeply involved in music. He had taken guitar lessons as a youngster, put it aside while he pursued athletics, but picked it up again at Stanford, where he was a teammate of Lee Plemel, a pitcher who also could play bass.

In 1989, both were in Florida: Plemel at St. Petersburg in the St. Louis Cardinals’ chain, and McDowell in extended spring training at Sarasota. McDowell bought a drum machine and a four-track recorder and they began experimenting with the songs that McDowell had been writing.

Eventually, McDowell and Plemel were joined by then-White Sox pitcher Wayne Edwards, who had been taught to play the drums by his father, a member of the Hondells of ‘60s fame. The three made the Extendagenda album, which consists entirely of McDowell’s songs, in a rented studio with a backup guitarist and keyboardist hired by McDowell.

The album, marketed through a few stores in Chicago and a mail-order service handled basically by McDowell’s family in Van Nuys, has sold about 3,000 copies, McDowell said. That is not enough to retrieve his investment, but the album has generated favorable reviews in Rolling Stone and other publications, the tour of last winter, a few TV and radio appearances and several concert dates.

White Sox pitcher Scott Radinsky, a former Simi Valley High left-hander who has a rock group of his own, has replaced drummer Edwards, now in the Toronto farm system. McDowell is preparing songs for a second album, which probably will be produced in the mom-and-pop fashion of the first.

“We didn’t have time to grow as a band or to grow in popularity before we made the first album, but it served a purpose,” he said. “It opened some doors. It made people aware we’re serious and willing to work hard at it.

“We’ve come a long way, and now we need to produce something really good, but I haven’t pursued a major label because we’re not at a point where I can demand the artistic freedom I want to retain. A big company is also going to want to exploit the baseball thing, and that’s not what we want. We’re not in position to make the world tour that a major label would demand, and we’re not the million-dollar property that might get it a quick return on its investment.”

In some ways, though, McDowell is a million-dollar property. His salary went from $175,000 to $1.6 million as a loser in an arbitration handled by his father and brother. He was seeking $2.3 million and was disappointed that it had to go to arbitration when the White Sox were giving multi-year contracts to two other young stars, Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura.

“It was frustrating in the context that I didn’t think the White Sox recognized how much I had contributed, how much I wanted the team to be good and how much I wanted to be good,” he said.

“It’s not so much the money, because all of our numbers are ridiculously high, but it’s like a ranking, and on a comparative basis I’m not where I think I should be.

“It’s funny, but some people looked at my 7-0 start and said I was motivated by what happened, but I have too much pride for my performance ever to be affected by how much money I make or don’t make.”

He has made enough to have recently bought a new house in Chicago, and he also has that extended agenda as another form of compensation.

“Having another side of me that people can see and relate to makes me feel better about myself,” he said. “It’s like you have something else to offer besides what you do on the field. I mean, it’s a release, another way to express what I am. It’s made me more comfortable with my baseball.”

More comfortable, perhaps, but no less competitive.