Marshall Plan : After a Forgettable Season in Japan, Former Dodger Is Attempting a Comeback With the Seattle Mariners

Mike Marshall, the former Dodger, sits in the Seattle Mariners’ clubhouse with no guarantees. He is 33, back from a bad experience in Japan, and trying to win a job as the Mariners’ right-handed designated hitter, his onetime promise rubbed out on too many trainer’s tables.

“I’d by lying if I said it wasn’t frustrating,” Marshall said of the misplaced opportunities. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think I could be sitting here with 2,000 hits, 300 home runs and a $5-million contract. It was all there for me.”

Marshall recognizes that and more. He says he has come to grips with the past and its problems, accepts who he is and where he is.

If this Phoenix suburb represents a last chance, if his is a career to be measured more in skepticism than statistics, Marshall said he recognizes that he was often his “own worst enemy” and should have played through many of the pains and strains.

Teammates tried to tell him that, but their ignored advice turned to flashes of anger, charges of malingering.

“When you’re a big leaguer at 22 you think you know it all,” Marshall said, knowing now he didn’t, knowing he should have listened rather than “retreating into a shell” when teammates came to him and came at him.

He knows, too, that if he had “played 140 games a year,” he would still be with the Dodgers instead of looming as a comparatively cheap remedy for the Mariners after fruitless stops with the Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, Angels and Nippon Ham Fighters.

“It’s no secret we’re looking for a right-handed bat and don’t have the money right now to go a more expensive route,” said Woody Woodward, the Mariners’ general manager.

“We know Marshall has the ability to drive the ball and know his reputation is that he’s hurt a lot or doesn’t want to be in the lineup.

“We understand all of that, but also feel that if an individual wants it bad enough he can put the labels behind him. I mean, sometimes when a guy gets away (as Marshall did to Japan), it renews his commitment through the realization of what he had, what he was missing.”

The Mariners will pay Marshall about $500,000 if he wins his DH battle with Carmelo Martinez and plays a specified number of games.

Marshall would have made about $1 million more if he had remained for the second year of his two-year contract with the Fighters.

His hope in going to Japan was to follow the Cecil Fielder route, to play every day again, re-establish his career by hitting 30 or more

home runs and return to bona fide guarantees.

He returned to conditional offers from the Mariners and Chicago White Sox and chose the Mariners because it is all new--from the owners to the manager to the coaching staff--and Marshall said he is confident he will be judged on what they see, not on what they might have heard.

“I looked on it as the best situation for me because everyone will be starting from the same place,” he said. “It’s all in my hands. I really feel I have a chance here.”

He also said his “disappearance” for a year might have defused expectations and that Seattle represents a lower-key environment with a ballpark suited to his power.

The question is, can he play enough games to generate some?

In the three years that he hit 20 or more homers and drove in 82 or more runs for the Dodgers, he played at least 134 games.

However, he has played more than 105 games only once during his last seven seasons and not more than 70 in any of the last three. He was put on the disabled list for the ninth time in his career last year when he suffered a groin pull and the indignity of being sent to the Fighters’ minor league complex to recuperate.

Can anyone say for sure he didn’t have a groin pull? Would anyone question his 1985 appendectomy or his 1984 foot surgery or the 1987 finger surgery to remove a wart that was putting pressure on a nerve?

The doubts seemed to arise from Marshall’s response to recurring back spasms and strains, his long absences from the lineup. He fought with Phil Garner in Los Angeles and nearly fought with Pedro Guerrero.

Traded to the New York Mets for Juan Samuel in 1990, Marshall brought his reputation with him. Ultimately, his condition was diagnosed as intestinal inflammation, but he had a tough time convincing then-manager Bud Harrelson.

“My blood count was down and I was bleeding internally,” Marshall said. “I went in to see Bud and he didn’t want to believe me because of all that had gone on with my back in Los Angeles.

“He said if I didn’t want to play I might as well go home because he was going to suspend me. The next day I was in the hospital.”

It is the meanest of professions. Scouts and others are quick to affix labels that are impossible to shake.

Marshall argues that he has always bounced back from a surgery, sprain or pull.

However, his back problem has long resisted definitive diagnosis, and he said he should have responded more aggressively, exercising more and playing more.

“I was able to do so much when I was healthy that I was reluctant to play and risk becoming less than a complete player when I wasn’t healthy,” he said. “For a long time, I went with the assumption that a day or two off or an injection now and then was the answer. Days turned into weeks, and I missed a lot of games because I wasn’t really dealing with the problem.

“I still remember hurting it for the first time on a ground ball to Ozzie Smith in a game at St. Louis in 1986. I was 26, and it never felt the same and wasn’t going to by sitting around, but I didn’t realize it at the time.”

Marshall said teammates such as Dusty Baker, Steve Garvey and Rick Monday tried to persuade him that he should leave the decision to the manager, let Tom Lasorda decide if he was hurting the team by playing or not, “but I kept thinking it was my responsibility, and got in trouble because of it.

“I mean, at the time, I didn’t realize it was a compliment, didn’t realize what they were saying was, ‘We need you out there even if you’re only 75%,’ ” Marshall said. “I thought I had to be 100%.”

The recognition that there were times he should have played in pain and let Lasorda wrestle with the choice doesn’t alter Marshall’s belief that teammates are “sacred” and should not criticize each other publicly.

“I never said anything negative about another player or questioned his ability to play, but the media (in L.A.) had to be getting that from somewhere, and it was coming from the same people who ran to the bank to cash their checks when Gibby (Kirk Gibson) limped to the plate to hit that home run (in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series), the same people who turned around and questioned why he wasn’t playing the next year,” Marshall said.

“I mean, here’s a guy who may have shortened his career by playing hurt in the playoff with the Mets (in 1988), then he gets second-guessed for not playing. It’s the perfect example of ‘What have you done for me lately?’

“There’s not much you can do about it, and I’m obviously not the only guy it’s happened to.”

The patience and promise wore thin together. Two things happened in 1988:

--He refused to play first base because he believed it put too much strain on his back, forcing the Dodgers to play musical chairs at that position and trade for Eddie Murray when the season ended.

--He also took himself out of a World Series game that year, leading to another round of head shaking.

Ironically, the Dodgers gave Marshall a three-year contract after that season in the hope, Executive Vice President Fred Claire said in reflection, that the “security would allow Mike to move on and do the things his ability should have allowed him to do.”

It didn’t work, and an organization that, in Claire’s view, “had given Mike every chance to succeed” and was “as frustrated as I’m sure Mike was” had little choice but to trade him after he was restricted to 105 games because of a sore lower back in 1989.

Marshall has never played regularly since, although he believed he was ready to through his commitment to back therapy, the all-out exercise program he said he should have started earlier.

So much for should-haves. After sitting on the bench, he asked the Mets to trade him, asked the Red Sox to release him. He signed with the Angels in late July of 1991, but after a week as a reserve, at a time when he had “pretty much decided to go to Japan and didn’t want anything to change my mind,” he asked to be re-released.

It was a pivotal period, and Marshall said he might have made other decisions and chosen other routes after leaving the Dodgers if he could have continued to lean on the fatherly advice of agent Jerry Kapstein. But Kapstein had left the business and Marshall believed “there was no one in the game I could turn to, no one who might help me recognize what was happening.”

Japan, he hoped, would help turn it all around.

“I got off to a good start,” he said. “I knew I needed it and wanted to build on it, but my curiosity ended kind of early. It was only May and I was itching to come back.

“I have nothing bad to say about Japanese baseball, but I just didn’t adapt. Maybe it’s an excuse because I didn’t play well, but all I could think about was how much I wanted to leave.

“It got kind of messy. The team wasn’t doing well and they were unhappy because of all the money they were paying me. We had a first-year manager who would take me out if I didn’t get a hit my first or second time up. He sent me out when I pulled the groin, but I never actually played a game in their minor league system.”

He appeared in 67 games with the Fighters, batting .246 with nine homers and 26 runs batted in. He is back now with a minor league contract, but doesn’t believe it will come to that.

“If I do everything I’m capable of I’ll be here (with the Mariners) or with some other major league club,” he said. “By no means do I feel that I’m too good to go down, but I’d go only if I felt I’d been (cheated) by a decision here and knew I’d be back in a matter of time.

“I also realize that if I don’t perform, it will be time to hang it up, but I can’t imagine that scenario. I may have felt differently at times in the last couple years, but I worked hard over the winter and don’t feel I’ve lost anything. I don’t feel any differently than I did with the Mets or those early camps with the Dodgers.”

Obviously, he is different, but Marshall said he doesn’t want this to sound like a sob story because he is fortunate to have played nine-plus seasons in the majors, been in five playoffs and reached a point in his life and career where he can have fun, knowing his wife and two children are his real priority.

He says he has only good feelings about his time with the Dodgers and the faith Lasorda showed in him, although he wonders about the direction the club has taken, with so many young Dodgers having been forced to make it elsewhere and so few coming up through the system.

“Orel (Hershiser) is the only real Dodger left, and that’s not the organization I knew,” he said. “They always had three or four guys coming up together. It’s happening in all of baseball, but the last place I thought it would happen would be L.A.”

His L.A. story hasn’t evolved the way many thought it would, and Marshall says he now tells young players what those veterans told him, that they should lighten up and have fun, that they should make the most of their opportunities with their original organization because no other organization will judge them in the same light and that it all passes in the blink of an eye.

For Marshall, of course, if he blinks now, it might be over.