Parrott Seeks Return Trip on Alternate Route : After 4-Plus Years in Majors, He’s Making Pitch to Get Back

Mowing down hitters that glorious day was as easy for Mike Parrott as pegging his pals during those countless laugh-it-up, lemon-throwing battles in the orchards near his Camarillo home.

Twenty-one up, 21 down, a perfect game with 17 strikeouts for the Camarillo High senior right before the eyes of Baltimore Orioles’ scout Ray Poitevint.

Tall and lean with Buddy Holly-style glasses sitting atop a hawklike beak, Parrott was a rare bird in semi-rural Ventura County in 1973. His wicked fastball owned the inside corner and his hard-breaking slider buckled hitters’ knees.

Poitevint was sufficiently impressed to convince Baltimore to draft Parrott in the first round with the 15th choice overall, only a few picks after Robin Yount and Dave Winfield. Eddie Murray was the Orioles’ second-round pick.

“As a high school boy, Mike was as good as they come,” said Poitevint, now vice president for international baseball operations with the Angels. “He was easy to scout. He had great pitches and such determination.”

Parrott’s ascent was swift. He reached the major leagues in under four seasons and became a staff ace by 1979, treating Rod Carew like a faceless Marmonte League hitter, striking him out in front of the hometown fans.

Parrott’s downfall came as quickly. A one-hop comebacker caused a severe groin injury in May, 1980, and after six weeks on the disabled list, Parrott suffered through a string of losses only Anthony Young could appreciate.

But although Parrott’s playing career eventually turned as sour as those lemons he hurled as a carefree youngster, he has risen once again and is poised for a return to the major leagues.

So what if the likeness of a wacky wildcat with long, tufted ears is stenciled on his cap.

So what if he lives in a foreign city a couple thousand miles from his wife, 4-year-old daughter and Colorado country home.

Serving as pitching coach for the fledgling Ottawa Lynx of the triple-A International League puts Parrott one step from the Montreal Expos, the Lynx parent club that soon could be Parrott’s club.

“I got into coaching to stay in baseball,” said Parrott, in his sixth season as a coach. “I set a goal in 1973 to become a player in the big leagues. I don’t know how long it will take, but I want to get back there as any kind of coach.”

Montreal’s pitching coach, Joe Kerrigan, is a longtime Expo employee, which Parrott views as a plus.

“Montreal always tries to promote from within,” said Parrott, 38. “Since I’ve been here they have been fair about that.”

Fairness is important to Parrott, who as a pitcher sandwiched 10 minor league seasons around his four-plus years in the majors. Without a trace of bitterness, he tells of perceived slights as a player. And with more than a trace of regret, he tells of reluctantly submitting fair and honest evaluations of pitchers to the Montreal front office.

“At first it was hard for me to be critical of certain players, even when they were bad,” he said. “I learned you have to put personal feelings aside. There have been pitchers I love as a person, but they didn’t have talent.”

At Parrott’s first coaches’ meeting after being hired by Montreal as a Class-A coach in 1988, he was appalled.

“I’m thinking, this is ruthless what they say about certain guys,” he said. “I sat back and wondered what people had been saying about me: ‘He stinks, gotta get rid of him.’

“I was released three times myself. It’s not a good feeling.”

The first cut hurts the deepest, as Parrott discovered when the Milwaukee Brewers released him on the last day of spring training in 1982 only two months after they acquired him from the Seattle Mariners in a trade for Thad Bosley. Parrott hooked on with Omaha, the Kansas City Royals’ triple-A team, and watched in frustration as the Brewers went to the World Series.

“That was the first time I had been released and it pretty much crushed me,” he said. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I felt I didn’t deserve to be released.”

Based on his numbers the previous four seasons with Seattle, both the Brewers and Parrott could make strong cases for their divergent opinions.

Parrott could point to 1979, when he led the Mariners with a 14-12 record, a 3.77 earned-run average, 13 complete games and 229 innings pitched.

Detractors could point to 1980, when Parrott suffered through a confidence-draining 1-16 campaign for a team that won only 59 games. The comebacker to the groin, hit by Roy Smalley of the Minnesota Twins, put Parrott on the disabled list from May 1 until mid-June.

“I wasn’t wearing a cup and it hit me square,” Parrott said. “Then I came back too soon. There was still a lot of swelling.”

His ERA swelled to a whopping 7.28 and Parrott finished the season with 14 consecutive losses.

“It seemed like he was never the same (after the injury),” said Mario Mendoza, the Mariners’ shortstop at the time.

Parrott admits as much, recalling his first start after coming off the disabled list.

“We played the Brewers and I faced Cecil Cooper in the first inning,” he said. “I threw a sinker down and away, and when he swung, I flinched.

“I could visualize the ball coming at me. And he had missed the pitch.”

In 1981, the year of a players’ strike, Parrott was better, but it wasn’t exactly a return to the form of ’79. He was 3-6 with a 5.08 ERA in 85 innings and was traded to the Brewers early the following spring.

Five years languishing in triple A never resulted in another shot at the majors, so Parrott retired in 1987 after a 15-year professional career.

He returned to his home in Lyons, Colo., outside of Boulder, settled down with Heidi, his wife of two years, and enrolled at the University of Colorado. Parrott, an easygoing man who spends free time with a fishing pole or golf club in his hands, had plenty of good friends and memories--fond and otherwise--to sustain him.

There was his September call-up with the Orioles in 1977 after he was voted pitcher of the year in the International League. At the last home game in front of 56,000 fans, a retiring Brooks Robinson was honored.

“All the players sat on the third base line,” Parrott recalled. “Just being on the field with that crowd, watching Robinson with his 16 Gold Gloves lined up on the field sent goose bumps up my spine.”

There was his first appearance in the big leagues that same month. He shut out Detroit for 2 2/3 innings in a middle relief role, prompting Baltimore Manager Earl Weaver to call him into his office a few days later and say that Parrott would definitely not be in the starting rotation the following year.

The way Parrott saw it, Weaver was simply being courteous to a young pitcher with potential. The Orioles’ rotation consisted of Jim Palmer, Rudy May, Mike Flanagan, Ross Grimsley and Dennis Martinez, all of whom won at least 14 games in ’77. Sure enough, Parrott was dealt to Seattle during the off-season.

There was the midseason road swing in 1979 when Parrott shut out the Red Sox in Fenway Park, pitched a complete-game victory in Baltimore for the Mariners’ first victory at Memorial Stadium and shut out the Angels in Anaheim before a large contingent of family and friends.

“One of the biggest thrills of my life was watching Mike strike out Rod Carew twice that day,” said Remy McCarthy, the former Oxnard College basketball coach who is a lifelong friend of Parrott. “Nobody got to third base. We all stopped with him and had beers after the game. It was a thrill for us because he hadn’t changed.

“For a guy we grew up with to be doing that. . . We used to have lemon fights, and you had to make sure Parrott was on your team because when he hit you, it hurt. Ten years later, he’s striking out Rod Carew.”

A year later, misfortune struck. The Mariners, an expansion team formed in 1977, hadn’t made much progress. Mendoza, the shortstop, inspired the term Mendoza Line, a standard of poor hitting. Parrott’s 16 losses weren’t even a team high; Rick Honeycutt lost 17.

Manager Darrell Johnson was fired in July, 1980, and replaced by Maury Wills, whose bizarre behavior made every day an adventure.

“I’ve got to be careful how to describe this. . . . There were unique things (Wills) tried to instill in us,” Parrott said. “Those were a crazy few months. He wasn’t mentally ready for the job.”

When, finally, Parrott’s job was no longer chucking a hardball, it didn’t take him long to realize that the next-best job would be to teach someone else how to chuck a hardball.

“While in school, I realized I missed baseball,” Parrott said. “My wife asked me if I had ever considered coaching. I sent my resume to many teams and the Expos were the first to call.”

Chris Nabholz, Mel Rojas, Kent Bottenfield, Brian Barnes and Jeff Shaw are Expo pitchers Parrott has coached.

“You have to be a psychologist,” he said. “The way you go about helping a pitcher makes the difference. You can’t be a dictator. If you are teaching from their standpoint, you want their input so they feel they are contributing to helping themselves.”

Tolerance is a quality Parrott exhibited early. In high school, the Camarillo basketball coach requested that the team stop hanging out with kids who wore their hair long.

Parrott, the team’s center, stepped forward and said: “Coach, we’ve known these guys all our lives. Are you saying now that we’re on the basketball team, these guys can’t be our friends anymore?”

The coach relented. McCarthy, Parrott’s teammate, appreciated the gesture.

“Camarillo was a very small town and everybody was friends,” he said. “There weren’t any bad guys.”

These days, Parrott sees the positive in pitchers.

“I’ve had good young arms,” he said. “Pitching is more mental than anything. The guys who know how to use their arm will be successful.

“I love this. I learn something every day.”