Worrell A Winner in His Book

In the 21st century, if baseball is still being played and chronicled, a historian might pull out the record of the Dodgers’ Todd Worrell and conclude that he was not a very effective pitcher. I mean, Worrell probably will have been in the big leagues for 14, 15 years with 46 victories to show for it.

You can picture his grandchildren saying, “Wow, Grandpa! All those years in the big leagues, and you had only three wins a season?”

It will be a bum rap. Todd Worrell is one of the most effective pitchers in the history of the game. He has two World Series appearances, a rookie-of-the-year award and two All-Star game appearances to prove it.

So, how come all this isn’t visible to the naked eye?

Well, first of all, Worrell works in the engine room of major league baseball. Relief pitchers historically were second-class citizens. Relief chores were traditionally assigned to washed-up pitchers whose role was simply to get the game over with, mop up a failed effort and try to get the team into the clubhouse as soon as possible with minimal further damage.

Qualifications for a relief pitcher were usually a sore arm and a faded fastball. The game was generally considered over when the starter got knocked out.

An old-timer named Firpo Marberry changed all that. His manager was a young, innovative playing manager, Bucky Harris, and he began to use Marberry as an offensive weapon, not a guy covering up a retreat.

Marberry pitched in 55 games in 1925 and didn’t start any of them. He was 20 years ahead of his time. Harris didn’t just hand him the baseball and say, “Try to keep it under 100!” Instead, he said, “Get ‘em out, we’ll think of something!”

When the Yankees used Johnny Murphy in the same way in the ‘40s, the press boxers even came up with a new designation. He was called “Fireman” Johnny Murphy.

The “firemen” almost took over the game in the next couple of decades. The nine-inning pitcher became almost obsolete.

Cy Young pitched 749 complete games. Walter Johnson had 531. Last year, Curt Schilling led the National League in complete games with eight. At that rate, he’d have to pitch for 94 years to catch Cy Young.

Worrell has never pitched a complete game in the big leagues. He has never even started a game in the big leagues. Cy Young started 815 of them.

Old-time managers almost never removed a starting pitcher, save for a pinch-hitter. Today, a manager will take a starter out to pitch to one batter. Relief pitchers have moved in with the family. Left the servants’ quarters. They can shower with the team now. No one says, “Could you hurry it up please, busher? Mr. Ruth would like this shower.” They are as important to the lineup as the cleanup hitter. Maybe more so.

The one place they match the storied old-timers is in games pitched. Cy Young teed it up in 906 games. But Hoyt Wilhelm took the mound in 1,070. Wilhelm was basically a reliever. He didn’t start a game in 18 of his 21 years.

But it was not till 1985 that a relief pitcher was voted into the Hall of Fame. By then, even umpires had been voted in--for 35 years.

In the 1960s, Chicago’s venerable sports scribe, Jerome Holtzman, undertook to rescue relievers from the galling anonymity of their craft. To find a way to pay homage to their contributions, he invented a stat. After all, the game had RBIs, ERAs, batting averages, slugging percentages, stolen bases, all kinds of categories to measure the productive. The reliever often couldn’t get a win, no matter how well he pitched.

So, Holtzman devised the “save,” a measure of the effectiveness of late-inning relief pitchers.

Before that, they were the ultimate in selflessness, as inconspicuous as butlers.

Todd Worrell joined these ranks of baseball’s “saviors” quite by accident. He was sitting in the bullpen in Oklahoma City one night as a starting pitcher in the lineup of the minor league Louisville Redbirds when his manager, Jim Fregosi, approached him gingerly with a proposition.

“Would it do you some good,” he asked Worrell, “to leave off starting and become a stopper? I mean, you got that fastball and all.”

Worrell was not all that thrilled. A “stopper,” in big league parlance, is a guy who comes in at the last minute to douse an oil-well fire or take over the controls of a crashing plane. Usually with Barry Bonds at bat.

On the other hand, Worrell reflected--Todd never does anything in a hurry--he did notice that he was losing velocity on his fastball as games progressed.

“By the seventh inning, it was becoming more hittable,” he recalls.

Exactly! Fregosi told him. How about if he only had to pitch one or two innings a night? His fastball would hold up.

Worrell was sold. From that night on, his big league career, fame and fortune were assured.

His importance to the Dodgers is on a par with any 20-game-winner or nine-inning pitcher on the staff.

He’s not Cy Young. Over nine innings, at any rate. For two, though, he can be.

Relief pitching is an honorable profession now. Finally out of the red-light district. But it was inevitable that the press box would come up with the non-save. This is a category called the “blown” save.

Worrell is a big fan of the save. The blown save, he’s not so enthusiastic about.

“Sometimes, a save is blown because you inherit baserunners from a previous pitcher,” he says. “Those runs do not count on your earned-run-average. But they can add up to a blown save for you.”

Blown or bagged, Todd Worrell has done what his parents told him. He saved for his future. Last week, he blew one when the Cardinals rallied with two out in the ninth inning. The next night, he bagged one.

The Dodgers can’t win the pennant without him. He’s no threat at all to Cy Young and his 749 complete games. Of course, if Cy Young had had Todd Worrell on his staff, he might have come out of a lot of those games in the seventh inning. And he might not have lost 316.