Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut on Mound

When a manager or pitching coach or teammate visits the mound, “It ain’t good 99% of the time,” Angel left-hander Allen Watson said. “They’re not coming out there to give you money or anything.”

On-the-mound meetings can range from an order to hit the showers, to a stern tongue-lashing, to advice on what to throw to the next batter.

Or they can result in something priceless; a line causes a pitcher to double over in laughter and gives him an anecdote he’ll remember for years.

Like the time Mark Portugal gave up home runs on three consecutive pitches at Cincinnati, igniting a Fourth-of-July-like pyrotechnic display after each blast, and then-Houston manager Art Howe ordered pitching coach Bob Cluck to the mound.

“What the heck am I supposed to say?” Cluck asked Howe before leaving the dugout. Then it came to him. Cluck, who is now at Oakland with Howe, told Portugal: “Look, we just got a call from the guy who does the fireworks, and he wanted me to ask you to give him some time to reload.”

Then there was the time a young Watson was getting bombed in the early innings of a day game in St. Louis in 1993. “[Cardinal catcher] Tom Pagnozzi came out to the mound and said, ‘Hey, rookie, do you know what time it is?’ Damn, we’re going to miss happy hour.’ ”

And you thought these guys went to the mound simply to implore their pitchers to throw strikes?

Jerry Reuss was pitching for the Dodgers one night when manager Tom Lasorda emerged from the dugout with that look Reuss knew all too well--the left-hander was gone. The score was tied and Reuss had a feeling the Dodgers might rally, so he pleaded to remain.

“I said, ‘Let’s do the democratic thing, we get one vote each,’ ” Reuss said, as catcher Steve Yeager joined the conversation. “Yeager would cast the deciding vote, so I figured I was in. Lasorda asks Yeager what he’d do and he said, ‘Shoot, I would have taken him out two innings ago.’

“Lasorda took the ball from me and said, ‘What a country! Even at Dodger Stadium we see democracy in action.”

Sometimes a conversation on the mound can include the opposing team’s pitcher.

Gene Mauch was managing the Expos one frigid day in Montreal and went to the mound to speak to Steve Renko. St. Louis pitcher Bob Gibson, who had a lead, was steaming in the other dugout, yelling at Mauch to get the game moving.

“I figured I’d just take my time, and that ticked him off even more,” Mauch said of Gibson. “Then he screamed, ‘Hey, Mauch! The only thing you know about pitching is you couldn’t hit it!’ ”

Some conversations on the mound have nothing to do with pitching. When Angel pitcher Omar Olivares made his big league debut for St. Louis in 1990, he gave up a leadoff single and then picked the runner off first.

Cardinal first baseman Pedro Guerrero went to the mound for a chat with Olivares. “He said, ‘Don’t throw it too hard over here,’ ” Olivares said. “ ‘I’m trying to check out that girl behind the dugout.’ ”

In a game last season, often-off-the-wall Angel catcher Todd Greene went to the mound to visit Chuck Finley.

“I said, ‘Hey, Fin, if you were building a house, would you prefer brick or stucco?’ ” Greene said. “He said he’d go with stucco. Then Lach [pitching coach Marcel Lachemann] came out looking all serious, wondering what we were talking about.

“We told him, and Lach goes, ‘Well, in my day, we built houses with mud and straw. . . . Geez, I’m outta here!’ ”

Said Finley: “We talk about everything but what we’re trying to do. . . . That might be the problem.”

It wasn’t a problem for Larry Bearnarth, a Detroit Tiger scout who was pitching for the New York Mets in a Memorial Day doubleheader against the San Francisco Giants in 1964.

Bearnarth had pitched seven innings of relief in a nightcap that eventually went 23 innings, and he was exhausted in his last inning, the 15th. Jesus Alou singled to open the inning, Willie Mays walked, and up came the dangerous Orlando Cepeda.

Manager Casey Stengel went to the mound, and Bearnarth, noticing a pitcher warming up in the bullpen, figured he was out.

“Casey looked at me and said, ‘Tra-la-la,’ ” Bearnarth said. “That was all he said, and then he left. Cepeda then hit a liner up the middle, [Met shortstop] Roy McMillan caught it, stepped on second and threw to first for a triple play.

“I got back to the dugout and said, ‘Casey, what does tra-la-la mean?’ He said, ‘Tra-la-la, triple play.’ ”