Schilling Deal May Play a Part in Two Divisional Races

Late one recent afternoon in the visiting clubhouse at Pro Player Stadium, Curt Schilling watches a game, a Phillies’ game, on a laptop computer propped open on a stool next to his locker. He pays particular attention to the pitcher in Philadelphia’s familiar red-and-white pinstripes, a big blond right-hander with raw power and a biting slider.

Nobody, none of his brand new teammates on the Arizona Diamondbacks, bothers Schilling as he stares at the screen and watches himself. It’s the way of the world in a major league clubhouse. You don’t bug today’s pitcher unless he bugs you first, a maxim compounded in this case by the fact that very few Diamondbacks know Schilling well enough to make easy small-talk. These are their first few hours together.

But they notice. Randy Johnson notices.

“He’s computer literate,” Johnson says, watching from a distance. “I’m not. Maybe he can teach me how to use that thing.”

You already know the D-Backs got themselves a pretty fair pitcher last week when they outbid four other playoff contenders for Schilling. They got a power pitcher with control, a strikeout artist, a proven winner, a veteran who has been through the playoff wars, a dominator who right now has one of the hottest arms in the game.

After shutting out the Braves last Wednesday, Schilling’s is 8-6 with an era of 3.47. In 129 innings, he has struck out 105 and walked only 35, yet those stats don’t tell the whole truth about Arizona’s trade-deadline acquisition. His more recent numbers come closer. In his last nine starts, Schilling is 7-2 with an ERA of 1.68.

You knew he was good. But you may not have known--even some of the Diamondbacks didn’t know--what a technogeek Schilling is during the process of staying good. That game he was watching last Friday afternoon was his last matchup with the Marlins, from April 1999. CD/ROM and indexed by batter. His collection has grown to 60 disks by now, each at 650 megs.

On Friday, he needs to know why the Marlins’ Derrek Lee has had so much success (6-for-12 with three home runs) against him, so he rummages through the disks for those 12 at-bats. He clicks on Lee’s name. He sees the past.

“I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here,” Schilling says. “I’m not going to do anything nobody else has done. I’m not going to throw pitches no one else has thrown. I realized a long time ago that preparation was one of the few things that all great pitchers have in common. I can honestly walk out there on every fifth day now and say to myself that nobody is going to come to the plate more prepared to hit than I am to pitch.”

That’s what the Diamondbacks got from Philadelphia last week--consummate professionalism.

They didn’t get Schilling at his very best. They may never have him at his very best, at least not this season. Doctors tell him it will take until next year for his arm and shoulder to get back to where they were before last December’s surgery. The mid-90s velocity that took him to consecutive 300-strikeout seasons in 1997 and ’98 isn’t consistently there.

But Arizona got enough of the very best Schilling to make the difference in a race for the playoffs. When he absolutely needs the velocity, the big pitch, Schilling still can find it, as he did with a bases-loaded, two-out strikeout of Preston Wilson last Friday night. In part because he didn’t pitch during the first month of the season, he enters the stretch with an arm nowhere nearly worn out.

The D-Backs aren’t a perfect team yet. They still lack stability in right field and punch on offense. They’re a bottom-half team in National League statistics for average, runs and on-base percentage. Mostly because of their offensive shortcomings, they were only 23-27 in their last 50 games through Saturday.

And Schilling’s history against the Giants, the most formidable obstacle between the Diamondbacks and the division title, isn’t particularly good. The season may well come down to the eight games those teams play against each other in the last 11 days, and Schilling is only 3-6 lifetime against San Francisco.

But the way the schedule falls for Arizona the rest of the way, Schilling and Johnson should be able to start at least 23 of the remaining games, beginning with this weekend’s series against the Mets.

It’s hard to argue with the probability that they’ll build a cushion in the standings before those late showdowns with the Giants, as well as their pair of September series with the Dodgers.

“‘Obviously, it’s very premature to be talking about playoffs and the World Series and all that,” Johnson says. “But this team is going to get to the playoffs. I’m fairly confident of that. We went and got Curt to get us past where we were last year (a first-round playoff loss to the Mets).”

As it happens, Schilling’s arrival in Phoenix could affect the outcome in the N.L. East as much as the N.L. West. When the trade happened, Arizona had three series left with Atlanta (including the one early this week) and two with New York. If the D-Backs’ current rotation isn’t interrupted by rainouts or other hitches, the Braves can expect to see Johnson, Schilling and Brian Anderson (8-4, 3.96) in each of their pair of three-game series in September. Atlanta wasn’t scheduled to face Johnson earlier this week.

The Mets will miss Schilling this weekend in Phoenix and should miss him again in New York at the end of August.

The next two months, as well as October if the D-Backs make it that far, will tell intriguing tales of “what is” and “what could have been.” The original list of six teams to which Schilling agreed to be traded included both New York clubs, Arizona, Cleveland, Atlanta and St. Louis. At the last minute, he nixed a deal with the Indians that would have sent first baseman/outfielder Richie Sexson, infielder Enrique Wilson and right-hander Jaret Wright to Philadelphia, saying, “In the end, I decided I’m not an American League guy.” That trade likely looked better to the Phillies than the eventual deal they got from the D-Backs (outfielder Travis Lee, left-hander Omar Daal and right-handers Nelson Figueroa and Vicente Padilla).

Three teams on that original list of six--the Mets, Braves and Cardinals--could have had Schilling for their stretch runs to the N.L. playoffs. Instead, they are strong possibilities now to be playing against him in October. The Cardinals have finished their regular-season series with the D-Backs.

Schilling is 10-5 in his career against the Mets, and 8-8 against Atlanta. In ‘93, he was the most valuable player in the NLCS against the Braves. He started twice in that series and struck out 19 Braves with a 1.69 ERA. In one of those games, he struck out the first five Atlanta hitters he faced, still a League Championship Series record.

“I know the Braves’ lineup I’ll face on Wednesday,” he says. “I know pretty much what it’ll be. So I’ve got those nine to 11 guys on CD/ROM, and I’ll go over them for the next four days. I’ll know what I want to do.”

For the record, a couple of hours after his Friday afternoon computer session on the Marlins, Schilling faced Derrek Lee three times. Lee popped out twice and grounded out once.