Beginner's Pluck

By Tim Brown

June 6, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

John Smoltz so badly wants you to understand him, and to see his last 18 years as he does.

Unless you don’t want to.

Then he is past that, through with justifying himself as a pitcher. He is through with the third-wheel heartache and his bearing of organizational and emotional burdens. He has God and family and team beside him, and so there is peace where anxiety once lay.

Unless you’ve got 30 minutes.

“I’m not looking for credit,” he says one night. “I’m just looking for, ‘Job well done.’ ”

The distinction is subtle, but meaningful to Smoltz, whose four-year evolution from starter to closer to starter for the Atlanta Braves was as trying as it was gratifying.

“It’s hard to talk about when you’re going through the year and it’s pain you’re going through,” he says. “People don’t want to hear that, especially if you’re having success. So for the most part, no one really understands. Maybe they never will.

“The hardest thing I’ve had to do is deal with the closer’s role. I was doing the best I could. But there were times I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.’ ”

Smoltz is among the most approachable men in baseball. Soft eyes follow a hard handshake, a changeup off a fastball. As vigorously as he defends a career spent explaining who he is and why that is, he dismisses the complexities, hardships and misunderstandings within it, all of which he raises.

He possesses Cy Young Award bearing, born of his 24-8 season with the Atlanta Braves nearly a decade ago, and his handful of near misses. He is a postseason legend, and yet his signature moment was a team loss in the seventh game of a World Series.

At 38, after four elbow surgeries spread over a career as a starter and then as a closer, either of which would stand alone impressively, Smoltz is back in the first inning.

There were times, he says, when the journey was satisfying enough. The Braves won a World Series and played in four others, but his standing on those pitching-wealthy teams invariably was third, behind Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine.

He won 157 regular-season and 12 postseason games from 1988 to 1999, and then the ligament in his right elbow, already thready, gave out. He underwent Tommy John surgery, sat out more than a year, and in 2001 became a closer.

Other than Eric Gagne and, perhaps, Mariano Rivera, he became the closer. In 3 1/2 seasons, he saved 154 games in 168 opportunities, joined Dennis Eckersley as the only pitchers to win 150 games and save 150 games and, because of it, is considered by many as a Hall of Famer waiting for induction.

“He better be in the Hall of Fame,” Gagne says. “He’s changed the face of the game.”

Just when it appeared he had found the place where he would not be lost in a rotation of superstars -- Maddux and Glavine were in Chicago and New York -- where he hoped the people of Atlanta might appreciate his talent and sacrifice, where he could pitch to his heart’s content and not to his elbow’s destruction, John Smoltz asked for his old job back.

Through 12 starts, he is 4-4 with a 3.12 earned-run average, has allowed two or fewer runs in eight of his starts, and has received two or fewer runs in support eight times.

Once compelled by a stricken elbow to become a sidearm pitcher in the four days between regular-season starts, and once driven by bottomless aspiration to develop a knuckleball in the off-season, Smoltz is again over the top and throwing hard, now seven or more innings at a time.

No one knows for sure how many pitches that fresh ligament has in it. They -- Smoltz, Manager Bobby Cox, pitching coach Leo Mazzone, General Manager John Schuerholz -- will all know when they get there.

In the meantime, Smoltz will take the baseball every five days and do his fastball-slider-splitter-curveball thing. If that’s good enough, and if everybody goes along with the plan, Smoltz will pile the pitches together, stack the starts to the roof, ice the elbow and maybe take another shot or two at October.

He will start over again tonight, then start over again tomorrow, and if it doesn’t lead back to the World Series, then he’d hope everybody would know he tried, that he achieved, that his best often was better than anyone else’s.

“Nothing that was at the end of the road drove me to be the best,” he says.

No, that came quite early, as he was growing up in Lansing, Mich. His father, John Adam, nudged John into sports, but with an edge that developed in John unusual desires to work and win.

Smoltz recalls of his father, “We competed at everything -- cards, basketball ... “

From the locker beside his, fellow starter Mike Hampton interrupts, “Going bald.”

Smoltz laughs.

“Yeah, going bald. He beat me at everything that he could. He never let me win a game until I could. And then I never let him win a game.”

Smoltz’s grandfather worked 40 minutes away at Tiger Stadium, where he was on the grounds crew, tended to the press box, whatever was needed. The employees and players called him “Father John,” and often he would parade his lithe grandson through the ballpark.

“He must have said a thousand times, ‘This is my grandson. He’s going to play for the Tigers someday,’ ” Smoltz says.

He was indeed drafted by the hometown franchise in 1986, but when the Tigers found themselves in a title race a year later, Smoltz was traded to the Braves for veteran right-hander Doyle Alexander. Smoltz fell in with pitching coach Mazzone, beginning a relationship that remains almost 20 years later.

Alexander won nine games down the stretch for the Tigers in 1987, and Smoltz, with Maddux and Glavine, helped form the core of a Braves team that dominated the National League in the 1990s. Unlike Maddux, who got his 300th win last season as a Cub, and Glavine, who has won the last 24 of 266 victories as a Met, Smoltz rejected better free-agent offers to remain in Atlanta.

It seemed the right thing for him to do; his wife, Dyan, is a Georgia native, and his four children have known only one city. He also says he believes in Cox, and in the organization, despite the contract battles of the past, and despite its insistence he abandon the rotation for the bullpen.

The trend he cites: Beginning in 1991, with Smoltz as a full- or (as in 2001) a part-time starter, the Braves advanced at least as far as the National League championship series nine times. They missed in 1994, when a work stoppage canceled the playoffs, and in 2000, when Smoltz was recovering from surgery.

So, over an early-December lunch with Schuerholz, and after three remarkable seasons as a closer, Smoltz made one last pitch in 2004: He would resume his place in the starting rotation, knowing that no pitcher in the modern era had ever taken such a career path -- dominant starter to dominant closer to dominant starter. But, Smoltz figured, that was only because he hadn’t tried it before.

“I don’t regret pitching until my ligament went. I don’t regret staying here. I don’t regret being behind Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux. I don’t even regret making the move as a closer,” Smoltz says.

“But what I said was, when I went there, ‘In three years, we’ll find out if this makes us better.’ Because I had said, ‘We will not win a championship with me in this role.’ If we did, I would be the first to say I was dead wrong and this would be the rest of my career. If I’m telling people that all I care about is world championships, which I have, then my career has matched up, because I have selflessly given what my greatest desire would be to do.”

In three division series since 2001, Smoltz saved one game. The Braves were eliminated by the Giants, Cubs and Astros.

From behind his desk, a gray-blue cloud of smoke and a glowing orange cigar, Cox shrugs at the topic of Smoltz’s choice and of the possible consequences to Smoltz’s elbow. He says he only knows that he could always believe in him, and that Smoltz deserves this, a conclusion of his choosing to his career, and the organization’s trust. The Braves traded for a closer -- Milwaukee’s Danny Kolb, since demoted -- and gave opening day to Smoltz.

“I never doubt John,” he says. “Obviously, I love him. He’s always gone the extra mile.”

Beyond the Braves, there were doubts. In spring training, Eckersley told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “The thought of even having to do what he’s doing, that’s outrageous to me. He’s not getting any younger, and he’s had arm trouble. I really think it’s a crapshoot.... To tune it up to 125 pitches again, you’ve got to wonder if he’ll last.”

ESPN analyst Jeff Brantley, a former big league pitcher whose 615 appearances included 18 starts, held a similar opinion.

Except, Smoltz says, he was not a good starter, but perhaps a great one. And he did not go to the bullpen because he could no longer be a starter, but because the Braves needed a closer, and because a few medical and baseball people were guessing that fewer innings might mean less strain.

“What bothers me [is that] nobody, with the exception of Eckersley, really had a valid position,” Smoltz says. “Brantley? Brantley said, ‘I’ve done both and, I know. He’s kidding himself if he thinks he can do it.’ He’s done both? I’ve logged 2,500 innings as a starter. How many have you logged? Three-hundred innings as a closer.... It was too big a story. I don’t think they believed that I honestly believed I could do it.”

Lately?

“I’ve not heard a word,” he says.

Actually, he’s gotten people talking again. An hour before Smoltz allowed the San Diego Padres one run over eight innings in mid-May, Padre Manager Bruce Bochy said, “It’s incredible what he’s done. At his age, to come back out of the ‘pen. It says what a tremendous athlete he is. He could be one of the great closers in the game.”

Smoltz just wants to pitch, and wouldn’t mind being recognized with the best of his era. Painfully humble in some respects, he nods enthusiastically at the statistics that reflect his status among active pitchers -- sixth in ERA, behind Pedro Martinez, Maddux, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and, for the moment, Kevin Brown; fifth in WHIP -- walks plus hits per inning pitched; even 15th in saves. But, 12th in wins, with 167, against 125 losses, “50 or 60” of which, he says, could be explained by poor run support or his own stubbornness to pitch into the eighth and ninth innings.

He’d have to pitch well for another season and a half to reach 200 wins. And 300 -- as Maddux reached and Glavine conceivably could -- is unreachable.

His career, he says, will have to be measured otherwise, by people who might not get him, or the way he went about things.

“If you’re a left-hander who throws 80 miles an hour and you find a way to win, you’re a pitcher,” he says. “If you’re a right-hander who’s got great stuff, you think, ‘I have great stuff, I’m not a pitcher.’ Nobody can say that about me anymore. Not after what I’ve been through. If they don’t follow it with the word ‘pitcher,’ then they haven’t seen me. You can’t go through what I’ve been through and not be a pitcher.

“And now, honestly, I’m at peace with my career. You can write what you want, say what you want, but it won’t change my obedience to being the very best that I can.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Start-finish line

John Smoltz began his career as a starting pitcher, was converted to a closer during the 2001 season and returned to the rotation this season:

*--* AS STARTER

*--*

* Years: 1988-99, 2005

* Record: 163-119, 3.37 ERA

* Most victories in a season: 24

*--* AS A RELIEVER

*--*

* Years: 2001-04

* Saves: 154, 2.35 ERA