Aug 28 2013 01:15 PM
TIM LEARY: A PAINFUL WAIT FOR AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
By MALCOLM MORAN
Published: July 18, 1982
| MALIBU, Calif. TIM LEARY remembered the day when he formally became a member of the Mets' pitching staff. A year ago in April, at the age of 22, Leary either lacked perspective or he possessed too much, because he had no idea how important he had become to the future of a baseball team. ''It was no big deal to me,'' Leary remembered. He was a very big deal. His promotion to the Mets, after a long debate, was announced in a news conference attended by the general manager, the manager and the pitching coach. Leary had pitched just one year of Class AA ball, and yet his earned run average with the Mets that spring was 1.50. The question of his immediate future - a year in Class AAA or a one-way ticket to New York? - became a major topic in management discussions. And when the decision was finally made and Leary was brought to New York, more than a dozen reporters talked to him within an hour. They asked about his first start as a Met, a week away, against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. For the pitcher who had already been compared to Tom Seaver and Jim Palmer, veterans well on their way to the Hall of Fame, that was the beginning. ''I wasn't running around, saying, 'Whoopee,' '' Leary said here last week. ''I was a rookie. Still am, officially.'' Fifteen months, two innings and 37 pitches after the beginning of his major league career, Leary has wondered if he has reached the end. His doubts began with a muscle strain in his right elbow suffered in the second inning of his first game as a Met. They deepened with pain in his throwing shoulder last winter that was not completely diagnosed as a nerve problem until just over a month ago. And Leary's problem was made more complex by communication problems with a manager, a coach, and the team physician. Once, Met management made plans for a young pitching staff with Leary as the No.1 starter. Now, despite the organization's public optimism, management is not automatically including Leary in its private plans. So Tim Leary is a gentleman of leisure, waiting at home for his shoulder to heal. There is no exercise program for his arm, because any work would create the risk of causing more aggravation than improvement. Leary runs, and rides a bicycle, and swims without using his arms. He waits for his next meeting, in mid-August, with Dr. James Parkes, the Mets' doctor. He is at home in Malibu, close to his mother in Santa Monica, and near the Pacific Coast Highway, the beaches, and the picture-postcard scenery. He is also 3,000 miles away from New York, and far enough removed from questions he cannot answer. ''I can seclude myself from a lot of people,'' Leary said. He speaks quietly as he talks about the emotional highs and lows of the last 15 months. ''Some people here are removed from baseball,'' he said. ''That's not a part of their life. If I was to live in Santa Monica and still be around there, a couple of times a week they'd say, 'Oh, how's baseball? How's your arm?' That's the first thing they say. It's better that way, though.'' It is better that way because Leary has felt even more uncomfortable when the questions go unasked. ''I've had that happen,'' he said. ''They don't mention baseball. They think it's so bad they can't talk about it. I've had worse things happen. When my father died, that was much worse.'' When Leary has occasionally made the 45-minute trip to Dodger Stadium, he has studied the pitchers and discovered reminders of what is possible. ''I've thought, 'God, I can be as good as any of them,' '' Leary said. ''I still feel that way. I go to games and think there's only about 10 pitchers - counting relievers, more than 10 - that super impress me.'' There is little else to do but rest, and watch, and think of what went wrong. ''It doesn't cross my mind too much,'' he said, ''but if it does cross my mind, I'll just sort of pretend I'm back in high school. Back then it was no big deal. I wasn't in the big leagues, so I wasn't losing anything. I'll just have a normal life and enjoy myself here. Hopefully, I'll be able to get back and have a full career. ... ''Now I think, well, if things didn't work out, I could always do something. I could finish school. '' There is no time limit and no guarantee. The only consistency is the pain in his shoulder, which was once so bad that it hurt as he shifted gears in his car. The examinations of more than a month ago confirmed what his shoulder had already said. ''If I just lift my arm,'' Leary said, ''I can tell. ... Just sitting here, I can tell.'' At the start of last season, there were observers who rated Leary at the front of a rookie group that included Fernando Valenzuela of the Dodgers. When the Mets played at Dodger Stadium this weekend, Leary was a visitor, a question mark that was once an exclamation point. ''There's a lot of things,'' he said. ''It's hard to begin.'' As Leary progressed in his first spring as a Met, despite his statistics and raves from opponents, he says it became more and more obvious to him that he was uncomfortable. Nothing was wrong with his arm, but Leary was troubled by the way he thought he was being used. In 1979, his junior year at U.C.L.A. and the year he became the Mets' first selection in the draft, Leary struck out 111 batters in 148 innings. In his first professional season, with Jackson of the Class AA Texas League, Leary struck out 138 batters in 173 innings, and he was named the league's most valuable player. But Leary did not see himself as a strikeout pitcher. He preferred to rely on intelligence and a range of pitches. ''Play with the batters' minds,'' he says. That was not the Mets' plan. ''I know he thinks that way,'' Bill Monbouquette, the Met pitching coach and the organization's minor league instructor last year, said recently. ''I've said, 'Tim, you have a chance to be a power pitcher. A power pitcher doesn't mean you're going to go out and strike out 13, 14 or 15 a night. It means you'll be hard to hit.' ''He's said, often, 'I'm a guy that gets ahead of the hitters, and gets everything over. I consider myself more of a ground-ball pitcher, making them hit the ball and making the guys catch the ball.' '' That was clearly not the style that made Leary the talk of the Mets' camp. Leary had discussed his reservations about being a power pitcher with Monbouquette, but not with Joe Torre, the Mets' manager last year, or Bob Gibson, the pitching coach. ''There were no lines of communication,'' Leary said. And his success made a conversation seem less necessary. Leary allowed three earned runs in 18 innings, with 12 strikeouts. In a game against the Dodgers, he pitched four innings, the longest appearance for any Met to that point, allowed two singles and one walk, and had five strikeouts. Against major league competition, he was everything that Monbouquette had seen in Class AA. More and more, the name Leary was linked to Seaver. ''This boy just reminded me so much of him,'' Monbouquette said. ''Not so much that he looked like Tom, throwing, just the way he went about his business. He was a stickler about conditioning. I often thought, 'I hope I'm not putting the jinx on him.' '' Frank Cashen, the executive vice president and general manager, said he was aware of Leary's pitching preferences, but he never talked to him about them. ''What I do know,'' Cashen said, ''is from what you saw of his physical equipment, I thought he was a power pitcher to the extent that his fastball was his best pitch.'' As Leary achieved more and more success, he became more and more confused. ''Because I got the feeling that Torre and Gibson were trying to get me to go for strikeouts,'' he said. ''I'm not going to win by striking out nine guys. That kind of screwed me up. It was taking away my personality on the pitching mound. ...'' ''We never did that,'' Torre, now the manager of the Atlanta Braves, said recently. ''We didn't tell him to think about strikeouts. He was trying to make the ball move in different ways that we felt could have been responsible for his injury. He was turning it over, trying to make it move all the time. There are pitchers that don't throw as hard as he does that have to do that. ... ''Tim definitely had his own ideas,'' Torre said. ''When you're set in your ways, when people talk to you, it's like a steady hum. I know I always respected people with experience and figured I could learn more. When you form your own ideas, it's like an immovable object.'' But Leary said he did listen. ''I thought, 'these guys know. They've been around. Maybe this will help me,' '' Leary said. ''And at the time, I was doing well, too, so I didn't say much. I thought 'later on, if I do well, I'll just pitch the way I want no matter what they say.' But that time never came. I just threw too many hard fastballs. It caught up with me.'' On a chilly Sunday afternoon in Chicago, everything changed. Leary suddenly felt pain in his elbow after he released a pitch in the second inning and left the game after the inning ended. ''If they would have just let me pitch the way I wanted to pitch,'' Leary said, ''I would have been O.K.'' Five weeks ago tomorrow, on the west side of midtown Manhattan, a frustrated pitcher sat in the office of a frustrated doctor. Leary's elbow was considered healthy, but now there was shoulder pain that could be traced to a trip to the winter league in Venezuela that Leary now wishes he never made. Leary had been sent to Venezuela after six frustrating games late last season with the Class AAA Tidewater team. The pain continued this spring, and seemed even worse in comparison to the success of the previous spring. ''It was my own fault,'' Leary said. ''I guess I wasn't vocal enough that there was a problem, even though I thought it was obvious. ... I guess I didn't express myself, before.'' The Mets found Leary's shoulder problem mysterious and concerned that Leary, who never before had to cope with the stress of serious arm trouble, was taking advice from outsiders. By early June, Leary thought that exercise programs had been hurting more than helping. As they sat in the office, Dr. Parkes felt that he was not getting through to the pitcher. ''I said, 'How do you feel?' '' Dr. Parkes remembered. '' 'Well,' he said, 'I feel better.' I said, 'Tim, you sound like my father. Do you feel better?' '' When Leary showed the doctor where the pain was, it was a different place than Dr. Parkes had seen before. This time, Leary pointed to the base of his neck, in the front and the back. ''That's the first time he said, 'I really don't feel good,' '' Dr. Parkes said. ''He didn't want to complain. He didn't want our management to feel he was complaining unduly.'' Tests and examinations by Dr. Parkes and two specialists found that the supra scapular nerve was being pinched, with definite evidence of irritation and tendinitis. There were tests to search for any vascular problem, such as the one that resulted in the stroke suffered by J.R. Richard of Houston, and those tests revealed that vessels coming from the chest to the arm were being pinched during extremes of motion created by Leary's pitching delivery. ''So we had a complex problem,'' Dr. Parkes said. ''Not a serious one, I believe, but complex.'' There was another problem that Dr. Parkes thinks was resolved that day in his office. ''I said, 'Do you have confidence in me? Do you like me? Do you trust me? If not, I'll get anybody you want.' '' Dr. Parkes remembered. ''He said, 'No, no, I do.' I said, 'If you do, we've got to be friends. We've got to talk. Then you're not the bad guy. I'm the bad guy.' '' What the doctor meant was a bad guy in the eyes of management. Leary has heard the whispers that said that his problem could be found in his head rather than in his arm, and he resents those whispers. ''I have very definitely explained to him that this is not so,'' Dr. Parkes said. The truth was that Leary's hesitance to complain complicated an already difficult situation. ''I told him it was commendable not to cry to the doctor, and bite the bullet,'' the doctor said. ''But this is not what works at the major league level.'' The next step will be the August examination, after 12 weeks of complete rest. ''I would be very surprised if there is much irritation left,'' Dr. Parkes said. ''If there is any left, I would not hesitate to wait four to six weeks and test him again. I'm planning for next spring training for him to be throwing. That's my goal. If he does better than that, I've also told him I'm not going to hold him back.'' Dr. Parkes optimistically points to recent innovations in the nonsurgical treatment of injured shoulders, plus Leary's youth, intelligence and the improved communication. If the August examination shows no signs of irritation, Leary's return to a mound would be taken in small steps, to carefully build strength and confidence. ''I'm not going to even toss the ball if it bothers me,'' Leary said. ''I'll wait another year.'' As he waits, he tries to wait patiently. ''The Mets, they're good about it,'' he said. ''They could easily be insensitive. I'm not going to harp on what's happened and blame other people. ''I'll just have to wait my turn. I figure I was lucky to get where I was at the time. You couldn't ask for anything more. There are guys who play in the minor leagues all their lives and never play in the big leagues.'' And as everyone waits, there is the hope that when Leary was compared to Jim Palmer, who overcame severe arm trouble early in his career, that comparison was more accurate than anyone could have known. |
