Goldman’s baseball quotables #4: What Ron Washington can learn from Dizzy Dean
Q: What can Ron Washington learn from the very short career of Dizzy Dean? A: Everything.Q: Would it help? A: Probably not; it’s Ron Washington.
erome Miron-USA TODAY Sports
I made a joke during a radio spot about two weeks back of which I'm a little ashamed because it was about performance-enhancing drugs. I don't believe that said pharmaceuticals were as effective as their name and the conventional wisdom would have you believe, so making a joke that enforces that perception is just pandering. I was asked a question about the many injuries the Dodgers have suffered. I had just said, "And Hyun-Jin Ryu is on the DL with a butt injury -- "
The host jumped in, wanting to keep the rear humor going. “Hey,” she said, “it’s all about the glutes.”
"Right!" I said. "Butt muscles are important to pitching. Roger Clemens showed how far you could go with a strong butt. Actually, he showed you could go even further with a strong butt and a syringe than a strong butt alone." The host laughed, so I had done my job, but I felt guilty.
There's the kernel of a useful thought at work there, though. Look at the quote from Hall of Fame right-hander Dizzy Dean. Dean was full of bravado, boastfulness, attitude. His brother Paul, also a pitcher, was in the 1934 Cardinals rotation with him. On September 21 of that year, the Cardinals played a doubleheader with the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. Dizzy started the first game and pitched a three-hit shutout. Paul started the second game and pitched a no-hitter. "If I had known what Paul was gonna do, I'd have pitched one too," Dizzy said after. It sounds like a joke, but he was so good that year, going 30-7 and winning the NL MVP award (he led in wins above replacement, too, though no one knew that at the time), that it seems entirely possible.
Young Roger Clemens: a dorsal view (Getty Images).
Dean won 20 or more games four times, led the National League in strikeouts four times in his first four full seasons, and then, either because he had pitched over 1,500 innings by the time he was 26 or he fractured a toe in the 1937 All-Star Game (“Fractured, hell!” he shouted. “The damned thing’s broken!”) he was largely done. Though warned not to try, he attempted to pitch through the injury, thereby altering his mechanics and shredding his arm. It was probably well on its way to being wrecked anyway. He went on to a career as a famously ungrammatical broadcaster and ate himself from his playing weight of 182 pounds to over 300. Dean was golfing with President Eisenhower in the 1950s when Ike asked how Dean could have let himself go like that.
“I’ll tell you how it was, Mr. President,” Dean drawled. “For the first 20 years of my life, I never had enough to eat, and I ain’t caught up yet.” Criticized for his poor language skills during the Great Depression, he said, “A lot of people who don’t say ain’t ain’t eating.”
The former pitcher had an answer for everything, not all of them involving food. As the line about Paul Dean’s no-hitter suggests, Dizzy never lacked for confidence. He drove Cardinals president Branch Rickey insane with his constant salary demands. “I was in the top 10 percent of my law school class,” Rickey whined. “I am a Doctor of Juris Prudence. I have an honorary Doctor of Laws. So, would somebody please tell me why I spent four mortal hours today conversing with a person named Dizzy Dean?”
The problem is, confidence can only take you so far. Dean’s career looks a lot like Brandon Webb’s -- half a Hall of Fame career followed by a hard stop. Dean made it to the Hall of Fame because he was able to muddle through past the 10-season mark and his charisma made up the rest. Webb couldn’t get through seven seasons, so that’s that. With each pitcher injury there is never a guarantee it won’t be “that’s that.”
Brandon Webb" class="small" src="http://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/681614/Brandon_Webb.0.jpg" />
The momentarily great Brandon Webb. (Getty Images).
Toward the end of August, Rangers manager Ron Washington hinted that his ace right-hander, Yu Darvish, should pitch through right-elbow inflammation. "Well, I think it would just be the fact he doesn't quit on his teammates, that's all there is to me... So he's got inflammation. I've got inflammation." Washington later walked back the comments, but they reveal a spectacular lack of vision, one that cannot perform a proper cost-benefit analysis. What are an extra handful of starts to a team that is going to lose 90 to 100 games regardless?
Dean’s decision to pitch with a broken toe argues that sometimes “not quitting on [your] teammates” in the short term can be tantamount to quitting on them in the long term. Dean had all the guts in the world, all the self-possession, all the commitment, but he lacked common sense -- and as a result, after midseason ‘37 he also lacked an arm.
In other words, circling back to what I said about Roger Clemens, you will go further with an attitude and an arm than you will with just an attitude alone.The poet E.E. Cummings’ “Buffalo Bill’s” (see the link for Cummings’ line-spacing) broadens this lesson to encompass the entirety of the human condition:
Buffalo Bill ‘s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethatJesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
In the end, the inevitable mortification of our strengths mocks pretensions that mere will can overcome the weakness of the body and, in Dean’s case, illustrates the fleeting hour of the foolhardy brave and the facile cool.
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