THE BUCS DON'T STOP HERE
Pittsburgh was in its familiar place last Thursday, the cellar of the National League East, when manager Jim Leyland called the Pirates' public relations man, Greg Johnson, into his office. "See if you can get me the clipping from last Sunday's Newark Star-Ledger in which Howard Johnson had some derogatory things to say about us," Leyland said. "I want it up on the bulletin board before tomorrow's game."
Friday night's game would be against Johnson and the Mets, who are locked in a three-way battle for the division title with St. Louis and Montreal. The Expos and the Cardinals had already come through Pittsburgh for a pair of two-game series earlier in the week, and the Pirates had had a victory in each. "Any little edge helps," said Leyland, referring to the Johnson clipping and his hope of giving New York the same unfriendly treatment he'd given St. Louis and Montreal.
A last-place team looking for an edge three weeks before winter vacation? "We have our own little pennant race going in our own little second season," says reliever Jim Gott. "Hey, we're the first-place team in our season. And we're playing like it."
Are they ever. Between a watershed team meeting on Aug. 24 and last Sunday, the Pirates had gone 19-6, climbed out of the cellar to within three games of fourth place after having been nine games out of fifth. Pittsburgh is a young team, rich in pitching and defense, that will be a force in 1988, but last week it proved to be a force in 1987 as well, by playing tough with each of the division's big three.
On Monday, Sept. 14, the Pirates battled Montreal for 14 innings—"to exhaustion," said Expos manager Buck Rodgers—before losing 6-4. Tuesday they beat Montreal 5-1. Mike Bielecki pitched 6‚Äö√Ñ√∂‚àö√±‚àö¬® perfect innings in that game, and John Cangelosi scored the first run by stealing home—the first such steal by a Pirate since 1966. On Wednesday, St. Louis came to town and built an 8-2 lead, but Pittsburgh battled back and got the tying run up to the plate in the eighth inning before losing 8-5. Then on Thursday, Mike Dunne, the best rookie pitcher in baseball, moved to within 0.11 of the major league ERA lead with a 1-0 shutout of the club that traded him last spring. On Friday it was New York's turn. After the Mets took a 3-0 lead on Darryl Strawberry's first-inning homer, the Pirates came back with four in the bottom of the first, beginning with lead-off man Cangelosi's home run on the first pitch thrown by former Pittsburgh ace John Candelaria in his first appearance as a Met. The Pirates went on to pound out 17 hits in a 10-9 victory, which ended with Gott firing a called third strike past Strawberry and catcher Mike (Spanky) LaValliere throwing out Johnson—he of bulletin-board fame—attempting to steal second. After losing to the Mets 5-4 on Saturday, Pittsburgh came from behind Sunday to win 9-8 in 14 innings and take the series.
The Bucs have a good reason to be turned on by playing contenders. Eight of the players new to this year's Pirates came from clubs that led divisions last week: Gott, catcher Mackey Sasser and reliever Jeff Robinson from the Giants; Dunne, LaValliere and outfielder Andy Van Slyke from the Cardinals; and outfielders Darnell Coles and Terry Harper from the Tigers. "We'd like to finish .500 and in fourth place," says pitcher Brian Fisher, who came over from those semi-contenders, the Yankees. "But the most important motivation is that we're playing for our own self-respect, which will carry over into next year."
"When I came up," says Bielecki, who came to Pittsburgh from the minors to stay on Sept. 9, 1985, "most everyone who wasn't playing was up in the clubhouse during the game, eating pizza and watching TV. No one gave a damn. This is like a whole new world." The Pirates back then were a scandal-ridden joke. Several players had been summoned to testify in a trial involving the trafficking of drugs in the clubhouse. There was speculation that the Bucs would be sold and relocated. On the field, representing a franchise that won six division titles and two world championships in the '70s, were a bunch of high-salaried has-beens like George Hendrick and Jason Thompson, who clearly shared the community's lack of interest in the grand old game. No wonder Pittsburgh drew only 735,900 fans for the '85 season.
Something had to be done. Club president Daniel M. Galbreath's first moves were to fire general manager Harding (Pete) Peterson, and to lure back from his West Coast scouting assignment Joe L. Brown, who had been the club's general manager from 1955 to 1976. When Brown replaced manager Chuck Tanner with Leyland and himself with Syd Thrift (Brown remains on the club's board of directors), a lot of people thought he had lost his mind. Whereas Tanner had led the Pirates to the world championship in 1979, Leyland had managed only two big league games while serving as a White Sox coach. And Thrift hadn't held any job in baseball since the end of the 1976 season, when, as Oakland's director of minor leagues and scouting, he had watched the disintegration of the A's. With the likes of Sal Bando, Don Baylor, Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers abandoning the team via the first free-agent reentry draft, Thrift decided to take his leave, too. He complained as he went that "baseball was going away from scouting and development and into the insane world of purchasing agents." He returned to his native Virginia, started a successful real estate business and restricted his baseball involvement to the amateur level.
Now Thrift was running the Pirates. He had been a scout for Pittsburgh from 1957 through the 1967 season, having signed such players as Al Oliver, Don Money and Woodie Fryman. Then he joined the Kansas City Royals and ran their famous baseball academy for four years. There he gained a reputation as something of a Gyro Gearloose for his fascination with the aerodynamics of baseballs, an interest he maintains to this day. Out of the blue he's apt to launch into a discourse on how many times a four-seam fastball—one that is held across the seams—rotates between the pitcher's hand and home plate. But few people in baseball question his talent-spotting ability, and that's exactly what Brown was looking for.
"We had to perform a complete overhaul and start regaining the community's respect," says Thrift. "The players here were conditioned to losing. We had to change everything that went with the recent past." The rebuilding began with the unloading of veterans Hendrick, Candelaria, Al Holland and Bill Madlock. Thrift increased the annual scouting and development budget from $2.5 million to $4.5 million and implemented a program adapted from his old Royals' academy curriculum that included two- and four-seam fastball aerodynamics, measured leads for base runners, the timing of catchers' and pitchers' releases and seminars on such subjects as "the two-strike hitting approach."
Thrift also scrapped Brown's list of candidates to replace Tanner and hired Leyland. "We didn't have much here except some unbelievable contracts," says Thrift. "Jim and I knew that it would take us a year and a half of study to make the decisions on what we had to do." While they evaluated talent, Leyland quickly made his reputation as a manager. "He's the best I've ever been around," says pitching coach Ray Miller, who has been around a lot of managers, including Earl Weaver and Ray Miller. The players like him because he's not afraid to speak his mind. Leyland, says Van Slyke, "cheers for you and airs you out—but to your face—with positive criticism."
In July 1986, Leyland made a lasting impression on his players when he called catcher Tony Pena—at the time, Pittsburgh's only real remaining baseball hero—into his office and told him that there were a lot of things in his game that he would have to change. Before this season, Pena was traded for Dunne, Van Slyke and LaValliere. When the Cards came to Pittsburgh last week, Pena hugged Leyland and thanked him for his advice.
Before this season, Thrift knew that trading would be tricky because, he says, "I had only two real trump cards." One was 34-year-old pitcher Rick Rhoden, who was sent to the Yankees for pitchers Fisher, Doug Drabek and Logan Easley. The other was the 30-year-old Pena, and the trade Thrift made for him may have been the steal of the year. LaValliere, 27, is a potential Gold Glove catcher; Van Slyke, 26, is a brilliant centerfielder who at the end of last week had hit 19 homers and stolen 31 bases; and Dunne, 24, was 9-1 with a 1.94 ERA in his last 13 starts. He, Drabek and Fisher are the big three on a starting staff that through Sunday was 29-18, 3.53 since the All-Star break.
"Pitching and defense are the fastest way to the top," says Leyland. But Thrift didn't stop there. He picked up two useful utility players, shortstop Al Pedrique from the Mets and Cangelosi from the White Sox. In 1986 he had gotten Bobby Bonilla, a big, switch-hitting outfielder from the White Sox. Leyland kept him under wraps through June, then made him the regular third baseman, replacing Jim Morrison, who was traded to Detroit for the talented but enigmatic Coles. Bonilla was hitting .296 with 15 homers at week's end, and Coles hit his second Pirate home run on Sunday, a grand slam that helped beat New York.
The Pirates never talked about second baseman Johnny Ray's limited range and arm until after they traded him to the Angels on Aug. 29 for two minor leaguers. Ray's replacement, the acrobatic Jose Lind, has further strengthened Pittsburgh's defense, as the Expos saw last week when Lind went to the shortstop side of second to get a ball hit by Andres Galarraga and then robbed Tim Raines by reaching a hard grounder in the hole between first and second.
Thrift also used two deals with San Francisco to fortify his bullpen, getting Gott and Sasser for Don Robinson, and then dealing Rick Reuschel for Robinson and minor league reliever Scott Medvin. Thrift expects big things from the league's hardest-throwing lefty, reliever John Smiley. "Pittsburgh has more good arms than any team in baseball, by far," says Phillies scout Hank King. Says one G.M., "They're the only team with quality pitching to spare, so they can make themselves one helluva deal for the righthanded bat and shortstop they need."
As a result of Thrift's tinkering, 48 different players have worn Pirate uniforms this year. Morale hit a low when Reuschel was traded on Aug. 21. "Big Daddy was the most popular player on the team," says Leyland. Pittsburgh immediately lost three straight in Atlanta, so when it returned home on Aug. 24, Thrift addressed the players. "The trades are over," he told them. "This is the club we want. You're here because we wanted you. There are 38 games left in this second season. Set some goals."
"Twenty-five more wins," Gott shouted out.
"When I said goals, I meant realistic goals," Thrift replied. "We're 53-71."
"We'll win 25 more," Gott repeated.
By the time they finished with the Mets on Sunday, the Pirates had won 19 since that meeting and had 13 left to play.
"I think the fact that we're breaking in together this way, with an eye on next year, keeps us motivated and forgetting that some of us could have been in races," says LaValliere.
"We can't get carried away thinking we're a great team yet," says Leyland, perhaps thinking about last year's Cleveland Indians. "But the progress is unbelievable."
Too bad the fans of Pittsburgh have yet to notice. "We were all upset when we came off a 7-2 road trip that followed an 8-1 home stand, and we drew 5,000," says LaValliere. Says Van Slyke, "If we get lucky and draw ten thousand, nine thousand come to boo and the other thousand are Steelers fans who thought there was an intrasquad scrimmage."
"Winning is all that we have to concern ourselves with," says Leyland. In their own private pennant race, the Pirates are in first place and messing up that other race involving the Cardinals, the Mets and the Expos.
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RONALD C. MODRA
This run by Bonilla was one of 19 the Pirates had in two wins over the Mets.
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RONALD C. MODRA
Pittsburgh got a shot in the arm when Drabek came over from the Yankees.
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RONALD C. MODRA
The young Bucs (left to right): Barry Bonds, Bonilla, Lind, Van Slyke and LaValliere.
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RONALD C. MODRA
By replacing fat-cat veterans with hungry youngsters, Thrift has lived up to his name.