Orioles closer Felix Bautista stands 6-8, weighs 285 and routinely throws 100. Dubbed “The Mountain,” he looks like Shaq when he’s out there on the mound, or at least an NFL edge rusher. (And dare it be said that he’s now on the short list of great mountains, along with Everest, McKinley, that dude from Game of Thrones and “Climb Every …”?)
The point is, it might not ever be as good as it is right now for Bautista, who didn’t allow a run in July – well, other than those resulting from the two-run homer he surrendered to Rockies catcher Elias Diaz in the All-Star Game – and was named American League Reliever of the Month for the third time this season. Overall the 28-year-old Dominican has 29 saves (in 34 opportunities) for the AL East-leading Birds, as well as a microscopic 0.87 ERA and 101 strikeouts in 51.2 innings. It has reached the point where Cy Young Award talk has begun to swirl.
Closers come and closers go, though. Remember how Brad Lidge went 41-for-41 in save opportunities for the Phillies’ 2008 world championship team? His ERA ballooned from 1.95 to 7.21 the following season, and he was out of baseball by 2012. Remember comets like Bobby Thigpen, Eric Gagne and Mike Marshall from the distant past? All of them were dominant for a time, but that time passed quickly. The job is so demanding, physically and mentally, that few seem to thrive over the long haul – the obvious exception being retired Yankees great Mariano Rivera, the all-time saves leader with 652.
It is a constant high-wire act, life on a razor’s edge. Lose a foot off your fastball or lose your nerve, and you’re toast. And they all know it, all try to deal with the realities of the role in their own way.
“Sometimes you get, sometimes you get got,” another former Phillies closer, Mitch Williams, told me before managing the now-defunct Atlantic City Surf one August night in 2003. “That’s the nature of the game.”
Williams memorably got got a decade earlier, when Toronto’s Joe Carter launched a World Series-winning homer off him. Williams never shied away from Philadelphia after serving up that gopher ball, appearing at a reunion of the pennant-winning team the very year we spoke, and never bristled at the boos.
“I might not have won; therefore they have the right to boo,” he said. “I don’t think they boo a person. They boo a performance.”
So yes, thick skin obviously helps, as does a sense of humor. When Kansas City closer Dan Quisenberry was presented the AL Fireman of the Year Award before an Orioles-White Sox playoff game in 1983, he took the microphone in old Memorial Stadium and told the crowd, “I wanna thank God, my family and my offensive line.”
Then he left.
A short memory is no less essential; that is mentioned as much with closers as it is with NFL cornerbacks: To succeed, you have to put your failures aside, and move on. That’s not always easy to do, as then-San Diego closer Trevor Hoffman told me one sweltering July afternoon in 2007, before a game against the Phillies in Citizens Bank Park – not even for him, as he was late in a career that would see him record 611 saves, second-most all-time.
“It’s hard,” he said, “until you get the next outing under your belt, get a little bit of a rhythm and hopefully do something positive.”
Because the job never changes. The 27th out always seems to be the hardest one to get.
“I’m not going to say any out’s easy,” Hoffman said as he sat in the visitors’ dugout after running several laps in the outfield in 100-degree heat, “but you definitely get a sense of the game – how it progresses and the drama that builds. That last out is elusive at times.”
Sometimes it’s never recorded at all. Sometimes the other team winds up celebrating at home plate, dousing each other with Gatorade, doing everything but a conga line through the concession stand. And the closer is left to trudge off and face the music. After Doug Jones (no relation) blew a save with the Orioles in 1995. I can remember entering their clubhouse in Camden Yards and seeing him sitting there in plain view. His chair was turned not toward his cubicle, as was typical of most players, but outward. It was as if he was saying to reporters (not to mention his teammates): I own this, and I’m not afraid to talk about it.
A year earlier, Lee Arthur Smith, late in a career that would see him register 478 saves (third-most all-time), had closed for the O’s. And one July day he came on in the ninth to protect a one-run lead against Oakland, after Jamie Moyer had pitched brilliantly. Alas, Lee Arthur allowed a decisive two-run bomb to Mark McGwire. Afterward he adopted an approach similar to that of Jones. There was no hiding in the trainer’s room, no fleeing to the parking lot, no overturning the postgame spread. There were only hard truths to face.
“Jamie pitched great for two and a half hours,” Smith told reporters, “and I screwed it up in 10 minutes.”
Again, it’s the nature of the game. Kirk Gibson got Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series. Hell, then-Phillie Freddy Galvis got Aroldis Chapman, a fireballer in the Bautista mold, in a game 10 years ago. Even Rivera was not immune, though his most notable blown save, in Game Seven of the 2001 World Series, warrants an asterisk. That’s because he sawed off Luis Gonzalez with his signature cutter, only to see Gonzalez loop a single over a drawn-in infield to win it.
Eckersley told me before a game in 1994 he was always “scared to death out there,” which defies belief, given his success. He saved 390 games in his 24-year career, ninth-most all-time, despite spending his early years as a starter. In one three-year stretch with Oakland (1989-91), his strikeout-walk ratio was a ridiculous 215-to-16. The following year – 1992 – he saved a career-high 51 games and was named the MVP and Cy Young Award-winner.
Imagine what he would have done, had he not been so frightened.
Others freely admit that they relished the role. Former Orioles closer Gregg Olson told me in 1989 that the late innings are “the best part of the game,” and indeed the curve-balling Olson was terrific for five seasons (1989-93). Elizabethtown native Gene Garber excelled for far longer, recording 218 saves over his 19 seasons, and was never one to back down from a challenge.
This week marked the 45th anniversary of the night in 1978 when Garber, then with the Braves, extinguished Pete Rose’s last hope of extending his hitting streak beyond 44 games by fanning Rose in his last at-bat.
“Garber was pitching like it was the seventh game of the World Series,” Rose groused afterward.
“I had an idea Pete was hitting like it was the last game of the World Series,” Garber said, when told what Rose had said.
Interesting, isn’t it, that Rose – a guy who once plowed over a catcher (namely, Ray Fosse) in an All-Star Game – would take that tack. But that was Pete. And that was Gene, who for a blog post last October told me the following: “All I hear about is how the last out’s the hardest one to get. No, it’s not. That’s the one you want. That’s the one you have to have. And so you look forward to it. And it shouldn’t scare you at all. You should welcome it. … Go get it.”
Back in 1991, Garber and I had a conversation about a day – Oct. 7, 1977 – when as a Phillie the final out eluded him. Entrusted with a 5-3 lead against the Dodgers in the ninth inning of Game Three of the National League Championship Series, Garber retired the first two hitters, only to see a series of unfortunate events – not the least of which was Danny Ozark’s failure to replace Greg Luzinski in left field with Jerry Martin – lead to a three-run rally, resulting in a 6-5 Los Angeles victory.
If that day, which came to be known as “Black Friday,” sticks in Garber’s craw, he hides it well. He talked in ‘91 about the charged atmosphere surrounding that game and how players are entertainers. “They like a response,” he said.
And, he added, “Even though it was a disastrous finish, it doesn’t take away from the fact that I enjoyed every second on the mound. Even though the roof caved in, there are millions of guys in America who would have traded places and enjoyed being in uniform and on that mound.”
Just how he preferred to look at it, I suppose. Maybe how he’s conditioned to look at it. Short memory, right?
Bautista will have his days where such an attribute will come in handy. In point of fact, he almost had one Monday in Toronto, when he came on with one out in the eighth, the O’s up 4-2 and the tying runs on. He wriggled out of that jam, only to find himself in an identical situation in the ninth.
The Jays’ Whit Merrifield then turned on a 100 mph heater, and for a moment it looked like he would split the left-centerfield gap for a game-tying double. Enter Baltimore left fielder Austin Hays, who robbed Merrifield with a diving catch. Bautista then retired the final batter to finish off a laborious 35-pitch, five-out save.
In short, The Mountain had avoided getting gotten once more. While that has been typical of his season to date, that’s tough terrain to traverse over the long haul. Every closer has his travails. The best of the lot figure out how to come out the other side. He will have to do that, too.