How Could You Forget Buff Now?

VERO BEACH, Fla. —  The pitch was right where it had to be. One or more inches to the left, it would have been a ball. A little lower, it might have been a called strike. An otherwise altogether forgettable fastball.

It was a hitter’s pitch. A batting-practice pitch. On anyone else, it might have been a good pitch. But not on Jack Clark. It was right in his wheelhouse. His eyes almost bugged out of his head. He couldn’t have called room service and ordered a pitch any better.

It was a pennant pitch. Tom Niedenfuer had just served up the 1985 National League pennant to Jack Clark and the St. Louis Cardinals.

He knew it as soon as he let go of it. He thought to himself, “Oh, oh. Where’s that going?” It flashed through his mind that he had just pitched the third ball ever to be hit out of Dodger Stadium.

Hitters don’t always hit home run pitches. They have been known to get overeager, lunge--and pop it up. Great hitters have foul-tipped even batting-practice pitches.

Niedenfuer was not so lucky. Jack Clark got all of it. Clark sent his home run so high in the left-field seats that the left fielder, Pedro Guerrero, slammed his glove into the ground in disgust without ever even giving chase.

It was not your basic cheap home run. It was your 14-karat, all-purpose seat-breaker, game-breaker, season-breaker. What The Sporting News used to call your circuit clout, or Ruthian wallop. A tape-measure job.

This ball was on its way to Cooperstown. This was no handle hit that just cleared the foul pole. Clark had won the National League pennant in style.

He couldn’t have done it by himself. Thomas Edward Niedenfuer got the assist. The Dodger brain trust in the dugout had some input.

There are only a few individual pitches that make the Hall of Fame on their own. The one Bobby Thomson hit off Ralph Branca to give the Giants the 1951 pennant. The one where Babe Ruth called his shot in 1932.

They were all fastballs. No one ever hit a breaking ball into the Hall of Fame.

It’s known as challenging the hitter. Strength against strength. A form of chicken. A pitch to be thrown with a curl of the lip and a sneer, “Here, hit this, busher!” Casey at the bat should have got this pitch.

Jack Clark did. Tom Niedenfuer knew what he had done as soon as he let go of it.

Many years ago, the then-Cincinnati manager, Fred Hutchinson, was standing with his back to the batting cage in spring training. Behind him there was a crack! as wood met ball. Hutch cringed. His back arched and he covered his eyes.

“Where’d that go?” he asked me when he brought his hands down.

“The center-field seats,” he was told. “How’d you know? It was behind your back.”

Hutch looked up scornfully. “No pitcher ever mistakes that sound,” he said. “No pitcher mistakes the sound of a home run.”

Niedenfuer didn’t either. He didn’t even bother to turn around at the crack of the bat. He knew he had just served up a major league gopher ball, the gopher of the decade. He quickly retired the last batter, a lefty named Andy Van Slyke, shoved his glove in his pocket and got ready to face a winter of “Why’d ya pitch to Clark? Whyn’t ya walk ‘im?!”

You might expect to find pitcher Tom Niedenfuer cowering--or glowering--around his locker down here at the Dodgers’ spring training facility, snarling at journalists and autograph seekers alike as they approached him with the obligatory what-kind-of-a-pitch-did-he-hit? inquiries.

Another man might have growled: “Get away from me, you vultures!” or “How many times you think I been asked that question, dummy?”

It’s not Niedenfuer’s style. He patiently relives the nightmare over and over. On radio, TV, in print. He can hear the bleacher wolves, “Hey, Niedenfuer, throw ‘im the gopher!”

But, he has patiently accepted the pitch and all it implies. He knows it has gone into the lore of baseball and cannot be recalled and might as well be faced.

He knows what Charley Root must have felt like, spending his life explaining the pitch Ruth called his shot on. Or Ralph Branca describing the pitch that brought off the little miracle of Coogan’s Bluff for Bobby Thomson. Like them, Niedenfuer must wear that fastball like a hair shirt.

“It was a good pitch,” says the man the Dodgers call Buff, in honor of his size and strength. “It was a 94-mile-an-hour fastball. It was the location that wasn’t so hot. I wanted to get it up and in.”

Instead, he got it up and in the left-field seats. Only two pitches before, Niedenfuer had served up the apparently game-ending pitch to Cardinal Tommy Herr who, with one out and men on first and second, hit a ground ball to third that Dave Anderson turned into a seeming double play. The ball was foul by inches. Niedenfuer still had his date with destiny.

“The good news is, every story pointed out I had had a good season,” Niedenfuer remembers.

The bad news is, first base was open when cleanup hitter Clark came to bat that fateful ninth inning last October. “We looked to the bench and there was no sign to walk him,” Niedenfuer recalls. “Mike (Scioscia) came out, but there was no indication to put him on. So, we went after him.”

It’s a hard way to get into a Hall of Fame. But it’s a way. Few people would remember Tom Niedenfuer if he had gotten Clark out. No one knows the name of the pitcher who struck out mighty Casey. Charley Root would be long forgotten if Babe Ruth had popped up. Where would the lore of baseball be if Branca had walked Bobby Thomson?

Even Dodger fans forget the relief pitcher--Stan Williams--who walked in the 1962 pennant in the playoff against the Giants.

So, Niedenfuer has, not a monkey on his back, but a life-sized gorilla. He could get cards printed, saying: “It was a fastball out over the plate” and “No! I didn’t mean to get it there! If I had it to do over, it would be a curve in the dirt.”

On the other hand, maybe it’s better to have pitched and lost and some day have someone in a bar say, “Niedenfuer? Oh, yeah! Aren’t you the guy who threw that pitch to Jack Clark?” rather than, “You say your name is Niedenfuer? And you pitched for the Dodgers? Uh, what year would that have been? Er, was it the Brooklyn or the L.A. Dodgers?”

Or have someone say, “Did you ever know a Jack Clark?” And then have to say, “Yeah. I struck him out once with the pennant on the line.” And have nobody remember.