Leary Willing to Go to the Wall to Stay in Shape

Circumstances permitting, Tim Leary is eager to go to work for the Yankees, proving there is no accounting for taste.

Leary has no case against the Yankees, any more than he had against the Mets, Brewers, Dodgers and Reds, all offering him employment since his exit from UCLA, where, an Academic All-American, he studied economics.

You remind Tim he went 8-14 as a pitcher last year and he shrugs. With his background, he could have gone into savings and loan.

Traded to the Yankees by Cincinnati, he has been training diligently all winter, throwing a baseball against a wall. This not only can provide good conditioning, but, if needed, good therapy.

A psychiatrist we interviewed one time, in connection with guys who get mad in golf, opens his heart. He hates his clinic director with such passion, he reveals dolefully, that he stops at the driving range on the way to work and hits a bucket of balls.

Picturing, with each ball he strikes, the skull of the clinic director, he gets relief enabling him to endure the day.

Throw a baseball against the wall, envisioning George Steinbrenner, and you get the same gratification.

Leary is not duly alarmed that the short-circuiting of spring training this year spells disaster for the pitchers, as many observers warn.

“If we get to work by March 15,” Leary says, “I think most pitchers can be ready for the season opener. Minor league camps often don’t begin until March 10. And those pitchers are ready for the opener. Major or minor, it’s a human arm.”

Over the years, fastidious conditioning hasn’t impressed every pitcher. An outspoken opponent of exercise, which he claimed caused orthopedic and emotional damage, Satchel Paige avoided it all his pitching life. And, of course, he paid the price.

By 58, he was out of baseball.

Fond of Don Newcombe, Satch convinced Newk that the baths at Hot Springs, Ark., were more important to the body than spring training.

Newk got Roy Campanella to join him.

“We went partly to take the baths and partly to shoot craps,” Campy once confided. “It was easier to shoot craps. The hotel allowed us in the casino, but wouldn’t let us take the baths.”

The two had to search for an equal-opportunity spa.

A wide disparity of thought exists on what it takes a pitcher to (a) get ready for a season, and (b) sustain his condition during it.

Warren Spahn, who won 20 games or more 13 times, always has insisted that the preventive mentality rampant among pitchers today restricts performance.

By preventive mentality, Spahn means excessive worry over injury and wear, leading the principals to aerobic programs, running, stretching, lifting and exotic dieting.

And then there are those seeking chiropractors, acupressure artists, hypnotists, even practitioners of Eastern meditation.

“The trouble with pitchers in this enlightened age,” Spahn contends, “is that they learn too much about injuries. They know about elbows and rotator cuffs and hamstrings. They know so much that they worry about a lot of things that don’t happen.”

The consequence of the worry is that pitchers today start every fifth day--and the 300-game winner is on his way to extinction.

It is hard to understand how worrisome pitchers who embrace unconventional, if not bizarre, training habits succeed.

Who, in his preparation, could have been more unorthodox than Steve Carlton? We’re talking “behavior modification centers” he set up in the locker room. We’re talking kung fu, not to mention the rice pit he requested at Veterans Stadium for strengthening his pitching arm and his legs.

The rice offered the simplest form of positive resistance, Carlton tracing the concept to the Sixth Century at a temple in China where monks exercised. The club kept filling the pit because Carlton kept winning 20 games.

“From what I’ve seen of pitchers,” says Leary, a bright observer, “most of them don’t get neurotic until they get hurt. After that, they tend to get more sensitive.”

Does the prospect of working in the South Bronx trouble Leary?

“On the contrary,” he says. “The pressure on hitters in Yankee Stadium is greater than on pitchers. Fans at Yankee Stadium have been raised on offense. When they think baseball, they think Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, not pitchers. If a pitcher there goes six innings and turns in an ERA of 3, they’re happy.”

So, in good spirits during the lockout, Tim goes over to the schoolyard near his home in Santa Monica and throws the ball against the wall.

Pitching in this fashion, one is relaxed. A manager has yet to call time and come for a guy throwing a ball against a wall.