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| ALONE ON THE MOUND | |
 October 8 ,1999 
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ROGER ROSENBLATT: Around the eighth inning of Kevin Costner's "perfect game," in the new, terrible-but-I-cried-like-a-baby-anyway movie "For Love of the Game," his catcher tells him that their lowly Detroit Tigers are the best team in baseball today because of you. COSTNER: I'm going home. ACTOR: You and me, one more time? COSTNER: Why not? ROGER ROSENBLATT: That kind of compliment can only be paid a pitcher because a pitcher can, on occasion, constitute the whole game. Yet he is alone in the game, elevated above the others on a mound in the center of the field, distant and on his own. In the Major League play-offs, the pitcher becomes centrally important, especially in the heady home run era of the likes of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. His job is to frustrate such people by misinterpretation, to fool, anger and disappoint them; he gives and takes away. But the essential nature of his position is that he is alone in the game. And so he may have a special appeal these days as a cultural figure. These are times when more and more people are seeking the solitary adventure to remind themselves of basic human qualities. Usually they seek adventure vicariously by reading stories about "The Perfect Storm," "Into Thin Air" and "The Endurance." They seem to long for a moment of naked solo risk, but the soft and comfortable modern world doesn't give them that. If people wish to succeed alone they must be alone with others, alone in the game, their place of business, their social life, their Internet. They must be just like a pitcher, like the Red Sox Pedro Martinez, the best pitcher in the game. He wins for his teammates, yet lives in his own atmosphere, as they say, "his zone." Once in a rare while a pitcher will pitch a perfect game: 27 up, 27 down. Yankee fans have pleasurably seen two such miracles in the past two seasons: Last year by David Wells, this year by David Cone. SPORTSCASTER: Pops up unplayable. A perfect game by David Cone. ROGER ROSENBLATT: "For Love of the Game" gives us yet another against the Yankees, which proves the movie fiction. But perfection in baseball, as in other things, is the exception that proves the rule. And the rule for the pitcher is individual struggle in the midst of others. You can lose a game because of someone else's error, someone's laziness or incompetence or your own. You're alone in the game but you're also part of the team and the game is not yours, which may be why so many pitchers look and seem like nut cases on the mound. They grow vast mustaches like Oakland's Rollie Fingers. They stomp around like Al Hrabowsky, the "Mad Hungarian." Or they have conversations with the baseball like the Tigers' Mark "The Bird" Fidrych.@ Even with the apparently normal ones, like Atlanta's Greg Maddux, or L.A.'s Kevin Brown, one suspects that there's some wonderful screw loose somewhere. How could it be otherwise? When he's got his stuff, he's all alone; when he's off his game, he walks away alone. The greatest pitchers I ever saw beside Martinez were Whitey Ford, Early Wynn, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, Don Newcomb, and the Dodgers' Sandy Koufax, Koufax being the best. He, too, pitched a perfect game, against the cubs in 1965. In a perfect game a pitcher is more alone than ever. People don't want to talk to him, to jinx him. He sits apart from his teammates on the bench. This they show in "For Love of the Game." The farther the game goes, the more distant he becomes, until the end, when his teammates all pile on him and cheer like crazy, as they did for David Cone, but they pile off, too. And in his next outing, there is the pitcher again, like the rest of us, starting over, trying to prove himself, by himself, in the crowded world. I'm Roger Rosenblatt.
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