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Saturday, January 28, 2006
Prankster takes over Camp Leo
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
An obvious question to Roger McDowell: Do you rock?
“If I do, I’m not aware of it,” he says. “But where I’ve been, there’s not a lot of TV coverage. So I don’t know if I do or not.”
Roger McDowell is the Braves’ new pitching coach, succeeding the famous dugout rocker Leo Mazzone. Gone now to Baltimore, Mazzone isn’t without his eccentricities, but anyone who remembers Roger McDowell from his pitching days knows he held the reputation as the flake’s flake. As a player, McDowell definitely rocked.
He used to give teammates the ol’ hot foot. He performed with a mariachi band at Dodger Stadium. Playing himself, he appeared on an episode of “Seinfeld” as the notorious “second spitter.” According to Wikipedia, “McDowell was known to wear kilts off the field.” He was known even more for wearing his uniform upside down — pants over his head, shoes on his hands — during a game.
Another obvious question: Isn’t donning a uniform upside down rather hard? “There was a little difficulty there — up around a ‘10’ in difficulty,” McDowell says. “But I stuck the landing.”
The most obvious question: Is Roger McDowell, pitching coach, as unfettered as Roger McDowell, pitcher?
“No,” he says. “I guess you can say I’ve kind of grown up. I enjoy what I do in different ways. I still have the same desires and the same passions — they’re just expressed differently.”
Besides, a manager might get cranky if his pitching coach sat alongside with his pants on his head. Says McDowell: “They kind of frown on that kind of stuff.”
Speaking from his home in Palm Springs, Calif., McDowell was packing for the trip to Atlanta and his first real week on the job. Camp Roger — he won’t call it that, referring to it as “an early throwing program” — will commence Wednesday at Turner Field. The new guy knows he’s following the gold standard of pitching coaches. Of Mazzone, he says, “His success is pretty much second to none.” But McDowell, who’s 45 and who has worked just 41/2 seasons as a coach, has stamped himself as a rising star.
McDowell spent 12 years as a big-league reliever, throwing a wicked sinker and being credited with the win in Game 7 of the 1986 World Series. His best years were with the Mets, where he and Jesse Orosco were a tag team, but by 1998 McDowell had had three shoulder operations in 14 months and simply couldn’t throw anymore.
He’d gone to camp with the White Sox that spring. After McDowell retired as a player, Sox GM Ron Schueler asked him to hang around as a pitching coach for the minor leaguers’ extended spring training. In midseason McDowell became the pitching coach of the Class AA Birmingham Barons and didn’t much like it.
He retreated to California with an eye toward playing golf on the celebrity circuit. One problem, though: “My golf game stunk.” He did community relations work for the Dodgers, one of his former teams, and by 2001 was ready to return to the game full-time. “The ballpark,” he says, “is the greatest office in the world.”
McDowell spent two seasons as the pitching coach of the South Georgia Waves, the Dodgers’ Class A affiliate, and the past two with the Class AAA Las Vegas 51s. Last October, he was in Florida working in the instructional league when the Braves called and asked him to come interview. Within a week, they’d offered their prized job to a guy without any big-league coaching experience. Says McDowell: “It’s kind of like an intern getting the job as vice president of U.S. Steel.”
Coach-talk: McDowell wants his men to throw strikes, duh, “but not just a strike — a quality strike. A pitcher who’s behind in the count can’t be as aggressive. You want guys to get ahead in the count, challenge with the fastball, get beat with your best pitch.”
Mazzone was noted for having pitchers throw twice between starts. What’s the McDowell regimen? “It depends on the individual. In different parts of the season, a guy might throw more than twice if he’s struggling. It’s based on a pitcher’s need. It’s not set in stone.”
It would be virtually impossible to improve on what Mazzone has done, but the Braves will settle for a simple continuation. Befitting his background, McDowell was the sort of outside-the-box hire that might just work. Don’t be shocked if Rockin’ Roger sticks another landing.
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Early Bird Humphrey got all the sacks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Claude Humphrey is a candidate for sports immortalization again this year, his second time and the first long-term, authentic Falcons player to reach such heights. That means he is among the final 14 players to be considered for the Pro Football Hall of Fame when the austere body of selectors gets together in Detroit on Super Bowl weekend. One coach is on the list as well, but I trust that John Madden is mainly for window dressing, or maybe honorary chef, or the only nominee who spends half his life on a bus.
Humphrey was drafted by the Falcons out of Tennessee State in 1968, when they were bottom-feeding. His specialty was devouring quarterbacks, and after all these seasons and all the avaricious defensive linemen who have passed this way, he still is the team’s all-time leader in sacks, by a mile. (Sacks did not become an official NFL stat until after he retired.) He couldn’t have arrived in Atlanta at a more tumultuous time, playing for a string of coaches marching to their doom.
Norb Hecker was about to be fired, to be succeeded by Norm Van Brocklin, then Marion Campbell, then Pat Peppler, then Leeman Bennett. Humphrey was at least able to play on the Falcons’ first two winning teams under Van Brocklin before Rankin Smith fired the Dutchman and ducked. After the switch, the Falcons won only 11 games over the following three seasons before Bennett was brought in and righted the ship.
There were complications, though. Under the coaches prior to Bennett, Humphrey had the green light to dismember opposing quarterbacks. Bennett installed a more regimented defense, moving the ends out and opening lanes for blitzing, which led to the glorified “Gritz Blitz,” allowing opponents only 129 points, still a team record. That restricted Humphrey’s access to quarterbacks, and though he still managed 10 sacks, after four games the following season he walked into Bennett’s office and said, “I’m going home.” In his Hall of Fame bio, it is referred to as “temporary retirement,” but in truth, he just plain quit.
He explained his discomfort this way: “For years we were mostly concerned with rushing the passer, leaving the run to tackles and linebackers. Now I’m staying at home, taking care of a particular responsibility. It was a complete unlearning process, forgetting everything I’d done over the past nine years.”
Campbell, meanwhile, had landed in Philadelphia, coaching the Eagles’ defense. Humphrey knew where he wanted to be, the Eagles traded two fourth-round draft choices to get him and there he resumed his assault on quarterbacks. In 1980, Humphrey sacked 15 and he and the Eagles were on their way to the Super Bowl, which they lost to Oakland. So, in the end, the Falcons share Humphrey with the Eagles in his quest for a place in Canton.
There are two in the Hall of Fame who did time with the Falcons, but in the mop-up stage of their careers. Tommy McDonald led Falcons receivers in 1967, his final season, with 33 catches, and Eric Dickerson gained 91 yards in 1993 on his way to sunset. But after all these seasons, the Falcons have only one they can claim as their own to reach this stage, and this is Humphrey’s last time around before he passes on to the Veterans Committee. There have been preliminary nominees before, Tommy Nobis, Mike Kenn and Jeff Van Note, and Dan Reeves as coach, but neither survived beyond that stage.
It’s an illustrious cast of linemen that Humphrey faces in the Detroit election, L.C. Greenwood, Russ Grimm, Bob Kuchenberg and Gary Zimmerman, all who have been there a number of times before; the late Reggie White, making his first appearance, and Rayfield Wright, the veteran Dallas Cowboy from Griffin, making his last as the choice of the Veterans Committee. Offhand, White, Greenwood and Wright would appear to be at the head of the class with impressive postseason credentials.
It might not be considered easy for a coach to speak favorably of a player who walked out on him, but Leeman Bennett still regards Humphrey as “as good a defensive end as I ever saw.” That puts the final verdict in the hands of the 36 delegates who go to the polls on Super Bowl eve.
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