Editor's note: ESPN.com is publishing two excerpts from Roger Angell's new book: A Pitcher's Story: Innings with David Cone." This is the second part of the excerpt.
Just the other day, I told Cone that I'd been thinking back to 1995, too, and that ball four to Doug Strange. Murray Chass, the Times baseball pundit, had said to me recently that he'd run into David at a Players Association executive-board meeting in Florida, nearly two months after the game, and found that David was still brooding about the pitch.
"It took me forever to get over that," David said. "I couldn't sleep. I almost didn't go out of my house for a couple of weeks after. I'd thrown a hundred and forty-six pitches in the game up to that point, and I had nothing left, but I was still sure that was the right call. I just didn't execute. Maybe I'm stubborn, but I have this conviction that I should be able to deliver any pitch in any situation."
He looked stricken, even now. "I'll never forget that flight home," he said. "My catcher, Mike Stanley, kept telling me it was his fault for calling the pitch, but I wouldn't let him get away with it. Buck Showalter, the manager, must have known that he was finished with the Yankees after the loss, and Donnie Mattingly is somewhere else in the plane, going home for good and knowing that he's never going to play in a World Series. I'd let them all down."
There's always a game or a series that needs to be pitched over again, I remind myself now. Look at 1999. Cone, seemingly at the pinnacle of his career after the perfect game, runs into unexpected setbacks for the remainder of the year: he gives up six runs in four innings to the Indians, including a grand slam, in his next start, and is later driven to cover in a game against the Rangers, coughing up six runs in an inning and two-thirds. He goes without a win for more than three weeks, and picks up only two over the remainder of the season. Suspecting that Cone's age has begun to show in his work-he is thirty-six, and has thrown close to twenty-six hundred innings at this point, and, counting warmups and side sessions, more than a hundred thousand major-league pitches-Yankee manager Joe Torre and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre reluctantly begin to space him out a bit, adding a fifth day between his starts, when possible. Cone resents the move and its implication, but says little. Starting the second game of the American League Championship Series (he didn't get a call in the Bombers' three-game sweep of the Rangers in the divisional series), he spins a devastating win against the ambitious Red Sox, surrendering two runs over seven innings and fanning nine. In the World Series, he shuts out the Atlanta Braves in another seven-inning stint, giving up a lone hit, and the Yankees cruise to their third World Championship in the five years he has been with the club. Which is the real Cone?
Cone's Porsche is flashing a right turn, and I slide over a lane. There's the Havana Sandwich Shop up ahead, just this side of Kennedy Boulevard.
So where does Cone fit in, I'm asking myself. Pedro Martinez, who's gone 42-1l with 564 strikeouts in his first two seasons with the Red Sox, is the best pitcher in baseball right now, no two ways. His preternaturally long fingers and absolute dominance over the hitters with that darting, down-moving stuff bring Sandy Koufax to mind. Pedro will breeze into the Hall of Fame at this rate, and so will the Big Unit, Randy Johnson, whose hair and height-he's six-ten, and flying-and ground-devouring stride down the mound make you laugh nervously with every pitch, so happy you are that you're not the batter. Greg Maddux, the whey-faced Atlanta grandmaster, won four consecutive Cy Young Awards in the mid-nineties, and on a good day his pitches still gnaw relentlessly around and under the edges of the strike zone, silently eating up outs. The three stand apart, but Cone holds the warmer place in my regard.
Never mind his pitching style-we'll get to that-it's the man's contradictions that grab me. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, when he was a baby-faced starter with the brilliant and notorious Mets, he quickly became known as another hard-party nighthawk, with a penchant for sexual misadventures that repeatedly made the tabloids ("...despite the choirboy looks" became a favorite tag). Champions in 1986, before Cone's arrival, those Lenny Dykstra, Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, Doc, and Straw Mets were a celebrity force majeure in the big city, but high salaries and a penchant for second place began to wear out their welcome over the next few seasons. Dykstra was traded off to the Phillies, and others followed him out the door, as the team was dismantled, star by star, with manager Davey Johnson joining the exiles in 1990. Cone's best friends on the club, Bobby Ojeda and Ron Darling, went next, but when he himself was shuffled off to Toronto, in 1992, the move came as a shock. "We underachieved," Cone once said of his old club, "but that team was broken up too soon. New York belonged to the Mets then, and we were all proud of that. Part of me will always be a Met."
Cone performed strongly for the Blue Jays that year, helping them to a World Championship in October, but over the winter he moved along as a free agent to the Kansas City Royals, the club that had first drafted him, years before. A Cy Young Award rewarded Cone's 16-5 record with the Royals in 1994, but the players' strike that August amputated the season, costing his Royals a shot at a championship. When peace was restored and play resumed the next spring, he was summarily dealt back to the Blue Jays, then soon sent along to the Yankees. All these teams and all that money-by now, he was a $6-million-a-year pitcher-subjected Cone to the "hired gun" obloquy that disgruntled fans (and some sports columnists as well) were aiming at the players in the wake of the unpopular strike, but again he defied categorizing. One day back then when I asked him about the high pay and low public regard that the players seemed to have won for themselves, he said, "We'd be more popular if we'd won a lottery, instead of being someone who's tried to perfect his craft and tried to put himself in a position to earn an exorbitant amount of money."
This new David Cone, poised and articulate, and a distance removed from the party boy of a half decade before, had been chosen by his peers in the Players Association to represent the American League at the bargaining table during the hardest weeks of the strike, and he turned up again and again in front-page photographs and on the late news during the protracted negotiations. His presence at labor councils in Florida and New York and Washington, and with the group of owners and players that met with the President at the White House, and his suave summaries before the cameras of the latest issues and talking points were surmised, by Cone and everyone else, to be the probable cause of his swift dismissal by the Royals, once the strike was over.
After his first year with the Yankees-by 1996, that is-Cone had assumed a unique and self-invented role with the dynastic and once disputatious old champions as a team spokesman: an anchorman explainer of controversial plays, dugout gossip and player psyches, and the daily run of rumors, anxieties, injuries, and front-office maneuverings that afflict every clubhouse over the long season, never more than in New York. Beat writers and columnists and TV people began to gather in front of his Stadium locker even on days when he hadn't pitched or wasn't about to, and in taking them on he appeared to sense, almost uncannily, how his words and ideas would work for the team and for the avid needs of the media at the same time. Instead of conflicting with Torre's pre-game and post-game press conferences, he became a resource for the manager, and an extra, more nuanced source of news about the players. When pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre was diagnosed with multiple myeloma just after the beginning of the 2000 season, Cone said, "Every American family has to deal with cancer in one way or another. We're no different"-a line that flew into every reporter's notebook.
Other teams have produced these media captains-Keith Hernandez, a genius at game analysis, did it for the hardline championship Mets-but none have understood the needs of his listeners better than Cone. "David is the best since Stengel," Jack O'Connell, the national baseball writer for the Hartford Courant, told me one day. "He understands the whole thing- who you are, who you're with, and what you've written. He knows your deadline and he's always there. He'll wait until the last guy has all he wants. He never looks tired or bored. He's smart and generous."
We're here-I pull into the dusty little parking row next to the diner, where Cone is waiting for me, smiling behind his shades. Off the field, he is non-combative, with a Milquetoast hand-shake-it's a protective mannerism for his pitching hand-and an almost indolent backward tilt to his head. He is six-one but non-hulking, and when we get inside he draws only a scattering of stares. After we've ordered I ask him if he's talked to the Boss, George Steinbrenner. We're still ten days away from the official pitchers-and-catchers opening of spring training.
"No, but he's here," he says. "George takes spring training seriously. A couple of years ago, I gave up a grand slam to Andr?s Galarraga, and he didn't talk to me for three weeks. In a spring game? George wants to win. Before the infamous Game Five in Seattle, in '95, he'd given us one of his traditional pep talks in the clubhouse, and then he comes over to where I'm sitting with Jack McDowell. He looks Jack up and down and says, 'And you, you little Stanford fuck, are you going to be ready?'"
Our laughter makes us sound like kids snickering about their dad.
"Sometimes this stuff works," David says. "But George...
Before the playoffs in '96, we're all in the players' lounge, where there's a spread of food. George goes over and picks out a strawberry and comes over to Kenny Rogers, who was going to pitch that day. He stands over Kenny and says, 'Do you know what this is? It's a strawberry-and that's where you're going to be, back on your daddy's strawberry farm if you don't do it today.'"
Doing it for Cone nowadays may require some way of saving his middle-aged arm. My recollections of him in a game always involve a heavy accumulation of high counts, fouls, strikeouts, and bases on balls, with a hit batsman or two thrown in as well. Why so many pitches? I ask.
"I'm working on that this year," he says. "It's time for a little conservation." But in the next moment he has brought up a Mets game in 1992, right after the All-Star break, when he beat the Giants at Shea, 1-0, with an insane admixture of prodigality and thrift.
"A hundred and sixty-six pitches and a 1-0 shutout-I don't know if that's been done before," he says. "That was just before I got traded to the Blue Jays. I was averaging about a hundred and forty pitches a game. Maybe they'd thought my arm was going to wear out, but I was pitching great then. When I got traded, there was a Mike Lupica column in the News which agreed with the decision to let me go. Standard Lupica-he decides what people are thinking and then goes the other way. I still have it put away somewhere, because it's been a motivation for me. Anything to get that edge out there. The piece asked how many innings I could have left in my arm, after throwing a couple of zillion. That was about fifteen hundred innings ago."
But all the same, I say-a one-hundred-and-sixty-six-pitch shutout?
"It's one of the three or four favorite games of mine, ever," he says defiantly. "John Franco was down with an injury, so they couldn't call on him. We had no pen, and we're trying to stay alive in a pennant race. That game made me so proud-maybe I thought it connected me with the ghosts of the past and the days when pitchers stayed in forever. Guys I tried to model myself after like Luis Tiant and Juan Marichal and Satchel Paige."
There's a pause while I try to get all this into my notebook. The table is littered with crumbs from our Cuban sandwiches. The restaurant is just about empty.
"I wouldn't try it now," David says, more quietly. "I still hate to come out of games, but I'm trying to get better habits. The Yankees are like a second marriage for me-they've gotten the benefit of all the mistakes I made with the Mets. I've become a good second husband."
Roger Angell's celebrated baseball books include The Summer Game, Five Seasons, Late Innings, Season Ticket, and Once More Around the Park. He is an editor and writer with The New Yorker.
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