Lou Marson & Jason Donald Olympic bronze medalists
double bobble head.
Schmidt is at peace with life
Tony Zonca
By Tony Zonca
The poet Yeats once famously said, “I have an abiding sense of tragedy that sustains me through temporary periods of joy.”
That could have been Michael Jack Schmidt talking about any of his 18 seasons in a Philadelphia Phillies uniform.
Schmidt was at FirstEnergy Stadium last week as part of a tour of minor league ballparks to
raise awareness of
BPH, commonly known as an enlarged prostate.
Of course, the majority of his 25-minute press conference was consumed by baseball, what else? He answered questions about the 2008 Phillies’ slump, Ryan Howard’s burgeoning strikeout total, hitting in Citizen’s Bank Park – he estimated he conservatively would have hit seven to 10 more home runs a season playing there – and the deep and abiding respect the players have for Charlie Manuel, especially after the manager benched Jimmy Rollins for failing to run out a pop-up.
Good stuff, all of it, but as the only guy in the room who covered just about all of those 18 years as a baseball beat writer, I gazed at Schmidt – handsome and trim, articulate and charming – and my mind returned to yesteryear – before $4-a-gallon gas, $3.50-a-loaf bread and stock-market numbers that are tumbling faster than the Phillies’ team batting average.
Some 25 years ago I wrote: “The affair between Philadelphia and Mike Schmidt has been a stormy one. No mere summer romance, it has been a marriage composed of spats and mutual disappointments. There are people, one suspects, who pay their way into Veterans Stadium primarily for the purpose of heaping abuse on Schmidt. And seeking a perfectionist’s vacuum, Schmidt, ever sensitive to the abuse, goes off alone.
“The problem for Schmidt seems to be the fans’ notion of the necessity of triumph. We have conferred on sports our worst anxieties. We demand deeds of our heroes they are often incapable of achieving. We fail to realize that defeat and victory, success and failure, are inseparable brothers. And today’s fans seem to possess a monstrous potential for antipathy.
“And in the eyes of the storm sits Michael jack – a solitary, regal, gifted, oddly troubled and introspective millionaire.”
Now, 58 and obviously at peace with himself, Schmidt allows us finally to penetrate the veneer of his character.
“My personality on the field was somewhat the opposite of a Rose or a Dykstra,” he began. “Back in the day I kind of wanted to emulate an Aaron, a DiMaggio or a Gehrig, guys who played the game with a kind of dignity. To me that was easy, because it seemed like that was the way I went about things without trying – don’t show a lot of emotion.
“The game surely didn’t come easy to me, but the projection I might have given to fans and other people around me was that it did, and that I didn’t have to work as hard to be successful. I was kind of the opposite of the on-field personality that matched up with Philly sports fans.
“I was a white-collar player in a blue-collar town. I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to be me. It was a lot of work to be me. There were big expectations for me – the highest paid, the cleanup hitter, and in many cases the spokesman for the team.
“I’ll probably be like that till the end of time. Why can’t I have more fun?”
Why, indeed. After all, he was on a journey to the Hall of Fame. He was crafting a career that would establish him as the absolute preeminent third baseman in the history of the game. He would walk away with 548 home runs, three MVP awards, 10 Gold Glove awards and 11 appearances in the All-Star Game.
And that was only a small portion of his imprint on his team, his city, his sport . . . his legend.
Yet, for all his accomplishments . . . and with Michael Jack there always seemed to be a “yet” . . . there always existed the feeling that he could have done more, if only. . . .
He had a growing army of critics – he was the whipping boy for the team’s many failures – but none more so than himself. He was hard on himself. He seemed never satisfied, never at ease. He constantly tinkered with his batting stroke, and he was a notorious hitter in the cage, often departing with bloody palms and furrowed brow.
He could be churlish and variegated in character, and he owned a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude.
“I felt a lot of pressure to play at a certain level,” he said. “It was hard work to do that. It was a challenge for me. That’s the way I looked at it. It would’ve been more fun to enjoy that challenge more than I did.”
He was asked about the perception that he was an elitist on the field, that he never got dirty. Twenty-five years ago he would have melted the reporter with the famous Mike Schmidt stare and sneer; now he waved the idea off with a chuckle, but not without his usual dialectic approach to such subjects.
“I dove for plenty of balls,” he said easily. “I dove into bases, maybe slid harder on double plays than anybody in the league. I just didn’t find a wall to run into like Aaron Rowand early in my career.”
Still, Schmidt was a walking, talking dichotomy, capable of Ruthian heroics and Mendozian misadventures.
He would slug four successive home runs at Wrigley Field, then slump to a 1-for-16 effort that same year in the postseason; he would bat .467 in the LCS against the Dodgers, then get one lousy hit in 20 at-bats against the Orioles in the 1983 World Series.
He would suffer the ignominy of striking out four times on 12 pitches in one game, then turn around and stroke a game-winning home run on the 13th pitch he saw.
He would bat .274 with 38 home runs, 114 runs and 101 RBIs along with a career-best 11 triples and 104 walks one year, then slump to .251 with 21 homers and 78 RBIs in an injury-riddled season the next. That was 1978 and the fans booed him unmercifully all year.
That was Michael Jack Schmidt. He was human, after all.
Finally, 1980 rolled around – time did not allow us to reflect on that glorious season, when Schmidt was at his best in all capacities. Soon after, the fans began to recognize him for what he was – kind of a Manny being Manny mantra in Boston, though with positive overtones – and largely embraced him through the end of his career on May 30, 1989.
We couldn’t finish this piece without mentioning Reading’s role in Schmidt’s splendid career.
Let him tell it: “I signed in June 1971 and part of the bait was to play in the exhibition game in Reading. It was at the Vet and they sent me off to shortstop with Larry Bowa, who was a little standoffish, a little bit jealous at the time. I was the shortstop, I was the college phenom that was projected someday to be the Phillies shortstop, I guess. That’s what he thought, anyway.
“He got sick and couldn’t come up to the exhibition game that Monday, and they asked me if I wanted to play shortstop for the major league club. Why not? One minute you’re in an Ohio University uniform, the next you’re in a major league uniform.
“I hit a home run to win that game, and they told me to stay here, leave your stuff here and start playing for the Reading Phillies. It worked out in the long run for me, but at the time I probably needed a little more seasoning at the lower levels to compete here in the Eastern League.
“I cherish my days here in Reading. I stayed at the Reading Motor Inn. I remember a lot about the area. It’s (the ballpark) a lot different. I had not been to Reading since the stadium’s been remodeled. When I go out there I’m going to see a lot of things I’ve never seen before.”
For the record, Schmidt batted .211 for the R-Phils. Two years later he would make his debut in Philadelphia – following a 1972 late call-up – and hit just .196. He would strike out an alarming 136 times in 367 at-bats, but you couldn’t ignore those 18 home runs and that singular presence and athleticism he possessed in abundance.
Schmidt did reveal something about himself during his brief chat that I had never heard him say before.
“It’s a life that I never thought I’d ever achieve,” he said. “I never thought what ended up happening to me would ever happen to me at any point in my career until 1983, ’84, ’85, once you get close to that third MVP.
“When I came to Reading I couldn’t hit a slider with a boat oar. I didn’t even know what a slider was. I never did learn to hit it here, and I never did learn to hit it till my fourth year in the big leagues. I was never a phenom in college. I was always susceptible to being sent down (to the minor leagues), if you want to know the truth. Physically and mentally I was never strong enough mentally (early on).
“I don’t know. It’s just life. I don’t have any answers for why it turned out like it did except it’s God’s plan for Mike Schmidt.”
Michael Jack, only a poet could have said it better.
