In Baseball, Last Year’s Champions Are Playing Like Chumps

One of our new rituals of Memorial Day is to memorialize the passing of the previous season’s baseball champions. It doesn’t take long anymore. By the end of May, the guys with the rings are usually in the wringer.

Although this trend has been with us for a decade, it never has been more clearly manifested than this spring. The New York Mets and Boston Red Sox, two clubs that definitely don’t seem headed for an October rematch, have managed to demonstrate every key reason why modern baseball hates a repeater.

For a century, the root cause of instability usually has been found on the mound. Pitchers always have been erratic from one year to the next. Arm woes are inherent to the most unnatural motion in sports--throwing overhanded. However, that old problem has been exacerbated by the sport’s current love affair with sliders, screwballs, forkballs, sinkers and every sort of elbow and shoulder-torquing junk pitch.

The fastball--the easiest and safest pitch to throw--is dying out. “Nobody throws hard anymore,� said Roy White, a coach with the New York Yankees. “One reason Roger Clemens dominated the league last year is that a fastball in the mid-90s (m.p.h.) seems unhittable when so few guys even throw in the low-90s.

“When I came up (in the late 1960s), Detroit had McLain, Lolich and Earl Wilson. Cleveland came at you with Sam McDowell, Sonny Siebert, Stan Williams and Luis Tiant. Every series it was Dean Chance, Jim Lonborg, Jim Palmer, Andy Messersmith, Vida Blue. Everybody blew smoke. You didn’t even mention a guy like Siebert. Now, he’d be a monster.�

Youth league baseball, with 12-year-olds throwing curves, and the booming college game, where the aluminum bat has almost made the fastball on the fists an extinct pitch, has changed all that. Even Clemens was told at Texas that he needed more types of trick pitches because even mediocre batters could chunk cheap hits over the infield off him with the new unbreakable bats.

The strike zone has migrated with the times, moving low and low and away. The fastball above the belt is now “ball one� and the heater in your kitchen is “ball two.� So, if you want to survive, babe, get a sinker and slider and some kind of diving change-up, preferably with a fadeaway action. Then pray your arm doesn’t fall off.

So far this spring, Bob Ojeda, the Mets’ leading winner, and Boston’s Oil Can Boyd, who lived by the scroogie, already have had arm miseries. Ojeda had ulnar nerve surgery that will end his season. Boyd still is sidelined and winless. Both starting staffs are in shock.

In California, where the Angels are struggling to repeat, Kirk McCaskill already has gone the sore-arm way of Ron Romanick. A whole generation of just such slider specialists, like Dave Stieb, Jack Morris and Dan Petry, are battling to have careers of normal length, while the Nolan Ryans and Don Suttons never seem to disappear.

Fame and a concomitant complacency always have been a problem for champions. These days, in a sport where 66 players make a million dollars a season, a third wild card enters the picture: Mega-money.

If a club won’t give it, that can sink a ship. Witness the cheap Red Sox, who wouldn’t give Clemens and catcher Rich Gedman the salaries they clearly merited. After missing spring training with a holdout, Clemens (4-4) already has lost as many games as he did all of last season. He’s still very good (ERA under3.00), but it only takes a tiny lost edge to start giving up game-losing home runs in the ninth inning, as he has.

Teams, like the Mets, who give big money across the board to keep the club intact can’t really win either. It’s human nature that, out of 24 players, a few will lose motivation. That’s all it takes in a game in which distinctions of physical talent are almost invisible. Anyone who appreciates the level of a pro athlete’s sacrifice--and the modern jock seems to be more of a weight room workaholic every year--can sympathize with how hard it is to do the last set of reps with millions in the bank.

Finally, the magnitude of our contemporary media spotlight has many damaging side effects. One play can alter a reputation for life. When we look at Calvin Schiraldi’s 6.28 ERA with the Red Sox or Bill Buckner’s struggle to keep his first base job, how can we help but assume that their World Series failures still haunt them and affect how others see them? Jim Rice couldn’t drive home the big runs in the Series.

Conversely, Ron Darling carried the Mets in the postseason and suddenly was anointed the team’s future stopper. With New York’s pitching in a shambles because of Roger McDowell’s hernia and Dwight Gooden’s drug rehabilitation, has Darling (2-3, 5.28 ERA) tried too hard?

An extroverted gang like the Mets is cut no slack nowadays. The world is full of rocky marriages, but it’s Darryl Strawberry’s domestic squabbles that make the back page. That barroom scrap last summer in Houston wouldn’t make much of a ripple if it involved four Padres. But four Mets hear about it for months.

When Manager Davey Johnson has a chew-out session with his team for losing three in a row to “a mediocre (Braves) ball club,� or fines Strawberry $1,500 for oversleeping, or grouses about his general manager going over his head on personnel decisions, he can sound like a panicky grouch even though he really believes his team will leave fifth place any day now and end up in first.

Momentum used to be a football buzzword. Now, it often seems more at home in the baseball world. Teams and talent are so well balanced that victory by chain reaction is now our most frequent common denominator of new champions.

The Cincinnati Reds hitch their star to Eric Davis or the Chicago Cubs suddenly think Andre Dawson is the missing puzzle part they needed. Gary Ward--beaned, traded and barely pursued as a free agent--suddenly acts like a cleanup hitter once he’s in Yankee pin stripes. Or the Royals unearth one hot youngster after another.

For years, the sorry crashes that we associated with this Memorial Day all came from the direction of Indianapolis. Now, we realize that we should look in four other directions as well. This year, the worst wrecks may be found in Houston, Anaheim, Boston and New York.