Chuck Benedict
During the baseball season, Ismael Valdes lives in Glendale while
pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who hold court less than three
miles from the Glendale city limits. Valdes, a likeable Mexican-American,
is an enigma in major league baseball.
Recently, Ismael made his first at-home pitching start for the Dodgers
since returning from the Chicago Cubs, where he was deemed expendable
after spending time on the disabled list. Sunday's effort was a disaster.
During his several previous Dodger years, "Rocket" was a chatty
conversationalist who said all the right things. (Players usually use a
set of pie-in-the-sky answers like, 'I'm just trying to help my team.').
However, much of a true competitor's success is mental -- not in terms of
sanity, but in a perception of the tough daily challenges of life in
the game. It's the mature athlete who is able to guard and guide his own
mental approach.
Valdes has been thought by some teammates and others to lack the
adrenaline that makes the competitive difference. There may have been
some truth in such an accusation, since not all of us reach adulthood
with the fierce drive of a Tiger Woods, Kirk Gibson or Deacon Jones.
Hurler Valdes has a type of grip on the ball that makes his pitches
dart and spin enough to fool most of the hitters most of the time. But
his grip at the time of release has had a tendency to create blisters, an
imposing enemy to his control.
Many who have not had the problem consider blisters to be more of an
inconvenience than a deterrent to success. Often it has been implied that
Valdes' blisters could be treated and then ignored while in the game.
However, until one has walked in Valdes' spikes or pitched with his
hand grip, it is a fictional guess as to how the delicate art of pitching
can be affected by blistered fingers or the anticipation of such
blisters.
Altering a delivery style can be damaging. Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis
Cardinals was an outstanding pitcher, winning 30 games in 1934. This
writer was in the grandstand for the All-Star game of 1937 when Dean's toe was fractured by a line drive off the bat of Earl Averill.
With semi-serious arrogance, Dean shunned medical advice. Concealing
a limp, Diz continued to pitch, but the sensitive toe ruined his
stride. As a result, his new, untrained delivery style caught his deltoid
(shoulder) muscle unprepared, and the new motion ruined the shoulder for
life. Dean never was the same. A deltoid doesn't repair easily.
