RMJ 139 July 4

FRIDAY, JULY 4 ● Independence Day ● Houston, vs Cincinnati

Judy and Ryan took off for Austin early this morning.  His team, the Stars, is playing in an Independence Day tournament, and he is going to pitch for the first time since March. The pain in his shoulder is gone now.

 

Tommy Greene was not so lucky. He has been battling shoulder problems for the last few years, and I’m afraid the battle is over. It looked that way tonight.

Somehow, he summoned the velocity to strike out Deion Sanders and Curtis Goodwin to open the game. Then his velocity dropped precipitously.

We had a 2-0 lead in the fourth inning when Willie Greene hit a three-run homer into the upper deck. We never came back; never really threatened.

I took Tommy out of the game with two outs in the fifth. He was throwing his fastball 82 MPH, which is slower than most pitchers throw their changeups.

When I took the ball from him on the mound, I did not detect any emotion. But when I saw him after the game, sitting on the floor in the training room staring off into space, I knew his career was over. I asked Dave Labossiere about it, and he told me that Dr. Bryan had checked his shoulder and pronounced it dead.  

 
Year Tm Lg W L ERA G GS GF CG SHO SV IP H R ER HR BB SO
1997 HOU NL 0 1 7.00 2 2 0 0 0 0 9.0 10 7 7 2 5 11
8 Yr 8 Yr 8 Yr 38 25 4.14 119 97 7 11 5 0 628.0 591 310 289 62 241 461

Tommy Greene was a first-round draft pick of the Braves in 1985. He made it to the big leagues in 1989. He was traded to the Phillies, where he became one of the best pitchers in the league in 1993. He won 16 games that year and pitched a no-hitter.

Now he is 30 years old. He should be in his prime. Instead, he is at or near the end.

I know how it feels: I was finished, with shoulder problems, at age 30 myself.

You feel so helpless. You are still young enough to do everything except the one thing that matters: throw hard. And without throwing hard, you are nothing.

For the better part of your life, your athleticism has been your identity. Now you are a forgotten man — a nobody.

I could sense the emptiness in the hollows of his eyes. I could feel the loneliness.

And though I could offer hope by telling him that I once felt the same way, and I have found life after baseball to be challenging and rewarding in its own way, I could not tell him that there would never be another year like 1993 for him.

My year was 1969:

 
Year Age Tm W L ERA G GS GF CG SHO SV IP H R ER HR BB IBB SO HBP WP
1969 22 HOU 20 13 2.33 39 37 0 20 4 0 305.1 240 97 79 18 72 6 232 1 9

Some guys make it to the big leagues and never have a defining season. At least Tommy has that memory. It is one he will cherish.

I didn’t feel like talking to Tommy after the game. The timing didn’t seem right. Yesterday, he asked me if he could fly home over the All-Star break to see his family.

“I haven’t seen them since spring training,” he said. “I could be in Pittsburgh Wednesday night or Thursday morning.”

I told him to go see his family and be back for the game on Thursday.

“Just tell Barry [Waters] what you are doing, so he will know whether to have a room for you Wednesday night,” I said. “I’ll see you in Pittsburgh.”

Now I wonder if I will see him at all.

Tommy wasn’t scheduled to make another start until the following Monday. Now I doubt he will be able to make the call.

At the end of spring training, we asked Tommy to go to AAA, where he could work his way back as a starter.

“You just don’t warm up fast enough to pitch relief,” I told him. To his credit, he made it back — just in time to pick up another loss and say goodbye.

 

Several years after I retired to the broadcast booth, I was exiting the team bus when an autograph-seeking youngster said, “Didn’t you used to be somebody?” I laughed and signed his book.

“I used to be somebody but now I’m nobody,” I said.

It’s not so funny when it happens. Somebody one day, nobody the next.

It really hurts if it happens when you are still young and strong. Tommy has been a real soldier in his comeback attempt. Now he is fading away.

 

We are fading fast too.

The Reds scored another run in the sixth. We got our last hit in the fifth.

Bagwell is in a slump now. I knew it would happen, sooner or later. I was hoping that someone else would pick up the slack. Even without Bagwell and Biggio, we should be a better team than the Pirates. But Pittsburgh beat the Cardinals today, to recapture a share of the division lead. Incredibly, we are only a game back.

It would be different if we were ten games over .500 and charging forward, a game back. As it is, one game seems like Mount Everest.

Biggio is battered from head to toe. Bagwell is bent from the load he has been carrying. Bagwell and Biggio have 35 homers between them; the rest of the team has 24. We are four games under .500 for the first time.

Is this the beginning of the end? Or is it a low point from which we will rise?

Tom Martin

Is this the beginning of the end? Or is it a low point from which we will rise? I have no way to know. I do feel, however, that I am a better manager than I was on Opening Day. If the players stage a comeback, we can still win our division. If they don’t, my managing career may go the way of Tommy Greene’s pitching career.

 

This game did have a significant bright spot: Tom Martin overpowered the Reds in the eighth, and Billy Wagner struck out the side in the ninth. With Shane Reynolds and Russ Springer coming back after the break, we may be able to win some low-scoring games again, as we did in April.