The day after the election of George Brett, Robin Yount and Nolan Ryan to the Hall of Fame on Jan. 5, Mark McGwire caught a segment from this roundtable discussion that aired on SportsCenter. "It meant a lot to me because I played against all three," he said. "I hope when I'm finished playing, people will say I represented some of what made those guys so special. They played the game the right way."
My own vivid memories of the three leave no doubt of that. George once told me, "Every time I leave the box, I'm running for a double." A scout once said that over four seasons, the fastest he ever timed Yount going down the line to first-base hit, routine grounder, popup, whatever-was 3.9 seconds; the slowest, 4.0. In 1978, Red Sox second baseman Jerry Remy, who had been Nolan's closest friend on the Angels before being traded to Boston, squared to bunt on his old buddy and saw a 95 mph fastball zipping at his head. ("It still ticks me off," says Ryan, "that the little SOB got the bunt down.")
Brett was the extrovert, the outgoing California kid. Back in the early '80s, he lived in K.C., up in the hills above Alameda Plaza. When I was in town for a series, my daily sixmile run took me by his home, and he used to leave the front door open and a pitcher of orange juice and the morning paper on the kitchen table for me. Usually the first Royal at the park and often the last to leave, he would spend hours sitting in front of his two or three lockers stuffed with shoes, pictures, memorabilia and junk, talking and laughing with people who stopped by.
"The one thing I couldn't stand was guys who went halfspeed," George says. Sure enough, when slow, home run oriented teams came to town, George would hit groundballs up the middle on the fast Royals Stadium turf and hustle them into doubles, not concerned about showing up the likes of Fred Lynn. George's single best stroke, though, was the upper-deck homer he hit off Goose Gossage at Yankee Stadium to give the Royals the '80 ALCS.
Robin loved competing. Still does. He can't just play tennis on his backyard court; he has to win. He even plays golf hard-and fast. "My kids are a lot more well-rounded than I am," he says. "Maybe 95% of everything I do has something to do with sports."
He also liked living on the edge. At Desert Mountain Golf Club in Scottsdale, he was famous for driving his golf cart too fast and flipping it. He cracked up his race car at Riverside topping 150 mph. When asked if he'd been scared, he replied, "No, I just lay there thinking, 'I can't believe I wrecked this beautiful car.' " Once, after more than an hour of driving his motorcycle over a cliff for a magazine photo layout, he apologized for not doing any wheelies: "I tore up my back last week when I flipped doing a wheelie on the highway. When I get to spring training, I don't want too many scars."
Where George was at ease in the spotlight, Robin was not. He and his wife, Michelle, declined to allow a family portrait for Sports Illustrated because they didn't want their kids treated differently from other kids. Robin was so selfeffacing that at the '82 World Series, when writers grew impatient with his bland answers, he turned to me and said, "Explain that I'm not a bad guy-I'm just not colorful."
Nolan found out early in his career about the incredible responsibility that came with his talent. In a May 1974 game at Fenway Park, Red Sox second baseman Doug Griffin squared to bunt. Ryan went up and in, Griffin froze and when the pitch hit Griffin-whose helmet didn't have a side flap-the sound was like that of a grapefruit smashing against a wall. Griffin lay motionless. "I went in and saw him unconscious, his eyes rolled back," says Ryan. "It was then I realized I could kill someone."
Ryan also remembers that two months later, Griffin returned to the lineup and got two hits off him. "I was scared to pitch him in," says Ryan. "But can you imagine how tough he was? I never knew him, but I sure respect him."
There was a sense of the superhuman in the man, still throwing 98 mph in his 40s, yet he always had time to be decent. After his final no-hitter, in 1991 against Toronto, ESPN asked if he could hang around and go live on Baseball Tonight 90 minutes after he struck out Roberto Alomar to finish the game. Ryan agreed to wait, and when we talked before the show, he said, "It's no problem. After I got done with the media, I had to ride the bike for 45 minutes, so I'd still be here anyway."
"It was hard work," Ryan says of the thousands of hours he spent just keeping his legs in shape to minimize stress on his arm. "But when I competed-and that's what I lived for-it was really fun."
PG: George, I know you and Robin are very good friends- you named your third son after him. But what was your relationship with Nolan?
BRETT: I never said a word to Nolan my whole career until our last game in Texas when we got our picture taken together, and we took out the lineup cards. I would talk to opposing players, but never to opposing pitchers because they had one job, to get me out, and my job was to get on base and drive in runs and score runs.
PG: Did you dislike your opponents?
BRETT: Some guys you dislike, but I never disliked Nolan. I think players know who the gamers are on other ball clubs. And you respect them, never hate them. You dislike the guys who aren't gamers, who maybe play just for the money and who don't respect the game as much as you. Those are the guys that you dislike.
RYAN: I respected other players, but I didn't want to get to know them on a personal basis. For me to be the type of pitcher I needed to be-aggressive-I didn't want any of that to interfere with it. When I went out there, it was strictly business. If I needed to pitch inside to them, I didn't need to have those other things to think about. Like George said, I never visited with him, never visited with Robin. But you respected them because of their ability and for the way they played the game. You felt better about getting them out than you did about somebody else in the lineup. I didn't like to see either one come to the plate with a guy on third and less than two outs because I knew they were going to do everything they possibly could to drive that run in.
YOUNT: You know what, I enjoyed getting hit once in a while. It fired me up, got my intensity level up. It helped me become a better player.
PG: How much a part of the game is intimidation? I think back to George in the 1980 World Series. Dickie Noles of the Phillies threw at your head. To me, it seemed that was a turning point in the series. Do you think it was?
BRETT: At the time, I didn't. People have told me since then that our team hit .115 or something after that 0-2 pitch he threw behind my head. And nobody said, "Look Out!" Nolan said earlier today that a pitcher knows if he's lost it and the ball's going to hit someone in the head. His first reaction then is, "Look out!" And the catcher's first reaction is, "Look out!" But nobody said a word, so I kinda knew it was intentional. I took it as part of the game. The next pitch he threw me a wicked slider and I struck out. That's part of the game, and I remember thinking, "Mike Schmidt, the next time you come up somebody's going to throw one behind your head." It never happened, though, so they might have felt a little more comfortable in the batter's box than we did. And yes, I've heard people say that's why they won-because they knocked me on my rear end.
PG: Robin, you were on a very free-swinging team with the Brewers in their heyday. Did you guys have pitchers who tried to intimidate you?
YOUNT: That group that we had in the late '70s and early '80s-Gorman Thomas and Jimmy Gantner, Pete Vuckovich and Paul Molitor and Ted Simmons- was not a team that was going to be intimidated. If anything, we intimidated other teams. We were an interesting group. Intimidation never worked against us because guys were always there to back each other.
RYAN: On the intimidation factor, Peter, I think knowing when to pitch in is real important, because if your timing is bad, and it's the wrong hitter, it can work the opposite. And certain ball clubs, too: I felt like Robin's ball club was that way. You didn't go out there with the thought that you were going to intimidate those guys. If you did that, it brought the rest of those guys up a notch because they weren't going to stand for it. And they weren't going to charge out there and get two or three guys thrown out fighting you in a game. They were going to do it at the plate. They were going to be more aggressive.
PG: People talk about the money today's players make, but more and more you hear, "I want to play for a winner." Is that what drove you?
BRETT: That's why I stayed in Kansas City. We were the most competitive team in baseball when I came up to stay in 1974. In 1975, we gave the A's a pretty good run for their money. In 1976, we won our division. Then we were in the playoffs, it seemed like, almost every year until about 1985. I'll never forget the feeling of going to bed the night before Game 7 of the World Series. That's something I wish everyone could experience. That's what sports is all about.
PG: All of you guys seem pretty fearless. Is that the case?
BRETT: I was scared to death every game. That's the honest-to-God truth. Because I don't know anybody who wants to go out in front of 40,000 people and fail. And you always have that doubt, regardless of how many hits you've gotten and what your batting average is, that you might go 0 for 4 and strike out three times, or you might let a ball go through your legs in the eighth inning and lose the ball game. I was scared to death every time I put on that uniform.
YOUNT: Part of the reason I played as hard as I did was because I didn't want to embarrass myself. If you're fearless, sometimes you get careless, and that's when mistakes happen. Some form of fear is good because it helps you focus.
PG: Robin, I've seen you ride motorcycles over cliffs and crack up go-carts. You once crashed a race car doing 190 miles per hour
YOUNT: That's an exaggeration!
PG: What's the difference between that kind of fear and the kind of fear on a baseball diamond?
YOUNT: It's not that you're scared to death. It's a respect for what you're doing and the certainty that without the concentration that it requires, you're not going to do it properly. As I said before, I think that little bit of fear helps you focus.
RYAN: Let me tell you about one fear that I had, and it was with him. (Points at Yount and smiles.) Robin and I went fishing one time (Yount laughs and high-fives Brett.) on an off-day in Milwaukee. We fish until dark, so he gives me a ride back to the hotel, and he's got a little two-seat red sports car
BRETT: ... Probably a Porsche
RYAN: And he's maybe 21 years old and I'm 27 or 28, and he's driving like a bat out of hell, and I am absolutely petrified. And when I got out of the car, I thanked the Lord for getting me back to the hotel safe.
YOUNT: Ken Berry had been the Angels centerfielder before coming to the Brewers, and he and Nolan were friends. Ken had planned to take Nolan fishing, but at the last minute, he couldn't go, so he asked if I would take him. We spent that whole day together in a boat, and we didn't say two words to each other. The whole time. We just sat there. We fished. And when we were done, I dropped him off at the hotel. That was part of that whole deal we were talking about before. He probably didn't
want to get too close to an opponent.
PG: Robin and George, because you played your whole careers in one city, you set the personality for a team. With all the player movement now, could teams as close as those Brewers and Royals teams ever exist?
YOUNT: The Yankees this year seemed to have some legitimate chemistry that helped them play better. I know that was the key to our success in '82. Guys on that team would get to the ballpark early and play a game called flip that was as competitive as the actual ball game. We'd nearly get into fights over our silly little flip game before batting practice, yet we were able to use it as a positive. After the game, 90% of the guys would all go the same direction. At home, we had team parties where the families were all involved. This went on for a few years. After that group split up, it was never repeated on any of the other teams I was with.
BRETT: The best team I ever played on was very close. In 1977, we won 102 games and lost in five games to the Yankees in the playoffs. However, the most camaraderie I ever experienced was in 1985, when we won it all. We only won 91 ball games that year, but it was the type of team that would be at the ballpark at 2 in the afternoon playing bridge. At first, only four guys knew how to play. The next thing you know, we had 12 guys, then 16. Everybody would be sitting around, changing partners and kibitzing and it was just the greatest feeling. Look at that team-we had Frank White and Willie Wilson, but we also had Steve Balboni at first, Buddy Biancalana or Onix Concepcion at short, Jim Sundberg catching, Lonnie Smith in left and Pat Sheridan or Darryl Motley in right. Not that good a team to be a World Series champion. But it was so much fun to be around those guys. Why couldn't we win in 1976-77-78? We had better talent. But there was that added ingredient in '85.
PG: Who was the best teammate you ever had?
YOUNT: That's hard because I've played with so many great ones. For pure class, a great player I was fortunate to play with as a young kid was Henry Aaron. Here was the home run king, and he made you feel like he was no different than anybody else. Ted Simmons knew the game inside and out and was constantly challenging players, quizzing them on the bench. What would you do in this situation and why? Always talking baseball. At the ballpark, at the hotel after the game, on the bus-always baseball.
RYAN: The guy that I enjoyed as much as anyone as a teammate was Jose Cruz. He loved the game, and he gave it everything he had. If he had a bad game, he'd come into the clubhouse and say, "I stink." After a great game, you couldn't tell it from the way he acted. He was a very positive person in the clubhouse and on the team for the Astros.
BRETT: The best friend I had in baseball was Jamie Quirk. Still have, as a matter of fact. We were both very young and single and from Southern California, living in this small Midwestern town of Kansas City. We grew up together in baseball. The best player I ever played with? It's a toss-up between Frank White and Hal McRae. Whenever Dan Quisenberry would come in and we would need three groundballs, we hoped they'd hit them to Frank, because we knew if they did, we'd win. Hal, with his fire and aggressiveness, taught me how to play the game. I never saw Hal give an at-bat away.
PG: You're all Hall of Famers now. Is there a guy you thought was a surefire Hall of Famer, but for one reason or another, failed to make it?
RYAN: J.R. Richard. If he'd stayed healthy and hadn't had that stroke-he had the talent. It happened so early in his career he hadn't put together Hall of Fame numbers. But he had the potential.
YOUNT: Paul Molitor had so many injuries early in his career that it looked like he wasn't going to achieve all he could have. But he persevered, actually became a steadier, healthier player the second half of his career. That's when the numbers really started to accumulate for him. Obviously, he's now a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame.
PG: George, how much credit does your hitting coach, Charlie Lau, deserve?
BRETT: He changed everything about my swing. Everything. When I came up, I had a stance just like one of my heroes, Yaz. I never hit .300 in the minors, and yet I was able to hit .300 11 times in the big leagues. My theory prior to Charlie Lau was to see the ball and hit it. I didn't know anything about a weight shift or extension, or anything like that. He basically flattened out my bat on my shoulder, and taught me how to drive the ball the other way. First it was hit the ball the other way, then it was drive the ball the other way. And then just react to balls in. I really believe that some guys are born good hitters. Not me. I was made a good hitter-by Charlie Lau.
PG: It seems very clear that Mark McGwire has adopted some of the Charlie Lau theory
BRETT: Mark McGwire is going to hit his 50 home runs every season, but did you notice how much farther they were going this year? I think it's because of all the extension and the weight shift. His arms and lower body are working together now. And if you compare the home runs that Sammy Sosa hit to right- and centerfield last year, you see he has a lot of Charlie Lau in him too. He gets through the ball better, and he told me he's waiting on the ball a little longer and trying to drive it to rightfield. Drive it, not serve it.
PG: Did anyone try to change you, Robin?
YOUNT: Yeah, because to be honest with you, my swing was certainly not the prettiest thing I've ever seen, even though it worked for me. I had very few mechanical thoughts when I was a hitter. If I did, I was usually not very successful. I was strictly a reaction hitter. I would let the ball get as deep on me as I could, try to recognize it as early as I could, and when it got there, I tried to hit it as hard as I possibly could. That's about as scientific as my hitting got.
PG: How about you, Nolan?
RYAN: At times with the Angels, people felt like I should learn a slider so I'd have a breaking ball that I could be more consistent with. But I felt like if I tried to develop a slider at that time, it would take away from my curveball. If I threw my curveball for a high percentage of strikes, I usually had a good game. So I stuck with my curveball.
PG: Who's the one pitcher or hitter you face in your nightmares?
BRETT: Terry Forster. When I first came up in 1974, the White Sox had him and Goose Gossage in the bullpen. It took me three years to hit a ball fair off Forster. One time, I popped up foul and was praying the third baseman would catch it, because I didn't want to face Forster again.
RYAN: Willie McCovey. Because when I was a youngster with the Mets, I was pretty much a one-pitch pitcher. With Willie, it didn't matter how hard you threw-he could catch up with it.
YOUNT: Goose Gossage, by far, gave me the most nightmares. Obviously, George doesn't feel quite that way (Laughs.)
BRETT: I was a lefthanded hitter, so I had something working for me against Goose.
PG: Robin, you nearly left baseball to try a career in golf. Was that a time when you were thinking, "This game is just too much for me"?
YOUNT: I didn't look at it that way. When I first came up, it was great to be a major leaguer. But it's amazing how fast that wore off. I became frustrated because we didn't play .500 ball for five years at the start of my career. I didn't play for the love of baseball. I played for the love of competition. Baseball's just what I did best. Not winning the seventh game of the '82 World Series is the biggest regret of my career. To this day, that hurts more than anything I ever did in baseball.
RYAN: I experienced those feelings when I was with the Mets because of my inconsistency and because I wasn't getting to pitch on a regular basis. I questioned myself as to whether I should go back to Texas and do something else. Now you realize that's all part of baseball.
BRETT: I'm glad the game never got me down to where I wanted to turn my back and say screw this. Well, maybe there were times I felt like that a little, but I just stuck with it as long as I could. Even in 1993, I didn't have that bad a year. I had 19 home runs, but the game beat me. It wasn't that much fun winning, and losses didn't hurt as bad. If I had played one more year, it would have been for the money. The game deserves better than that. It was too good to me, and I couldn't treat the game that poorly.
Mark McGwire was the on-deck hitter in 1989 when Ryan got the final out of the inning with his 4,999th strikeout. "I went back out to first base and spent a whole inning scared to death that I would be No. 5,000," McGwire says. "But when I got up, I hit a line drive to center. An inning later, Rickey Henderson became 5,000. I can't tell you how happy I was. I have all the respect in the world for Nolan, but I didn't want to be his 5,000th. Robin and George would understand that. And you can be certain that Nolan would never have wanted to be my 62nd.
"Respectful competition, that's what it's all about," McGwire says. "And I don't know many people who personified that better than George, Robin and Nolan."