Great article on Peterson in the NYTimes
Sabyer
LEE JENKINS
Published: June 13, 2004
he remaining pieces from Rick Peterson's collection of seascape paintings
still hang in his home, subtle reminders of a time and place when they were
just about all he had.
Through his years as a self-described starving artist, Peterson would paint
and read and sometimes fast in an attempt to clear his body and mind in a
struggle to find the right line on his life.
Baseball coaches can seem born out of the diamond, carved from fungo bats,
polished over the years like glove leather. Ask them when they decided to
become coaches and they shrug, as if there was never really a choice.
Peterson remembers the day, the place and the moment. It was the starting
point for a career that has taken him from minor league towns to major
league cities, enabling him to advance the science of baseball and open the
mind of an industry resistant to change.
Peterson, 49, is best known for developing a nucleus of young pitchers in
Oakland who led the American League in earned run average the past two
seasons. But perhaps more stunning is what the pitching coach has
accomplished this season with an aging staff in New York, taking the Mets to
the top of the major leagues in E.R.A. and helping them remain competitive
despite an inconsistent defense and a relatively unproductive lineup.
This has all been in the works for more than the past 25 years, since the
day Peterson woke up with an empty stomach and decided to take a walk on the
beach.
At the time, he was living in an apartment in San Diego about the size of a
freight elevator, just steps from the bustling boardwalk and raucous roller
coaster on Mission Beach. He was collecting unemployment, gathering food
stamps and working part time as a physical education instructor at a local
elementary school for $60 a week.
On the other side of the country, his father, Harding Peterson, was
assembling a team that would win the 1979 World Series and make "We Are
Family" a civic theme song. Harding Peterson was the Pittsburgh Pirates'
general manager, but his son was just another kid on the beach, promising
his parents he could make it on his own.
Back then, Rick Peterson was a pitcher still laboring through the minor
leagues every summer, but his arm was injured and his spirit was restless.
He headed to San Diego in the winter of 1978, not for any reason other than
that he was from New Jersey, and San Diego sounded like a place you could
warm up and start over, even if you only had $1,000 in your savings account.
Outside of his dingy apartment, Peterson noticed a flier one day promoting a
free seminar with a holistic chiropractor. He wondered if the chiropractor
could somehow heal his ailing arm. After Peterson served as a volunteer at
the seminar, he asked for a regular appointment. He paid with the only
assets he had - his Impressionist oil paintings of the ocean.
The chiropractor treated several professional athletes in San Diego and had
many prescriptions, including a weeklong fast. Peterson would be allowed to
eat raw fruits and vegetables at the start of the week, then only liquids.
For a 23-year-old who was looking for something, and did not know exactly
what, it was a suggestion worth trying.
As it turned out, that fast sped up the course of his career. Near the end
of the week, he strolled out of his apartment and onto the sand. He has
always been tightly built, a fitness fiend, but he was about 25 pounds
lighter than normal because he had eaten so little solid food during the
winter.
"I was walking on the beach and it was like an epiphany," Peterson said. "I
wasn't thinking about anything, but all the answers just came to me. You're
a teacher. Go teach. Put on your uniform and go teach."
For a while, he had wanted nothing to do with that uniform ever again. He
had worn it since he was a child, when his father was playing for the
Pirates and when he would go into the clubhouse thinking of Roberto Clemente
and Willie Stargell as uncles.
Sabyer
LEE JENKINS Published: June 13, 2004
The remaining pieces from Rick Peterson's collection of seascape paintings
He was still wearing a uniform on what might have been the worst weekend of
his career, nearly two decades later, when he threw 200 pitches in a game
for Gulf Coast Community College in Florida, and was called to pitch in
relief the next day. From then on, Peterson played with a tendon in his
throwing arm that was detached from the bone.
He transferred to Jacksonville University the next year to study psychology
and art, but he could still paint the corners of the plate and eventually
graduated to the minor leagues with the Pirates, where he spent more time as
a player-coach than as a player.
After one of his final pitching appearances as a regular player, he sat on
the floor of a janitor's closet in Alexandria, Va., his arm resting in a
dirty sink. The Pirates executive Murray Cook walked into the room, took one
look at Peterson and said, "I think that's it."
Peterson spent a large portion of that night staring into a mirror in his
hotel room, tears rolling down his cheeks, asking himself, "So now what?"
"I didn't know what I was going to do?" Peterson said. "I was going through
some serious soul-searching. I wanted to find my life's work and I didn't
know what it was going to be."
No matter how far he strayed from baseball - into art and psychology and
Eastern philosophy - he could not leave it altogether.
When Cook offered him his first job with the Pirates as a minor league coach
in 1979, not long after that winter in San Diego, Peterson made it his
mission to use baseball as his platform, merging East with West, modern
science with old-school hardball.
The game was not altogether ready for him. Even his father pushed him to be
a doctor or a lawyer, fields better suited to a stable future. After
spending over a decade with the Pirates and the Cleveland Indians, and
bouncing from the minors to the majors, the Chicago White Sox and the
Toronto Blue Jays hired Peterson in the mid-1990's, then fired him in the
span of two years. Executives in Toronto said he was too advanced. People in
Chicago wondered why he had pitchers throw with their eyes closed, even
though the organization's most prominent minor leaguer, Michael Jordan,
practiced free-throw shooting with his eyes closed.
"There were times then that I thought I'd be out of baseball," Peterson
said. "I was frustrated to the point where I didn't know anymore if anyone
would let me do what I do."
Peterson seemed to fit in better on the team at the American Sports Medicine
Institute in Birmingham, Ala., a biomechanics lab where he first joined Dr.
James Andrews and Dr. Glenn Flesig 15 years ago to analyze pitching motions,
to identify trouble spots on the elbow and the shoulder and to evaluate
methods to prevent pitching injuries, particularly in young people. Even
now, Peterson has not allowed any of his three sons to pitch until they turn
15.
"I saw a real drive back then to use his brain as well as his experience,"
said Flesig, who still works regularly with Peterson. "He wasn't another
piece fitting into the system. Other pitching coaches were doing it their
team's way, or the way it had been done for years. Rich was questioning
that, not just accepting it. Talking to him is different than talking to
other pitching coaches. I find it's more introspective and analytical."
Peterson remained in baseball partly because he still hungered to improve
it. The A's Billy Beane, already forging a reputation as a rebel general
manager, fired the team's pitching coach, Bob Cluck, late in spring training
of 1998, even though Cluck was best friends with Manager Art Howe. Beane
then promoted Peterson, whom he had hired to be a roving instructor, and
watched him cultivate the best young rotation in baseball, helping them
avoid the sort of arm trouble that cut short his own career.
"It was a tough spot for Rick, but we hit it off right away," said Howe, who
was also reared in Pittsburgh and has been reunited with Peterson in New
York. "I think he has always appreciated that I gave him the reins and let
him do his job."
Howe and Peterson can come across as complete opposites, one a mild-mannered
traditionalist, the other a high-energy revolutionary. Peterson cannot be
confined to the stadium, using his spare time to develop a baseball-specific
laptop computer and a software program that computes data on every hitter.
Peterson tells his pitchers what a given hitter is batting against 1-2
changeups on the inside corner of the plate, and what they should throw as a
result.
"There's a reason why we have the best pitching staff in baseball," said Tom
Glavine, who is making a bid for comeback player of the year. "When you have
a lot of veteran guys, people think they won't listen and buy in. That's not
necessarily true. We're smart enough to realize that there are things we can
do better, and Rick can teach us those things."
Glavine remembers how Peterson gathered the Mets pitchers after a rare rough
spot in Arizona this season and presented them with a bag of fortune
cookies. Each pitcher took out a cookie and read his fortune. Instead of
rolling their eyes, they started joking that their fortunes would change,
and, sure enough, Glavine went out and beat Randy Johnson in a 1-0
masterpiece.
With his mound mantras, his running catch phrases and the motivational
sayings that he keeps pasted in his celebrated black book, Peterson has been
easy to parody over the years. But Mets pitchers, the only critics who
really matter, have become almost protective of their new coach. Not only do
they defend his practices, they resent any implication that he is some sort
of baseball radical.
"What we've done in his first year is not a coincidence," Al Leiter said.
"His passion for what he does burns so hot, it's like a white flame.
Sometimes I think it's frustrating for him because he wants everyone to have
the same passion he does."
Leiter is 38, pitching with a frayed labrum in his left shoulder and at that
stage of his career when he is starting to wonder what he will do when it is
over. He will undoubtedly have opportunities in television, business and pol
itics, but someday soon, he too could be standing in front of a mirror,
asking himself, "So now what?"
Peterson, the coach who reminds Leiter to rotate his hips, keep his hands
low and throw only changeups on 1-2 counts, can also help answer that
eternal question.