Pitcher’s Book Not Enough; Hershiser Prefers Interfacing

Every big league pitcher keeps a book on hitters. Some pitchers actually jot down the information in a book, some store it in their heads. Some, because of lack of storage space, keep the information in their catchers’ heads.

Orel Hershiser may be the first pitcher ever to store his pitching secrets on a floppy disk. Orel is a child of the computer age. The Sultan of Software.

Laugh if you must at the image of a microchip-programmed pitcher, but Hershiser and his lap-top PC (personal computer) are kicking the league’s butt. He started using the computer three starts into this season, and is 15-5 with a 2.59 earned-run average.

“I know it’s really against the grain of baseball tradition,” Hershiser said, when reminded that former Dodger pitchers such as Sal Maglie and Don Drysdale might consider the computer a tool for the wimpy. “The image is the guy on the bench chewing tobacco, going out and pitching and just throwing hard. (The computer concept) is a little high-tech.”

Still, Hershiser doesn’t apologize. To him, baseball is war, and anything legal is a weapon. Let the hitters go get their own computers.

“My computer replaces the old pitcher’s book, only I put more into it,” Orel says. “I keep a record of how I felt on the mound each game, my physical status, the adjustments I made on the mound. If I was going good, what it felt like. Whether the adjustments I made worked.

“It’s mostly for learning about hitters and about myself, recording the feelings I have on a daily basis. Like maybe I warmed up really well, seemed to have all my pitches working, but when the game started I wasn’t making the pitches. What did it feel like, what adjustments did I make, did they bring me back in line?

“I’ll write down a key pitch sequence that worked, or a change in the philosophy of a hitter--a dead-pull hitter who got a couple hits to the opposite field, for instance.

“In general, I’m really mechanically conscious out there. That’s where the computer helps. My recall is so much better. If you’ve just studied (on the computer) adjustments you made in the past, it’s easier to have them at the top of your mind when you’re out there pitching, instead of having to search for ideas.”

Seriously, though, has the computer made Orel a better pitcher?

“I think so,” he said. “If it hadn’t, I’d quit using it.”

Orel is a guy willing to try new things, and junk them. He took a swing at self-hypnosis last season. “It made me too intense,” he said. “I wasn’t able to roll with the punches, flow with different energy levels.”

Riding along on spaceship Earth, Orel has also tried some less metaphysical methods of self-improvement as a pitcher. Diet, for instance. Since coming to the big leagues in 1984, he has almost entirely eliminated red meat.

And he is big on old-fashioned listening and learning.

“My whole theory about my career is that if you listen to old-time baseball players, they always say, ‘I wish I knew then what I know now.’ ” he said. “My key is that I want to learn as much as possible about pitching while I’m still able to compete.”

He picks the fertile brains of such people as Sandy Koufax, Ron Perranoski, Roy Campanella and Duke Snider.

And, after every game, in the privacy of his own home or hotel room, or on a plane, Orel unfolds his trusty PC and interfaces with it, or whatever you call it when you punch stuff in and pull stuff out.

He even makes note of great defensive plays, or notable fielding lapses of teammates, things that might help him at contract-negotiating time. He’ll be able to tell the arbitrator: “Sure I lost that Aug. 29th game, but remember in the fifth inning, how we didn’t turn that easy double play and it cost us the game?”

Also, using the computer is a skill that Hershiser thinks will serve him well in what he calls “post-career opportunities,” a phrase Dizzy Dean never used.

But ol’ Diz himself would respect the way Orel pitches. Forget Hershiser’s CPA spectacles, his unassuming manner, his baby face, his computer. In a game, Hershiser is one of the toughest, most confident pitchers you’ll see. His mound attitude approaches quiet arrogance.

Orel is no wimp, even if he is proud of a photograph of himself meeting George Bush when the vice president visited Dodger Stadium recently.

Orel is tough. It used to be said of pitchers like Drysdale and Early Wynn that they’d brush back their own grandmother if she was crowding the plate.

I don’t know if Orel would go that far. But if he thought it would help him, he’d steal his own grandmother’s floppy disk.