Orosco Not Slowing Down At 45

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Dodgers reliever Jesse Orosco, the major leagues' oldest player, turns 45 Sunday.

``My only goals were health and consistency and making the postseason every year,'' Orosco said. ``I've done everything I could to take care of my arm so I could be out there every day for the manager and the team. Now, I'm just going day by day. I worry about today's game today and tomorrow's game tomorrow. I'm not going to look at years ahead.''

Orosco, the record holder for most games pitched (1,138), is way short of the record for oldest player, set by Satchel Paige, who was 59 when he pitched for the Kansas City Athletics in 1965.

Orosco shows no signs of slowing in his 23rd major league season. The left-hander has a 2.08 ERA, allowing one run and four hits over 4 1-3 innings and seven games. During spring training, he pitched 11 scoreless innings.

``Jesse's a 70-year-old man and he's still throwing the ball real well,'' Dodgers reliever Paul Quantrill joked. ``What I've learned from Jesse -- and I think that's vital -- is that he's still playing at his age because he knows how to pitch, he's got real good stuff and he keeps himself in good shape.''

``But I think the biggest thing is that he loves and respects the game. I mean, it's just like going to Little League with him because he's happy every day and he fools around all the time. But when you give him the ball, he's locked in because he's a professional.''

Orosco, who played with 40-somethings Harold Baines and Cal Ripken Jr. during his five seasons in Baltimore, didn't have many goals when he threw his first pitch for manager Joe Torre's New York Mets in 1979.

Dodgers closer Eric Gagne was 3 years old when Orosco made his big-league debut. A career reliever, Orosco has an 84-76 record and 141 saves -- and on an October night in 1986 struck out Boston's Marty Barrett to win a World Series title for the Mets.

These days, he is flourishing in his role as a situational pitcher whose sole purpose is to get left-handed hitters out in the late innings. They still have difficulty with his slingshot sidearm delivery.

``When you hand him the ball and you look in his eyes, even though he's in his 23rd season, you still see the fire and you still see the passion to compete,'' Dodgers manager Jim Tracy said. ``I can't tell you how much respect I have for this guy -- and it's not just because of the good start that he's off to this year.

``This is a special guy we're talking about here. He cares about winning, he cares about his teammates. His influence on the younger players on this club is spectacular. And he's still getting people out, so who wouldn't a guy like that on the team?''

Orosco got his love of the game from his father, who played sandlot ball until he also was in his mid-40s. Jesse thinks he would have gotten a big kick out of seeing his son pitch off a big league mound on his 45th birthday.

His teammates plan to welcome in the clubhouse with a surprise Sunday.

``I get some ribbing from my teammates here and there, but I don't listen to half of it,'' Orosco said. ``I mean, why make it worse on myself?''

I can just hear some National League manager, spying Jesse Orosco warming up in the bullpen, yelling at his players the way Casey Stengel did his Yankees whenever they saw Satchel Paige warming up in the pen (Paige in the majors was used as an effective reliever): Get your runs now - Father Time is coming!

How long has Jesse Orosco been around? Put it this way: He was a rookie in the same season as Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines (1979). He was the minor-league player to be named later when longtime Met southpaw extraordinaire Jerry Koosman, frustrated with the De Roulet family's inability to rebuild the team after M. Donald Grant (following Joan Payson's death) effectively stripped the club bare, asked for and got a trade to his home state team, the Minnesota Twins, Orosco becoming a Met in 1979 - when Joe Torre was managing the Mets and Bob Gibson (you can look it up) was their pitching coach for awhile. By 1983, he was the Mets' go-to guy in the bullpen, Neil Allen having pitched and (allegedly) drank his way out of the role and then gone to St. Louis in the Keith Hernandez deal.

Second most memorable moment: 1986 World Series. An inning before he winged his glove airborne and sank to his knees after fanning Marty Barrett to nail the series for the Mets, Orosco pulled off perhaps the most classic sneak attack in Series history: with Mets on first and second, a bunt situation, Orosco bunted at a couple of pitches with the Red Sox showing the "wheel" play (first and third basemen charging down the lines, shortstop running to third to cover, second baseman running to first to cover), then waited to see if the Sox would use the play once more. Next pitch, Orosco squared to bunt, the Red Sox put the wheel play on as the pitch was delivered, and Orosco pulled his bat back and just swung it easily on the ball, rapping a seven-hop base hit into left center field through the empty middle of the infield, driving home Ray Knight with the insurance run. (Darryl Strawberry had given the Mets some breathing room with a monstrous leadoff homer in the inning to make it 7-5). Sports Illustrated, in fact, argued that Orosco and not Knight should have been the Series MVP.

Orosco was also part of an unusual double switch in a 1985 game against the Cincinnati Reds: Exhausted of position players with Roger McDowell in the game for the Mets, manager Davey Johnson took a tiring Darryl Strawberry out of right field, sent McDowell out to play right, brought in Orosco to pitch, and switched the two pitchers off a couple of innings, the Mets finally winning the game.

The Mets actually re-acquired Orosco, from the Baltimore Orioles, in a December 1999 trade that sent pitcher Chuck McElroy to the Birds. But three months later, the Mets traded him to the Cardinals for Joe McEwing.

Who held the record for the most major league games played before Orosco broke it? Dennis Eckersley, who set his mark of 1,071 in 1998 before his retirement.

Orosco has been mostly an excellent pitcher for the jobs he's been asked to do, whether as a strong closer in his earlier seasons, a smart setup man in later seasons, or the expert situational pitcher he's been over the past several seasons. A Hall of Famer? He probably falls short enough of a Hall of Fame relief pitcher when all is said and done - but Jesse Orosco for the most part has been an above average pitcher. I'm convinced he was weeded out of the closer role in due enough course because he relies on control and a rather twisty slider rather than a howitzer-like fast ball to get the job done. I can't for the life of me understand where it got written that a good closer could be nothing but a flamethrower, and I notice the flamethrowers as a rule don't last very long in the role, unless they're freaks of nature. And here is Orosco, an epitome of the term "crafty left-hander," and his example almost makes you think that in today's alleged mindsets, the likes of Hoyt Wilhelm and Elroy Face would be unemployable as anything other than one-hitter pitchers at best while their clubs wait for the next speedballer. I notice a few more closers showing up with more than just a burner in the repertoire, but it seems still to be the rule that if you can't burn it in, don't even think about closing. Stupid is as stupid does, as usual.

To my knowledge, there is no truth to any rumour that Orosco has a clause in his contract stipulating a continuous supply of Geritol...

They tend to give him more leeway in the decades-played category than by his age, but Minnie Minoso - believe it or not - was actually a year younger when he made his for-the-pension appearances in 1980 than was Satchel Paige when Father Time made his gig for the 1965 A's. So you'd be going down from Paige to Minoso to Wilhelm to Ryan to Orosco.

Classic line from Minoso, when told once that he didn't speak English very well: Bat, ball, glove, she no speak English.

Minnie Minoso, by the way, has a not-unrealistic and building base of support among baseball analysts as a bona-fide Hall of Famer. Allen Barra, in his new book Clearing the Bases, makes a very strong case that Minnie Minoso may be the best player who is not in the Hall of Fame and not named Ron Santo, and better than about half the white players and most (not all) of the black players from his main era who are in the Hall of Fame. (Santo is no questions asked the best player of his time who isn't in the Hall of Fame, and Santo does deserve the honour.) Barra makes a point of lining Minoso explicitly up with Larry Doby and Enos Slaughter, both of whom (Barra is right about this) are Hall of Famers but bare borderliners in terms of actual performance, but the case for Minoso strengthens when it's seen that in a certain sense he had no prime: he was twenty-nine when he achieved official rookie classification, yet he was deemed by those who saw him play as one of the maybe ten best players in the game at the time. His strongest physical evidence, from the surface, seems to be that on the so-called Gray Ink test (I think this means, top ten finishes in key playing categories), Minoso is 45 points above where you'd expect an average Hall of Famer to be.

In that rookie season, 1951, Minoso was actually better than the American League's Rookie of the Year winner, Gil McDougald of the Yankees. He hit a whopping 63 points higher than McDougald (.326 over .263), he drove in four more runs, led the American League in stolen bases (31 - please shall we cease and desist with the canard that Maury Wills restored the stolen base to the game...it just ain't so; Minnie Minoso had it working as part of his game for years before, though Minoso's stolen base totals diminished somewhat steadily by the end of the 1950s and Little Looie Aparicio had arrived to pick it up several steps by 1956). Minoso also had a better on base average and slugging average than McDougald by fat margins. "The lesson to Latin players for the next forty-odd years: you'll have to do better than the non-Latin player just to be noticed, and far better to win an award," Barra writes, and he's right about how the Latin players were seen even compared to the black players of the 1950s' first waves...

But for the 1950s, Minnie Minoso was the no-questions-asked best Latin player in the majors and one of the fifteen best any players in the majors. He went to the All-Star Game seven times between 1951 and 1960; his last three coming when the fans lost the All-Star ballot (following two years worth of ballot-box stuffing by Cincinnati fans) - think about it: the professional men on the field who watched the game thought an elder Minnie Minoso was still one of the players worthy of being on the All-Star roster and in the games. He won his only three Gold Glove awards in 1957, 1959, and 1960 - when he was in his late thirties. He finished in the top ten of the Most Valuable Player award voting five times in those years; he was in the top ten in on-base percentage nine times between 1951 and 1960; he led his league in hits in 1960 (he was 38 years old); in only one season between 1951 and 1960 did he fail to place in the top ten in total bases (he led the American League in 1954); he led his league three times in triples and once in doubles and was a very frequent extra-base hitter; he led the league in stolen bases three straight (1951-53) and came in second three times; and, if you like a guy who just likes to get on base, here's one for you: he led his league in getting hit by pitches in ten out of eleven seasons running.

He was actually a very similar player to Jackie Robinson, except that Minoso was maybe a slightly better power hitter, but the distinction there is kind of moot. Both men made the majors for all intent and purpose in their late twenties, an age when prime is pretty much gone (people forget that about Robinson sometimes); both men did things to make damn sure their teams won. Like Robinson, Minoso was a pioneer in his way - the first black Latino in the major leagues (his Indians teammates, Mike [The Big Bear] Garcia and Bobby Avila, were way lighter skinned; Garcia, in addition, was a California native - he died in 1986). I think there's one hell of a good case for electing Minnie Minoso to the Hall of Fame. If someone doesn't, I could name you about fifteen players worse than him who are in the Hall, and almost as many who don't even come into his neighbourhood whom people are likely to shove into the Hall before him.

And, now that I've opened my big fat yap, some other thoughts on some other often-bespoken Hall of Fame prospects...

Ron Santo - See above. He's the no-questions-asked best player of the 1960s who isn't in the Hall of Fame, and he's about a hundred stories above anyone else who's not in and has a following of people thinking he should be in. As a matter of fact, assuming Pete Rose ever gets himself straight with baseball, I think Rose ought to wait until Santo is in, and not just because Santo didn't hang around for nearly a decade beyond his legitimate usefulness just to bust an all-time record.

Joe Torre - He could end up being the only guy who's a Hall of Famer as a player and a manager, at the rate he's going. He's even more underrated than Santo, an interesting syndrome considering their playing careers all but dovetailed, but Joe Torre was an excellent baseball player. As a side argument, Torre was a better catcher in six seasons at the position than Ted Simmons (who's often cited as a belongs-there candidate) in ten seasons there.

Ken and Clete Boyer - Ken Boyer deserves the honour, even if he's slightly below Santo at the same position. Clete Boyer was an outstanding defencive third baseman - but for a lot less time than his contemporary Brooks Robinson. You hate to eliminate a glove like his, but Clete Boyer comes up just short enough, and Brooks Robinson was actually a better hitter.

Tony Oliva - Maybe the best pure hitter of his time. For eight straight seasons, he finished below third in his league in hitting only once, and he won three batting titles. He also has a hell of a slugging percentage, led his league in hits five times, in doubles four times, and by the way he was absolute murder with men on base. Even with his knees betraying him, he managed to hit .304 lifetime and slug .476 lifetime, with a better-than-average on base percentage playing in a pitching-rich era.

Dick Allen - By the numbers, he's a no-questions-asked Hall of Famer. By dint of the fact that, as Bill James pointed out with his usual political incorrectness, Allen - a very real victim of racism - turned out to use racism to blow his teams apart and keep them from winning, it shouldn't really be a topic. "He did more to keep his teams from winning than anybody else who ever played major league baseball," James has written. "And if that's a Hall of Famer, I'm a lug nut."

Thurman Munson - I see little in his actual performance to justify his selection. He still gets an awful lot of favour because of his premature death in that jet accident, but he just hasn't got the hard performance papers - primary or secondary numbers - to make it any more than a sympathy vote. He won the Most Valuable Player award in one of the two seasons in which he truly did play over his own head; his best power year, in fact, was one of his average run production years - and his were among the weaker run-producing years for his position in his league. He also comes out in the wash as below league average defencively. His career was already well enough on the downside, but even eliminating his injury quotient and allowing for the subjectivity of his personal image (he is about evenly divided between those - teammates and otherwise - who considered him a stand-up fellow and those - teammates and otherwise - who considered him the biggest horse's ass in a Yankee uniform who wasn't named Reggie Jackson), Thurman Munson simply falls too far short of a Hall of Famer, and he would not have produced to a Hall of Fame level had he lived to do it, and not just because he was already being groomed out of catching.

Vada Pinson - He probably gets so little notice because he did a passel of things better than many rather than a couple of things better than any (he was one of the best and most consistent center fielders of his era, but he suffers the same fate which bedeviled Richie Ashburn for years: his name wasn't Mays or Snider) - but Vada Pinson was a terrific player. Pinson was also a classic take-one-for-the-team player and he was one of the best hitters at setting up runs as well as driving them in on the pre-Machine Reds. He wouldn't dishonour the Hall of Fame should he make it, though it would have been nice if he could receive the honour while he was alive (he died in 1995). A favourite Vada Pinson story of mine, by way of pitcher-author Jim Brosnan: Pinson once bombed a home run at old Crosley Field and ran around the bases like he had a hellhound on his trail. (He was a very good baserunner and base stealer.) "Little man," Frank Robinson needled him when he got back to the dugout, "you just better stick to the singles and leave the long one to us cats who know how to act 'em out!"

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