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A tale of two pitchers: The careers of two high school rivals
One of the most popular game shows in 1960 was CBS’ “To Tell the Truth.”
The format consisted of a host, four panelists and three contestants, two of whom would pretend to be the third. The panelists would question the contestants and then vote on which one was “telling the truth.” The half-hour length allowed for three groups of contestants, and each wrong guess by the panel would win $250 for the participants. The June 16, 1960, episode began with an Annapolis graduate and followed with a high diver on horseback. Then came the final segment.
As the curtain rose, three young men in suits and skinny neckties stood side by side. Announcer Johnny Olson asked each in turn the standard question of the program: “What is your name, please?” Each replied, “My name is Sam McDowell.” Host Bud Collyer read McDowell’s “affidavit,” which identified him as, to use Collyer’s words, “pitcher extraordinaire” who had been pursued by 14 of the 16 major league clubs.
Despite Mr. McDowell’s 6-foot-5inch frame towering over the two imposters, the panel cast three of their four votes for a Radio City Music Hall employee. Mr. McDowell’s answers to their questions had been truthful but flat and seemingly hesitant. His broadest grin came when Collyer announced that the three wrong guesses by the panel would win the contestants $750. Before leaving the stage, Mr. McDowell broke the news that two days earlier he had signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians.
What made Mr. McDowell “extraordinaire” was clear from his affidavit: 85 wins out of the 91 games pitched, including 40 no-hitters. The year before, at the Colt League World Series, he had pitched a nohitter and two one-hitters. What Mr. McDowell didn’t say was that he had played those games for Pittsburgh teams from the time he was an 8-year-old. When he signed with Cleveland, he was 17 and had just graduated from Central Catholic High School in Oakland.
Central’s principal rival in the Catholic League was North Catholic, then located across the Allegheny River on the top of Troy Hill. If Mr. McDowell had competition, it came from Joe Cleary, the ace for the Trojans. Mention to Mr. Cleary that he lost 1-0 to McDowell in 1960 and he’ll fire back, “Yes, but you’re forgetting that I beat Sam the previous year.”
Mr. Cleary was only a sophomore then but, like Mr. McDowell, had been astonishing fellow players and fans since he was 8. In his last year in Little League ball, Mr. Cleary pitched a perfect game, and in the Pony League, he played on two separate teams.
Joe Wyzkoski, the Trojans’ shortstop, recalls the McDowellCleary battles well.
“We won that game in ’59 and Joe Cleary deserved the victory, but Sam McDowell gave us a lot of
help.” Mr. McDowell was firing fastballs, but he couldn’t control his wildness. The next year was a very different story: Mr. Cleary held Central to one run, but Mr. McDowell was unbeatable, according to Mr. Wyzkoski:
“I was sitting in the dugout waiting to bat, and one of our guys had walked. I watched him take a lead and then the first baseman tagged him out. McDowell’s throw to first was so quick that none of us saw it coming.” Mr. McDowell’s easy lefthand motion, high kick that obscured the ball and bullet throw would eventually earn him the nickname “Sudden Sam.” Had the game been at Central, he might have had another no-hitter.
North played its home games at Gardner Field, and most Little League teams had a better facility.
“I don’t think Gardner had a single blade of grass on it,” Mr. Cleary laughs, but it had a short right-field fence. Larry Szykowny, the Trojans’ first baseman who would go on to star in basketball and baseball at Pitt, remembers that fence fondly:
“Sam was working on a no-hitter, and it was late in the game. I was coming to bat and decided this time up to use one of the lightest bats we had, since Sam threw 95 mile-per-hour fastballs at times. On
the first pitch, he threw me one. I swung and hit it over the right-center field fence for a ground-rule double to break up his no-hitter bid that day.”
Once Mr. Szykowny got to second, he was careful to stay close to the bag. “Because of Sam’s quick pick-off move, you couldn’t feel safe in taking a big lead and getting stuck in your tracks.”
The game ended as a shutout, and Mr. McDowell went 8-0 for Central that year.
Different directions
Although he had played baseball a few blocks away from Forbes Field and even pitched batting practice there, the Pittsburgh Pirates were World Series bound with a strong pitching staff. Mr. McDowell went with the team willing to pay top dollar and signed a $75,000 contract with Cleveland. He then headed to Lakeland, Fla., for minor-league training.
Mr. Cleary pitched another year for North, leading the team for the third time to the Catholic League championship. Shortly before graduation, he signed with the Pirates and packed his bags for Tennessee to pitch for Kingsport in the Appalachian League, where Steve Blass had pitched the previous
year. Mr. Cleary’s boyhood dream to be a Pirate was coming true. That summer he pitched 40 innings, most of it in relief. He won two games and lost one. It had been a good summer and one that ended early enough for Mr. Cleary to register for Pitt’s fall trimester.
For Lakeland, Mr. McDowell was revealing that Cleveland had gotten what they paid for. Yes, he walked 80 batters that summer, a wildness that he would find hard to control, but he also struck out 100. “Sudden Sam” was still firing fastballs few batters could hit.
If issuing walks was Mr. McDowell’s nemesis, arm trouble became Mr. Cleary’s. In 1962, he pitched a total of nine innings for the Burlington Bees in the Midwestern League when his arm began to hurt. Resting at home for the remainder of the season, he expected to return in spring 1963 and come into his own. He remembers all too well what happened at spring training:
“I was asked to pitch batting practice, and when I got to the mound, all the Pirate brass were sitting behind the batter’s box. I hadn’t warmed up, but I figured this was my chance to impress the brass. I was going to show them what I had. I threw as hard as I could, and by the end of that batting practice, my arm was dead.”
The Pirates released him, and his major league dreams were gone in a day. “That really messed me up,” he admits. He hadn’t planned a future beyond baseball and struggled for the next few years. In 1967 his life took on a new direction.
As a sergeant in Army intelligence, he earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam, married, got a degree in government from American University, and, after law school at the University of Maryland, became a director at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where one of his clients was Clarence Thomas.
Mr. McDowell in 1963 was controlling one kind of wildness but not another. He has admitted for years that he started drinking early and often. He wanted to impress his older teammates.
Despite Mr. McDowell’s description of himself in those years as the meanest drunk, he had a remarkable career: six All-Star games, Sports Illustrated Pitcher of the Year in his 1970 20-win season, and 2,453 career strikeouts.
After holding out for more money in 1971, though, Mr. McDowell slumped and Cleveland traded him to San Francisco. The New York Yankees paid cash to get him in 1973, and by 1975 he was a free agent.
In one of the final ironies of the Cleary-McDowell rivalry, Mr. McDowell signed with the Pirates and spent his final days at Forbes Field, not far from Central Catholic. While he pitched reasonably well for two months as a reliever, the Pirates, as they had with Mr. Cleary, let him go.
The real Sam and Joe
Like Mr. Cleary, Mr. McDowell had trouble adjusting. His marriage failed, he went into debt, and by 1979 he was living in the basement of his parents’ Pittsburgh home.
His drinking was widespread enough that he became the model for the alcoholic ex-pitcher Sam Malone on the television show “Cheers.” After Gateway Rehab gave him the tools to get sober, he enrolled at Pitt, getting associate degrees in sports counseling and addiction, helped other ballplayers get sober and eventually established a community in Clermont, Fla., for retired players.
At the end of the final segment of “To Tell the Truth” on June 16, 1960, Collyer issued the directive, “Will the real Sam McDowell please stand up.” The tall teenager in the middle who stood up wasn’t the real Sam McDowell any more than the real Joe Cleary was the 20year-old eager to impress the Pirates brass.
The real Sam and the real Joe would emerge only after their playing days were over.