It’s a Dawgs life now for former Jays coach
OKOTOKS— Inside the Duvernay Fieldhouse, four young pitchers are testing their arms.
“Set!” commands the man in charge, brandishing a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke, intently watching the kids, studying their windups, releases, gauging arm strength.
“Relax! Go!” Then the familiar Thwak! Thwak! Thwak! Thwak! of baseball hitting glove. “Good. Good.” And again. “Set! Relax! Go!” Thwak! Thwak! Thwak! Thwak! And again. “Set! Relax! Go!” The man in charge sporting the spiffy Van Dyk is Bruce Walton.
Bringing big-league expertise, near two decades in the Toronto Blue Jays’ organization, to the Okotoks Dawgs’ baseball academy for the next couple of months.
“It’s basically the same,” reckons Walton, with a shrug. “Proper mechanics. Proper throwing motion. Keeping the arms healthy, at the same time building arm strength and creating a little more velocity.
“Same game. Still baseball. I’m still doing what I love to do — coach.
“Three days a week. It fits in my life right now because I want to be home, want to be with my family, but I still want to be involved in baseball. For the last 17 years I’ve been with the Blue Jays, the last 11 in the big leagues, and I want to bring all the knowledge that I’ve acquired over that time and bring it forward to these kids.”
After being brought out of the bullpen, Walton — who pitched in the majors for four organizations between 1991 and ’94 — was promoted to Jays’ pitching coach for three seasons, 2009 through 2012, helping the likes of Roy Halladay, Ricky Romero and A.J. Burnett.
On this Tuesday early evening, his second day on the new job, he’s working with the Dawgs’ bantam- age hurlers.
The idea is to help develop a Dawgs’ manual — including long-toss and off-season maintenance program — for the pitching department.
So how in tarnation does a fella from Bakersfield, Calif. with extensive majorleague baseball experience wind up 40 kilometres south of Calgary in early November helping out the academy of a collegiate summer team, anyway?
First, he weds a girl living in Calgary, is how.
Then, late this fall, after a word with a Toronto baseball writer giving him the goods on the Dawgs, the quick drive out to Okotoks for a cup of coffee with coach A.J. Fystro and managing director John Ircandia.
Then a tour of the facility and it all comes together.
“The Blue Jays made me a roving pitching coach and I went to Medicine Hat, my first professional coaching job. That season, 1988, I met a lot of people from Calgary. Then, the usual, a friend of a friend of a friend ... and the next thing you know I met my wife.”
So for the past 16 offseasons, Bruce and Katina Walton — now the parents of two children — have returned to Calgary, from October through February.
“My wife loves it here. She’s never leaving Calgary. This is our home.
“A piece of advice: Never take your wife somewhere she does not want to live.”
After stints pitching for three organizations — the A’s, Expos and Rockies — between 1991 and ’94, the lifelong baseball man finally realized a dream when the Jays’ promoted him out of the bullpen to pitching coach on Oct. 30th, 2009.
“You have to be a very selfish person,” he says of the coaching fraternity. “You’ve got to take time away from your family. From any kind of hobby you ever had. Fishing’s out. Golfing’s out. Basically you’re at the yard at 12. You’re studying hitters. The game starts.
“And you just keep doing it over and over and over, for 11 years straight.
“You’ve gotta be down to earth. You’ve got to be a one-day-at-a-time person. You can’t look at four months down the road, you’ve gotta look at how do we get better tomorrow. And you try and create a great atmosphere for all the pitchers so they perform, to their expectations and to our expectations.
“At times, that becomes very stressful.
“You’ve got guys making a lot of money, big contracts, who are expected to have good years. And they better have good years. If not, the finger-pointing starts. At the end of the day, it’s all about wins and losses.
“It’s a grind, a 162-game schedule over 180 days. You’ve got to keep guys strong, you’ve got to keep guys healthy for every start. You gotta have a short-term memory. And I was pretty good at that. Regardless of whether we got beat 30-1 or if we won 1-0 I came out the next day the same guy.”
Walton was among the over 20 million North Americans in front of his television set the night many old friends and allies — manager John Farrell, third-base coach Brian Butterfield, bench coach Torey Luvollo, coaching staff assistant Brian Abraham — celebrated a World Series victory with the Boston Red Sox over the St. Louis Cardinals.
“It was a lot of fun seeing those guys on TV, accomplishing something they — we all — set out to do a long time ago. Win a world championship. They did it a little quicker than I thought they would ... But they put so much time and hard work in, you had to feel great for them. Brian Butterfield, for instance, I’ve known him for 12 years.
“I let it kinda cool down but, yeah, I did text ’em. Texted ’em all. No, I didn’t get in the way of (Barack) Obama’s call (to Farrell). I figured their phone was rattling enough. But I dropped them a couple messages, saying ‘Congrats!’ ”
When the Blue Jays released him on November 26, 2012 it was the end a long relationship. But there’s no residue of bitterness on the part of Walton.
“I love the Blue Jays,” he says unequivocally. “I bleed blue. “Still. “Working with Roy Halladay, Chris Carpenter, Pat Hentgen, Scott Downs, Ricky Romero ... I can go on for days about all the hard work we put in and to see the kind of careers those guys had is really rewarding.
“Out of the bullpen, seeing Jason Frasor, someone I worked with a lot, we had a lot of talks, went through a lot of stuff together both good and bad, break the appearance record for the Toronto Blue Jays ... “That’s the satisfaction. “I mean, 17 years ... I’ve got a lot of friends, a lot of family, in Toronto.
“My kids” — from a first marriage — “grew up around all the front-office people there, the coaches. So we know ’em really well. The business side of it, I no longer work for them. But the personal side of it, they’re still all my friends.
“We had a lot of injuries that last year. The previous years we’d done a pretty good job but we just ran into a couple bad weeks. It happens. But it was a great ride. Seventeen years in that organization ... I can’t believe I lasted that long.
“The Blue Jays eventually gave me the chance to be a pitching coach in the big leagues. For that, I’ll always be grateful. The downside is, I don’t know anybody else in baseball.”
That Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! of baseball on glove has been stilled for the moment.
But there are more kids filtering into the Duvernay Fieldhouse, eager to learn from a major-league coach who’s worked with some of the best.
“This,” says Walton, “is a real good fit for me right now.
“I haven’t driven from Calgary to Okotoks in the snow yet, so I guess we’ll see how that goes. But it’s a great facility out here, with the diamonds outside, the locker-rooms, fantastic. The kids are gung-ho, excited about baseball.
“This last year I’ve spent every single day with my family. I’ve been able to barbecue. Sit out on the porch enjoying the nice Calgary weather. Going on family vacations. Those little things people who aren’t in baseball maybe take for granted.
“I’m kind of reinventing myself at little bit now, at age 50. I think my priorities are changing.
“I still love baseball. I always will. But I want to live the second half of my life enjoying other things.”