Buehrle dependable from the start
The pitcher is 22 years old. He is being paid $225,000 (U.S.) in his first full season as a major-league ballplayer. To everybody’s astonishment, he has become the accidental ace of the Chicago White Sox starting staff.
It’s a job that was supposed to be assumed by David Wells, acquired in a trade from Toronto. But Boomer has been plagued by back woes.
So along comes this unassuming upstart, half a year’s experience throwing out of the bullpen, with a homely fastball that can be timed on a sundial.
One day a reporter asks the kid about Wells, how the veteran’s presence, if re-signed, might impact on the near-rookie’s immediate future. And because the pitcher is still a raw naif, he answers forthrightly. “He’s getting older, so he might be out of here in a little bit.”
Mark Buehrle meant no disrespect. Wells, in fact, had been a mentor: lefty to lefty.
Barely into his 20s, Buehrle couldn’t foresee a time when he would be in Wells’ shoes — long in the tooth, worn down, called “Papa’’ by the young stud he’s tutored in the ways of big-league moundsmen, and maybe himself “out of here in a little bit.”
Friday in Tampa might be the last we see of Buehrle as a Blue Jays starter on the hill, unless manager John Gibbons, who’s practically engaged in a bromance with his good ol’ boy southpaw, tosses Buehrle a sentimental lifeline and allows him one more mini-start Sunday, the last day of the regular season, on less than 48 hours rest. If 200 innings is still within reach. If he doesn’t go 82⁄ innings Friday
3 night — an awfully tall order — that would get him to 200 for a 15th consecutive season.
Gibbons says he’s leaning that way. It might be all he can offer.
Not like Buehrle is going to blow out his arm or anything. Even less likely that he’ll be included in the post-season starting rotation. He has become, with startling suddenness, over matter in Toronto’s pitching considerations, not assured yet even of a spot in the bullpen, which he hasn’t inhabited since Year One: 2000.
The young Buehrle emerges from his past in the sports pages of old Chicago newspapers. Here he is as a scrubeenie, a 38th-round draft pick, called up by the White Sox in July, 2000, 511⁄ innings of work that year 3 — the last and only time he’d be below 200 — posting a 4-1 record in middle relief. And here he is at spring training the following year, natural brown hair bleached highlighter yellow, a dye job gone bad he admitted. “I used some L’Oreal stuff. I paid the consequences for it.”
Yup, he got to fluorescent locks a decade and a half before Marcus Stroman — his mentee — discovered his inner flaxen.
But after three wins and a 0.95 ERA, superstitious teammates won’t let Buehrle either change the colour or simply shave off the whole mess. “They told me I’ve been pitch- ing well with the blond hair, so I can’t change it now.”
Hard to imagine Buehrle, the way we’ve known him in Toronto, all shaggy and, well, middle-aged, as experimentally young.
Yet the description of how he plied his craft, from those days to these, hasn’t changed at all. Pinpoint control, changes of speed, excellent mechanics, “slop-slinging.” Could always throw strikes.
“I used to go to carnivals when I was a little kid and I was always knocking the milk bottles down and stuff like that,” he told one scribe.
He would always throw briskly — the least time between pitches. Endlessly relaxed. “He’s as cool as a fan when it comes to pitching,” slugger teammate Frank Thomas once observed, unusual because he never hung out a Do Not Disturb sign on pitching days. “You really can’t tell which day he’s pitching. He doesn’t put a game face on.”
Here’s Buehrle the five-time allstar, the four-time Gold Glove winner, the no-hit game versus Texas, the perfect game versus Tampa Bay, the World Series champion. The active leader in games started. Will it end at 492? When the Jays clinched at minimum a wild-card berth last week- end, Buehrle side-stepped most of the clubhouse hoopla, went and made himself a sandwich. The following day, probably his last start at the Rogers Centre — six innings, no decision — he rejected sentimentality, claimed he had not even made his mind up yet whether to pull the retirement plug. Asked if his career resume had earned him a slot in the playoff rotation, he refused to bite. Indeed, he was the most honest voice in the room: “Um, I mean they can look at that. But I think they need to look at who’s throwing the ball the best right now, who’s feeling the best.”
That’s not him. And that’s baseball, at is harshest.
A couple of weeks earlier, rejoining the team in Boston after getting a cortisone shot in Toronto — his start pushed back, though he’s never missed one, never spent a single day on the DL all these years — Buehrle sounded only a tiny bit melancholy. “I feel I’ve always been, I guess, the guy that’s counted on to go out there every five days. Now I’m getting skipped for some other guys. So it’s a kick in the stomach, a little bit, just realizing that age and innings maybe is starting to catch up.” Whether we see him on the bump again or not: Here’s lookin’ at you, Mr. Buehrle.