Whitson Finds Calm Shores and Then Pitches Up a Storm

Street life and neon lights are not Eddie Lee Whitson’s style. Instead, give him a misty forest or a rippling lake or even a sand castle on the beach.

Most of all, give him friendly people. That’s what the folks were like back in Erwin, Tenn., where Whitson developed his idea of the good things in life.

Very few people would find parallels between San Diego and Eastern Tennessee, but Eddie Lee is one of them.

San Diego has everything he needs, including a major league baseball team. That is how he makes his living . . . pitching baseballs.

“You can’t get much more relaxed than I am,” he said. “We’re back where we belong. It’s nice and laid back. I’m really enjoying life, both on the field and off the field.”

His comfort level, quite likely, has much to do with the fact that he is among the winningest pitchers in the National League. He has eight victories for a team with only 25, a remarkable 32% of an entire pitching staff’s wins.

Statistics are nice, but the story behind the statistics is nicer.

This is a fellow who made a mistake that was not really a mistake, but nevertheless had to be undone for his sanity and the safety of his family. This is a fellow who enjoyed his best of seasons while pitching for the National League champion Padres in 1984. He was 14-8 with a 3.24 earned-run average. This was a fellow who parlayed that success into financial security--a five-year contract worth $4.5 million.

Unfortunately for Whitson, that contract was with the Yankees. It was unfortunate because the Yankees play in New York, and that was not Whitson’s kind of environment . . . not in the best of circumstances.

In the worst of circumstances, which Whitson encountered, it was threateningly unbearable.

“For me to be in New York,” he said, “was like a fish being out of water. I never went anyplace. I left home in New Jersey to go to the ballpark and went straight home after the games. It was like that for a year and a half. Definitely no fun.”

Why Eddie Lee Whitson? Who knows what pack mentality causes one man to bear the brunt of harassment as common as boos and as ludicrous as tacks under his tires? His won-lost record for his time with the Yankees was a more-than-respectable 15-10, albeit the earned-run average a pedestrian 5.38. Is there a trace of sensibility in driving a man into a shell because of an earned-run average?

This bad experience came to an end last July, when the Padres reacquired him in a trade that sent Tim Stoddard to New York. Whitson, his wife Kathleen and daughter Jennifer could not get to an airport fast enough.

The return to San Diego did not provide an instant elixir, at least on the field. The Padres were in a bit of turmoil and about to sink into the depths of the NL West. Whitson struggled along with everyone else on the team and finished 1-7 with a 5.59 earned-run average.

Spring is spring, however, and Whitson knew a new year would be better. It might even be like those not-so-old days of 1984.

“I wanted to get everything back together in a positive way,” he said. “I wanted to have another year like 1984. Baseball is 85% to 90% mental, and I had to get it together in my head. I had to have the confidence that I could do what I wanted to do.”

Whitson gathers his confidence in peaceful moments. He finds such moments plentiful in the off-season, which he now spends in Dublin, Ohio. He lives near Jack Nicklaus’ golf course at Muirfield, but does not subject himself to the exasperations of that game.

“I’m more into hunting and fishing,” he said. “When I’m out fishing, I don’t care if I catch anything or not. It’s the relaxation you feel. I go home and go white-tail deer hunting, and 80% of the time you’ll find me sleeping in the woods propped up against a tree.”

This man, you see, is laid back.

He was sitting in the Padre clubhouse one afternoon this week, a couple of days after he’d won his fourth straight game with a two-hitter over Houston. He was wearing a Bass Pro Shops cap and a T-shirt with a picture of a fish leaping from the water.

Life was the way he liked it to be.

Those simple pleasures were nice, but it was made all the better by the fact that his slider was snapping like the soaring fish on his T-shirt.

“Right now,” he said, “all of my mechanics are nice and compact. I don’t try to be an Einstein and go out there with 15 different pitches. I’m a four-pitch pitcher. If I can get four pitches over anytime I want, I can win.”

He can win, and is winning.

It’s natural to ask anyone pitching well at this time of the year about the All-Star game, but Whitson just smiled.

“It would be a great honor,” he said, “but I expect Tony Gwynn will be our only guy. I’ll take the three days off and probably go down to the beach with my little one to build sand castles.”

Eddie Lee Whitson can do that kind of thing in San Diego. He can do things with the family. He doesn’t have to hunker behind locked doors or check his driveway for nails and broken glass.

One day this week, in fact, he was even so bold as to go to the Del Mar Fair and walk the midway. Jennifer, 5, was naturally interested in acquiring a stuffed animal. Whitson noticed one of those booths with stacked milk bottles and baseballs.

Piece of cake, right?

“I didn’t knock down one of ‘em,” he laughed. “They must have had lead in the bottom.”

The most important thing, to Whitson, was that he was there with his family. They were “out among ‘em” and having a good time.

Whitson had forgotten all about those stubborn milk bottles by the time he was done knocking over the Houston Astros the next evening.

Priorities are priorities, and they are all falling into place for Eddie Lee Whitson these days.