Mind Games

by Mike Newall

It's understandable that Burrell would blow off interviews, especially one for a story in a Philadelphia publication. What else can the angle possibly be but it? Talking to the press--any press--is no fun when things are going badly, which is an understatement of epic proportions when it comes to describing what Burrell has been going through this baseball season.

"Well shit, you can definitely hear it," he says when asked about the booing that came early in the season. "It's not like I'm standing up there and I can just block 'em out. Yeah, you hear it, but when you put on this uniform you have a responsibility to 25 guys, to the organization and to the city and fans. If they feel like I'm letting them down, well, that's motivation, that's not crawl in the hole and cry about it. You think, 'Maybe these motherfuckers are right. Maybe I have to step it up a bit.'"

Pat "the Bat" Burrell, the Phillies' 26-year-old left fielder, is four months deep into his personal hell of a baseball season, and somehow, someway, the city that booed such formidable and proven sluggers as Mike Schmidt and Del Ennis before him has yet to chew up and spit out this kid who's looked all summer like he'd be better suited playing wiffle ball in his backyard.

It's not just that the young, good-looking and extremely gifted native Californian who now lives in Center City and can be often spotted hanging out at places like the Irish Pub with a hottie by his side is in a slump. The man has lost his mojo. Not just misplaced it--lost it. All of it.

Worse, this was supposed to be the year--the season he would take the big leap from emerging star to superstar. Last year, with two seasons of big-league experience under his belt, the No. 1 draft pick from the University of Miami had what many consider a breakout season. He swatted 37 home runs and drove in 116 runs--seventh and third in the National League, respectively. The expectation was that those numbers would jump considerably this season.

Burrell was the future, and with a new stadium opening in 2004, the Phillies were ready to pay for it. The club signed him to a six-year $50 million contract extension in the off-season as part of a plan to restructure the team around its emerging young star.

High-priced acquisitions were made, millions doled out, all in an effort to win--and win now. And so far this season, despite Burrell's slump, the Phils have been doing just that a lot of the time. By the All-Star break in mid-July, the Phillies had knocked off an impressive 52 wins--the most by any Phils squad since 1993. The team began the second half of this season with a hold--however tenuous--on a playoff spot.

With winning, good vibes returned to the Vet. There was a no-hitter early, and a series of thrilling late-inning victories, and Phillies fans--cynics at heart from decades of losers and would-be contenders--slowly started to believe there could be a postseason.

Pat Burrell's season-long hitting funk has rendered him the worst hitter in the league. No other player with the minimum number of plate appearances required to qualify for the batting title has a lower average.

Hitting slumps are normal in baseball, especially among sluggers. But what separates Burrell's failings from other slumps--other than the shocking ineptness of his efforts--is both their longevity and the fact that they have no apparent explanation. He's not injured or inexperienced, and he doesn't seem emotionally troubled.

And still, there's a puzzling patience. Burrell may have heard his fair share of boos early this season, but the fans have switched tactics, greeting Burrell with ovations louder than those for any other player.

"They boo you when you're doing shitty," he says. "But you deserve it. They know what I am capable of doing, so it's frustrating for them. I'll go through a stretch where I don't get any hits for a week. But as bad as I've been these people have been behind me. It has been almost shocking at times."

It could be that with the team winning, it's a nicety they can afford. The boos didn't help, so maybe we're all trying to cheer him out of his woes.

The fans are no dummies. They realize that playoff success hinges greatly on Burrell getting it going in the late season.

"If we weren't winning I'd probably be hanging from the Ben Franklin Bridge," Burrell says.

But more than that, despite the misery he totes to the plate, Philadelphians seem to instinctively like this blue-collar kid from tiny Boulder Creek, Calif.

But can even the fans at the Vet cheer loud enough to help Burrell get his groove back?

It's the Fourth of July, and the Phillies clubhouse is appropriately festive. The team has won eight of its last nine games, and is still riding the high of the 12-2 drubbing it handed the Cubs.

Rap music booms throughout the room as Jose Mesa's kid shows his father the new cornrows shortstop Jimmy Rollins just styled for him. The clubhouse is a smaller and more intimate space than one might expect. Inside, the Vet is showing its age, and player accommodations aren't much better than what you might find at your local YMCA.

Despite the festive atmosphere, Burrell is nowhere to be found as his teammates prepare for batting practice a few hours before game time. In his unattended locker, behind his game-day jerseys and hanging street clothes, there's a framed autographed picture of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

For the second day in a row, his name is missing from the lineup board that hangs near the field entrance.

A dozen or so reporters pile into the small office where manager Larry Bowa waits, reclining in a leather chair, dressed in game pants and a T-shirt.

"He'll talk if he feels like it, and won't if he doesn't," says a reporter of Bowa.

The writers in the cramped room sit silent for a few minutes before one dares to pose the first of a few safe questions.

Ten awkward minutes pass--there's the feeling of the media trying to gather their courage--before someone dares raise the Burrell benching.

"I'm giving him a mental rest day, let him relax a bit," snaps Bowa. "I don't know how long I'll sit him. We've got to get him going in the right direction. We have tried everything. He's been putting in the extra work, watching the films. We've had X-rays done and given him a day off here and there, but nothing seems to be working. He's just going to have to turn it around himself."

Burrell has indeed been putting in extra work, including daily early batting practice sessions with Phillies hitting coach Greg Gross.

Still, the slump has progressed from bad to worse.

During April and May he hit a meager .199. Rock bottom appeared to come in June, when Burrell managed just 16 hits, one home run and four RBIs.

He began making adjustment after adjustment at the plate, changing his stance repeatedly. He even had his eyes checked.

But the strikeouts kept piling up.

Advice came from every direction.

"Relax."

"Lay off the outside pitch."

"Crowd the plate a bit more."

"Stop bobbing your head so much."

Mike Schmidt, who worked with Burrell in the past, prompted a few days of uncomfortable headlines in June when he once again offered his instructional services.

The sportswriters stopped biting their tongues.

"His game hack is about as flawed as a professional baseball player's swing can be," wrote veteran Daily News sports columnist Bill Conlin.

Some writers were beginning to wonder aloud whether a trip to the minors was in order. A particularly harsh scribe even compared Burrell, who had once been thought to have the potential of a Mark McGwire, to Bad News Bears sad sack Rudi Stein. Bears Coach Morris Buttermaker, you may remember, hoped Stein would let himself get hit by a pitch for the sake of the team.

Bowa's pregame press conference over, Burrell is still nowhere to be found. But the reporters remain intent on waiting him out. They stand whispering in the middle of the clubhouse floor.

After a few minutes, Burrell emerges from the trainers' room and brushes past the waiting writers.

One reporter whispers, "I'll go if you hold my hand."

Finally, an intrepid soul, notebook in hand, breaks from the pack, and the rest follow Burrell to his locker.

"I come to the park ready to play every day," says Burrell as he puts on his batting practice uniform, "Obviously it's disappointing, but maybe I'll see something different from the bench."

A coach sticks his head into the clubhouse and yells at Burrell to hurry it up. Stretching exercises are about to start.

When a writer asks another question, Burrell glares, "Guess you didn't hear the part about me having to stretch?"

The session over, the writers disperse and follow Burrell to the field.

There's a scene in Ron Shelton's classic baseball movie Bull Durham where the exasperated coach of the lowly Durham Bulls assembles his team in the showers and tells them, "This is a simple game. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball."

There may be truth in that statement, but hitting a major-league fastball may be the most difficult feat in professional sports. A batter has two-tenths of a second to decide whether he will swing at a pitch that's traveling toward him at upwards of 90 miles an hour.

To be among the elite who can hit balls thrown at that speed, major-leaguers their bodies in the weight room and dissecting game films. But once they step into a batter's box their reflexes take over, and they put good wood on the ball or they don't.

If a batter falls into a slump, mechanics are worked on in practice until the player pulls himself out of it.

It's when they begin to obsess on their mechanics that they can get themselves in real trouble.

"When a player begins to struggle, they tell themselves, 'It's all right. I'll pull out of this.' And when they can't, it becomes a confidence thing," explains Phils hitting coach Greg Gross, "You go into the box and your thinking becomes cloudy. You begin to analyze all the little things you've done your whole life as a hitter. The slump becomes mental. It becomes a head game."

"I had a year that I hit .240," recalls John Kruk, first baseman for the '93 division-winning Phillies and now a Phils broadcaster. "You get into a rut and you can't get out of it. You have guys offering advice, but it doesn't matter what anyone tells you. It's all mental. It's not anything physical. That's what a slump is--mental. You get to a point where you doubt that you can even hit, and you go up there thinking way too much. You're like, 'Where's my hands? Where's my feet? What am I doing? What am I looking for?' By then it's strike one. You just have to dumb down. Dumb down and do what comes naturally."

Harvey Dorfman, a leading sports psychologist, calls the phenomenon the "diamond-in-the-manure-pile disease."

Dorfman has worked with dozens of slumping major-leaguers. He envisions the diamond as the graceful act a slumping player has lost sight of. The manure pile represents the distracting thoughts that build in the player's head.

He says players can obsess themselves into the "manure pile" and lose the ability to perform even the most basic skills.

There was Mackey Sasser, a starting catcher for the New York Mets in the early '90s who became unable to throw the ball back to the mound after pitches.

And Steve Sax and Chuck Knoblauch, two all-star second basemen who developed problems late in their careers throwing the ball to first base.

Steve Blass was a 19-game winner with Pittsburgh in 1972, but walked 84 batters in 88 innings the next season and was forced out of the game. Something in his mind prevented him from throwing strikes.

Most recently there was Jonathon Johnson, a top pitching prospect in the Houston Astros organization. He started to develop severe control problems last season. Then earlier this month, during a minor-league game in New Orleans, Johnson walked off the mound and quit baseball after hitting a batter. It was his 13th errant pitch in just three innings.

"A player may get deep into a slump," explains Dorfman, "and begin to obsess over what the fans are saying, what their teammates think, their personal stats or their contracts. All those thoughts will slow down their reflexes and keep them from performing. It's like if their muscles could convene at night and have a few beers they would say, 'We'd be fine if these guys would just leave us alone.'"

Pat Burrell was neck high in Dorfman's "manure pile" when the Phils traveled to New York earlier this month to take on the Mets in a four-game series to close out the first half of the season.

A few days prior Dallas Green, a longtime baseball man and senior adviser to the Phillies, went on WIP sports radio and opined that Burrell "was in a complete fog at the plate," adding he could no longer "recognize a ball from a strike." Green declared that Burrell's batting problems could no longer be classified as a slump. It had become "a crisis."

In New York's Shea Stadium, Burrell was taking practice swings, awaiting his turn in the cage as a group of young autograph seekers hung over the Mets dugout and frantically called his name. He turned to them with a smile and put his finger to his lips in an effort to quiet them down.

Burrell hardly seems miserable during batting practice. His swing is easy and graceful, and he strokes pitch after pitch smoothly, sending some balls into the upper-deck regions of the left-field stands.

In the cage, his cool cockiness--which had long ago drowned in the swamps of his hitting funk--has returned.

It's easy to imagine him back at Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose, Calif., where his power stroke was so impressive that fellow students would come to watch him hit long drives that would scatter the shot-put team that practiced well beyond the left-field fence.

It's easy to see why Jim Morris, Burrell's manager at the University of Miami, called him the best hitter he'd ever seen in college ball.

It's just as easy to see why the Phillies were so eager to select Burrell first in the amateur draft in 1998 and lavish him with an $8 million signing package.

Watching him in the cage at Shea was like seeing the Burrell of the last two years.

Before all this, he wouldn't walk to the plate--he'd swagger up to it, dangling his bat at his side like an instrument of destruction.

He didn't just hit--he mashed.

He didn't just play left field--he inhabited it.

But this was just batting practice. Burrell would close out the first half of the season hitting a pathetic .196.

The night of July 19 was perfect for baseball. A week-long heat wave had finally broken a few hours before game time, and the air at the Vet felt far cooler than the announced temperature of 84 degrees.

On the field, the 1993 Phils were celebrating their "10th Anniversary Weekend," and the nearly 29,000 fans who came out to the park were greeted at the gates by John Kruk, Lenny Dykstra and a host of other players from that beloved team.

Burrell had spent the All-Star break vacationing in Phoenix, and it seemed the three-day rest had served him well.

Though he'd managed only one hit in the two games since the break, he appeared noticeably more comfortable at the plate. His at-bats didn't seem quite the pathetic affairs they'd been in the first half.

The left-field bleachers were filling up slowly as Burrell did his final pregame stretching some 10 minutes before the scheduled 7:05 start.

"Pat's going to be fine," said one college-aged fan attending the game with his girlfriend. "He's been working his ass off and is going to pull out of this any day."

"He's hot," added the girlfriend, who wore a Burrell jersey.

"I like the guy, seen him in the bars a bunch of times," continued the boyfriend, annoyed by his girlfriend's adulation. "I talked to him, bullshitted baseball with him. He's a down-to-earth guy."

It was a 3-2 ballgame in the fourth inning when Burrell stepped up for his second at-bat of the night.

Three batters earlier, Jim Thome, the slugging first baseman, brought the Phils within a run with a mammoth opposite-field home run.

Burrell was greeted with thunderous applause. He connected on a 2-0 fastball, hitting it about 350 feet. His home run tied the game and sent the crowd into a frenzy that didn't end until he popped his head out of the dugout for a curtain call.

After the game--which the Phils would eventually win in 11 innings--Burrell addressed reporters in the clubhouse, telling them that the All-Star break gave him a chance "to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'Let's get this shit together.'"

He interrupted himself when he noticed a bandage on an older reporter's forehead.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

"I fell down," replied the reporter.

"When?"

"Tonight, around 8:30."

"You must start hittin' it early."

In the clubhouse the next morning, Burrell's good humor has carried over. "You know hitting, the mental part about it anyway, is all about confidence, and if something isn't clicking for you it can throw you off all the way," says Burrell, sitting in a folding chair at his locker. "You start second guessing everything you're doing, and you got everyone trying to help you, and you get in the game, and you don't know who to listen to and who not to.

"It's a whole vicious fucking cycle," he continues, "You're thinking about too much stuff instead of just seeing that little white ball. It's like a domino effect. One thing goes, and then another and another, and pretty soon you're like, 'Fuck, get me out of here.'"

And then Pat Burrell gives what may be the biggest insight into the hell he's endured all season.

"You try and leave it here," he says. "But you know, you're sitting at home, the phone's ringing, and you don't even wanna pick it up. You don't want to talk about it."

Pat Burrell is looking for his checkbook. Just an hour earlier, he stood at the plate with his team trailing by two runs in the bottom of the ninth. He struck out to end the game, leaving the tying run on first base.

He's already in his street clothes--a powder blue designer suit--and his travel bag is ready to be loaded on the bus that will take the Phils to a charter flight to Chicago.

He's been rifling through his locker for about 10 minutes, and has now gotten the clubhouse attendant to help him search.

The writers wait patiently behind him.

"I got nothing for you boys until I can get this figured out," grunts Burrell. He then pushes through the pack of reporters and walks out of the clubhouse, leaving his bag behind.

A writer remarks that Burrell can now cross off another item from his "Ways to Avoid the Media" list.

After a few minutes, the clubhouse attendant comes over and picks up Burrell's bag.

The reporters continue to wait, but they soon find themselves all alone.

Pat Burrell has once again left the clubhouse.

Mike Newall (mnewall@philadelphiaweekly.com) is a PW staff writer.