Reese Kaplan -- Hated Mets Relievers Part 4 of 4

I’ve always had a soft spot for guys who throw trick pitches, whether it’s a folly floater, a screwball, a knuckleball or a submarine style pitcher.  It’s a totally different look to befuddle batters and often leads to great success due to the great change in velocity or the sheer uniqueness of the spin or the delivery.  Some of them are even less stressful on the arm.  It makes you wonder sometimes why more people don’t embrace one of these weapons for their arsenal given the great success possible when you mix it up with the usual fastballs, changeups, curves and sliders.

The problem, of course, is that not only aren’t there many role models on whom to pattern your own effort, you also find that some of these trick pitches are difficult to control.  Teams have very little patience with folks who walk the ballpark, and thus the early goodwill built by reliever Doug Sisk turned him from reliable setup guy and occasional closer to someone who was booed so mercilessly that the manager went so far as to only use him in games on the road to help him avoid the hostility at home.

Once upon a time Doug Sisk was an asset in the Mets bullpen.  From ages 24 to 26 working exclusively in relief, Sisk posted a not-too-impressive 6-8 record over a 125 game intro the majors he owned a sparkling 2.12 ERA.  People simply were not hitting him.  Even during that prime period of his career he was walking too many and fanning too few – 117 free passes in 190 IP with only 69 strikeouts.  However, he yielded just 7 hits per 9 IP and only 0.1 HRs per 9 IP, a fine testament to the sinking action of his sidearm delivery.  With that kind of work keeping people from scoring it seemed like he could be a part of the bullpen future.

In his first full season with the Mets in 1983 he was in the bullpen when Tom Seaver made a triumphant return to the Mets, going mano a mano against none other than Steve Carlton after his six-year exile to Cincinnati.  When Seaver started fatiguing in the 7^th inning, Sisk was summoned into the scoreless game for the final three frames.  The Mets rallied to score 2 runs to take a 2-0 lead and Sisk let a few men on in the 9^th as would be typical of his appearances, but he managed to get Mike Schmidt to fly out and Tony Perez to whiff to earn his first major league victory.   

Pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre once said, “We use to use Sisk to get to Orosco.  Now they’re both game enders.  Doug’s sinker explodes. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect him of throwing a spitter.”

There were certainly signs that this tightrope walking act couldn’t last forever.  In his 1984 season during which he delivered a 2.09 ERA he was walking an alarming 6+ batters per 9 IP.  Then in 1985 the wheels came off completely.  His ERA ballooned to 5.30 and the walks continued to pile up.  Arm troubles surfaced for the first time since he was in school (which, ironically, led him to the sinking sidearm pitch in the first place).  He felt he couldn’t get the action on the pitch which was sometimes erratic but always down explosively somewhere around the plate. 

In 1986 and 1987 Sisk was forced to pitch exclusively out of the stretch due to his ailing shoulder and could not get the full windup going anymore.  Ironically he posted his best strikeout numbers and reduced the walks, but by then he was a pariah.  In one hate mail letter posted to Sisk it said, “Take one Tylenol and one cyanide capsule – per day!”

After the World Championship season of 1986 Sisk managed to hang on for one more go in a Mets uniform before he was dispatched to Baltimore for one lackluster season. He then missed the entire 1989 season and most of 1990 due to surgery on both knees.  His career ended in Atlanta in 1991 during which he appeared in just 14 games and was out of baseball at age 33.

Nicknamed “Risk” for his propensity to put any lead into jeopardy, it was so bad that manager Davey Johnson got a Rolaids commercial due to the stress level watching Sisk perform on the mound.  He was one of the triumvirate of players affectionately known as the “Scum Bunch” along with Orosco and Danny Heep who controlled the back of the airplanes (including the infamous flight which caused a ban from United Airlines due to the $7500 in damages the players caused in a booze, cake and coke-fueled bacchanalia.   

It was perhaps best summed up by a fan who once quipped, “Sisk is the only pitcher I know who would walk the bases loaded and throw a double play grounder to get out of it.”  That, in a nutshell, is the man the fans loved to hate.