It’s unusual for a small child to have so many jobs, but John Smoltz did them all rather well.
“I was the pitching coach, the manager, the GM, the broadcaster and the star player,” Smoltz said.
He did them the same from his driveway in Warren to his family’s home in Lansing as a teenager, unwittingly preparing himself to take on the toughest moments baseball has to offer, while also carving out the opportunity to delight in its purest and simplest forms, all on the game’s biggest stage, as an adult.
“And I would always come out victorious,” he said.
There aren’t a ton of opportunities for Smoltz to have a new point of view within the sport, but he’ll have that Thursday while co-piloting the FOX broadcast of Major League Baseball’s inaugural game at the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, Iowa between the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox (7 p.m.).
Smoltz has braved the World Series on the mound and on the mic, came out a Hall-of-Famer in pursuit of the first endeavor, already has an Emmy to his credit as a broadcaster, and Thursday he’ll have his work ethic in both areas to thank for earning a true slice of baseball heaven.
MLB is presenting a genuinely new baseball experience, hand-delivered by the past, and it’s gotten Smoltz thinking a lot about his own field of dreams at St. Gerard Catholic School in Lansing, and a vision he’s trying to bring to life in his hometown.
Smoltz has renovated the trio of diamonds on St. Gerard’s property, and now it’s time to take it further. Soon, in the shadow of the state’s capitol building, will lie a brand-new field, created in the image of a bygone era, bearing his name.
He, too, is trying to move the game forward by looking back, starting with the place he grew up. Despite the notoriety surrounding his competitiveness, the Michigan-born Hall of Famer knows that unconditional love is what got him — and the game — here in the first place.
Drive and defiance
If you’re hearing somebody tell a John Smoltz story, there’s a good chance it has to do with him doing something crazy to get ahead as a player. The robotic persistence that drove him to a Hall-of-Fame career is well-known, and some of the examples can make a person wonder how he ever had any friends at all, growing up.
Smoltz’s best friend Chuck Casparilla can’t help but laugh when he thinks about the pingpong matches they had in their basements as kids. All 5,000 (at least), he said, were logged in a notebook, on Smoltz’s insistence.
It’s telling that the session he remembers most is one they didn’t log, at Smoltz’s home following Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, which started with Smoltz on the mound for Atlanta and ended with a pinch-hit single from Minnesota’s Gene Larkin to win it in the 10th inning, 1-0.
“It was his stress release,” Casparilla said.
Smoltz’s idea of relaxing is returning to a fire that no longer burns hot, or starting a blaze that one day will.
He used to take pingpong very seriously. In the right setting, he still does, but for the most part, it’s just another item on a long list of activities Smoltz has conquered to such a degree, that he doesn’t have to worry about being the best.
The morning after the Braves got their World Series title in 1995, most of the players were stapled to their bed by a hangover. But Smoltz, who would eventually make PGA Tour Champions after retiring from baseball, was not. He was out on the golf course at 9 a.m., already “onto the next thing,” Capsarilla said.
And therein lies the paradox that drove Smoltz to become one of the biggest names in baseball history: Everything that landed him there was out of love for the game, but it’s also clear that he, to this day, can’t stand second place in any regard, because he’s proven so many times that one doesn’t have to settle.
He worked like a madman, punctual with routine, perhaps unknowingly chasing the feeling that he had on the sidewalks in Warren and Lansing, the one where everything was simple and he would “always come out victorious.” He now does the same in the booth.
“He prepares to broadcast like he prepared to pitch,” FOX broadcast partner Joe Buck said. “He knows what each hitter is looking for and what pitchers would make them dangerous. That approach got him to the Hall of Fame on the mound, in my opinion, will someday do the same for his work in the booth.”
There was also a third element to Smoltz’s success: defiance.
He was an accordion player before his parents, both musicians themselves, put him into T-ball — and he was a darn good accordion player, too. But the love wasn’t there, and at the age of 7, Smoltz was returning from a contest in Chicago, which he won, when he put his foot down at a gas station near the family’s home in Warren.
“He said, ‘Mom, I didn’t ask to play that thing, I don’t want to play that thing,'” Smoltz’s father recalled. “He said, ‘I want to be be a Major League Baseball player.'”
Smoltz’s mother, Mary, regrets pointing out that the odds of that happening were “a million-to-one.”
“To this day, I am so sorry, because every time he said it, I tried to burst his bubble and say, ‘OK son, we need a backup plan,” Mary said.
The Smoltz patriarch laughed when remembering what his 7-year-old told told her that first time: “He said, ‘I’ll be a gas station attendant.'”
To his roots
Love first, work second, defiance third. That’s the approach Smoltz is taking to grow the game in a world that’s become too competitive for his liking, if you can even imagine that.
“Marmaduke,” as he was once known, would be the first to say that his work ethic landed him in the Hall of Fame, but the 1996 National League Cy Young Award winner realizes that the fact it developed naturally is maybe just as important.
He wasn’t being lugged around to weekly out-of-state tournaments or spending hours a week at a training facility, like 10-year-olds in today’s sports climate are. His training was play time.
Casparilla, Smoltz and the other boys in the neighborhood used to invent new games and reconfigure old ones. One summer evening before seventh grade, St. Gerard’s baseball coach, Carl Wagner, was driving by the Casparillas’ house. He lived a street over, and just couldn’t help himself when he saw his star pitcher throwing heaters with a whiffle ball.
Concerned that his star player might injure himself, he stopped.
“He goes, ‘Johnny, what are you doing? … you’re gonna hurt your arm,” Casparilla said. “And of course, Johnny looks at him and says, ‘Coach, I’m throwing left-handed.'”
“He kind of looked at him, and Johnny persisted to throw the ball left-handed and strike me out. (Wagner) got in his car, and went home.”
Strike one
He was once one of the most feared pitchers in all of baseball, and now, he admits, if he were to walk into St. Gerard today, “there wouldn’t be anybody, but maybe a few teachers that have crossed paths, that would know who I am.”
You’d also be hard-pressed to find a kid that knows the game he’s trying to sell as the next big thing.
“Strikeout” is a baseball mini-game beloved by the game’s older generation of players.
In a similar way that the rules of 1-on-1 basketball narrow the game down to make it more viable for a lack of teammates, “strikeout” does the same. It can be played by any number of players, and in lieu of having defenders, relies on where the ball is hit to dictate how many bases a batter has earned, and a rectangle on a wall behind the batter to determine whether the pitch was a strike.
Smoltz is partnering with “Strikeout Baseball USA” founder Jeff Lazaros to put the wheels into motion. The funding is still being sorted out, but the plans are all there for a new iteration of an old game.
“Hopefully the facility is going to get kids off the streets and be able to play a game that doesn’t have to be in a uniform, doesn’t have to be nine-on-nine,” said Smoltz, a onetime Tigers prospect. “Outside my house, on Maycroft, I would put the brick-wall strike zone right outside my house.
“I pitched in every seventh game imaginable on that sidewalk there.”
His father, also named John, believes this could be the start of something truly impactful. He envisions his son’s field being the first of many. He dreams of Derek Jeter possibly following suit in his hometown of Battle Creek.
But mostly, he’s just excited.
“Maybe a coach comes by and sees you fielding balls. ‘Hey kid, you ever played on a baseball team?'” the eldest Smoltz said. “I believe it could happen, and I am just pumped.”
Smoltz, his father, and Casparilla have shared this excitement as the idea comes together. They’ve all had a first-class seat on a journey to the big leagues, and know what it takes.
What’s most important, though, is that after all these years, none of them have forgotten that nobody ever won a World Series in MLB without first doing it in their driveway.
Nolan Bianchi is a freelance writer.