Sometime after the Braves hired Leo Mazzone in 1979 to be a pitching coach within their organization, he went to see Johnny Sain.
Sain won 20 games four times for the Boston Braves between 1946 and 1950, helping lead the team to the 1948 World Series. Later, Sain embarked on a successful second career as a pitching coach. So many of the best pitchers of the 1960s crossed paths with Sain, from Whitey Ford to Jim Kaat to Denny McLain.
By the time Mazzone met him, though, Sain was living out of an RV in West Palm Beach, Fla., with only one more brief stint in the majors ahead of him.
“Johnny was a little bit of a rebel,” Mazzone told Sporting News recently from his Anderson, S.C., home. “He believed in throwing a lot and running a little. He believed in hanging with his pitchers only. He believed in making pitchers first-class citizens.”
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Going against the grain in any profession, be it baseball or a traditional office job, can have severe costs — though Sain’s misfortune proved a bonanza for Mazzone.
“Leo, I’ve been looking for somebody to take all of my information,” Sain told Mazzone. “Understand it, use it, do whatever you want with it.”
Sain added something else, though: “There’s a lot of people that don’t want it.”
So many years later, Mazzone knows all too well what Sain meant.
In October, Mazzone will have been out of baseball for a decade, fired by the Orioles in 2007 after a disastrous two-year stint as pitching coach. Before this, Mazzone had a 16-year run as pitching coach of the Braves, developing hurlers such as Tom Glavine, John Smoltz and Steve Avery and taking others such as Greg Maddux to greater heights.
Much like Sain, the greatest coaching mind of his generation has been exiled. At 68, Mazzone’s chances of getting back in the game are slim, too.
But it’s not too late for the Baseball Hall of Fame to rediscover either man.
Cooperstown chances: 25 percent for Mazzone, 20 percent for Sain
Why: It’s difficult for managers to get in the Hall of Fame, with just 23 men enshrined as managers. For whatever reason, though, it’s been impossible thus far for coaches to get inducted, even if cases could be made for a variety of men from Mazzone and Sain to hitting guru Charlie Lau to Tony LaRussa’s longtime pitching coach, Dave Duncan.
Players who had mixed runs as coaches are Hall of Famers, from one-time Dodgers hitting coach Babe Ruth to Honus Wagner, rescued from poverty during the Great Depression with a coaching job from the Pirates. But, of course, Ruth and Wagner and other coaches such as Rogers Hornsby are in Cooperstown strictly for their playing contributions.
At some point, if the Hall of Fame wants to break the mold a little, Sain or Mazzone wouldn’t make a bad first coach inducted.
Mazzone recalled the sessions in Sain’s RV in West Palm Beach, not long after the men met. Sain would cook cornbread and beans and the men would sip vodka and talk pitching into the night.
Mazzone quickly realized about Sain “that he was the most intelligent man I ever heard when it came to talking about pitching and talking about the common sense of keeping arms healthy.”
Sain taught Mazzone his methods.
“He basically had this entire system based on throwing more often, with less exertion and (with more) changing speeds,” Mazzone said. “He didn’t care how hard a guy threw and I didn’t care how hard a guy threw.”
Sain eschewed much of the conventional pitching wisdom in baseball, such as flat-footed long-tossing by pitchers from the foul line to the middle of the outfield. Mazzone despises this practice to this day.
“You practice your craft at 60 feet, 6 inches going downhill to a catcher,” he said.
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Sain taught Mazzone that there were five ways to get a hitter out: stuff, movement, change of speeds, location and motion. He taught Mazzone about how pitchers could control their fastballs, how to cushion their elbow, the least amount they could take off on a change of speed and so much more.
Mazzone began to employ Sain’s methods to great effect in the minors, where he had much success keeping arms healthy. Greater successes awaited him in Atlanta, where Mazzone became the Braves’ pitching coach in 1990.
Some of Mazzone’s methods in Atlanta remain well-known. In short, it was all about getting pitchers to throw more often, with less exertion.
Mazzone operated a voluntary one-week camp prior to spring training each year, Camp Leo. In addition, in modifying Sain’s system to accommodate a five-man rotation — which had become popular in the 1980s — Mazzone had pitchers throw an extra day on the mound.
Great employees can only go so far without a good boss, though. Mazzone found one in the Braves’ manager for his entire run with the team, Bobby Cox.
The Braves were the last team in the majors to relent to pitching counts, Mazzone said. Cox didn’t want them up on the scoreboard. For team purposes, Mazzone had a clicker in hand and would cheat on pitching counts, not counting intentional walks or one-pitch pop-ups.
“I used a common sense pitch count in my head, not the exact number,” he said.
Cox didn’t care, beyond being known to ask Mazzone on occasion what the real pitch count was for a hurler who’d been in the game awhile.
Then there was John Smoltz.
Smoltz began the 1991 season 2-11, before going 12-2 over the rest of the season and helping carry the Braves to the 1991 World Series. Smoltz famously went to see sports psychologist Jack Llewellyn at the All-Star break that year. But Mazzone said Cox is the No. 1 reason Smoltz is in the Hall of Fame.
Some people wanted Smoltz out of the rotation at the 1991 All-Star break. Mazzone wouldn’t hear of it. Nor would Cox, who had the power to make the change.
“Bobby Cox said, ‘John Smoltz is the best 2-11 pitcher I’ve ever seen,’” Mazzone said. “Then he gave Smoltzie the chance to go back out there in the second half and he gave him the opportunity to start. John took off and the rest is history.”
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Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine mirrored Smoltz by going to Cooperstown after innumerable successful years with the Braves. Many other pitchers from Denny Neagle to Kevin Millwood to Kent Mercker had the best years of their careers in Atlanta.
“Everybody says, ‘... Mazzone had success because he had those three guys.’ No, no, no, no,” Mazzone said, referring to Glavine, Smoltz and Maddux. “There was a whole lot more to it than those three guys. And we had the third guy after we’d been to the World Series twice.”
After the 2005 season, Mazzone joined the Orioles, with childhood friend Sam Perlozzo serving as manager.
Mazzone knew the first week of spring training that he’d made a mistake. Team brass wouldn’t let Mazzone hold Camp Leo. The Orioles’ system had few prospects. He never got a meeting, in his two years with the organization, with mercurial team owner Peter Angelos.
Today, Mazzone does pitching seminars across the country, decrying the emphasis on velocity, the pressure to throw hard that he believes is wrecking too many arms.
Certainly, pitchers such as Maddux didn’t need overpowering speed to thrive.
“Maddux said it best one time when he got a group of young pitchers together in spring training,” Mazzone said. “He said, ‘You know why I’m a millionaire?’ He said, ‘Cause I can throw my fastball where I want to.’ He said, ‘You know why I got beachfront property in LA? Because I can change speeds. Thanks, Leo. Thanks for letting me talk to the pitchers.’ That’s all he said and walked off.”
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Mazzone also serves as a special assistant to the coaches at Furman University and does a sports talk radio show at 9 a.m. EST every Saturday with 680 The Fan in Atlanta.
“It’s funny,” Mazzone said. “My career took the same thing as Johnny Sain’s career. You had your years in the big leagues and you had a lot of success for a lot of reasons, for a lot of good people that were around you. And then at the end — why was I meeting Johnny Sain and he was in the minor leagues?”
He believes, strongly, that Sain belongs in Cooperstown.
“There’s no question about it,” Mazzone said. “I think it’s a no-brainer. I think’s he’s not only one of the greatest baseball minds, but the greatest pitching mind in the history of the game.”
Of his own candidacy, he’s more reserved.
“When somebody mentions that, I about — to be honest with you, I about crap myself,” Mazzone said.