Out of a Job, but Not Missing a Beat
Ann Johansson for The New York Times
Scott Radinsky, who owns a skateboard park in Simi Valley, Calif., was in his first season as Cleveland’s pitching coach.
By HILLEL KUTTLER
Published: August 25, 2012
Scott Radinsky pitched for four major league teams from 1990 to 2001. A left-handed reliever who appeared in 557 games, Radinsky compiled a 42-25 record, a 3.44 earned run average and 52 saves. In 2004, he began working his way up the coaching ranks for the Cleveland Indians, serving as a pitching coach for four of their minor league teams. In 2010, he became the Indians’ bullpen coach, and this year, he was put in charge of the pitchers. But six days after a reporter interviewed him in Cleveland, Radinsky was home in California, without a job and pondering his next move. And he was being Radinsky, which means being engagingly different, as this two-week account demonstrates.
TUESDAY, AUG. 7 From the cushioned bench in the Cleveland Indians’ third-base dugout, Scott Radinsky periodically leaned forward and twisted his neck toward left field. His hurlers were engaging in pregame stretching, but Radinsky was being a real father, not a figurative one. He was monitoring his 9-year-old son — also named Scott, and wearing an Indians uniform — while he shagged fly balls.
Progressive Field was quiet, making it easy to converse. Later, Radinsky would jog to center field to check on the previous night’s starter, Zach McAllister, who had been a third-out grounder from escaping the second inning down, 2-1. Instead, an infield error led to three hits, a walk and McAllister’s departure. The ensuing 10-run inning propelled the visiting Minnesota Twins’ 14-3 rout.
Radinsky was asked how a young pitcher rebounds from deflating errors and what he had told McAllister during a mound visit. “You watched it — whatever I said didn’t matter,” Radinsky said. “You just push the reset button. It’s like the calluses you build; they help you get better.”
The Indians held the American League Central Division lead on May 28, but a prolonged slump, inexperienced starting pitching and a league-worst earned run average sent them tumbling. Still, as he spoke, Radinsky tried to project confidence in the work he had done. “I try to keep things on an upbeat level,” he said. “It’s what I like about the job: the challenge. I want to see these guys succeed.”
Radinsky grew up in California and was a third-round pick out of Simi Valley High School in 1986. That is a normal enough baseball profile, but Radinsky truly stood apart as a baseball lifer. Try to imagine other veteran arm gurus — Dave Duncan, for instance — taking on side careers as a punk-rock singer and skateboard-park owner, both of which are part of the Radinsky résumé.
In fact, as he prepared for that night’s game in glorious summer weather, he stood in both age (44) and attitude as the major leagues’ youngest pitching coach.
But just two days later, Ruben Niebla would inherit Radinsky’s job. Radinsky would be slowly driving home toward Los Angeles.
FRIDAY, AUG. 10 West of Cleveland, near Gary, Ind., Radinsky did not need Interstate 80 to clear his mind. Speaking on a phone to the same reporter with whom he had sat on Tuesday, he sounded neither angry nor consumed by self-pity over being fired 111 games into his first season as pitching coach. A quarter-century in professional baseball has inoculated him to its fickleness. Coaches sprout calluses, too.
Manager Manny Acta had interrupted Radinsky’s breakfast on Thursday to summon him to a noon meeting. Radinsky stepped into Acta’s office and saw General Manager Chris Antonetti sitting there. The gig was up.
An Indians affiliation that began with Radinsky’s final major league pitches in 2001 had suddenly ended. Acta and Antonetti shook Radinsky’s hand, wishing him well. Radinsky asked a clubhouse attendant to ship personal items from his locker, then returned to his apartment.
“We’re going to find a new team,” Radinsky said he told his son.
“Oh, cool. Can I still like the Indians?” the boy said.
“Yeah, you can.”
“Well, what’s the new team going to be?”
“I don’t know yet, buddy, but we’ll find out soon.”
“I’m totally fine, man,” Radinsky said as he talked on the phone. “I’ve never really been through this situation before.” But, he added, “I know how it works.”
He was driving alone. His family — his wife, Darlenys, the sister-in-law of Ozzie Guillen, a former Radinsky teammate; and his three children — had flown back to California from Cleveland, leaving him time to think, talk, look ahead. In other words, to be Radinsky, which is to be calm and introspective, almost beatific.
He said that he would ponder his employment options when other jobs opened after the season and that he wanted to remain in baseball. But crossing into Illinois, he had no schedule. He figured he would reach his home in Thousand Oaks within five days. But if musician friends in Denver were playing when he passed through, he might pull up a chair and linger.
“I loved it,” Radinsky continued, thinking about Cleveland. “I was surrounded by awesome baseball people. I made some good relationships.”
He said he was happy about closer Chris Perez’s two All-Star selections, Vinnie Pestano’s emergence “into one of the best setup guys in baseball” and the ex-Met Joe Smith’s career turnaround. Rising as a coach through the minors alongside left-handed reliever Tony Sipp and witnessing Sipp’s development was “the most gratifying thing in the world,” he said.
Radinsky taught pitchers “to trust in your stuff” rather than work to hitters’ weaknesses. Derek Lowe, who pitched for Cleveland this season before joining the Yankees, said, “That’s the biggest thing he tried to instill in us.” Lowe added: “He’s not a big numbers guy. We didn’t have a lot of meetings. I respected that.”
Two days before Radinsky was fired, Acta and the Indians’ president, Mark Shapiro, had lauded his competitiveness, communication skills and optimism in separate interviews. They admired Radinsky’s fortitude as someone who battled cancer while pitching for the Chicago White Sox in the 1990s.
But by then, Radinsky’s fate was probably sealed.
SUNDAY, AUG. 12 By Saturday, Radinsky had reached the Rockies. By now, he had nearly traversed Utah.
In another phone conversation, he said the cross-country drive home reminded him of concert tours he had taken as the lead singer with bands called Scared Straight, Ten Foot Pole and Pulley, his current group.
Pulley operates around baseball’s off-season and everyone else’s day job: airplane mechanic, parks department employee and crew member for another band. In high school, the band Radinsky formed eventually kicked him out early in his baseball career because he was not around enough. Now, of course, that would not be a problem.
Radinsky was happy to have a reporter tag along telephonically. Passing Illinois cornfields on Friday, he had mentioned “Field of Dreams.” His cinematic association on Sunday was “Cobb,” about the aging former Tiger’s transcontinental drive with the ghostwriter Al Stump.
Radinsky’s first major league manager was Jeff Torborg, who in his own telephone interview remembered him as “a young, aggressive athlete,” a “raw, strong, hard-throwing kid — a free spirit.”
He said Radinsky’s life “really changed” when he contracted non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, missed the 1994 season and helped coach his high school team. “I didn’t think he’d want to stay in the game — his interests were so wide,” Torborg said. “He was never afraid. You could take him into Yankee Stadium and have him face Don Mattingly, and it would not faze him.”
MONDAY, AUG. 13 Ninety minutes from home, Radinsky said he had to shake his head at the way things had turned out. Before he was fired, his family had planned to fly home from Cleveland and then rejoin him as the Indians traveled to California to play the Angels and the Athletics. Now they would all stay put in Thousand Oaks.
But he insisted he was not feeling down as his sudden joblessness sank in. “Everything that happens is just kind of a leap on the lily pad, just another steppingstone,” he said in that fallback reflective mode of his. “Everybody moves on, everybody finds their place. That’s why life’s not a mystery.”
His earlier-than-expected off-season routine meant a three-school car pool; daily visits to Skatelab, his skating park with its own hall of fame; and band practice on Monday and Thursday nights.
Radinsky grew up using a skateboard as a means of transportation. “We’d go everywhere,” he said. “When you’re kids, it’s freedom.”
In the mid-1990s, his band played a concert in an indoor skateboard park. Which got him thinking. Less than a year later, he and a friend had opened their own and then attached a museum to it. And now it had more than 4,000 items, including Radinsky’s old skateboards.
“I can either be at the beach tonight and watch the sun go down, or have a barbecue in my backyard. I haven’t quite decided which it’s going to be,” he said as he neared his house. In some ways, it sounded better than watching the Indians.
TUESDAY, AUG. 21 Radinsky’s first week back home ended up including both the beach and barbecues and singing into a towel to exercise his vocal cords before band practice.
Family time had its limits, though. Radinsky decided to skip an outing at Dodger Stadium, saying he did not want to attend games, at least not yet.
But baseball was not far away. Radinsky said he was “waiting to see” what jobs would open up and that he would “absolutely look for a major league job first.”
“If I get fortunate to land one of those, I’ll pick up where I left off,” he added. “I got four months to do what I prepared myself eight years to do. Four months.”
He would like more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/sport ... wanted=all
