The newest members of the Baseball Hall of Fame will be revealed on Tuesday, and three overpowering aces of the 1990s — Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz — seem certain to be cast in bronze in Cooperstown.
Among them, they made 26 All-Star teams and won nine Cy Young Awards. They collected 735 victories and 11,113 strikeouts. Some of the game’s greatest hitters quaked in their presence.
Not Mickey Morandini.
Morandini was a second baseman for 11 seasons in the majors. He once turned an unassisted triple play, and Baseball-Reference.com lists his nickname as Dandy Little Glove Man. He never hit .300 in a season, but when he faced those pitchers, he became Rogers Hornsby. Morandini stepped into the box more than 100 times against Smoltz, Martinez and Johnson and hit .352.
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“There’s just certain pitchers you pick up the ball well against and certain pitchers you don’t,” Morandini said Monday from his home in Pennsylvania. “I can name a handful of pitchers who threw probably 75 or 80 miles an hour, and I couldn’t sniff them. I can’t tell you how many ground balls to second I hit off Bob Tewksbury.”
It is one of baseball’s endearing charms that an otherwise ordinary player can sometimes own a legend. Over three starts in 1965, at the height of his powers, Sandy Koufax was flummoxed by a jocular backup catcher for the Cardinals. The catcher went 5 for 6 with a double and a home run off Koufax in those games, and then Koufax walked him intentionally.
The catcher’s name? Bob Uecker.
Morandini was a better hitter than Uecker, who turned his .200 average into a career in comedy and broadcasting. Morandini, a Class AAA coach who aspires to manage in the majors, batted .268 for his career. He appeared in the All-Star Game in 1995 as a backup to Craig Biggio, who could also be elected on Tuesday.
But while Morandini could handle Smoltz (.344), he was hopeless against Tewksbury (.133). He faced Martinez 30 times and hit .370. He faced Omar Daal 30 times and hit .185. He could always turn on fastballs, he said.
“It was a gift, I guess,” Morandini said. “A lot of repetition, a lot of work.”
The games against Smoltz and Martinez, though, were more fun than work. Mariano Duncan, a right-handed hitter who was Morandini’s teammate with the Phillies, could not touch Smoltz’s slider and dreaded the thought of facing him. Morandini, a left-handed hitter, would play instead and hack at the first fastball.
“Normally when Smoltz got me, he had a good split-finger, and on days when he also had that slider working and it was really sharp, he’d give guys fits,” Morandini said. “That’s why you never wanted to be up there with two strikes off him.”
Smoltz was a master of the postseason, 15-4 in his career, but his first loss came to Morandini’s Phillies in the 1993 National League Championship Series. Smoltz fanned 10 but allowed two unearned runs and a pivotal single to a pitcher, Danny Jackson. Before he could pitch a seventh game, the Phillies won the series in six when Morandini knocked out Greg Maddux with a triple.
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That was also the season Morandini first faced Martinez, before Martinez was traded from the Dodgers to the Expos for Delino DeShields. Morandini would often face Martinez in the N.L. East and remembers how Martinez’s curveball and changeup improved in Montreal, how he learned to pitch and not just throw heat.
Morandini also remembers a brawl when Martinez charged the mound against Mike Williams, firing his helmet in a rage.
“Pedro was just wild enough that you couldn’t get comfortable at times,” Morandini said. “He’d put you on your butt any time he wanted to, and then when he went to the A.L. and didn’t have to hit, he could do it at will.”
Still, Morandini’s fastball-hunting plan often worked. It was less effective against Johnson, whom he faced while playing for the Cubs in 1999. A right-handed hitter, Gary Gaetti, had become ill, putting a reluctant Morandini into action.
“As frightening as it was for some right-handers to face Pedro and Smoltz, that’s how frightening it was for me to face Randy,” Morandini said. “He was dealing. I don’t even think I swung in my first at-bat because I really didn’t see it.”
Yet somehow, after that strikeout, Morandini pulled a first-pitch triple down the right-field line in his next at-bat. His reward: a starting assignment against Johnson the next time the Cubs faced the Diamondbacks. Morandini went 0 for 3 with a walk that day but did not strike out.
Johnson led Arizona to a championship in 2001 with help from Curt Schilling, a teammate of Morandini’s in Philadelphia who is also up for the Hall. The voters have a blind spot regarding Schilling, who has not topped 40 percent in his first two appearances on the ballot despite the best strikeout-to-walk ratio of the 20th century.
“He thrived in big games,” Morandini said of Schilling, who was 11-2 in the postseason. “That’s what he lived for.”
One of the biggest games of Morandini’s career, at least at the time, was on Sept. 8, 1998, when Mark McGwire trotted right by him as he rounded the bases on his 62nd home run. It broke Roger Maris’s single-season homer record and was heralded as an epic moment.
Now McGwire, who has never received even 25 percent of the vote, is in danger of falling off the ballot. Like other giants of the time — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens — McGwire has ties to steroids that give him little hope of election.
“It’s tainted,” Morandini said. “It’ll always be tainted. There were some of the best athletes to ever play the game in that era, but are they Hall of Famers? Probably, by their stats. But there will always be some issues with what went on, and a lot of those guys obviously aren’t going to make it.”
Still, some players will make it on Tuesday, most likely that group of aces. They all achieved excellence, and they all felt the wrath of a dandy little glove man named Mickey.
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