One-on-One With Walt "Clyde" Frazier

Published in SBJ January 18, 2007

Walt “Clyde” Frazier, named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history, was a seven-time all-star, four-time first-team All-NBA, and two-time league champion with the New York Knicks, for whom he now serves as a television and radio analyst. In its documentary series, The 50 Greatest Moments at Madison Square Garden, the MSG Network has named Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals—in which Frazier had perhaps his finest performance—as one of the arena’s top five events. 

Q. In your book The Game Within the Game, you wrote, “Players are not born great. They have to develop a tenacious work ethic before they can succeed. “But Stephon Marbury said, “Point guards are born; they’re delivered by God. You can’t make point guards.” Whom should I believe: you or Marbury?

Frazier: You should believe Michael Jordan, who was cut from his high school team. He’s considered to be the greatest to ever play, but he was not good enough in the 10^th grade to make the team. Players are born tall, but they’re not born great. I never knew that I would be a pro player because I didn’t have a phenomenal talent. But I had a good work ethic and when I got an opportunity, I capitalized on it. Whereas some guys are so talented they rarely work on their skills. Those are the guys who have a very short career in the NBA.

Q. MSG is counting down its “50 Greatest Moments.” I have to think that Game 7 in the 1970 NBA Finals (Knicks vs. Lakers) is at or near the top. 

Frazier: Well, it’s No. 1 for me. 

Q. Bill Bradley called your performance “the best seventh game of any NBA player.”

Frazier: Unequivocally I had my greatest game ever: 36 points, 19 assists, seven ‘bounds, four steals.

Q. You remember those numbers. 

Frazier: I sold popcorn at half-time….

Q.  You wrote about the injured Willis Reed limping onto the court before that game: “The scene is indelibly etched in my mind, because if that did not happen, I know we would not have won the game.” Was it that much of an inspiration?

Frazier: Yeah, it was. It gave us so much confidence. Before the game, everyone was talking to Willis, wanting to know if he could play. I remember [Bill] Bradley saying, “Willis, just half of you would be more than anything anybody else could give us at that position. Try to play, man.”

Q. Reed hit the first two baskets of the game.

Frazier: A lot of people think it was premeditated, that we waited until that moment. But when we left the locker room, we had no idea he would play.

Q. It fired up the fans.

Frazier: That’s the other thing. The fans became so catalytic. Once they started cheering, I saw [the Lakers’] West, Baylor and Chamberlain mesmerized. They stopped doing what they were doing and were standing there staring at Willis. At that point, I said to myself, “We got these guys.” I felt so confident once I saw that.

Q. You wrote that the game is “more stagnant” now and described the “Swiss-cheese defense, clowning, and dunking that have become prevalent in the NBA game today.” Is there a prescription? How do you change that?

Frazier: It’s going to be difficult because when you have the influx of young players from high school or after one year of college, they’re still learning the nuances of the game. That’s why you rarely see the old-school style of basketball. These guys don’t know that. They’re enthralled with three-point shooting and the dunk. The mid-range jumper is becoming a lost art. Free-throw shooting is mediocre because guys don’t seem to practice it. 

Q. The job descriptions have even changed.

Frazier: When you slot people into a position—the point guard doesn’t shoot, the shooting guard doesn’t dribble—you’re making everybody a specialist. When I was a guard, I had to defend. I had to rebound. I had to shoot. I had to do everything. That was my job. But that’s not required in the players today.

Q. You were either a backcourt player or a frontcourt player.

Frazier: Right. So, you had more versatility than the players have today.

Q. You were the first player to sign a sneaker deal, back in 1971.

Frazier: With Puma. My first contract was five grand and all the sneakers that I wanted. In those days, nobody was getting paid. They would give you shoes, but they weren’t paying you to wear them. 

Q. Sebastian Telfair got a reported $18 million from Adidas after jumping straight from high school and before he played his first NBA game. 

Frazier: My highest contract…I probably ended up making $100,000 a year on the shoes. That was a lot of money then.

Q. You wrote that “The business of basketball can sometimes be at odds with the game of basketball.” What did you mean by that?

Frazier: If you go to the All-Star game, they’re promoting hip-hop and all this different stuff to sell tickets and cater the game to the young people. But when the [players] want to dress that way, they’re [told], “You can’t come to the game like this; you’ve got to dress this way.” It’s kind of a double standard: the business of the game and what the game is really about. 

Q. You called the NBA “a marketing disaster” when you played.

Frazier: We had no marketing. We had no major sponsors. But a lot of that was racist because the NBA was a lot of black guys and they were highly paid. So, we were kind of stigmatized in the press that we were guys who just did drugs. They weren’t concerned about other things. That was part of the problem back then.

Q. What turned it around?

Frazier: Larry Bird. Larry Bird and Magic [Johnson] coming in. And then Michael [Jordan] and the whole [idea] of people accepting the players as players. They weren’t seeing color; they just saw talent. 

Q. You refer to the “young billionaire guys coming in accustomed to running the show, but they don’t know basketball.”

Frazier: The Mark Cubans. Yeah, the young owners coming in now, they’re just there for, a lot of time, self-promotion. They don’t really have a background in basketball. They’re just businessmen. That could be detrimental to the game. We saw that with some of the guys firing coaches because the coach wasn’t listening to what they were saying from the sidelines. The game had never been run like that before.

Q. You wrote, “When I played, the owners and management ruled the game. Today, the players rule the game.… When I played, you got paid for what you had proven you could do. Now they pay you for what they think you can do. The league has found out the folly of such a system and they’re trying to change it.” How does the league change it if the players rule the game?

Frazier: That’s why it’s going to be a very difficult thing to do. The folly of that is… some guys might be in the twilight of their contracts but are still owed gargantuan money. How do you change that? You can’t change it because the Players Association now, you’re required to pay X number of dollars to the players for maximum contracts. So, it’s a quagmire that the league is in, and how to solve it is really going to take some time.

Q. Any suggestions?

Frazier: Because they’re compelled to pay so much money under the salary cap, they just have to use prudence with the guys they think are going to be the max players. They have to make sure that in five years these players are still going to be at the top of the elite class in the NBA.

Q. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.” That could almost describe your style.

Frazier: Definitely. I’ll never forget [a game] when I was in eighth grade. I had turned the ball over and was yelling at the ref. My coach called me over and said, “Frazier, don’t lose your head, son. Your brains are in it.” When I was on the court guarding guys, I tried to get them upset. Because if you’re upset, you’re not thinking properly. You’re vulnerable. 

Q. For example?

Frazier: When I played, you could hand-check guys. My defense was not really physical. I was more a perception guy. But some players, like Phil Chenier or Jerry West, didn’t like contact. So, I liked to put my hand on them because I wanted them to slap it away. If they were doing that, they couldn’t think about shooting or dribbling. They were being annoyed. Once I had that response, I knew I had an advantage. 

Q. A mind game.

Frazier: To me, 80 percent of the game is mental in pro sports. At that level, everyone has talent. Everybody’s been a star somewhere. It’s who gets up for the game every night. It’s the mental preparation that separates them. 

Q. You never got called for a technical.

Frazier: In grade school, high school and college, my coaches never allowed us to talk to the refs. I always had disciplinarians as coaches, which was to my advantage as I was growing up. We never had prima donnas on our teams. There was always only one set of rules. I liked rules and regulations. That was part of what my discipline was about.

Q. The brawl in the Knicks game last month [Dec. 16] revealed a lack of discipline.

Frazier: Because guys lost their cool. Also, all of the guys involved are young players. What it is it’s kind of bringing the street mentality into the NBA, the style over substance. We would give a guy a hard foul, but then we’d help you up and say, “Oh, sorry.” Where these guys [today], they knock you down and when you look up, they’re standing over you with the chest out. We used to let sleeping dogs lie. If we were beating you by a lot of points, we didn’t say anything to you. We didn’t want to do anything to psyche you up.

Q. Did you agree with David Stern’s response?

Frazier: Yeah. It’s the game within the game, business and the sport. He’s trying to get control of the game. He knows that in order to keep the major sponsors, he can’t have brawling on the court. These [players] have to project a certain image. And that’s what he’s trying to do now to get this discipline back.

When you mention the NBA, everyone thinks very positive. They don’t see brawling. The commissioner doesn’t want any negative connotations related to the game. 

Q. The players understand?

Frazier: The players should understand that. They are the beneficiaries of what Bill Russell did and Bob Cousy did, and all of these players did. This is why they’re making millions of dollars, so they should understand what’s going on here. But a lot of players do not have a history of the game. They rarely know me; they barely know Russell. They don’t know that at one time the league was about to fold. 

Q. The league has taken measures to address that.

Frazier: It’s crucial for the NBA—and I think it is doing it—to try to give these players a concept of the history of the game. The league now has orientation for rookies and different things to try to educate them about basketball’s past and perhaps where it’s going.

Q. You said only three Knicks have ever approached you for advice.

Frazier: Some of them are just now realizing the type of game that I had. One day, David Lee came up to me and said, “Clyde, did you have a game once with 19 rebounds…. And [Jamal] Crawford said, “I heard you had a game with 36 points and….”

Q. Show them the tape.

Frazier: (Laughing) Right. The other thing the [current Knicks] are not aware of is how provocative Madison Square Garden can be, and how intimidating it can be for the opposition. These guys don’t really know the history of …when teams feared coming into Madison Square Garden. 

Q. You have said that “the gym rat is a dying breed in America.”

Frazier: Look at undrafted players like John Starks and Darrel Armstrong. You rarely see guys like that now. Most of the guys you see are highly ballyhooed players coming out of high school or college. You see very few guys getting that opportunity now like Starks and Armstrong.

Q. You wrote that “Highlighting style over substance permeates every facet of the game today. Style is an important part of the game and the culture of basketball. … But when style replaces substance, when putting on a show leads to losses and shoddy fundamentals, then players need to re-evaluate their game.”  Is there a place for showtime in the game today?

Frazier: Of course. That’s why people like basketball. [Earl] the Pearl [Monroe] had style; Clyde had a different style. Bird had a style; Magic had a different style. This is why fans gravitate to different players. People thought I was cool because when all hell broke loose, I looked like the game just started. You could never read me. I had this poker face. Everybody said, “Wow. He’s cool.” But on the inside, I’m percolating like everyone else. 

Q. As the point guard, you had to set the tone.

Frazier: From being the oldest of nine kids, and always being the leader [on my teams], I had acquired this demeanor from my coaches. They would always say, “Hey, Walt, you’ve got to take charge.” In a way, I was kind of groomed for it. My parents would say, “You’re in charge. You got to do this or do that. I grew up with that pressure. And I liked it. The more the pressure, the more I relaxed. I think if you look at the superstars in the league, they relish pressure. They want to take the game-winning shot. That’s the difference between superstars and the average players.

Q. When did the traveling and palming violations become legal?

Frazier: When the game became entertainment. When we played, the radio announcer would refer to the “yo-yo dribble.” You know, on top of the ball. Now, everybody’s under the ball because they’re carrying it. The league created this Frankenstein, and now they’re trying to take it out. You let guys get away with traveling and carrying the ball for years, and now, all of a sudden, you’re taking that away. If you look at college, they do the same thing now. That little hop move, man—what if Wilt Chamberlain could stop and hop! How many points would he have had! To me, that’s a travel. How can you stop and hop and still go? You never would have been able to stop Wilt, or any of the other guys. The entertainment aspect of the game allowed that to happen.

Q. The kids in CYO are doing it.

Frazier: I know, and you can’t tell them any different because they are influenced by the pro players.

Q. Any interest in coaching?

Frazier: I thought so, man, but at this point in my life, I don’t know if I could dedicate my life to basketball again. But I see so many things that I could help players with. Some mundane things on defense, like the baseline. You rarely find guys in the NBA who can stop people from driving baseline. Or how to play guys without the ball. To me, those are very basic fundamentals that the players are lacking.

Q. You think it’s easier to steal the ball now from a dribbler.

Frazier: Once you have your hand under the ball, you have no control. The only thing you can do is stop dribbling. When I’m dribbling on top of the ball, I can dribble faster, I can dribble lower, I can do anything to elude you. But once you go underneath the ball, you’re dead. You can only carry the ball again or pick it up. So, I don’t have to worry about you going around me once you go underneath the ball. I can go for a steal. I would definitely have more steals with guys dribbling that way.

Q. Is there anything is basketball you would not miss if it were eliminated?

Frazier: I like the game as it is. The three-point shot is second only to the dunk in devastation. The problem is not the three-point shot in the pros. It’s the three-point shot in high school. In high school I would only use it in the last two minutes of the quarter so that it’s not a staple of the game. Sometimes we play the Nets in the Meadowlands, and after the game they have a high school game. Every shot is a three-point shot.

Q. And they can’t shoot.

Frazier: Right! This is what I’m saying. They grow up and they can’t shoot the mid-range jumper, which was a staple of the game when I played. When I talk to women who used to watch the game, or to old people, they go, “Man, these guys can’t shoot, Clyde. What is going on?” And that’s why. They can’t shoot because they rarely practice the mid-range jumper. 

Q. They can’t shoot free throws either.

Frazier: I blame the coaches for that. When I was in college, the starting five each had to make two free throws consecutively or we could not leave the gym. You talk about hostility! You talk about guys hating you! “Hey, man. Make your damn free throws! I want to go eat. I’m hungry.” You talk about focus and concentration. That’s where it happens. Guys are saying, “O.K. Come on. This is it. All right. We got two. We got four. We got six. Come on.” And I always wanted to be the last guy, to make nine and ten, because I liked pressure. I’d think, “I’m going to concentrate on making these shots.” If you saw teams doing that, or if you missed a free throw at the end of practice and had to run a suicide for each miss, you’d see a tremendous improvement.

Q. You coach kids, right?

Frazier: I still coach kids, and when I see them shooting free throws and they’re all missing, I say, “What are we trying to do, guys: See how many we can miss, or how many we can make?” I’d say, “The next guy who misses a free throw, you’ve got to come over here and do pushups.” 

Q. Incentive.
Frazier: Right. Then they start making them. Nobody wants to do pushups. So, they start focusing and they start making their shots. Free-throw shooting is all practice and concentration.

Q. You went 12-for-12 from the line in Game 7 in 1970.
Frazier: You have to simulate game conditions. Before I’d practice free throws, I always ran, because you never go to the line in a game when you’re not winded. You’ve been running, you get fouled, and you go and shoot. 

Q. Shaq can’t hit 50 percent of his.
Frazier: Shaq is shooting 100 free throws, but he never leaves the line. Somebody else is chasing the ball. What I would do, I would run one sprint down to the other end of the court and back, and then I would go to the line. If I missed the first free throw, I’d sprint some more. So, I’d put pressure on myself that I had to make so many or I’d start running. That’s how I improved. My rookie year, I was 67 percent. I ended up at 80 percent, or somewhere near there. But it was just practice and concentration. 

Q. What’s the biggest challenge facing the NBA?

Frazier: Educating the young players in the league on the legacy of the game. Explaining why they are making the type of money that they’re making and what they have to do if they want to continue to make that type of money. I say to the players, “You guys talk about a guy who was taunting you? What if Jackie Robinson reacted that way? We would not be playing professional sports, man. You guys don’t even know taunting.” 

Q. What was that like in college for you?

Frazier: Even when I played in college, there were certain schools where they called us names and threw things at us. What did Bill Russell go through? Or Oscar Robertson, the first black at Cincinnati? Or Elvin Haynes, the first black guy at Houston? I say to the players, “What if those guys reacted that way? What if they showed they wanted their props? Where would you guys be today? You wouldn’t be here making millions of dollars. You guys need to know the history of the game and why you’re in this position to make the kind of money you’re making.” 

Best career move: Maintaining my ego. Not allowing my ego to get in the way of where I was and where I was going. When you leave the game, there’s a tremendous transition because people are no longer catering to you. Everyone has to go through that. It took me two years to control my ego. You have to adjust. Also, I brought God back into my life. I started to attend church regularly again. And my fortunes seemed to change.

Most influential person: My mom. She provided the impetus for me to want to be an athlete. When I was growing up, she was always talking about having a house with a big kitchen. I guess because of all the kids. I can remember when I was 11 or 12 years old, I’d pray, “Please let me be a basketball player or football player so that I can help my mom to get this house.” In 1973 I fulfilled that dream.

Superstitions: None, because they put added pressure on you. Guys have superstitions in the playoffs. They won’t go this way, or they won’t go that way. They tie their shoes one way. It’s just too much work. So, no, I didn’t have any superstitions.

Smartest player: Bill Russell. He was so intimidating and the things he did on the court to harass you. 

Greatest competitor: Willis Reed. Heart of gold and 110 percent all the time. If I played you in a pickup game, I would let the game get close and maybe you’d have a chance to win. Willis Reed would just pulverize you from the beginning.

Date & Place of Birth: 3-29-45 in Atlanta, Ga.

Education: Southern Illinois 

Favorites:

Vacation spots: St. Croix and Maui

Piece of music: I’m oldies but goodies. I Motown down. The Temptations, the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers. That’s what I listen to over and over.

Book or author: Other than myself? The Bible. All the profound sayings come from the Bible.

Movie: Dances With Wolves

Quote: “I complained bitterly when I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

Pet peeve: Since I’m seeking tranquility, I rarely let too many things upset me these days.

Regrets: Not growing up with my son. Unfortunately, I was separated from him once I came to New York. That’s something that I’ll always regret.

Word Association:

NBA: Action

Knicks: Lovable

Isiah: Shrewd, clever, slick. 

Stern: As the name implies. Very stern. 

Stephon: Penetrating, creating.

LeBron: The second coming

Shaq: To the rack

Clyde: Glide

One-on-One with Mike Marshall

Published in SBJ March 2, 2009 

Mike Marshall broke into the major leagues in 1967 with the Detroit Tigers. Fourteen years and eight teams later, he retired, but not before making his mark as the game’s most durable relief pitcher. In 1974 he appeared in 13 straight games and won the Cy Young Award after he set single-season records for appearances (106), relief innings (208) and games finished (84).

Marshall, who earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State in kinesiology (the study of muscles and their movements), has devoted 30 years researching the art and science of pitching. He has been a tireless critic of the traditional pitching motion and an advocate for a training program he devised that he claims puts no stress on a pitcher’s arm. But he said he cannot get an audience with a major league team to discuss his findings.

Q. What’s your assessment of the business health of baseball?

Marshall: Well, I’m not involved that closely. And when I was a player rep, the owners didn’t tell us too much about the business part of it. Of course, the big business that they’re in now, and one that I predicted back in the mid-’70s, is cable television. That’s a huge revenue source for them.

Q. You saw the future in that in the seventies?

Marshall: Oh, yes. I was sitting with Ted Turner there in the old ballpark and we were talking about the different ideas that he had. He mentioned that he was going to put his team on cable television. I told him the thing I hate when I get on the radio is it’s all music. I want to hear news. I’d like an all-news station. He sort of took that idea pretty good.

Q. Are you suggesting that you gave Ted Turner the idea for a cable news network?

Marshall: (laughing) I wish I had. I’m not going to say that that led directly to what he did, but certainly he thought well of the idea. We were talking, and I had come up with a contract negotiation technique where I would negotiate the money but then I would loan the money back to the team at prime rate, which was certainly better than what the teams usually got. He liked that idea, and then we started talking about different things in business that he was doing. I guess he thought I had some ideas about how to do things a little bit differently from what was being done then in baseball. The idea of loaning money out and making interest on it made sense to me.

Q. You might have been ahead of your time.

Marshall: I always felt that baseball was an industry that could have done a heck of a lot more, and still could. Where I got into trouble was as a player rep. I kept recommending to my side of the negotiation that we should stop negotiating individual salaries and distribute the salaries ourselves by having the teams pay their percent of the total revenue into the Players Association, and then we’d come up with an equitable way to distribute the salaries that would follow a bell-shaped curve. That more than anything else is what got me out of baseball. It was more the Players Association than it was the owners that finally got me out of Major League Baseball. The idea that the agents wouldn’t make any money if they didn’t get to take their five percent for basically adding nothing to the value of baseball.

Q. What’s right about baseball? What does it do best?

Marshall: I don’t think it does anything best. It doesn’t train its pitchers; it doesn’t play the game the best. It’s all entertainment; it’s all star-driven.

Q. You had a 14-year MLB career with nine teams, won the Cy Young Award, taught for 22 years in college…

Marshall: Things went pretty well for me, much better than I ever expected. Teaching was a great joy, but I only did it where I could also be the head baseball coach. I’ve never been interested in being solely a professor, even with the opportunity to do research. I couldn’t have stayed away from the baseball field if I wanted to, which is why for the last few years I’ve been running my own baseball team: just dealing with baseball pitching.

Q. That is the Dr. Mike Marshall Pitchers Research and Training Center?

Marshall: Yeah, but I just turned 66. I’ve essentially shut that down. I’m training out those guys who are continuing into the second year of their program. As soon as these guys are gone, I’m done training baseball pitchers.

Q. Who is it that comes to you for the training?

Marshall: Over the last 10 years or so it’s been pitchers who did not get an opportunity to play college ball. And then there would be the injured players. Some were involved in college baseball, others in professional ball who were injured and released. 

Q. These are pitchers who still hope to get a shot at the major leagues?

Marshall: Yes. The purpose I had when I started it was to introduce my ideas into the pitching motion. I wanted the opportunity to take pitchers and have them try new ideas out.… to see if we can’t improve baseball pitching. The primary problem that I’ve run into over the years is the rejection by the traditional baseball pitchers of anybody using my motion.

Q. Were pitchers trained more effectively in the past?

Marshall: Who are the pitching coaches? Check their academic backgrounds. Pitching coaches are ex-pitchers. Do you think they are going to invent anything new? They’re going to do what the guy who won the first game 130 years ago did. Scientifically, it is absurd what they teach. 

Q. Your contention is that the traditional pitching motion is essentially flawed and leads to injury?

Marshall: If somebody wanted to invent a pitching motion that was inherently dangerous, that had all the elements of all injuries — you could ruin your hip, your knee, your lower back, the inside and outside of your elbow and the front and back of your shoulder — use the traditional pitching motion. 

Q. And you support this from first-hand major league experience and from a career studying the subject?

Marshall: Oh, yeah. And on my web site (www.drmikemarshall.com) I have a list of all the pitchers who were injured last year and on the disabled list. It averaged out to over six per team. That’s over half of your pitching staff. How in the world can you not understand that there’s something wrong with what you’re doing!

Q. I saw a statistic that showed there were 271 different injuries to Major League pitchers last year that put them on the disabled list. Even with a minimum 15-day stay on the DL, that amounts to several seasons of inactivity. Multiply that by the average MLB salary…

Marshall: That’s a lot of money they’re wasting with unemployable or unusable pitchers. They might want to get a little science in there as far as strategies and so on. There are different things that they can do. With pitching injuries there are resolutions, and they don’t want to deal with that. I think I would take a look at trying to find out how to prevent these injuries, and yet nobody is. Or let’s put it this way: They are, but they’re asking the wrong people. 

Q. Who are they asking?

Marshall: They’re asking orthopedic surgeons. Orthopedic surgeons are not the ones to ask about how to prevent injuries. They know nothing about bio-mechanics and how to fix them. And the bio-mechanists don’t know anything about anatomy. They’re just number crunchers, so they don’t understand what muscles get hurt and why. I know anatomy. I know mechanics. I know the laws of physics. And I’ve done it. I’m the only person that has all of the requisites to deal with pitching-arm injuries.

Q. No one else is qualified?

Marshall: Let’s put it this way: I haven’t found anyone else who is, and I’ve been looking all over for him.

Q. Wouldn’t that be helpful to an MLB organization?

Marshall: (laughing) From your lips to their ears. Pitching coaches are so afraid of me. I spent my time earning a doctoral degree. I actually know what I’m talking about. If that intimidates you, I’m sorry. But they keep saying I’m doing stuff outside of the norm. Damn right it’s outside of the norm. The norm is killing their arms and destroying the game. 

Q. So, you can help, but you intimidate people? Is there some insecurity?

Marshall: That’s exactly what it is. The pitching coaches are very defensive and insecure. 

Q. Putting aside the intimidation, and given the pitchers’ contracts and the loss of service to injuries, would it not be worth it to at least listen to an alternative plan, a plan that might conceivably keep the high-priced investments healthy?

Marshall: You’re too rational. I’ve offered to show them for free everything that I do. I’m not doing it for me. I don’t expect them to pay me anything. I just want baseball to be injury-free, as far as pitching-arm injuries that you can avoid. 

Q. You sent a letter to all 30 MLB teams in the mid-1990s offering your services. How many teams responded?

Marshall: Zero. In each letter I said I wanted to talk to them about the training program I had. I said that I can eliminate all kids of pitching injuries, yadda yadda yadda, and I let them know that I had the doctoral degree and the playing experience, that I’ve done the research since 1967. I was the first one to bio-mechanically analyze the pitching motion. I think I know what I’m doing, and I’ll challenge anybody to demonstrate that anything I do is wrong. But I can’t even get anybody to say that.

Q. You set a number of relief records, and in the 1970s you averaged two innings per appearance. Nowadays, most relief pitchers don’t throw two innings, and some of them don’t even throw one inning on successive days.

Marshall: That’s because they’re improperly trained. When I pitched 208 closing innings in 1974, I was never stiff, sore or tired. If I hadn’t thrown the night before, I’d throw at least 10 minutes of batting practice the next day. I could have pitched easily in every single game; I believe I could have pitched two innings in every single game. Of course, the hitters might have had something to say about that. 

Q. Not to minimize what closers do now, but they enter the game in the ninth inning with the lead and the bases empty and just have to get three outs.

Marshall: Go ahead and minimize it. You’ve got a lead, so if you know how to pitch, you don’t give up home runs. If you pitch fewer innings, [the hitters] don’t get to see what you do as often, and it’s hard for them to make adjustments. So, pitching 80 innings one inning at a time with a lead? That’s a walk in the park. 

Q. It’s easy?

Marshall: Billy Beane made a point. He said that if you want to get something for nothing, find a guy that can throw a little bit good and throw strikes, use him in a closing role and pump up a lot of saves, and then you can sell him for something very valuable because that’s not a very difficult man on your team to replace. He’s right! It’s the easiest gig in baseball. 

Q. How about bringing your closer in with the bases loaded in the seventh inning. That’s a save situation.

Marshall: That’s right. That happened to me a lot. I’d finish an inning and then go back out the next inning. Or try pitching tie games in extra innings on the road. Now, that’s a gig! You’ve got to get six outs and the other guy has to get three, and your team has to score in order to get a win. It always amazes me that the managers never put their alleged best closer in the game in that situation, where if they give up a run, they lose. That doesn’t make any sense. If he’s so damn good, put him out there then.

Q. What would you do?

Marshall: I would have a specialist: somebody who could come and throw the nastiest sinker or some kind of overpowering pitch. He would come into this adrenalized situation and battle his way out of just that inning. Then I’d get somebody out there with nobody on for the easy gig.

Q. Bring someone like Mariano Rivera or Jonathan Papelbon into those situations?

Marshall: Absolutely. If he’s a good pitcher, put him in when it counts.

Q. Nobody does that.

Marshall: No. You asked me what baseball does right. There isn’t much baseball does right, in my opinion, either in playing the game or advertising the game. I don’t think they have the bullpen right either.

Q. It’s a copycat system. Every team does it the same way because they’ve always done it that way.

Marshall: Pitching coaches are afraid that if they do something different and it doesn’t work, they’re going to get fired. You can understand that. The general managers are quick to fire and place the blame elsewhere, and they’re very slow to try anything innovative or to bring someone in who will be innovative. That’s why baseball is the farthest [behind] in terms of any scientific research. They don’t even want to hear it. They are anti-science, anti-intelligence, anti-new ideas. And the blame goes to the owners. They have to have some intelligence about what’s going on. 

Q. What will it take for baseball to at least examine another study?

Marshall: I have no idea. If you find out, you let me know and I’ll do it in a heartbeat. 

Q. How has Greg Maddux stayed healthy for so long?

Marshall: I don’t have research studies on him at all, but one thing that he does extremely well is to pronate. That is, he turns his thumb down when he releases the ball, especially when he throws his changeup. But he does it on his fastball, too; that’s how he gets the ball to tail back to the pitching arm side of home plate. And pronating your pitching elbow prevents injuries to the elbow. He does some things very well technically. 

Q. Not just technically…

Marshall: He does one more thing that I think is great. He’s smart and gets out of the game before hitters can hit him. He won’t go more than three times through the lineup. Even at his greatest, he wouldn’t go through the lineup more than three times. And he doesn’t try to overthrow. He throws balls that move, and he tries to hit spots. So, he’s not just out there rearing back and letting lose with his body going all over the place. You put those things together, and he’s had a pretty good career. But who’s going to get signed today throwing 85-87 miles an hour, as Maddux does most of the time? 

Q. Pitchers today are nurtured very slowly and pitch count in tabulated religiously. 

Marshall: Yeah, and that’s causing the pitching arm injuries too because they aren’t fit. 

Q. The pitchers are not fit?

Marshall: You have to be in shape to throw a baseball hard, and pitch count is not the answer. And if you have a really horrendous motion and every time you throw as hard as you can, you’re microscopically tearing the connective tissue of the ulnar collateral ligament. It tears and tears and tears very gently. You don’t ever rupture the entire ligament with one pitch on a perfectly healthy ligament. It’s over time. And the pitchers don’t feel any pain. When the pitchers complain of pain in their elbow, that’s muscle. You feel pain in tendons, but... ligaments are completely passive. They do not apply force. They’re like guy wires holding bones together. There’s no sensory mechanism, although they do have a blood supply and they are able physiologically adapt to stress. They will get bigger and stronger, and my training program emphasizes that. The program strengthens the ligaments but does not put any unnecessary stress on them.

Q. By fit, you mean arm fitness?

Marshall: Yes, and it doesn’t happen overnight, and you certainly don’t take offseasons off. Rest is atrophy. So, when these guys come in and say that their arm hurts, they are told to take two weeks off. All that does is make them weaker and the next time they throw they hurt it easier. A pitcher will have surgery, and then goes right back to throwing the same way. That’s the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Yet that’s what trainers do: right back to the same motion. No! Injury defines a bad pitching motion. If you get hurt, you have a bad pitching motion. Change it.

Q. According to a story in the New York Times last September, “A theory researched by the Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci and now widely accepted in baseball …says that any pitcher younger than 25 whose total number of innings jumps by more than 30 from the previous season leaves himself susceptible to injury the next year, or at least to a much higher [ERA].” Have you heard of this?

Marshall: Yeah, I have. All those sabermetric guys look at things from a statistical standpoint. I could buck that very easily. Just let me train those pitchers and I’ll increase the innings by 100 and they’ll never hurt themselves. It’s looking at things backward. You’re not finding causes; you’re trying to find Band-Aid solutions by looking at statistics. You’ve got a bad pitching motion — change it! That’s the problem. 

 Q. Would a major league pitcher be allowed to come to you on his own? 

Marshall: That’s been the question I’ve been wondering about all along. All these guys are hurt. I think they know who I am; maybe they don’t. 

Q. What about reaching out to the agents? It would seem to be in their interest.

Marshall: There have been a couple of agents who said they would like me to take a look at their pitchers. But I never heard back from them.... Right now, pitchers who make the major leagues are genetic freaks: those who have the highest percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers. They are not skilled. They do not have the ability to throw high-quality pitches, non-fastball type of pitches. It’s silly how ineffectively trained they are. These pitching coaches don’t know how to teach them anything. They’re just babysitters who are trying to ride the coattails of some genetic freaks in the major leagues.

Q. If major league pitchers, and major league baseball itself, are, as you suggest, not open-minded to examining the problem of pitching injuries, what about going younger: Little League? 

Marshall: I’m having success with the parents of 10 year olds. The parents are concerned about their sons being injured. College coaches are dogmatic as all get-out: It’s this way or the highway. High school coaches, because the parents can get on those coaches and keep them from having their sons participate, have leverage. The high school coach has to take the people who are enrolled in school. So, we’re having some success with the high school coaches. I spoke recently to high school coaches in Louisiana and in Arizona and was received well in both places. Several of them told me that they are going to implement my program. I expect the same kind of reception when I speak to the Illinois high school baseball coaches. The high school coaches have concerns about injuries to their pitchers. 

Q. Tommy Lasorda said, “You wanna fix Little League baseball, let the moms coach.”

Marshall: There you go. Absolutely right. Moms don’t want their sons to get hurt. They will do anything to find a way not to have them hurt. If there is a bio-mechanically and anatomically perfect way to apply force to a baseball and eliminate injuries, why wouldn’t we want to go that way, even if it doesn’t look anything like the way [pitchers throw now]? 

Imagine if Dick Fosbury, instead of being a high jumper, had been a kinesiologist who designed that jumping technique but couldn’t jump. Well, I designed my pitching motion and made several adjustments and set several records, but I don’t get credit for it; they just say I’m a physical freak. When Fosbury went out and jumped higher than anybody else, it was hard for his coach to say, “I’m not going to let you jump.” Well, they tried to ban it initially.

Q. Fosbury was ridiculed at first because his jump was so unorthodox.

Marshall: Exactly. And because he went over [the bar] backwards, they said he was going to break his neck. They tried to ban it based on injury. He didn’t injure himself, and now it is recognized as the bio-mechanically and anatomically perfect way to high-jump.

 Q. You paint a bleak picture for the future of pitching.

Marshall: Yeah. It’s going to remain as bad as it is today as long as people continue to teach and believe in the traditional pitching motion. But back in 1976 or ‘77, I got a telephone call from Bill Veeck. He said, “Hey, Marshall. I want to know what you know.” He was in Chicago and I was in East Lansing. He showed up the next day and we spent the whole day talking about baseball pitching. I showed him my high-speed film studies and explained everything. At the end of the day, he said he wanted me to become his pitching coach. I was a free agent and was about to sign a rather large contract for that time. I told him I’d love to do it as soon as I was done pitching. Of course, he sold the team before that. But that was as close as it came to actually having some proper training in professional baseball.

Q. Original thinkers like Veeck have been looked upon skeptically. You need another original thinker now.

Marshall: You don’t think the owners are going to let one in there, do you?

Q. Can you concede that there might be an owner with some imagination?

Marshall: Mark Cuban, who wants to buy the Cubs, is an original thinker. If he were to find out that I know how to train pitchers, he just might let me do it. Nobody else will. It’s not going to happen. I don’t know if the owners are still mad about me getting free agency into baseball or what, but they’re not going to let it happen.

Q. Can you send baseball a Candygram and kiss and make up?

Marshall: I wish I could.

Q. All right, hypothetically, if you were baseball commissioner, what would be the first order of business?

Marshall: To take out the part of baseball that ruins it the most: to make sure the pitchers are able to pitch without injuries. The fans can’t enjoy the game if their pitchers are injured.

Q. You obviously have this passion for what you preach. You have offered to give away what you have learned. What is your motivation?

Marshall: I love baseball. It’s the greatest game in the world. No question about it. I was 5-foot-8-½ inches tall at my tallest. Now, at age 66, I’m 5-foot-6-½. I was able to pitch major league baseball and finish in the top seven in the Cy Young five times. That can’t happen in any other sport. I can’t play professional basketball or football or any of the other major sports. But baseball is a great game: the most skilled, the most intelligent game there is. I love baseball and I don’t like injuries. There’s no reason for them. And it’s so simple to me. I can make just three or four suggestions and eliminate all pitching injuries. Nothing major, nothing complicated. Things you can learn in less than two weeks, and you’ll never injure your arm. 

Q. It must be very frustrating.

Marshall: I stopped worrying about what other people think back when I was 6 or 7 years old. My obituary is written. Nothing I do from now on is going to make any difference.

Q. What’s the first line in your obituary going to say?

Marshall: The first closer in the game to win the Cy Young Award. That’s what’s going to be my obituary.

Q. When in the obit will it get to your pitching theory?

Marshall: Never. Never. They don’t know about it, don’t care about it, aren’t interested in it. It will say I had this prickly personality, that I tried to force my own ideas about pitching on everybody else. That what a jerk he was there. But, boy, he did win the Cy Young Award. He wasn’t good enough, of course, to be in the Hall of Fame even though he owns all the closing records and more than any other closer in the history of the game has done. 

Q. It bothers you.

Marshall: I’m not upset. I know the politics of life. Life is not fair. You’re taught that. You think it is, and then you find out that it isn’t — and it isn’t. The Peter Principle is alive and well. People rise to the level of incompetence and that’s where they stay for the rest of their lives.

Q. Maybe we can get a Little League mom to be baseball commissioner.

Marshall: (laughing) That would be a start. But if there are kids out there who are throwing my way and enjoying themselves and are pain-free, great!

Personal

Date and place of birth: January 15, 1943 in Adrian, Michigan

Favorites

Vacation spot: No, once I’ve seen something, that’s great, whether it’s a place or book or a movie, but I don’t need to see it again. I want to see something else. My wife and I love to go to various cities in this country and spend four days and three nights. We get on the Gray Line bus tour and listen to everything about the city. If there’s one place we go more than anywhere else, it’s New York City, to see the plays.  

Piece of music: I’m stuck in the ’60s and ’70s. I’m a Muddy Waters fan.

Book: I’m not a novel reader. I read more scientific journals kind of stuff.

Quote: Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Movie: Cadillac Records

Best baseball movies: Bull Durham and Field of Dreams

Worst baseball movie: The Babe Ruth Story

Superstitions: No, I’m too scientific for superstitions.

Regrets: If you’re not trying, then you’re not making mistakes. But if you make mistakes and you learn from them, then there’s nothing to regret. You do the best you can. I wish I had done some things differently, but I did the best I could with the information I had at the time. And that’s 

Most influential persons: William Heusner, my kinesiology professor, opened my eyes to things I didn’t know existed. As a result of that, I had a Major League career I never would have had. And Gene Mauch gave me a chance in the Major Leagues.

Toughest opponent: Joe Morgan

Pitchers today you admire: Greg Maddux