Would anyone here think that a person with the following stats would help the young Rays hitters. I would also like to know if one would pay to see a guy play with the following stats:

*a 7-time MVP

*a 14 time all star

*an 8 time gold glove award winner

*a 12 time silver slugger award winner

*a two time batting champion

*Lead the NL in OBP 10 times including last season

*a 7-time leader in SLG%

*9 times lead the league in OPS %

*Is the all time career leader in HR's and two time HR champion

* lead the league in walks 12 times, came in 2nd 4 times, and placed 3rd once.

How many more games do you think the Rays would win with a guy that puts up these kind of numbers in the line up?

And we ask should we sign Lofton! Pffffft!

After hearing of Kaz's injury/soreness/stiffness etc. the injury reminded me of an article I had read some time ago. Maybe Kaz and his pitching coach can take some notes.

Here it is:

Royals pitching advisor Fischer shares wisdom of 60 years in baseball
Joe Posnanksi

Absolute No 1: Don't bang your heel.

SURPRISE, Ariz. | They call Bill Fischer "Walking Wisdom" around here, which makes the guy laugh. Walking Wisdom, eh? Yeah, they should have been there that day in '63, 11th inning, when ol' Walking Wisdom pitched for the Kansas City A's and decided to throw a bleeping fastball to Mickey Mantle. The Mick blasted it off of the bleeping right-field facade at Yankee Stadium. They called it 620 feet. They called it 734 feet. Whatever, it was bleeping far.

"Of course if Mickey Mantle was playing at Yankee Stadium today," Fischer says, "with the bleeping fences in, with center field at 400 feet, he'd hit 800 bleeping homers."

Bleep. You can probably tell that Bill Fischer does not exactly buy into the walking wisdom thing. First off, Fish ain't walking too good. He's 77; they got him a golf cart to scoot around in as the Kansas City Royals' senior pitching advisor. Senior is right. Fish has been in baseball for 60 years; only Don Zimmer has been puttering around the game full time for that long. Zim's written two books about it.

Fish hasn't written any books, and he will tell you why. It's because in 60 years as a starting pitcher, reliever, scout, coach, guru, psychologist, coordinator, babysitter and patriarch, he's learned that this baseball deal ain't that bleeping complicated. It comes down to four things. The four absolutes. People you know, people like Roger Clemens, John Schuerholz, Tom Seaver, Dayton Moore, lots of others, they'll tell you that if you follow Bill Fischer's four absolutes of pitching, everything else falls into place.

Of course, others will tell you that Fish don't know what the bleep he's talking about. That's all right. Fish says that some stupid sons of guns in this game of baseball also will tell you that the sun rises in the West.

Don't bang your heel. That's the first absolute. Young pitchers get hurt all the time. They blow out their arms, their elbows, their shoulders, they chip bones, they tear tendons, and why? Fish will tell you why; he's been in this game since Harry Truman was in office. It's because these numskulls wind up, throw as hard as they can, and on their follow-through they bang the heel of their front foot into the ground, BAM, all that force rattles through them, shakes up the arm, a mini-earthquake every pitch.

"It's like driving 100 mph and then slamming the brakes as hard as you can," Fish says. "You think that's good for the car? You know any car mechanics gonna tell you to do that? Bleep, I'm just talking common sense here."

As he talks common sense, two Royals coaches walk by. It's physical day at camp -- Fish has already had his physical.

"Hey baby, how'd you check out?" one coach asks Fish.

"They told me to take two days off and quit," Ol' Walking Wisdom says.

*

Absolute No. 2: Throw four-seam fastballs.

Fish's first day in pro baseball was at a Chicago White Sox tryout camp in Wisconsin in 1948. Red Ruffing, the gritty old pitcher who gutted his way into the Hall of Fame despite losing four toes in a mining accident, was running things. Red liked the kid's style, offered him 150 bucks a month to report to Wisconsin Rapids. "No bonus, no nothing, that's not a lot of bleeping money," Fish says. He never hesitated.

Fish won his first 10 games at Wisconsin Rapids, and he hit five home runs in that span. "They thought I was another Babe Ruth," he said. In those days, after the war, the minor leagues were bursting with new Babe Ruths. It wasn't easy to move up. Fish pitched Class D ball, then Class C, then Class B, then Class A. He won 90 games in the minor leagues. He was a drill instructor in the Marines for two years. He didn't get to the big leagues until he was 26 and exhausted.

Well, most of them were like that. Ballplayers were different then, hardened by war, toughened by vicious salary battles and backbreaking offseason jobs, determined to keep their spot. Fish won seven games that first year as a reliever. He threw strikes and gave up one home run all year. The next year he got traded to Detroit, and then three months after that he got released. And so on.

All that time, Fish kept looking for the secret, a gimmick, a way to get people out. He started throwing slow curveballs to lefties. He started messing around with the way he gripped the baseball. None of it worked too good. Maybe that's why he became America's leading advocate of the four-seam fastball. You probably know there are two basic kinds of fastballs -- the four-seamer, where the pitcher grips the ball across the seams, and the two-seamer, where the pitcher grips the ball along the seams.

The two-seam fastball has become popular because the ball tends to move down when you throw it. It doesn't go quite as fast as the four-seamer, but when thrown right, the ball dives down and rushes in on right-handed hitters. In today's game, everyone wants that downward movement. Well, almost everyone.

"The pitchers are all trying to pitch the same," he says. "You hear them talk, it's all `Keep the ball down. Keep the ball down.' What a bunch of bleep that is. That's where all the bleeping guys hit, down. The worst bleeping hitters are low-ball hitters. The hardest pitch in baseball to hit is right here, up and in, high and tight, and there ain't no way you can throw a two-seam fastball up here."

The big reason, though, that Fish loves the four-seam fastball is that there's nothing tricky about it. You throw the ball naturally, no violent arm gyrations, no crazy wrist twists. The four-seamer is a challenge pitch, me and you, man to man, let's find out.

Any time Fish even thinks about two-seam fastballs, his face exhibits pure disgust. The only thing Fish hates more than two-seam fastballs is the cousin pitch, the slider.

"Sliders are a dime a dozen," Fish says. "Sinker-slider pitchers are a dime a dozen. They'll lose more than they win. See how many sinker-slider pitchers are in the Hall of Fame. Not too many. Not too bleeping many."

It goes without saying that Bill Fischer was a sinker-slider pitcher.

*

Absolute No. 3: Don't pitch across your body.

In August '62, Fish walked Bubba Phillips to lead off a game in Cleveland. He did not walk another man for almost two months. It remains the longest walk-free streak in baseball history. The record had been held by Christy Mathewson.

The funny thing is that 1962 was the first year that Charlie O. Finley was the sole owner of the Kansas City A's, and if there's one thing Finley appreciated it was a publicity stunt. The 1962 A's were battling Washington for last place, they couldn't pitch a lick, and they were notably lacking in, well, anything. Fish's no-walk streak became his story. Finley said he would give his man a $1,000 bonus if he broke Mathewson's record of 68 innings in a row without a walk.

Fish went for Mathewson's record against Baltimore in the second game of a doubleheader at old Municipal Stadium in Kansas City. He needed to pitch seven innings without a walk. And Fish did not walk anyone into the seventh inning. Then he struck out Marv Breeding, gave up a couple of hits, got Russ Snyder to pop out and finally, for the record, coaxed Brooks Robinson to hit a ground ball to short. He had done it -- thrown more consecutive innings without a walk than any man ever.

"Here's your bonus," Finley said as he handed over a $1,000 check. "And I'll tell you what -- for every inning you pitch without giving up a walk, I'll give you another $100."

Well, that's all Fish needed to hear. There's a reason his third absolute is that pitchers should not throw across their bodies -- it's unnatural. "If I'm going to hit you, I don't step across my body, do I? No. I step straight in. Boom. Then I can drop you."

Straight in. Fish knows it works. He went another 16 innings without a walk. He carried the streak into the last game of the season, in Detroit, when, as he remembered it, manager Hank Bauer came over and said, "Hey, Fish, you might want to talk to Finley. He just fired me, and he told me he's not paying your bonus neither."

Fischer says that ensuing conversation went like so:

Fish: "Mr. Finley, I hear you're not going to pay me."

Finley: "Yeah, Mr. Fischer, I get carried away with moments and then I realized I made a mistake."

Fish: "You're going to pay me that bleeping money."

Finley did pay, eventually, months later and then took that amount out of Fish's next contract. So it goes. In the end, Fish went 84 1/3 innings without a walk, a record that no one, not even Greg Maddux, has come especially close to matching. The streak ended when Fish walked a batter named Bubba Morton, which makes his the only streak in sports history to begin and end with a man named Bubba.

*

Absolute No. 4: Right-handers throw from the right-hand side of the pitching rubber; lefties throw from the left-hand side of the pitching rubber.

If there's one thing Fish believes it's that those bleeping guys in baseball are out to get pitchers. They want offense, the suits, and it makes him sick.

"I want you to put this in big bleeping letters, because everybody condemns pitching these days," he says. "If they want to make this game fair, put the bleeping mound back up where it bleeping was before they took it down. They took it down in 1969 to penalize pitchers because they were getting too many bleeping guys out. Put it back up and give pitchers a fighting chance again."

That year, 1969, was also Fish's first year as a pitching coach. He'd been hired by the Kansas City Royals to work with minor leaguers after being released by the White Sox. He liked it. He got through sometimes. Oh, sometimes players would not listen to him, thought they had all the answers, but they came back to him when their ERA's looked like the price of a two steaks at Jess & Jim's.

He became pitching coach in Cincinnati in 1979, where he worked with an older Tom Seaver ("He'd drive you nuts, but guys like that, to beat them you almost got to kill them"). Then he went to Boston and worked with a young Roger Clemens ("He was a blockhead too, but man did he work. This stuff they're saying about him now, the steroid stuff, I don't believe a word of it"). He got canned both places. That's baseball.

He went to work in Atlanta's minor leagues, for his old friend John Schuerholz. He went to Tampa to be major-league pitching coach when he was 70. He got canned again, went back to Atlanta. He figured that to give his pitchers a shot in this unfair game, they needed an angle. So he put his pitchers on the arm-side corner of the rubber and told them to pitch their hearts out.

"You use angles in pool, right?" Fish says. "Billiards? Know what I mean? Same thing. Angles."

"How ya doing Fish?" Royals pitching coach Bob McClure says as he walks by.

"Bad!" Fish says, and he barely smiles.

*

Fish doesn't know how much longer he can keep this going. His knee hurts. He can't hear much. His eyes are going. But he does keep going.

Royals general manager Dayton Moore keeps talking him out of retirement. Moore loves him. Bleep, everybody loves him.

There's a fifth absolute, one that he doesn't talk about as much. He says, "You've got to help somebody every day. It may just be a couple of words. It might be a kick in the butt. It might be grabbing them by the collar and saying, `You're better than that.' But you gotta do it."

So what's the fifth absolute?

"You beat on them but you love them," Ol' Walking Wisdom says. "You beat on them but you love them. That's what this great game is all about."

http://www.kansascity.com/sports/royals/story/502797.html