The Worst Thing That Could Happen To A Hitter? Terrific Success, Sometimes

Three months earlier he was the hottest hitter in baseball – a redheaded pounder of the baseball who had put a team full of players many years his senior onto his back and lugged them along for a couple of weeks. He was, I had written at the time, Player of the Month after just one week in April.

Now he sat in front of his locker, fiddling with a bat, perhaps wondering what had happened in the ensuing 90 days. The batting average was sinking like a block of concrete in the Detroit River. The strikeouts were piling up like an autumn’s worth of unraked leaves.

So maybe it was natural that Chris Shelton scowled at the interloper who was talking to him before a game against the Chicago White Sox – the ink-stained wretch who was asking him, basically, Hey, what happened to the swing?

Me.

“I’m not going to answer that question,” Shelton told me, with all the warmth of an Alaskan winter.

OK.

But the evidence was irrefutable. Shelton, the Tigers first baseman, had a tenuous hold on his job, which would have been an unthinkable notion three months prior, when he tore the cover off the baseball. Yet here he was, slumping horribly, a confused young man, another humbled by a game just when he thought he had it figured out.

“You got all that notoriety at the beginning of the year, and you really don’t like that, do you?,” I asked that day in late July.

He shook his head slowly and spoke in soft, thoughtful tones, still fiddling with the bat.

“That’s not me,” Shelton said. “I just like to go out and play, and I’m not comfortable with the spotlight on me.”

It occurred to me that Chris Shelton was in fact being cursed by the very same success that had blessed him coming out of the gate in April.


Shelton's hot start was his undoing, as it turned out

Less than two weeks later, Shelton still in the throes of a slump he didn’t wish to speak to me about, the Tigers traded for veteran first baseman Sean Casey. A player had to go, in order to make room for the solid hitter Casey.

Chris Shelton was that player – demoted to the bus rides and miniature ballparks of AAA ball, in Toledo.

Forty-five years earlier, another Tigers first baseman had a year in which it could be rightly suspected that he had made a pact with Mr. Satan himself.

Norm Cash’s middle name could rightly have been changed to Anomaly.

Cash, a career .271 hitter, had his Mr. Hyde year in 1961. As part of the Tigers’ own Murderers’ Row lineup which included Al Kaline and Rocky Colavito, Cash went ballistic. He had 41 homeruns, 132 RBI, and his batting average was a robust .361 – 90 points above his eventual career mark. The season before, Cash’s line read 18 HR, 63 RBI, .286 BA. The year after his anomaly, Cash sank to 39 HR, 89 RBI, and – get this – a .243 BA. One-hundred-and-eighteen points off from the season before.

Cash, years after, admitted two things: his ’61 season was maybe the worst thing that happened to him in his career; and that part of his success that year was due to corking his bat. So he was a victim of his own success – both as a hitter, and as a tamperer of baseball bats.


Cash cheated in '61, and paid for it

Cash steadfastly believed that if he didn’t try to hit as many homeruns – he ended up with 377 for his career – that he could have had a much higher batting average. Maybe.

Last April, Shelton exploded out of the blocks. He was 14-for-20 after his first five games, with five homeruns. He had nine homeruns by April 17. Then, just like that, the magic was gone. In his next 49 AB, Shelton managed just six hits. Perhaps more alarming was the fact that in those 49 AB, he struck out 12 times. In a heartbeat, it seemed, Shelton turned from a confident, powerful swatter to a flailing, clueless hack.

I’m no expert, but I suspect Shelton’s unbelievable homerun pace out of the gate cursed him into the thought that he was a true power hitter. That’s when the flailing began. It’s also when opposing pitchers, a rather smart lot, figured out that he expanded his own strike zone. Shelton, basically, would swing at anything within an area code of the plate.

At the time of our prickly discussion, Shelton was batting .274. Respectable, but it was a falling mark, like Ford stock. He was recalled in September, the time in Toledo hoped to be some sort of tonic. It wasn’t. In 19 September AB, Shelton had four hits – three of them in one game.

Today, in Florida, the Tigers working out under the sun, getting ready to defend their American League Championship, Shelton struggles to stay with the team when it flies to Detroit in about two weeks. An early spring training injury hasn’t helped. Manager Jim Leyland says it will be a “dogfight” between Shelton, Neifi Perez, and Ramon Sanitago to see who nails down the final bench spot. A year ago at this time, Shelton was already clobbering the ball in spring training, and his place on the roster was assured.

One year later…

Chris Shelton, if you want to know the truth, is working on a slump that’s now in its 10th month. For it hasn’t been since last May that he’s hit the ball with any authority. When he returned to the Tigers in September, he still exhibited the same hacking, flailing ways that got him demoted after the team traded for the reliable Casey.

But for the first two weeks of last season, Shelton was the hottest of hitters – a man swinging a magic bat that jet-propelled baseballs several rows into the bleachers. An awesome combination of power and a batting average in the stratosphere.

And it was the worst thing that could have happened to him, in retrospect.

Joe Garagiola said it – titled a book with the words, actually.

Baseball is a funny game.

And not always HA-HA funny.