Saturday Sounds No. 5: The Education of a Pitcher

Saturday Sounds No. 5 · From the SPORTSTALKNY archive · June 2019 · 41 minutes · Listen below

Twenty summers after the most famous afternoon of his life, David Cone was still thinking like a pitcher.

In June of 2019, just weeks after his book Full Count: The Education of a Pitcher — written with Jack Curry — hit the shelves, and just weeks before the 20th anniversary of his perfect game, Cone sat down with A.J. Carter and me on SPORTSTALKNY and gave us the most honest hour we ever got out of a ballplayer. Not the highlight reel. The machinery underneath it: the fear, the superstition, the math, the mothers and fathers and catchers who taught him how to stand on a mound and believe the next pitch was his.

And make no mistake about where that education happened. Cone won World Series rings with Toronto and the Yankees, and he threw the perfect game in the Bronx. But as I reminded him that night, he appeared in more games as a Met than anywhere else, he won more games as a Met than anywhere else, his lowest ERA came as a Met — and when it was over, he came back and finished his career as a Met. Eighty-one wins in Flushing. A 20-3 season in 1988 that somehow only finished second in the Cy Young voting. Two straight National League strikeout titles. An immaculate inning — three Reds, nine pitches — in August of 1991, and 19 strikeouts against the Phillies in the final game of that season, tying Tom Seaver's club record. The Coneheads knew. Now you get to hear the man explain himself.

Start with his mother. Joan Cone kept the scorebook at his games and charted every pitch, and long before baseball had a word for regression to the mean, she was teaching it to her son in three words: "You're due." Have a great game? "That's the best you're ever going to pitch," she'd tell him, "so enjoy it" — because you're never as good as you think you are, and it's coming back to the middle. Get knocked around? You're due. His father, Ed, was his first and best coach — a disciplinarian who would yank him out of practice when his attitude slipped, then work just as hard to build him back up. Cone pushed back against strict coaches his whole career, he admits, because nobody was ever going to out-coach his dad.

Then there's the perfect game. July 18, 1999, Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium. By the eighth inning, Cone says, he was in such foreign territory that he caught himself doing something he'd never done: talking to himself in a bathroom mirror, fighting off the gremlins — what if I hang a slider here? Nobody on the bench would come near him. The only levity came from Chili Davis, who grabbed a catcher's glove and warmed him up before the seventh because Jorge Posada was in the bullpen and Joe Girardi was on the bases — then got on him in the dugout for lobbing it in. "My stuff isn't that good," Davis told him. "Go ahead and let it go."

The road there was anything but straight. Cone's Kansas City high school, Rockhurst, didn't have a baseball team — he was a quarterback and a point guard who played summer ball in the Ban Johnson League. At 16 he stood on the field at Royals Stadium with some 300 kids at an invitation tryout, threw about ten pitches, and went home thrilled and deflated at the same time. The Royals signed him anyway, and by 1983 he was a hot prospect — until he tore his ACL covering home plate on a wild pitch, in an era when the surgery was still primitive. He rebuilt his delivery from the ground up, landing on his heel so his fragile front leg could take it, and then watched from the minors in 1985 as Bret Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza and Danny Jackson — the kids he'd come up with — won the World Series without him. That, Cone says, was the lowest point.

What brought him through was people. Dan Quisenberry, the Royals' great closer, pulled the brash young rookie aside during his first big-league batting practice — Cone had spent it chasing a girl in the stands instead of watching the hitters he might face — and explained the difference between getting to the big leagues and sticking there. George Brett took rookies into his home. And in New York, Cone learned the two flavors of veteran leadership in the same season. After one bad outing, Bobby Ojeda dressed him down across a card table on the team charter for daring to chirp about a card play. After a worse one — ten runs, still, Cone believes, a Mets record for a starter — he walked into the clubhouse the next day to find a softball sitting in his chair, with a note from Wally Backman: "This is what your fastball looked like last night." Wally was waiting to watch his face — then grabbed him, laughed with him, and made sure the kid loosened up instead of carrying it. "I never forgot that," Cone says. When he became the veteran, he chose Wally's way.

And then, about twenty-one minutes in, this episode does something no other Saturday Sounds has done. Researching my book on Kiner's Korner, I'd gotten hold of a tape of Cone's very first appearance on the show — a nervous kid in 1987, fresh off two rough starts, answering Ralph Kiner's question about lost confidence with total honesty: "I'd be lying if I said I didn't." We played it for him, 32 years later, and you can hear a master of his craft listen to the boy he used to be. Ralph, of course, was already breaking down the curveball and the little drop-down slider the world would come to know as the Laredo. That Boston exhibition start, Cone explains, was the light-bulb game — the day he learned you don't have to fear contact, that Catfish Hunter would give up a homer in the first at-bat and challenge the same hitter with almost the same pitch the next time up. "It's that fearless mentality that a pitcher really has to have," Cone says. "That is the toughest lesson for any young pitcher to learn." Bad outings scare pitchers away from contact — they start nibbling, fall behind in the count, walk people, and the whole thing steamrolls. The Boston game taught him the opposite: stay aggressive, challenge the strike zone, and even when it burns you, that's the formula.

Then there's the catcher. Cone calls the pitcher-catcher chapter his favorite in the book, and its hero is Barry Lyons — Gary Carter's backup in 1988, the man behind the plate on Father's Day that year when Cone carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning. Lyons was the first catcher who ever thanked Cone for shaking off a sign. Where a young Jorge Posada would get frustrated when Cone shook him off, Lyons treated the shake-off as the start of a conversation: shake me off, fine — now let's figure out what works, and let's do it quickly, before the rhythm goes. "Sometimes catchers need to be psychoanalysts," Cone says. "They need to allow a pitcher a little room to breathe." It's about reading body language, he says. It's about trust. And it started, for him, with Barry Lyons.

And then there's the finger. Squaring to bunt against Atlee Hammaker, Cone took a fastball off his pinky and shattered it. When the finger was reset, it sat a little bent — and the flaw became a feature: the reset finger forced his grip off-center on the four-seam fastball, and the ball started riding through the strike zone with a life it hadn't had before. Three-finger Mordecai Brown built a Hall of Fame career on a mangled hand; Cone got his version by accident. And no — before some high school kid out there gets an idea — that is not a training method. "That's certainly not the advice I'm trying to give," Cone laughs. There's an easier way to change a grip, I told him: a high-speed camera rather than a hammer.

So why is there a Yankee on the cover? I put it to him straight: most games as a Met, most wins as a Met, lowest ERA as a Met, finished his career as a Met — and Full Count wears pinstripes. They thought about it long and hard, he says. Part of it is practical: he works for the YES Network now, and the Yankees were going to help promote the book. But mostly it's the photograph itself — a six-foot, drop-and-drive pitcher caught at the moment of landing, stride stretched out, shoulder still closed. "From a mechanical standpoint," Cone says, "that was the best picture I ever saw." And there's a little defiance in it, too: the shot shows the way he wrapped the ball behind his back, the wrist snap the Royals' people once told him wasn't proper. He kept it anyway. It made the spin. It was his.

The infield gets its say, too. Later in his career, Cone admits, he turned grumpy about mound visits — just give me the ball back. But with the Mets, Keith Hernandez was "constantly screaming at me from first base," reading swings, telling him whether a hitter was late on the fastball, calling out what to throw next and pumping him up while he did it. "I can't tell you how much I really enjoyed playing for the Mets," Cone says, "and how lucky I feel by having Gary Carter as really my first full-time catcher and Keith Hernandez at first base." His verdict, and Mets fans may frame it: "I'll take Keith Hernandez at first base any day of the week."

For all his fascination with spin rate and tunneling, by the way, Cone lands exactly where his mother started. The analytics are for practice, for the off-season, for between starts — they can even tell a pitcher he's pitching in bad luck and shouldn't change a thing. But on the mound? "I still believe in feel. I still think that's the most important thing." Which is just Joan Cone's scouting report with a spreadsheet attached: "It's going to turn around for you. You're doing the right thing. Keep working hard." You're due.

We closed the way we close with the great ones — word association — and Cone didn't duck a single name. 147 pitches, the start that still haunts him, with a kid named Mariano Rivera waiting unused in the bullpen: "You can't help but think about those things — you know, what ifs?" Joe Torre: "the most level-headed leader I've ever been around — the smoothest operator I've ever been around." Derek Jeter, the best turn-the-page player he ever saw: "Doesn't matter what you did yesterday. Only thing that matters is right here and right now." Paul O'Neill, so intense he'd be standing in right field practicing his swing between pitches. David Wells: "a great competitor who was misunderstood a lot throughout his career." Mariano Rivera: "You almost want to check his pulse... ice water in his veins." Mel Stottlemyre: "the most upbeat and positive coach I've ever been around." And Chili Davis, one last time, for the perfect game — the man who found the one moment of levity in the middle of history: "Chili said the right thing at the right time."

Then I asked him for the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions David Cone. "To me, the best compliment you can ever give somebody is that they're a pro's pro," he said. "I was a player's advocate. I was proud of my time in the Players Association, advocating for players, for players' rights... that's the way that I would like to be remembered — as a pro's pro and a player's advocate." After this hour, we'd co-sign both halves of that. I told him A.J. and I only wished he'd published the book after Father's Day, so it wouldn't kill the sales of our own book — "piggyback with Glove Story," he laughed. Deal, David. Press play — and when you're done, come tell us your David Cone memories over in Talkin' Mets on the Korner. More from the vault next Saturday.

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