The former Indians pitcher built a career on one of baseball's meanest curveballs and the reputation as a clubhouse practical joker.
AP file"To me, it's a day of saying thank you, thanking all of the people who mentored me," incoming Hall of Fame pitcher Bert Blyleven (right, with fellow 2011 inductee Roberto Alomar) about Sunday's induction ceremonies in Cooperstown, N.Y. Blyleven won 287 regular-season games in a career that included four and a half seasons with the Indians. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- After Bert Blyleven got the word in January he was finally voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he put a notepad by the bed to scribble ideas for an induction speech.
"I already know my first line: 'Are we live?'" he said. "I'm going to have some fun with it."
Blyleven, 60, now a television color analyst for the Minnesota Twins, for whom he pitched 11 of his 22 major-league seasons, built a career on one of baseball's meanest curveballs and the reputation as a clubhouse practical joker.
"I'd like to light your shoes on fire right now if I could," he said during a recent interview in the visitors' TV booth at Progressive Field.
But when Blyleven took the mound, it was no joke.
"You knew when he stepped between the lines it was all business," said former Indians centerfielder Rick Manning, who played with and against Blyleven. "You knew you were going to get a good performance."
Rik Aalbert Blyleven was a quiet Dutch boy when he first took the mound for the Twins just two months after his 19th birthday. Jim Kaat, who anchored a formidable starting staff that included Jim Perry and Luis Tiant, said he still remembers Twins owner Calvin Griffith boasting the year before about a kid with the best curveball he'd seen since Camilo Pascual. (By the way, Perry, Tiant and Pascual were all Indians at one time as well.)
Kaat remembers Blyleven's first start. After giving up a lead-off homer to outfielder Lee Maye, he allowed only four more hits and struck out seven in seven innings to beat the Washington Senators, 2-1, on June 5, 1970.
"His approach was very simple," said Kaat, now with the MLB Network. "It was just fastball, curveball and if he had command of that curveball, he was going to be tough to beat."
By the time Blyleven retired in 1992, after 685 starts with five teams including the Indians, the two-time All-Star had amassed 287 wins, was fifth all-time with 3,701 strikeouts and ninth all-time with 60 shutouts.
And the Dutchman wasn't quiet anymore.
"He wasn't afraid of anything," said former Indians catcher Ron Hassey, now a minor-league manager for the Florida Marlins. "Just went right after the hitters."
Blyleven pitched for the Tribe from 1981 through July of '85, representing the Indians in the '85 All-Star Game before being traded back to Minnesota. When he arrived in a trade with Pittsburgh, Manning gave up his No. 28 in deference to the 6-3, 200-pound right-hander, who, by then, was among the game's elite pitchers.
Blyleven lived in Rocky River while with the Indians. Thirty years later, he remembers the Crazy Horse and another strip joint in the Flats called the Circus, but that not much else was happening downtown at the time.
He remembers playing with "a great bunch of guys," -- Manning, Mike Hargrove and Lenny Barker, Rick Sutcliffe, Toby Harrah, Duane Kuiper and Joe Charboneau.
And he remembers not a lot of wins.
"We had some really good players, but we didn't click on the field," said Blyleven, who will be inducted Sunday after 14 frustrating years of eligibility. "We had good pitching, not the best defense, not the best offense. [Then] we traded some of the guys away, like Sutcliffe and Barker. All of a sudden, we had good offense, pretty good defense, but then we had no pitching. So it just never really clicked together as far as what it takes to win."
The Indians of '83 fielded a respectable starting staff with Blyleven, Sutcliffe, Barker and Lary Sorensen. They still managed to lose 92 games, while Blyleven went 7-10 and injured his shoulder.
But the following year, in his final full season with the Tribe, Blyleven was 19-7 with a 2.87 ERA for a sixth-place team. He averaged nearly eight innings per start -- a trademark throughout his career.
The man was a workhorse. He pitched 242 complete games, and his 4,970 1/3 innings rank 13th all-time. Today, pitchers who complete eight or nine games in a season are considered doing well. Philadelphia's 34-year-old ace Roy Halladay, for instance, leads the majors with 64 career complete games.
"The emphasis on complete games and pitch count -- we never had that," Blyleven said. "The hitters usually let us know, the opposing team let us know when we were done. I don't like the way the game has gone. They baby the pitchers way too much."
Not that Blyleven's father, Joe, didn't do the same with his son. His dad worked as a bumper straightener after uprooting his young family from Holland to the United States by way of Canada in the late '50s. Blyleven was two when the family left Holland and six when it settled in Southern California, where an uncle lived.
He and his dad loved the Los Angeles Dodgers and listened to legendary Vin Scully and the late Jerry Doggett call the games. Blyleven said he actually learned to throw a curveball by listening to the announcers describe how Sandy Koufax threw his -- but not until his father gave him the OK.
"Koufax said if he ever had a son he wouldn't let him throw a curveball until he was about 13 or 14 years old, and that stuck with my dad," said Blyleven, who started playing as a 10-year-old catcher.
"My dad told me in his Dutch accent, 'Gosh darn it, you're not throwing a curveball until you're 13 or 14,'" he said, "and I didn't."
Blyleven, who had a baseball in his hand any chance he could growing up, learned to throw strikes against a block wall. He held his curveball like Bob Feller -- across the seams.
"It was never anything that damaged my arm whatsoever for 22 years," he said.
Still, Blyleven had elbow surgery in 1981, and the injury flared up again in his fourth start the following year with the Indians. He was just 2-2 and shelved for the season. But it wasn't the curveball that tore fibers in the elbow, he said. It was from pitching too much too soon after the '81 strike.
"To me," he said, "it was more off the fastball."
Radar guns weren't as prevalent at the time, but Blyleven figures his fastball fluctuated between 91 and 94 miles per hour. Not that speed mattered much.
"I never looked at how hard. That wasn't important to me," he said. "Importance to me was location of that pitch."
Almost as important was a well-timed gag, although a lot of those he pulled on teammates weren't fit to print, he admitted.
"He was the kind of guy," said Barker, "who, if you threw your chewing tobacco on the ground, he'd pick it up and put it in his mouth. He was a great guy in the clubhouse. He kept everybody loose."
It was an approach to life Blyleven says he inherited from his father, a man who, despite working a routine job, always seemed to save a joke for the family dinner table and was just a happy man, period.
In 2004, he lost his dad after a 20-year battle with Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative brain disorder he and his wife, Gayle, now raise money to fight.
Blyleven, a two-time World Series champion, was openly critical of Hall of Fame voters after continually being bypassed. When told this year he was in, he said the baseball writers finally got it right.
Also being inducted on Sunday are former Indians second baseman Roberto Alomar and longtime Toronto GM Pat Gillick. When Blyleven stands at the Hall of Fame podium, he'll be thinking, he said, of his father, legendary Twins teammate and friend Harmon Killebrew, who died in May, and others who guided him and would have been there had he been voted in sooner. But he bares no resentment.
"To me, it's a day of saying thank you, thanking all of the people who mentored me, from my little league coach to my high school coach to when I got to the big leagues at such a young age, Jim Perry, Jim Kaat, kind of taking me under their wings and teaching me the ropes," he said. "I'll have a smile the whole weekend."