“I’ll put it to you this way,” McCatty said. “Every time I threw a pitch, I hoped they hit it. Because if they fouled it off or took it, that meant I had to throw another pitch.”
‘Batty McCatty’ finds a way
Nationals pitching coach Steve McCatty knows the pain and pleasure of the game
Nationals Journal
Insight on the Nationals and all the latest news from Post reporters Adam Kilgore and James Wagner.
After his career, he learned he had pitched with a torn labrum in his shoulder and a bone chip under the top of his biceps. He figures the Athletics did not want him to have surgery, because it would risk ending his career. “They got what they could,” McCatty said. “Which probably wasn’t too good.”
Even with the pain, McCatty loved every minute. He stayed up late and talked baseball in hotel bars, gleaning information from his hitting teammates. He dealt with his bad days with humor. Once, a teammate came up to him on the mound and held out his fist. McCatty stuck out his hand. The teammate dropped six chicken bones into McCatty’s palm and told him, “This fell out of your elbow last inning.”
In 1982, the Athletics played the Padres in an exhibition, without the designated hitter. Manager Billy Martin hated making the pitcher hit, and so he told McCatty to go to the plate without a bat. McCatty had a better idea. He found a 15-inch souvenir bat and stuffed it in his back pocket. When he walked to the plate, the umpire asked, “Where’s your bat?” McCatty stopped and pulled out the toy bat. The headlines the next day called him “Batty McCatty.”
“I would say my way of dealing with pressure was to laugh it off,” McCatty said. “Otherwise, I might be hanging from a bridge somewhere after one of those games, you’d be so upset at yourself. That was just me.”
He coaches the same way. In his rookie season, Storen gave up a long home run on a slider. He arrived in the clubhouse the next day expecting a tongue-lashing. When McCatty saw him, he told Storen sarcastically, “Hey, that was a good slider.”
“He’s not afraid to cut it up with you,” Storen said. “I think that’s the cool thing. I think his whole approach is very straightforward. There’s no kind of beating around the bush like, ‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings.’ ”
McCatty needed the easygoing demeanor this season. The Nationals’ unprecedented decision to shut down Strasburg introduced a new pressure on the pitching staff. “He had a lot of [stuff] come down on him with the whole Strasburg thing,” left-hander Ross Detwiler said. “And he stayed even-keeled the whole way with everybody else. He very easily could have gotten stressed out about that. But he didn’t.”
The end of his career still eats at McCatty. Now he encourages his pitchers to speak up if they have an injury. He tells them, “I probably shouldn’t have pitched.”
McCatty, at 58, remains a pitcher in mind, if not body. He is there with his pitchers every time they throw. “I don’t worry about screwing them up,” McCatty said. “I let them go play.”
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