What went wrong with Phillies phenom Tyler Green?
It was a pleasant March afternoon in Dunedin, Fla., the minor league home of the Toronto Blue Jays.
Tyler Green, the Phillies first-round pick in the June 1991 draft, was scheduled to pitch. The big club had a rare off day, so much of the Phillies brass had shown up to watch their pedigreed prospect.
Manager Jim Fregosi, GM Lee Thomas, pitching coach Johnny Podres and a few scouts were seated in metal bleachers to the right of home plate. No golf today; this was special.
If Green was nervous he didn’t show it. Anything but.
Pitching for the Double-A Reading Phillies, Green put on a show that day that nobody who was there will ever forget.
He had come out of Wichita State, where in 1990 he was named the Olympics MVP, with a signature pitch called a knuckle curve that was advertised as being all but unhittable.
The pitch was jaw-dropping. It was as though a pool shark was playing on a table with no cushions and when the ball reached the edge it gave in suddenly and violently to gravity. Straight down. In an instant.
As a high school right-hander at Thomas Jefferson High in Denver, Col., Green achieved the distinction of being chosen the national Gatorade Player of the Year.
Green set the tone for the rest of the day when he completely embarrassed the first Blue Jays batter, who never took the bat off his shoulder. After the third pitch he stalked off, shouting, “What the hell was that?”
One by one they went down. The only thing they got out of that day was a little sun. As the game progressed they began to openly rag each other from their dugout, deciding to have some fun with their exercise in futility.
Green, all business, never lost his focus. The Phillies contingent wore their game faces all afternoon and left when Green had finished his outing. Oh, to be a fly in Fregosi’s car on the short drive back to Clearwater.
I had not seen a minor league pitcher shut down professional hitters since Roger Clemens came out of the University of Texas in 1983 and, pitching for New Britain, the Red Sox franchise in the Eastern League, silenced the bats of a powerful Reading Phillies squad.
Green went 6-3 with a 1.88 ERA for Reading in 1992. He would pitch a no-hitter in Triple-A in 1994 and join the big league rotation in 1995. He won eight of his first 12 decisions that year and was selected to the NL All-Star team. Among his gems were back-to-back shutouts of the Dodgers and Braves.
After one of those games Richie Ashburn said to his TV partner Harry Kalas, “Harry, this kid is going to win 15 games a year for the next 10 years.”
His prediction shows Hall of Famers can be mistaken when it comes to evaluating pitchers.
Green did not win a game after the All-Star break. He finished the season at 8-9 with a 5.31 ERA in 25 starts. He struck out 85 and walked 66. The arm problems that would plague him the rest of his professional career had begun.
Fregosi was no help. The writers liked to say the former All-Star infielder spoke as though he had invented pitching. Green was quiet, unassuming; I don’t know if he had any close friends on the team. He was Fregosi’s polar opposite in most things.
As Green’s troubles began in 1995 Fregosi began to question his pitcher’s character.
He once told me, “I don’t think he has what it takes to be a successful big league pitcher. He babies himself. He’s not tough enough.”
I believe Green sensed his manager’s opinion of him. Still, he never talked about it; it was not his nature.
I got to know Green during that 1992 season in Reading. I knew his father, Charlie, who once was a backup quarterback for the Oakland Raiders. I learned Charlie felt Tyler could have been more emotional on the mound, more outgoing off it.
One day in spring training Tyler and I went out for dinner. He invited me back to his high-rise apartment on the Clearwater beach. The entire living room was dominated by recording equipment, including a keyboard. Tyler was into music production. He and a partner were trying to sell original songs to professional artists, most of them country singers.
That he was excited about.
Green was sidelined the entire 1996 season. In 1997 he went 4-4 with a 4.73 ERA in 14 starts. The walks began to pile up; he had lost control of that special pitch. He was able to make 27 starts in 1998, finishing at 6-12 with a 5.03 ERA. He walked 85 batters and allowed 23 home runs.
He wound up with Kansas City and Cleveland and was done by 2000. He had undergone four shoulder and two elbow surgeries. His resume included an 18-25 record and 5.16 ERA.
There was talk that the strain the knuckle curve had put on his arm all those years had created his demise.
Too bad. He was a decent guy who was often misunderstood. If only Whitey Ashburn was right.