The Goat

Brian Anderson is pitching under a shining sun and an accusing scoreboard.

It’s the afternoon of May 27 at Kauffman Stadium, and the Royals are trying to win three in a row for just the second time this season. Anderson has allowed the Detroit Tigers to push across two runs in the first inning, but he doesn’t panic. It’s a hot day, he tells himself. The ball’s going to jump off the bats of both teams’ hitters.

The Tigers add a run in the second inning and another in the third. The Royals score twice in the fourth inning but still trail, 4-2. Anderson is in jeopardy of losing his seventh straight start.

Anderson takes the mound at the top of the fifth inning. Pitching in 86-degree heat, he needs three quick outs if he wants to stay in the game.

Instead he gives up three quick singles. Tigers lead, 6-2.

Royals manager Tony Peña walks slowly to the mound and calls for a reliever. Anderson listens to cheers for Peña’s decision to remove him. Applause gives way to boos when Anderson, after relinquishing the ball, jogs toward the dugout. “Finally!” exclaims a boy seated in the upper deck. Near him, office workers wearing matching corporate T-shirts abandon their hope for a series sweep. They pick up the plastic brooms they had brought to taunt the Tigers and head for the cool, dark tunnels.

The Tigers go on to win, 17-7. In the course of the victory, they pound out 27 hits, breaking the record for a Royals opponent. The hits aren’t cheap, either. A line drive off the bat of Carlos Peña strikes reliever Justin Huisman in the face, leaving seam impressions on his forehead.

Reporters crowd Anderson’s locker after the game. He greets them wearing a baby-blue Royals T-shirt and white baseball pants. His light-brown hair is limp and matted. He props a foot on a folding chair and leans forward, arms crossed. “There’s not much to say,” he says. “The game pretty much speaks for itself. There’s not much I’m going to add to it.”

But Anderson ends up talking for more than 20 minutes. Pre-empting the criticism of sportswriters and talk-show callers, he laments that he is the worst pitcher in baseball. A kid in rookie ball could do better, he says. “It’s just hard to put into words, because no one is this bad. No one. No one. Not even guys that have pitched with horrible injuries are this bad. And I’ve been. It’s bizarre.”

He continues later, “I’ve never experienced anything like this. I used to remember if I had two bad games in a row, that was, ‘Wow, what in the world! Two bad games in a row!’ Now we’re going on 10 or 11 just about in a row. It’s mind-boggling.”

The next day, Anderson, the Royals’ best-paid pitcher, is yanked from the starting rotation and sent to the bullpen, where he can do the least harm.

The baseball season began with great hope in Kansas City.

An 83-79 record in 2003 snapped an eight-years-long string of losing seasons. Looking to expand on that success, the front office acquired several new players in the off-season, increasing the payroll by $7 million. Many baseball experts believed that General Manager Allard Baird had spent the money wisely. “I really thought they did everything right this off-season,” says ESPN.com baseball writer Rob Neyer.

But fans expecting a winner have instead watched a team eat dirt. The Royals fell into last place on April 22 and have remained there, despite Peña’s ill-considered guarantee — made after a 12-4 loss — that his club would win the division. During one particularly woeful stretch, the Royals dropped 18 of 22 games.

Anderson, 32, was supposed to stabilize the pitching rotation. Last November, the left-hander signed a two-year contract worth $6.5 million. He’d impressed the front office by winning five of seven starts after a late-season trade from Cleveland. Over the entire 2003 season, he pitched well — his 3.78 earned run average was his lowest in 11 major-league seasons.

Anderson has led a peripatetic career, changing teams four times. He’s the kind of player baseball fans tend not to think about unless he’s pitching in front of their eyes. In fact, he’s known more for eccentricity than for effectiveness.

His injuries, for instance, have tended toward the peculiar. He ascribed a strained back to an uncomfortable cab ride. A cologne bottle lacerated his hand. A ground ball broke his thumb. A line drive cracked his foot (“That hurt,” he says). He once tested the heat of an iron by pressing it to his face. The burn on his cheek attested to the iron’s warmth.

During a 1999 road trip to Cincinnati when he played for the Arizona Diamondbacks, Anderson was caught naked outside his hotel room at 4:30 a.m. He’d been sleepwalking and had awakened when he heard the door close behind him. At some level of consciousness, he suspects, he wanted to fetch a drink from a vending machine, as he often did during hotel stays. “That time, I just happened to have no money, no keys and nothing on,” he says.

“The best part about that story was actually having to take the elevator. That’s the killer,” he adds. “Not only was I up there in just my birthday suit but actually having to get on that elevator.”

It was reported that Anderson covered himself with a found copy of USA Today. “I didn’t take the newspaper until I got off the elevator, so actually, on the elevator I was just in a corner, all hunched over, hoping that that door didn’t open up and somebody was getting on. But nobody did.”

Anderson was rescued eventually by a janitor, who threw him a towel and called the front desk.

Turning 30 didn’t bring an end to the high jinks. As a Cleveland Indian in spring training last year, Anderson discovered 20 minutes into a two-hour bus ride to Vero Beach, Florida, that he’d forgotten his glove and cleats. Anderson was scheduled to start the game in Vero Beach, so as the bus approached the stadium, he kept his eyes open for a mall. The bus came to a stop, and he took a trainer’s car and went shopping. He paid $65 for spikes at a Champs Sports and $24 for a glove at Wal-Mart.

Anderson is not a born flake, though it’s hard to imagine a right-hander sleepwalking nude through a hotel. More precisely, he’s someone who likes to tell jokes on himself. “Weird things happen to a lot of people,” he says. “They just don’t talk about it.”

A “B.A.” story must meet certain criteria. First, it has to be true. Second, it has to be funny. “And in the laugh, in the crux of the story, I can be the only guy who looks bad,” Anderson says. “I don’t want to drag a teammate in there.”

Even when others make Anderson look bad, he finds comedy. Last season, the Indians’ community-relations department produced a Brian Anderson postcard. For some reason, the postcard maker airbrushed Anderson’s eyebrows, making them appear unnaturally full. Most players would have been livid, says Indians radio broadcaster Tom Hamilton. Not Anderson. “He was like, ‘I look like an insect.’ He was running around showing it to everybody,” Hamilton says.

Hamilton credits Anderson’s parents for his ability to laugh at himself. His family owns a tire store in Geneva, Ohio, a small town east of Cleveland. Anderson’s father, Jim, taught him to pitch in the backyard. Their throwing sessions didn’t end until the young Anderson could hit a particular spot ten in times a row. “It made for some long nights sometimes,” he says.

Anderson’s parents taught him another kind of control. He says they never allowed his athletic ability to excuse bad behavior. “Most of the guys in this room, in Little League, they dominated,” he says, seated at a table in the Royals clubhouse. “They always were the best player in most everything they played…. All of a sudden, if you’re the best player on every team, then your parents start to coddle you…. ‘You get in a little trouble? We’re going to push that away, underneath the rug, because we need you for the big game, slugger.’ Stuff like that goes on. What does that tell a kid? He starts pumping his chest out like, ‘I’m pretty stinking important. I’m a big guy around here.’

“You keep that up through college and in the pros, and everybody wants a piece of you, telling you how good you are,” Anderson continues. “It’s real easy to get an inflated ego and become like that. I’ve been fortunate to stay grounded. I had great parents who never bought into that. If there was anybody hard on me, it was them.”

The freak injuries and major-league hitters have kept Anderson humble. Though he was selected by the California Angels with the third pick in the 1993 amateur draft (Alex Rodriguez went first) and made his major-league debut that same year, at age 20, Anderson has never dominated for more than a game or two at a time. He is a control artist who is prone to groove pitches that hitters lift over the fences, often with one or two men on base. The Arizona Republic labeled Anderson a “mild bust” toward the end of his five-year tenure with the Diamondbacks.

When his contract with Arizona expired, Anderson returned to Cleveland, where he pitched in 1996 and ’97. He signed a one-year contract for $1.5 million. The deal represented a cut in pay from the previous year of almost $4 million.

Anderson’s success in 2003 returned him to the ranks of baseball’s well-compensated, and he tried to start earning his keep while the ground was still frozen. For four days in January, he participated in the Royals’ winter caravan. The bus tour visited radio stations, supermarkets, sports bars and grade schools in Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa. (While Anderson rode the bus, his wife and his mother found a house in Overland Park. He and Anna, his wife, share the place with two Rottweilers.)

Anderson’s gregariousness made him ideal for the caravan. “I’ll trade you an autograph for an animal cracker,” he said to one shy, treat-toting youngster who approached him at a Hy-Vee in St. Joseph. He asked another kid about his missing baby teeth. The helmet-haired store manager got a picture of himself with the pitcher; Anderson flashed the peace sign. A bold young woman working in the deli told Anderson he was hot. “Wife!” he answered, waving his ring finger.

He talked baseball, too. A fan wearing a Royals jersey and stocking cap said he wished that the organization had signed Anderson to a long-term contract. “Hey, two years is [long-term] anymore,” Anderson replied.

A sad component of Anderson’s sudden decline is that it arrived at the moment he became the putative ace of the staff. Among his fellow Royals, only position players — Mike Sweeney, Carlos Beltran and Juan Gonzalez — earn more money.

Of course, by starting a pitcher like Anderson (career record: 75-69) on opening day, the team showed its potential weakness coming into the season. “If you want to question something, it’s the presumed opinion by the front office that the starting pitching would be good enough,” Rob Neyer says.

Anderson, for instance, was coming off a season in which he won 14 games. But his 3.78 ERA was illusory, because it didn’t take into account the 27 unearned runs he allowed. Earned-run average is an imperfect statistic; it more or less forgives pitchers for the mistakes they make after the defense commits an error. Anderson’s 27 unearned runs led all major-league pitchers, according to Baseball Prospectus, a statistic-minded think tank that publishes books and a Web site.

Arcane statistics aside, Anderson was not expected to pitch as badly as he has this season. “There was no reason to think he was going to collapse,” says Rany Jazayerli, a Baseball Prospectus writer and Royals follower who grew up in Wichita.

The rest of the rotation has not mitigated Anderson’s struggles. Darrell May, a left-hander whose style is similar to Anderson’s, has pitched almost as poorly. Jeremy Affeldt’s ERA was 5.24 before he moved to the bullpen. Jimmy Gobble’s inability to strike out hitters (2.01 per 9 innings) is one for the record books.

But no pitcher has been knocked around like Anderson. Batted balls flew over his head in rapid succession like airplanes taking off from a busy runway. Before he was yanked from the rotation, he had given up more hits than any pitcher in baseball. His ERA was an abominable 7.82.

Adding to the frustration, the source of Anderson’s trouble was a mystery to him.

“What could it possibly be?” he asked after the Tigers’ shellacking. “What could it possibly be? It’s not like my stuff’s not there. It’s the same stuff I had when I won every time I stepped on the field for this team. It’s the same stuff I’ve had for a decade. Don’t tell me everybody’s figured me out all of a sudden. I’ve been here 10 years.”

Anderson made a case that he was both bad and unlucky. The Tigers, he said, got base hits off pitches that were well out of the strike zone. “I gave up my fair share of hits, and I missed my fair share of spots. But then when you do make a pretty good pitch, and even that’s getting hit, where do I freakin’ throw it? Down the middle doesn’t work. Outer half is not working. Off the plate is now kind of shaky.”

He added, “You go home, it’s hard to come up with an answer.”

As an organization, the Royals haven’t been able to provide Anderson with much worthwhile advice. Catcher Kelly Stinnett says he thinks Anderson’s problems are mechanical. Stinnett arrived at his theory after watching Anderson intend to throw inside to Jermaine Dye in a game against the Oakland A’s. Anderson left the pitch over the plate, and Dye pegged it for a base hit. “He doesn’t miss that bad, usually,” Stinnett tells the Pitch.

On the day he announced the decision to send Anderson to the bullpen, manager Tony Peña said he believed that Anderson’s problems were in his head. “Right now it’s mental,” Peña said. “Right now he’s fried. Right now he doesn’t have room to think.”

General Manager Baird, speaking to the Pitch, seemed to agree with Peña. “We’re talking about a real competitor,” Baird said of Anderson. “He’s beating himself up. I think that’s part of the problem, because if you beat yourself up so much and you want it to the tenth degree, it’s tough to do that, especially in a skilled game and especially if you’re a skilled pitcher.”

Anderson did not want to go to the bullpen. He believed that one good start might get him back on track. “I got to make that happen,” he said after losing to Detroit. “It’s not going to come out of nowhere. I’m not going to go out to my backyard and pick a good outing off the trees.”

A day later, Anderson found out he had lost his spot in the rotation. He was asked if he thought going to the bullpen would help. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I think that remains to be seen. The powers that be, pretty smart men, think that it will.

“At this point, I haven’t done anything to warrant staying in the rotation, so this is what you get,” he continued. “So you go down there, and you make the best of it and try to turn things around from down there.”

The starting pitching is not all to blame for the Royals’ poor showing. At different times, the bullpen has blown leads. The offense has disappeared. The defense has been porous.

When the losses started to mount, Peña tried to keep his players loose. After the club dropped a game to the Minnesota Twins in April, he marched into the showers in uniform, stood under the water and streaked soap across his chest. Peña invited the players to join him, but none did. His behavior, Jazayerli says, has exhibited “all the characteristics of a manager who’s in panic mode.”

Players cope differently with defeat. Reliever Curtis Leskanic looked to superstition when things weren’t going well for him early in the season. “I have a home cup and an away cup,” he tells the Pitch. “I changed my home cup to away and my away cup to home.”

Mike Sweeney puts his faith in Jesus, and the captain has looked at times as if he’s carrying a heavy object on his back. “I know for this team to click, I need to pitch in,” he said at the end of May, when his batting average was .275, 32 points below his career average. “Up to this point, I don’t think I’ve pitched in as much as I could have. I know what I’m capable of and what I’ve done this year, and they don’t match up.”

Others try to keep a sense of humor. In the clubhouse before a game, shortstop Angel Berroa donned a catcher’s shin guards and pretended to field bunted balls. A few lockers away, first baseman Ken Harvey played the smart aleck. “I’m a big dude, but I can outrun all these cats,” Harvey said, addressing a challenge to his foot speed. Then he told hulking pitcher Dennys Reyes, “If you could run faster than me, with your big ass, you would be hitting.”

Harvey has been the Royals’ best hitter. His batting average climbed to .379 earlier this month. But he is perhaps the only Royals regular to exceed expectations. Stinnett says the team has not lived up to its hype. “Through the off-season, we were expected to be at the top of our division. That’s a lot of pressure, and sometimes you probably try to do too much.”

Adds Leskanic: “It just seems like sometimes we play not to lose instead of play to win.”

To listen and read the local media, though, the 2004 Royals lose because they lack heart. Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock recently criticized Baird for turning “a young, scrappy, feisty and quick 2003 team into an old, slow, passionless and gutless ballclub.”

Other members of the media have joined Whitlock in faulting the team’s style of play. Fellow Star columnist Jeffrey Flanagan, for instance, assailed the Royals for having a plodding, “station to station” offense. In the press box one afternoon, broadcaster Paul Splittorff was overheard telling a Star writer that the team needed more “guys who play with fire.” As examples, Splittorff cited Aaron Guiel and Brandon Berger — unimposing players who fit a stereotype better than they help an offense.

More than gamers, the Royals lack production. As of June 14, the team’s offense ranked 13th among 14 American League teams in terms of getting on base and 11th in hitting for power.

The 2004 Royals also miss the good luck that carried the 2003 team. “Last year, it was magic,” Harvey says, and he’s close to the mark. The 2003 Royals scored fewer runs than their opponents, yet they won more games than they lost. Jazayerli deemed the 2003 team “fluky” in the annual guide that Baseball Prospectus publishes. Such good fortune (there is little evidence to support the notion of the clutch hitter, for instance) was bound not to last.

Judging by all the new faces in spring training, Baird realized that the 2003 Royals overachieved. He won’t call it luck, but he can remember games last season when Royals runners who looked doomed rounding third base scored because the throw to home plate was cut off in the infield. “We executed in some ways above our talent level,” he told the Pitch in May. “I’m not saying we didn’t have any talent. But this group has more talent, and we’re not executing.”

Neyer says it’s easy to look today at the team’s record and fault the construction of the team. Baird did make questionable moves, such as signing 39-year-old catcher Benito Santiago to a two-year deal. But grabbing Juan Gonzalez, a reputed malingerer, was “a risk worth taking,” Neyer says, because of what he might have provided a contending team. “It’s natural to want to assign blame to the front office in these situations, but I really think that in most ways they got it right. It just hasn’t worked out.”

But many observers see a team not trying hard enough, a team lacking esprit de corps. One player refutes the charge. “On the field, there is no such thing as team chemistry,” Leskanic says. “I’ve been on teams where you don’t hear a peep in the dugout, and yet you win ninety games. I think there is no such thing as chemistry.”

“I think the people of Kansas City are very, very bitter right now,” Anderson says.

The fans had high expectations, he says, and the team “came out and nose-dived.” He adds, “I think they were like, ‘We waited all winter for this?’ And they got bitter in a hurry.

“The only way to get rid of that is to go out and win ballgames,” he continues. “We almost have to win them convincingly, because if the other team is even in the game, they’re not real happy. But you know what? You can’t blame them. You can’t blame them.”

Anderson said after the Tigers game that he might boo himself.

Though he took abuse as he walked off the mound, Anderson says fans have been supportive when he’s in a restaurant or grabbing a drink at Starbucks. “I don’t know what the reason for that is,” he says. “I try to be as honest as I can at self-evaluation and not make excuses. Maybe they appreciate that. You’re not going to say anything to me as a fan that I haven’t said about myself. If I don’t get the job done, I’ll tell you.”

As Anderson has struggled, he has felt worse for his teammates than for himself. “I feel terrible about that, putting us in a hole every time we freakin’ step on the field,” he says. It’s in his nature to hate disappointing anyone. His bright personality comes from a similar place. He’s tried not to bring his frustration home, though he admits there have been moments. “But it’s not fair to my wife to come home and kick the dog and break stuff. She’s hurting just as bad as I am. We don’t need two people moping around the house, so you try your best to leave it on the field.”

Sleep hasn’t come easily to Anderson this season. But a week after moving to the bullpen, he felt more restful. “I enjoy for now the change of scenery and knowing that every day I come to the park I have a chance to play,” he says.

Anderson adapted quickly to his new surroundings. In the process of telling pitching coach John Cumberland that he didn’t mind coming into the game as a reliever, he gave himself a good piece of advice. He told Cumberland that relief work required a pitcher to attack the hitter. Cumberland stopped him and repeated the phrase: Attack the hitter. “That really struck me,” Anderson says. “Yeah, attack. I mean, why not? Nothing else is working. Might as well have the mindset of ‘here it comes’ and try to make quality pitches. The other approaches have gotten you absolutely nowhere, so why not?”

Anderson responded to his own advice with a good outing. Pitching against Boston on June 5, he allowed only one run in four innings. Anderson entered the game with the Royals trailing 6-0, so it might have seemed to be a low-pressure situation. “But when you’re going through what I’m going through,” he says, “every time you get out there, it feels like the seventh game of the World Series.”

He adds, “It doesn’t matter at this point what kind of game I get in, whether it’s close, blowout, or we’re way up or we’re way down — it’s a huge outing for me. That was nice for me to go out there and stretch it out and throw 65 pitches or so and get some quality work…. It was satisfying.”

Anderson is sitting in the Royals dugout, sweat running down his face after shagging balls in the outfield. The temperature is above 90 degrees, but his recent success makes baseball seem less like a chore. “Hopefully we can get on some huge tear and put a little excitement back in the summertime,” he says.

“If not, it could get really long really fast.”