I never thought his was the face of a baseball player. It was too wise, too resigned, altogether too philosophical. Every time the camera found him in the dugout, he seemed to be processing something, trying to put things together that may or may not have made sense. His default mode was reflective, not what you’d expect from a major league baseball player, let alone a Cy Young award-winning pitcher. Perhaps it was the unusual, circuitous path he took to fame and riches in baseball. Or perhaps it was the tool he chose to take him along that path, the knuckleball, the mastery of which is no easier than trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
Or perhaps it was just that this is the person he is.
Even when he was treated as an expendable spare part by Manager John Gibbons in both of his team’s recent playoff runs, his expression remained inscrutable, yet understanding, as if he were pondering the line from Desiderata made famous by the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, “the universe is unfolding as it should”. In fact, Desiderata provides the foundation for a thorough characterization of R. A. Dickey, for its opening lines seem to capture his ways to a T: “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.”
The news broke yesterday that Dickey, whose four-year tenure with the Blue Jays came to an end on October second, has signed a one-year deal with Atlanta, and will return as many had predicted to finish his short yet amazing career in the National League, where he first came to prominence as this generation’s premier knuckleball pitcher.
Though I’m very sorry to see him leave Toronto, and he leaves a big hole in Toronto’s baseball culture, I’m very pleased to know that his career has not come to an end, and that another major league team has seen fit to reward his years of hard work with one more opportunity to be part of a major league starting rotation.
Interestingly, today Atlanta announced the signing of Bartolo Colon to a one-year contract as well. Colon, who is actually a year older than R. A. Dickey, had a great year with the Mets, deserved to land a nice deal somewhere, and, like Dickey, would still seem to have something left to offer to the rebuilding Atlanta team. Still, it’s an odd story. The two oldest pitchers in major league baseball, both in the starting rotation on the same team. I’m imagining a little annex tacked on to the dugout, with a couple of nice recliners and outlets handy for heated lap robes, and the electric kettle, to keep the spring and fall chill off those old bones . . .
There is more to the oldness of R.A. Dickey than his calendar age. His whole presentation, as a person and as a ballplayer, is retro. From his bloused stirrups (blue socks showing, pants worn as knickers in the traditional style) to his old-timey pitching motion and the off-handed flip of his delivery, he would not look out of place at all in an old, jerky, home-movie reel, perhaps from the thirties. And unlike the contemporary manner, he’s neither an outsized figure, like a Josh Donaldson, nor a drama king, like any number of his team-mates. When there is reason to celebrate as a team, he holds back, benignly smiling as if to say “have fun, kids, I’ll watch out for the cops, and drive you home if you party too much.” Success doesn’t take him too high, nor does failure take him too low. And if you ever needed a pinch-runner, or somebody to go to the bullpen to mop up in a blow-out, you knew you’d get “sure, chief, whatever you need”. Now that he’s back in the National League, I have no doubt he’ll get the bunt down or hit behind the runner when it’s called for. He might even break up a double play at second, Utley rule be damned!
In short, R. A. Dickey is a pro, has always been, and will always remain one. However things work out in Atlanta, Dickey will always be Dickey, and I hope the Atlanta fans will appreciate him for that.
And so he packs his books, takes his list of Tolkien-derived names for his bats, puts his arm over the shoulder of his buddy and catcher Josh Thole, and marches out of the clubhouse with him, the old pitcher and the young catcher, together still but for how much longer who knows.
As he departs, we hope he will remember the good things about Toronto, and disregard the bad. The ovations after a great outing, rather than being pulled with a 7-1 lead in game four of the 2015 ALDS, at four and two thirds innings and 78 pitches, because his manager lost his nerve and thought it necessary to burn David Price with game five still to be played. The satisfaction of having contributed to two postseason appearances by his team, rather than the disappointment of watching the 2016 postseason from a non-roster seat on the end of the bench.
Yer humble scribe may be in the minority, but here’s to R. A. Dickey for being a consummate professional, an interesting character, and an all-round good guy. Farewell, old pro. Pitch well and prosper in Atlanta, where the weather is warm and the knuckler will dance once again.
CODA: A FEW FINAL THOUGHTS FOR TORONTO’S LEGIONS OF DICKEY HATERS:
Having made my own feelings clear about R. A. Dickey, it would be remiss of me not to direct some last remarks to those who would prefer that he had never donned the bird and blue.
I won’t dignify Dickey’s detractors by giving much attention to the chorus of abuse he has suffered from many in the fan base here since his arrival in Toronto in 2013. Suffice to say that Dickey turning out not to be the reincarnation of Sandy Koufax, added to the emergence of Noah Syndergaard on the New York stage, fuelled a lot of foolish chatter, which needs to be stilled once and for all, allowing the man to leave with the dignity he deserves.
Of course, coming off his Cy Young award in 2012, great things were expected of him, especially within the context of the other major acquisitions Alex Anthopoulos made prior to the 2013 season. When the trade was announced, let’s remember that no one was really crying about the loss of pitching prospect Noah Syndergaard and catching prospect Travis d’Arnaud, who were relinquished to the Mets in exchange for Dickey. At that time, the chatter was all about the incoming star pitcher.
Anthopoulos’ first attempt to deal his way to playoff contention was an abject failure, as the team continued to wallow in mediocrity through both the 2013 and 2014 seasons. There were no saviours to be had from that off-season haul of Dickey, Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, and Josh Johnson, at least in the sense of being able to lead the team out of the desert and into the postseason. Johnson failed utterly to meet expectations, going 2-8 with a 6.20 ERA in his single season with the Blue Jays. Reyes stayed with the team until traded for Troy Tulowitzki in July of 2015, but he was never the impact shortstop and leadoff hitter that Toronto had hoped he would be, and eventually became a clear liability, both on the field and financially. In retrospect, Reyes’ greatest value was that he brought Tulo north of the border for us.
Mark Buerhle pitched well and honourably for three years, going 40-28, throwing 604.1 innings, with a high ERA of 4.15 in 2013, followed by seasons of 3.39 and 3.81. That he would pitch to the very limit of his ability was shown in his last start, when John Gibbons gave him the ball in the final game of 2015 in an attempt to extend his streak of 200-plus innings per year to fifteen on only two days’ rest. (He never got out of the first inning, getting only two outs and giving up eight runs, none of them earned, on five hits.) Sadly, the two outs gave him 198 and two thirds innings for the season; he fell only one and a third innings short of the 200 for fifteen straight years. Though he hasn’t officially retired yet, that was his last appearance in a major league game to date.
That Buerhle, et al. plus Dickey were not able to make Toronto contenders is not on them and what they did or didn’t do for the team. The disappointment fans felt over the team’s continued mediocrity is more attributable to the desperate and unrealistic hopes of the Blue Jays’ supporters themselves, and the excitement created by a general manager who had signaled that he might actually try to create a winning ball team in Toronto.
R. A. Dickey gave the Blue Jays exactly what they should have expected from an established major league starting pitcher: he took the ball every fifth day and more often than not, way more often than not, gave his team a chance to win. In the meantime he accumulated innings and rang up starts over the course of his four years in Toronto that no one could have expected from a pitcher who arrived here at the age of 38: 823.1 innings, 131 starts, 75 of them of the quality variety (six innings or more, three runs or less).
By comparison, and as a final word on the question of Syndergaard/d’Arnaud for Dickey, it needs to be said that the discontent over the deal, so loud over the last year or so, has to be put into context. To begin with, d’Arnaud, who still figures heavily in the plans of the New York Mets, has suffered a significant injury every year since the trade from Toronto, and has only caught for the Mets in limited spurts of good health. He came to the majors right away in 2013, but in the past four seasons has only appeared in 281 games out of a possible 648. Syndergaard did not make it to the Mets until 2015, by which time Dickey had already made 68 starts for the Blue Jays, and thrown 440 and a third innings. Since his promotion to the majors, “Thor” Syndergaard, with his impressive stature and great stuff, has had a 23-16 won-loss record with an ERA of 2.89, in a National League that generally tends to see better pitching stats because of the absence of the designated hitter. He has made 35 quality starts out of 55 total starts; his most impressive number is 384 strikeouts in 333 and two thirds innings.
There is no doubt that it would have been nice to have Thor down the stretch in the last two years, but who would have provided the innings in place of Dickey in the two previous years? For that matter, even in the last two years, Dickey logged 384 innings for Toronto, as opposed, I repeat, to Syndergaard’s 333 and two thirds. Again, who picks up the starters’ innings Syndergaard doesn’t give the Jays? Drew Hutchison? Jesse Chavez? Really?
To borrow a line that Joseph Stalin used to use to justify bumping off all of his political opponents, you can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs. In the case of R. A. Dickey, Noah Syndergaard’s loss was the cracked egg, and we’ve really enjoyed the tasty omelette of two straight seasons of going deep into the postseason. Would we have been there without Dickey? Hard to say. But this much is irrefutable: we made it to October with him in the rotation. Twice.