Bull Durham, a wildly overrated baseball comedy (give me “Bad News Bears” over it any day), features a character and pitcher named Nuke LaLoosh, a goofy son-of-a gun who throws extremely hard but with little control until he falls under the tutelage of catcher Crash Davis as played by Kevin Costner.
Except there was nothing funny or goofy about real-life pitcher Steve Dalkowski, the person who inspired the character for the movie, according to “The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver tricked, tormented and reinvented baseball,” a new book by author John W. Miller.
How did Dalkowski and Weaver cross paths? Both were in the Orioles’ minor league system. Dalkowski was a promising pitcher, who threw the ball at blazing fast speeds, while Weaver was managing the Elmira Pioneers in Elmira, New York.
Dalkowski threw so hard that he once struck out 121 batters across 62 innings for a Kingsport, Tennessee, team in the Appalachian League, according to the book. The only problem is he was just as wild, issuing 129 walks over that same span.
He had no idea where the ball was going and he drank, according to the book. Dalkowski, who came from a family of alcoholics, started drinking in the ninth grade and Weaver often found himself responding to middle-of-the night phone calls to come and get Dalkowski, either asleep on somebody’s lawn or locked up in the downtown drunk tank. Weaver, who was no stranger to the brown stuff, warned him that if he continued to drink he wouldn’t see 33, according to the book.
They also tried multiple ways to harness Dalko’s wildness, with Weaver finally breaking through to him as he did with so many players, explaining that if he didn’t throw strikes and the other team doesn’t swing, “you lose.”
That was the motivation Dalkowski needed and he finally showed improvement, eventually getting a shot with the Orioles and pitching well against the Yankees in a 1963 spring training game, according to the book. Unfortunately, Dalkowski felt something snap in his elbow.
“Injured and depressed, he drank beer for breakfast and behaved even more erratically. Weaver stopped bailing him out of jail.”
The Orioles released him and Dalkowski later found work as a migrant farm worker, picking fruit and planting vegetables. He also continued to drink and later developed alcohol-related dementia. Dalkowski died at 80 in a Connecticut nursing home from COVID-19 in 2020, according to the book.
Extra innings…
–The Weaver book is good, although the most interesting part is not his reign in the major leagues, but how he got there in the first place. Weaver in 1952 was a promising prospect for the St. Louis Cardinals. He played well enough that spring to earn a spot on the team, only to have it all taken away from him by player-manager Eddie Stanky, who decided he would play Weaver’s backup infielder position.
“On April Fool’s Day, 1952, Earl Weaver left Florida for Houston. Back to the bush leagues. Instead of motivating him, the rejection drove him to drink and depression, and set him on a purgatory through the minor leagues that lasted 16 years. He threw in the towel, and would never again play as well as he had those first four seasons in the minor leagues, and would never again share a locker room with Stan Musial.”
–I picked up the Weaver book wanting to learn more about the two post-season appearances the Twins made against the Orioles in 1969 and 1970. There was little about either series.
Weaver on the 1969 Twins:
“If you get three, four or five runs ahead, you try to get more before (Harmon) Killebrew hits the ball out,” he said.