Tony La Russa, then the White Sox manager, had been ejected from that game and watched the late innings from a dugout tunnel, straining to see just a sliver of the field. With Dave Winfield coming up as the potential tying run in the eighth, La Russa’s trusted pitching coach, Dave Duncan, spoke at the mound with Seaver and catcher Carlton Fisk. Seaver looked tired, and he was.
“One thing about Tom — he would always tell you the truth,” La Russa said by phone Wednesday night. “So Dunc went out to talk to him and said, ‘Tom, I think you’ve had enough,’ and Tom said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think I have anything left.’
“But Fisk went up to him and said something like: ‘You’ve had enough? This is your ballgame! Nobody’s coming in from the bullpen to get Dave Winfield. This is you — you’re Tom Seaver!’”
This was one Hall of Famer challenging another Hall of Famer to pitch to a third Hall of Famer — and Seaver did not back down. He ran the count full to Winfield, then fanned him on a changeup and went on to complete the game.
“He was the most intelligent pitcher we’ve ever been around,” La Russa said. “He was a great competitor and had really good stuff, but as he got older, he was still great because he knew how to pitch. Like Greg Maddux, in a way — they would look at a hitter, know what the hitter was thinking and pitch away from it. He was the perfect pro.”
In those later years, especially, Seaver had an intuitive understanding of how to work around his limitations. Early in the 1985 season, after beating the Tigers in Detroit, Seaver noticed the home plate umpire, Jim Evans, at the hotel bar. He tapped Evans on the shoulder, thanked him for a job well done, but told him he had missed one pitch: a 1-1 fastball to Kirk Gibson in the middle innings. Evans was puzzled; he had called the pitch a strike.
“I don’t want you to call that pitch a strike,” Seaver said, as Evans recalled a few years ago. “That was a mistake. I got it up too high, like a ball or two above the waist, and I don’t want any batter to get used to swinging at that pitch. My fastball is still my best pitch, my bread-and-butter, but if I keep throwing that one up there, they’re going to kill me.”