Steve Sparks Tackles a Challenging Career Quiz
Steve Sparks is a good storyteller, which serves him well in the broadcast booth. Now in his 14th season working alongside Robert Ford, Sparks forms one half of a Houston Astros radio team that ranks among the best in the business. He used to throw knuckleballs for a living. Pitching for five teams from 1995-2004, primarily the Detroit Tigers, the 61-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma native took the mound 270 times to the tune of a 59-76 won-lost record and a 4.88 ERA. All told, he faced 626 different batters over 1,319 2/3 innings of work.
How well does he remember his more-notable matchups? Following in the footsteps of Geoff Blum, David Cone, Mark Grant, Mark Gubicza, Jeff Montgomery, and Dan Petry — links to those pieces can be found on their player pages — Sparks sat down for the seventh installment of our Challenging Career Quiz.
I began by asking which batter he faced the most times.
“It would probably have to be somebody in the American League Central,” replied Sparks, whom I spoke with at Fenway Park in early May. “I’ll say Frank Thomas.”
His guess was spot on. Sparks faced Thomas 60 times, with “The Big Hurt” going 13-for-49 with three home runs, nine walks, and a pair of plunkings. His memories of the Hall of Famer?
“I had the impression that he couldn’t reach the outside corner,” Sparks told me. “I felt like if I had to go somewhere, throwing a fastball or a cutter, I could go away to Frank Thomas. I found out very quickly that I was wrong. He was so far off the plate that I didn’t think he could reach it. But he could.
“What a complete hitter he was,” Sparks added. “We see it a lot with Yordan Alvarez now. He’s not just a slugger by any means. He’s an on-base machine and a slugger.”
Asked who was a close second to Thomas in number of plate appearances against him, the knuckleballer-turned-broadcaster guessed Jim Thome. He wasn’t too far off — he faced the left-handed masher 52 times — but the correct answer is Omar Vizquel, whom he faced 59 times.
“I don’t think I did very well against him,” Sparks said. “With me throwing the knuckleball, that type of hitter had quite a bit of success. They didn’t get big; they stayed within themselves and went the other way. Vizquel probably did pretty well against me.”
That wasn’t necessarily the case. The defensively gifted shortstop fanned just twice, but also went a nothing-special 14-for-56 (.250) with a lone walk.
Informed that two players are tied for the honor of having the most hits against him, with 16 each, Sparks asked if they both played in the AL Central. I told him that one did, while the other did not. His non-AL Central guess, Derek Jeter (15-for-36), was a near miss. The correct answers are Alex Rodriguez (16-for-38) and Ray Durham (16-for-52).
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Sparks said of Durham, who was a Chicago White Sox stalwart for eight seasons. “I played against him a lot in Triple-A, too, and he had a good approach. He was one of those guys that didn’t try to pull the baseball. He would go with it, but when he saw it elevated, he would make a good pass and go in the other direction.”
The other half of the answer wasn’t something that Sparks expected.
“Really?” he responded upon hearing Rodriguez’s name. “That surprises me. I recall having really good success against him early on, although I do remember that a little later on he started trying to take the ball up the middle, rather than trying to pull me.
“He actually broke my finger one time,” Sparks added. “I think we were in Seattle. He hit a one-hopper that I reached for and broke the ring finger on my bare hand. It’s still bent. I didn’t miss any time, though. My next start was against Oakland and they shot me with some medicine before the game to kill the pain. I don’t remember exactly how I did, but it was a no-decision.
My apples-to-oranges mention of an infamous Dock Ellis game elicited a laugh. “It was a different medication,” Sparks replied.
After first guessing Thome, Sparks correctly named A-Rod as the player to whom he surrendered the most gophers. One of the five is especially memorable.
“I didn’t have very many good games when I was in Arizona, but I remember having have a good one against the Yankees,” said Sparks, who allowed one run over seven innings that day. “I pitched well, but A-Rod hit one of the furthest home runs ever at that stadium. Back then it was Bank One Ballpark, ‘The Bob.’ It’s all my son kept talking about in the elevator when we got to the parking garage after the game: How far was that home run? Gary Sheffield was in the elevator with us, and he was laughing. We’d beat them, but A-Rod hit that bomb.”
Sparks faced 29 different batters 35 or more times. Of them, who had the lowest OPS? In other words, which batter did he own?
“I didn’t own anybody,” responded Sparks. “But I’ll guess Greg Norton.”
That qualified as the erstwhile hurler’s biggest miss. He faced Norton just 11 times, with the switch-hitter going 3-for-7 with a double and four walks. The correct answer is Rafael Palmeiro, who went just 3-for-33 with a .586 OPS.
“I think that was probably just a coincidence,” Sparks said of his success against Palmeiro. “I remember having a pretty good game against Baltimore, and a couple of good games against Texas, but I think it just depended on whether or not I had a good knuckleball. If those days coincided with facing Palmeiro, so be it. If you have a good one, it doesn’t really matter who it is, to be honest with you.”
Then again, there are, as he’d mentioned earlier, better ways to approach a knuckleball pitcher. Taking the ball the other way is just one of them.
“I’ll tell you what the best approach was,” said Sparks. “I used to talk to Tim Wakefield about it. The guys who got on top of home plate, as close as they could, toes on the chalk, made you steer the ball away from them, because you didn’t want to hit them and give them a free base. That took away one side of the plate and typically got them better pitches to hit. You’d kind of get around the ball by steering it that way, which turned the pitch into kind of a bad slider.”
“A lot of it is the type of swings,” he further opined. “Some hitters had swings that were longer, and that played well against the knuckleball’s path and speed. And it’s funny, sometimes it was catchers who had success against me. Ron Karkovice [3-for-10 with two home runs]. Tony Peña [3-for-10 with a double]. They had a had a good swing for that pitch.”
One hitter in particular owned him, going a preposterous 9-for-12 with a double, a home run, and a walk. Asked if he knew who that was, Sparks initially guessed Paul Molitor (8-for-16 with a pair of two-baggers and a walk), only to then nail the correct answer: Troy O’Leary.
“Rafael Devers actually reminds me of him,” Sparks said of the left-handed-hitting outfielder, who played seven of his 11 season with the Red Sox. “His body language. But he was one of my favorite teammates in the minors [with the Brewers]. We got along really well. He probably just had a lot of confidence facing me. He was in a good mood and let it fly.”
Or perhaps those were games where his knuckleball simply wasn’t very good?
“I don’t know,” said Sparks. “Maybe I was throwing more fastballs. I threw more fastballs than most knuckleball pitchers.”