Johnny Podres: Pitcher, coach dies at 75
Johnny Podres, the crusty, sad-faced baseball lifer who helped transform the long-suffering Brooklyn Dodgers into world champions and Curt Schilling into one of baseball's best pitchers, died Sunday at 75.
Mr. Podres' wife, Joan, said he died at a hospital in Glens Falls, N.Y., near their longtime home in Queensbury. She said her husband, a chain smoker, had been suffering from heart and kidney ailments and was being treated for a leg infection.
JERRY LODRIGUSS / Inquirer Staff Photographer
Johnny Podres , who was the Phillies' pitching coach from 1991 to 1996, was instrumental in the development of ace Curt Schilling. "He made me realize the only limits in my life were self-imposed," Schilling wrote in his blog.
A lefthander, he compiled a 148-116 record during a 15-year career in which his considerable talents often were obscured by Dodgers teammates such as Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax. Still, Mr. Podres led the National League in ERA and shutouts in 1957, went 18-5 in 1961, and was a four-time all-star.
Later he became a pitching coach, working with the Minnesota Twins and the Phillies. He came to Philadelphia in 1991, left in '96 for health reasons, and remained with the club as a part-time roving instructor.
Still, Mr. Podres always will be recalled as the man whose near-mythical Yankee Stadium victory in 1955's Game 7 gave perennial bridesmaid Brooklyn - seven times a World Series loser - its first and only world championship.
"I guarantee, there was more celebrating in Brooklyn that day than there was for the end of World War II," Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodgers' general manager, once said.
Mr. Podres, who took part in that celebration and many, many more during his colorful half-century in the game, was the MVP of that World Series. Forever afterward, the personalized license plates on his cars read "MVP-55," a rare display of vanity from the self-effacing man who was a dead ringer for silent-film comedian Buster Keaton.
Four decades later, he was manager Jim Fregosi's pitching coach when the 1993 Phillies won their unlikely NL pennant. His ace was Schilling, who had come to Philadelphia the year before as a reliever uncertain of his stuff and his future.
Schilling, who became a disciple of Mr. Podres and his low-key but hyper-positive style, loved to tell the story of how that transformation began during their first meeting.
"I was coming from a bad situation in Houston," Schilling recalled in a 1995 interview. "The stadium was empty that day, and it was raining as we walked down to the bullpen. He asked to see my fastball, so I showed him a two-seamer, which is what I threw then."
"What the hell was that?" Podres barked.
"A fastball," Schilling said.
"That ain't no [expletive] fastball. That's a [expletive] sinker," replied the pitching coach, spitting out the final word.
Podres lunged for the ball, grabbed it across four seams, displayed the grip to Schilling, and handed the ball back. What followed was a fastball - and a career - that rose.
"Now that," said Podres, pacing, puffing, pleased, "is a [expletive] big-league fastball."
Yesterday, Schilling noted Mr. Podres' passing on his blog, 38 Pitches.
"Outside of the Lord, my wife and my father, there was no person who impacted my life more than Johnny Podres," Schilling, now a staple with the world-champion Boston Red Sox, wrote. "He asked everything of me and always got everything I had. He made me realize the only limits in my life were self-imposed."
Mr. Podres was old-school. He was quiet, grizzled and gruff, and disdained technological advances in the game, like computerized charts.
"I don't know nothin' about computers," he said. "I know pitchers."
He roamed the Phillies clubhouse, with one hand in a back pocket, a cigarette between his lips, blurting out often-incongruous questions to whoever crossed his path.
