The big right-hander was easily the club's best starter in the final month of 1996. Erickson went 4-1 with a 3.19 ERA in September, lending a critical hand--make that a critical arm--to the Birds' late season drive to capture the AL wild card slot.
For his career the California native is 21-8 and sports a 2.70 ERA in final-month starts. He has won more games and lost fewer in September than in any other month. His ERA is a full 1.7 runs lower than in his next best month, and although he's toiled most innings in September, he has yielded the fewest number of home runs in that month.
Why is Erickson so scorching hot just when the days are cooling off?
"Honestly, I have no reason," the 28-year-old bachelor shrugs. "Possibly it just takes me that long to get in a groove. I hope that's not the case, but maybe by year's end you finally get everything all ironed out. You're on a very regular basis by the end of the season."
Erickson is a workhorse. He likes to pitch as often as possible. He prefers a four-man rotation to a five, "because the more starts, the better off you are, the more practice you get. Five is nice, but six is terrible--you're too strong, you try to overthrow the ball, and your location suffers when you go to six days. Six or seven is terrible."
That's why Erickson hates the early season, which is sprinkled with scheduled off-days and unscheduled postponements.
"April is a mess," he explains. "Days off and rain outs and everything like that. In spring training you pitch every four days. Then, when the season starts, I pitched every seven days and just had absolutely no idea what was going on. We tried to pitch a five-man rotation, but three weeks into the season I think I had three or four starts. That throws you back a couple steps. By season's end you've got enough innings in, you arm's got good strength. I may be tired, but I think I'm throwing the ball as hard (in September) as I was in April, maybe harder. Maybe just everything comes together for me by the end of the year."
Others notice that jelling, too. After Erickson stymied Cleveland in the second game of the 1996 playoffs, manager Davey Johnson, calling Erickson "almost unhittable," said, "If he threw (all year) the way he has now and in September, he'd win 25 games."
He didn't, finishing the season 13-12 with a less than glorious ERA of 5.02. "I expected to do a lot better," the pitcher acknowledges, labeling his overall 1996 performance as "disappointing," although he says the season was salvaged for him by the team making it to the playoffs.
As a sinker-baller, Erickson is sharpest when he's not pitching at full strength. The stronger he is, the more his ball tends to come up and lose its maddening downward twirl, which, when he's on, causes batters to bang the ball into the dirt. On his better days, Erickson keeps his infielders busy. When he's really cooking, as he usually has been during his two Septembers in Baltimore, the outfielders may as well take the day off. They seldom get a ball hit their way.
Erickson induces so many ground balls that infield errors escalate when he's on the mound. As a result, he gave up more unearned runs during the regular and post seasons than all other Baltimore starters combined. In the final game of the year--the AL Championship 6-4 loss to New York--an error by Roberto Alomar led to five of the six runs scored against Erickson being unearned.
In the late spring Erickson complained about the fielding behind him, but by autumn he had curbed the public growling at his teammates. "Maybe it's just that there were that many more opportunities," he says of the infield errors behind him. "Being a ground ball pitcher, the odds go up. But those are things you can't worry about. Once you let go of the ball, you have no control over anything else. You don't know if the umpire's going to call it a strike or a ball. You don't know if the guy's going to catch it or drop it. All you can do is do your best and hope for a good outcome."
Erickson is one of the quieter and more intense players in the Orioles' clubhouse. And like most pitcher, he has his idiosyncrasies. Before and after innings, for instance, he does the very unpitcher-like thing of racing on and off the field. "I think it's important to hustle and always go full bore," he says. "It's just a part of hustling."
And while most starters hunker down in the bowels of the clubhouse and pass up pre-game workouts on days they pitch, Erickson accompanies his teammate on the field and goes through basic drills. "I like to get the blood going and get into a good frame of mind to pitch," he explains. "I like to play a little catch to loosen my arm up and loosen my body up, to get a little sweat going before I come in and stretch. Then I can really concentrate on the game."
He admits that when his concentration ebbs, so does his pitching: "If I don't focus 100 percent on the game, I'm not very good. When I lose that concentration, that's when I start giving up hits. It's that much harder to make good pitches when you're not (focused on) the game."
Mark Parent, who was Erickson's designated catcher in 1996, says the concentration is what makes him a good pitcher--that and his elusive sinker. "He's a real competitor," Parent says. "He doesn't like guys to get his off of him. You can see it in his eyes. He's really intense."
Erickson says he is able to leave that intensity at the ball park. "I'm pretty laid back off the field," he relates. "I get once every five days to play, four or five, and that's my opportunity to be out there, so I have to devote basically everything to it."
During the off-season he likes to be on the move--either on a golf course or traveling. "I'm never any place more than usually like two weeks--two weeks at a time," he says. "You get so used to our job, it's hard for me to sit there in one spot." Last year he spent time in Acapulco, Mexico.
This year he was hoping to visit Europe. When he's not traipsing about, he spends time at his home in Stateline, NV.
Erickson cam to the Orioles on July 7, 1995, in a trade that sent outfielder Kimera Bartee and pitcher Scott Klingenbeck to Minnesota. He was a 20-game winner (with a 3.18 ERA) in his first full season in the majors, 1991. But his victories declined and his ERA shot upward almost every year thereafter. He blames that spiral on the misfortune of the Twins, who tumbled in the standings after winning the 1991 World Series.
"The year I lost the most games (19, in 1993) was one of my better years," he recalls. "the team just wasn't a good team, so you go down with the ship."
In 1994 he hurled a no-hitter for the Twins against Milwaukee. But generally he gives up lots of hits, though often they are bouncers through the infield. With the exception of his first two seasons, he always has yielded more than one hit per inning. This year he came in third in the AL in most hits permitted (262, trailing only KC's Chris Haney, 267, and teammate Mike Mussina, 264).
Before signing with the Twins in 1989, Erickson spurned earlier offers when drafted by the Mets (1986) and Blue Jays (1988) so he could attend San Jose City College; "I figured it was more important to get an education in my background before checking into professional baseball, because who knows what could happen after that. It's more important to have something to fall back on."
A business and accounting major, Erickson also says he preferred playing baseball in college to the minors. "Life in the minors is miserable," he says. "They don't teach you anything. You're by far better off going to a good college program than any minor league system." In fact, he spent less than a year in the minors before reaching Minnesota.
But now Minnesota is as much a part of his past as a minor league burgs like Visalia, Ca., and Orlando. Baltimore is his baseball home (he's signed through 1997), a city he enjoys pitching in, largely because of its "awesome" ballpark and the excitement of playing before a packed house every night.
Erickson was probably the sharpest Orioles' starter in 1996 postseason
play. If Baltimore makes it back for a rerun in 1997, Erickson's
right arm will likely have a lot to do with it.
Thanks to Reagan for sending me this article