Being good up here is so toughpeople have no idea. One day in January, he went over to the field house at the University of Pittsburgh and joined some other Pirates there for a workout. Theres no doubt about itno information needed. He would never do such a thing outside. Spouse: Karen Lamb (m. 1964) Net Worth: $1.5 Million. (Last year, the National League and the American League both wound up with a per-game earned-run average of 3.62.) ), The Pittsburgh organization signed Steve Blass right out of Housatonic High in 1960, and he began moving up through the minors. One of Murtaughs first acts was to announce that Steve Blass would be given a start. (202) 225-7084. Steve Blass was a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who helped them win the World Series in 1971 and was an All Star in 1972. The Cubs won, 20, but Steve gave up only two hits and one earned run in the five innings he worked. Rose took another ball, and then grounded out on a medium-speed curveball. He still knew most of the hitters in his league, and, probably as well as any other pitcher around, he knew what to pitch to them in a given situation. The best result we found for your search is Karen Louise Blass age 80+ in Bradenton, FL in the South Bradenton neighborhood. Family (1) Spouse O.K., he said. 39 books | 264 friends Rionach Aiken. Now Ill throw him a sinking fastball, and still try to work him out that way. The best season-long earned-run average of the modern baseball era was Bob Gibsons 1.12 mark, set in 1968. This was understandable, for he was in limbo. I should know., The game rushed along, as games always do when Gibson is pitching. My next view of Steve Blass on a baseball diamond came on a cool afternoon at the end of April this year. It may also be seen, in a much enlarged version, on one wall of the office of Joe L. Brown, the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, in Three Rivers Stadium. Karen Lamb March 18, 1948 - December 7, 2020 Karen Lamb was born on March 18, 1948 and passed away on December 7, 2020 and is under the care of Casdorph & Curry Funeral Home. Steve had a lot of guts to stay out there as long as he did. Nobody knows, but some speculation is permissibleindeed, is perhaps demanded of anyone who is even faintly aware of the qualities of Steve Blass and the depths of his suffering. The players and coaches and fans I talked to about Steve Blass brought up a few other names, but then they quickly realized that the cases were not really the same. Earlier in the same summer, he also experimented briefly with transcendental meditation. He is thirty-fivedark hair, a mustache, and piercing brown eyes): Steve has the perfect build for a pitcherlean and strong. In 2009, he sent a record of a completely different variety that demonstrated his ability to still be accurate at something: he posted two holes-in-one in a single round of golf. At this ballgame, he looked like any young suburban father who had caught an early train home from the office in order to see his kids in action. By early June, his record was three wins and three losses, but his earned-run average suggested that his difficulties were serious. People in the sections near us kept calling and waving to him. He tried not to think much about baseball, and he didnt work on his pitching. Wed stop at an all-night restaurant every now and then, and Id walk in with a two-day beard and my old Charleston Charlies uniform on, looking like go-to-hell, Blass said. And so it went. . Then hed let it come out, and yell and scream and pound on things. He picked us all up. "I had all kinds of games, with different, very complicated ground rules. Steve Blass Height, Weight & Measurements At 80 years old, Steve Blass height is 6' (1.83 m) . Prior to this season, Steve announced it . It is clear, however, that Blass does not believe he gained any profound insights into possible unconscious causes of his difficulties. The Pirates were again engaged in a close and exhausting pennant race fought out over the last six weeks of the season; they moved into first place for good only two days before the end, won their half-pennant, and then were eliminated by the Dodgers in a four-game championship playoff. The catcher is Manny Sanguillen, of the Pirates, and his leaping teammate is pitcher Steve Blass, who has just defeated the defending (and suddenly former) World Champion Baltimore Orioles by a score of 21, giving up four hits. Roberto Clemente, of course, is dead; he was killed on December 31, 1972, in Puerto Rico, in the crash of a plane he had chartered to carry emergency relief supplies to the victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. Like anyone in hard straits, he was deluged with unsolicited therapies, overnight cures, naturopathies, exorcisms, theologies, and amulets, many of which arrived by mail. Steve Blass was born on April 18, 1942. There is no doubt but that the sudden taking away of their most famous and vivid star affected all the Pirates, including Steve Blass. My overriding philosophy is to have a regard for others, he once told me. He was a different man out there., Blass walked eight men in the fourth inning and gave up eight runs. He shortens up and then chases the pitch up here., He was animated. He has never worn glasses when pitching, which meant that Pirate catchers had to flash him signals with hand gestures rather than with finger waggles; however, he saw well enough to win when he was winning, and his vision has not altered in recent years. ) I dont think anybodys ever said that maybe I just lost my control. It is directly behind the overlapping hand and glove of the dancers, and it binds and recapitulates the lines of force and the movements and the theme of the work, creating a composition as serene and well ordered as a Giotto. Thus, it may be posited as a rule that a major-league hurler who gives up an average of just over three and a half runs per game is about at the middle of his professionan average pitcher. When I was pitching well, I was doing that very thing. He looked much more like a commuter than like a professional athlete. Karen Blass. [1] [2] He was the recipient of many fashion awards, including seven Coty Awards and the Fashion Institute of Technology 's Lifetime Achievement Award (1999). In '72 he had some of the best numbers of his career. William Ralph Blass (June 22, 1922 - June 12, 2002) was an American fashion designer. Im real proud of the fact that this thing hasnt bothered us at home. mark of 2.28 and Catfish Hunters 2.49 in the A.L. They can bury you before you even get started. I remember it was raining as we came out of the tunnel in Pittsburgh, and I drove straight to Forbes Field and went in and found the attendant and put my uniform on, at two in the afternoon. View. There have been hundreds of shiningly promising rookie pitchers and sluggers who, for one reason or another, could not do their thing once they got up to the big time. . For a time, his performance was borderline, but his few wins were in sloppy, high-scoring contests, and his bad outings were marked by streaks of uncharacteristic wildness and ineffectuality. Steve Blass, the longtime Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster and former pitcher, will retire at the end of the 2019 season, he announced at a press . Morgan, I decided, eventually singled to right on a curve in on the handlea lucky hitbut then Blass retired his next Cincinnati hitter, Dan Driessen, who popped out on a slider. . He tried to condense his 60 years with the Pirates into a form that would fit on that one sheet, but there were too many people to acknowledge and far too many stories to tell. I remember that after the 71 Series he said, I didnt think I was as good as this. He seemed truly surprised at what hed done. Lamb Harriet T Mather. Sometimes I think I got to hate the frustration and pain of this more than he did. Joe Brown had told Blass that the end of the line might be approaching. He threw well. Where was Steve Blass born? Robinson fanned, and Blass said, Same old twenty-eight., The Pirates won easily, 50, with Jerry Reuss going all the way for the shutout, and just before the end Steve said, I always had trouble sleeping after pitching a real good game. On many other teams, he would have been no more than the second- or third-best starter, and his responsibilities, real and imagined, would have been less acute. Steve Blass, who is now thirty-three, is out of baseball, having been recently driven into retirement by two years of pitching wildnessa sudden, near-total inability to throw strikes. He started again against the Braves on June 11th, in Atlanta; after three and one-third innings he was gone, having given up seven singles, a home run, two walks, and a total of five runs. I dont think anybody will ever understand his decline. The pitcher is knocked about, often by an inferior rival team, and leaves within a few innings; asked about it later, he shrugs and says, I didnt have it today. He seems unsurprised. There is no other player in recent baseball historyat least none with Blasss record and credentialswho has lost his form in such sudden and devastating fashion and been totally unable to recover. I thought it might be the end for me. What pleased him most that year was his consistency. Please take a peek at some examples of my animation, illustration and artwork here below. He was a terrific mimic. Blass refuses to make jokes about these nostrums. The Cubs batted around against him in the first inning he pitched, and in the sixth he gave up back-to-back home runs. ? he said. The distance between the minors and the majors, always measurable in light-years, is probably greater today than ever before, and for a man making the leap in the wrong direction the feeling must be sickening. In the summer of 54, when they won that record one hundred and eleven games, I managed to find every single box score in the newspapers and clip it, which took some doing up where we lived. The Charlies did a lot of travelling by bus. He hit Willie Stargell and Manny Sanguillen in batting practice; both players told him to forget it. The date of the photograph is October 17, 1971; the place is Memorial Stadium, in Baltimore. You could argue in 1971 that he could have topped Roberto Clemente for the World Series MVP awardhe pitched a four-hitter in that famous final game. Hes an exceptional offspeed hitter, and will give himself up with men on basegive up a little power to get that run in.. Karen's Quotes "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." He had another pretty good outing against the Cardinals, for no decision, and then started against the Mets, in New York, on September 21st, but got only two men out, giving up four instant runs on a walk and four hits. He made brief appearances in two games against Pirate farmhands, and threw well. Roland Hemond, the general manager of the White Sox, was at Bradenton that day, and he said, It was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen in baseball.. No, I couldnt do that., After the end of the 1973 season, Blass joined the Pirates team in the Florida Instructional League (an autumn institution that exists mostly to permit the clubs to look over their prime minor-league prospects), where he worked intensively with a longtime pitching coach, Don Osborn, and appeared in three games. The word on him among the other clubs in his league was something like: Good but not overpowering stuff, excellent slider, good curve, good changeup curve. 123 ratings20 reviews. Thats what people mean when they say youre in the groove. Sustaining this kind of control over a stretch of, say, one hundred and thirty pitches in a seven- or eight-inning appearance places such excruciating demands on a hurlers body and psyche that even the most successful pitchers regularly have games when they simply cant get the job done. The child in him is a great thingweve all loved itand maybe he was suddenly afraid he was losing it. The Pirate organization had been extraordinarily patient, but was, after all, in the business of baseball. These are routine pitching mistakes, which almost all pitchers are guilty of from time to time, and Blass worked on them assiduously. The Mets won, 102, dropping the Pirates out of first place, but Blass, although unhappy about his showing, found some hope in the fact that he had at least been able to get the ball over the plate. Just the other morning, he was out working on the lawn, and a couple of the neighbors children came over to see him. He is an actor, known for Abduction (2011), 1972 National League Championship Series (1972) and 1971 National League Championship Series (1971). Young kidsmaybe three or four years old. Blass was a less obvious heroa competent but far from overpowering right-hander who had won fifteen games for the Pirates that year, with a most respectable 2.85 earned-run average, but who had absorbed a terrible pounding by the San Francisco Giants in the two games he pitched in the National League playoffs, just before the Series. Pitcher Ron Reed singled, driving in two more runs, and was wild-pitched to second. (He was wilder than hell, Blass said. Pete Rose is leading offright? He lives in New York City. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and. The frustrating, bewildering part of it all was that while working alone with a catcher Blass continued to throw as well as he ever had; his fastball was alive, and his slider and curve shaved the corners of the plate. Not only did he never have a sore arm but he never had any of the stiffness and pain that most pitchers feel on the day after a game. At that point, he said, I was looking for even a little bit of successone good inning, a few real fastballs, anything to hold on to that might halt my negative momentum. He is friendly and informal, with an attractive smile. His totals for the one and one-third innings were seven runs, five hits, six bases on balls, and three wild pitches. At another point, he decided to throw every single day in the bullpen, to see if he could recapture his groove All it did was to get me very, very tired, Blass told me. Then, in the fourth, there were a couple of bases on balls and maybe a bad call by the ump on a close pitch, and suddenly there was a complete reversal. Ive had good luck against him with that sort of stuff.. When Ted Simmons stood in for the visitors, Blass said, Hes always hit me pretty good. Then, in late February, 1974, Blass reported to Bradenton with the other Pirate pitchers and catchers. Clemente, at last the recipient of the kind of national attention he had always deserved but had rarely been given for his years of brilliant play, remained erect and removed, regarding the swarming photographers with a haughty, incandescent pride. Im not certain that I saw Blass work in the regular season of 1972, but I did see him pitch the opening game of the National League playoffs that fall against the Cincinnati Reds, in Pittsburgh. Steve has worked at being a man and being a father and a husband. We sat behind home plate, down near the screen, and during the first few innings a lot of young fans came clustering down the aisle to get Steves autograph. Resides in Buffalo, NY. Karen Blass #176481. Well, I really did it. 4929 Wilshire Boulevard. He didnt quite make the big club when training ended in the spring, and was sent down to the Pirates Triple A club in Columbus, but the call came three weeks later. Blass spent four days with him, and then rejoined the Pirates, this time as a batting-practice pitcher. When Chris Blass went down swinging in the fourth, his father came over and said, The sinker down and away is tough. Steve Blass has a longish, lightly freckled face, a tilted nose, and an alert and engaging expression. View Profile. Thats pretty heavy, he said after a moment. The former Karen Lamb, who will celebrate her 49th anniversary with Mr. Blass today [Friday], came from an athletic family. Bill Virdon, the Pirate manager, was patient and told Blass to take all the time he needed to find himself; he reminded Blass that oncein 1970he had had an early record of two and eight but had then come back to finish the season with a mark of ten and twelve. As a result, he was of very little use to the Pirates even in batting practice. See Photos. A big-league fastball comes in on the batter at about eighty-five or ninety miles an hour, completing its prescribed journey of sixty feet six inches in less than half a second, and, if it is a strike, generally intersects no more than an inch or two of the seventeen-inch-wide plate, usually near the upper or lower limits of the strike zone; curves and sliders arrive a bit later but with intense rotation, and must likewise slice off only a thin piece of the black if they are to be effective. Marty Perez walked. Writer Kirk Robinson stated that, "In 1972, if you had to choose any pitcher in the . A few of them are bromides: He was too nice a guy. The Pirates had finally released him late in March (outrighted him, in baseball parlance), near the end of the spring-training season, and he had subsequently decided not to continue his attempts to salvage his pitching form in the minor leagues. Their fastball comes in high, their curves hang, the rest of their prime weapons desert them. His wife is Karen Lamb (5 October 1963 - present) ( 2 children) Steve Blass Net Worth His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. Ill throw it in the dirt to show it to himget him geared to that kind of speed. Everybody has been great to me, all through this thing, Blass said. And I felt that even this might not be enough for him. Finally, of course, one must accept the possibility that a great many players may have suffered exactly the same sort of falling off as Blass for exactly the same reasons (whatever they may be) but were able to solve the problem and continue their athletic careers. Steve Nobel. He didn't. It should also be understood that his was not at all the somewhat commonplace experience of an established and well-paid major-league star who suffers through one or two mediocre seasons. He needed continuous game experience if he was ever to break out of it, and he knew he no longer belonged with a big-league club. His June 1975 profile of Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve Blass who suffered, legendarily, from the yips is among his favorites. A longish, lightly freckled face, a tilted nose, and grounded! But was, after all, in the dirt to show it to him. The sections near us kept calling and waving to him pitcher in the tilted nose, and try... 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