From highest of highs and lowest of lows, Mark Prior shares his wisdom in Dodgers bullpe

Dusty Baker answered his iPhone as he exited a taxi. He came down to Venice Beach from his Northern California home for a September wedding, and he forgot his dress socks. He had his hotel call a cab and, inside, he asked the driver to please take him to the store and wait while he procured a pair. They had nearly returned when the man at the wheel finally said what was on his mind.

“Are you Dusty Baker?” he asked.

Yes, Dusty Baker answered.

A native Chicagoan, the driver said he almost didn’t recognize him without the toothpick. Then he brought up Mark Prior. He said he was in awe of his talent, overjoyed with his successes and in despair during the injury-fueled struggles that followed.

Over the last 16 years, Baker has heard a version of this on incalculable occasions. The Cubs have a lot of fans in a lot of places. Baker and Prior will forever be connected, through memories both euphoric and awful, but mostly awful. They did not win a World Series. The phenom’s career ended before anyone imagined.

The beginning of the end remains one of the most memorable moments in baseball history. Steve Bartman reached over Wrigley Field’s wall and interfered with Moisés Alou’s attempt at a catch in foul territory. Baker is often blamed for what happened next.

But on this afternoon, in this cab, the driver said he always appreciated how Prior took responsibility for not escaping the ensuing mess.

“Mark Prior manned up,” he concluded. “I love Mark Prior.”

“It’s funny you say that,” Baker said. “I’m supposed to do an interview about him right now.”

And then the phone rang.

In August 2002, the Cubs visited San Francisco for three games. The day before they arrived, Prior, then a 21-year-old marvel, had thrown 135 pitches in a complete-game victory. Baker, the Giants manager, showed up early for the series opener. As he sat in the stands with a friend, he spotted Prior running in the outfield.

Baker liked what he saw. During his eight seasons playing with the Dodgers, from 1976 to 1983, the team employed several standout pitchers: Don Sutton, Burt Hooton, Rick Sutcliffe, Bob Welch. Each man ran regularly between starts. By the turn of the century, few starters still did.

Prior brought a maniacal approach to preparation. “When it came to pitching,” he said, “I never wanted to fail or not succeed because of work.”

Enticed by the triad of Prior, Kerry Wood, and Carlos Zambrano, Baker became the Cubs’ manager that fall. He compensated for a weak offense by riding those three for 636 regular-season innings. They carried Chicago to Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series. Five outs from the World Series, with Prior on the mound, it all famously unraveled. Bartman stretched out his hands. Prior walked Luis Castillo. Alex Gonzalez flubbed Miguel Cabrera’s easy grounder. Derrek Lee doubled down the line. Finally, Baker came to get his ace.

After that night, Prior was never the same. His arm hurt when he reported to spring training. He made 21 unspectacular starts that year, 27 the next, nine the year after. He was 25 when he last pitched in the majors.

For more than seven years, Prior endeavored to make it back. It had taken him only six weeks to make it in the first place. In April 2013, at 32, he surrendered to the sport. Signed to Baker’s Reds on a minor-league deal, he took the mound one last time at the incongruously named Victory Field in downtown Indianapolis.

Baseball’s new top prospect, Gerrit Cole, opposed him, himself six weeks from his debut. Nearly 11 years had passed since Prior’s. He no longer threw as hard or with as much command, but still with conviction. He entered for the seventh inning and blew out his shoulder. He knew his career was over, but he decided to stick it out for the eighth. “Why not?” he asked. Topping out at 80 mph, he finished a scoreless inning and vanished home to San Diego with his wife and children.

At the end of July, Baker and the Reds visited the Padres, and the two men met for lunch at Old Town Mexican Cafe, a local favorite five miles from Petco Park. Baker advised him to find work quickly if he wanted to stick in baseball. By December, Prior had a job with the Padres. Four years later, he became the Dodgers’ bullpen coach, hired in part because of his unique composite of experiences.

“The highest of highs,” Dave Roberts said. “The lowest of lows.”

Prior’s big-league career ended prematurely in 2006. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

As he fought to return, Prior learned the ways of the minor leagues. They hadn’t applied to him his first time through. Coaches began to coat their words to him in gobs of cloying, unrealistic glaze. Years after he knew he would never be the same again, he was still hearing he could be. He longed for his days playing for Baker, who always told him the truth.

“I found that the more honesty I received, the better,” Prior said. “Maybe initially it’s more of a gut punch, but in the long run it’s better. I’ve just taken that into my coaching philosophy.”

So the man blamed for prematurely ending Prior’s playing career is also the man who influenced his coaching career. And as the Dodgers begin their postseason run Thursday against Washington, Prior will be standing in their bullpen as a product of that influence. So much of the team’s October fate has depended on, and will again depend on, relief success. Prior, wholly direct, does not dispute that characterization. Rather, he has used it as a motivator for much of the season. Emphasizing the truth is his way.

“Yeah, he was a superstar. Yeah, he dug himself out of the depths of injury,” said Eric Junge, the Padres’ pitching coordinator. “There’s no false pretense there, no arrogance. There’s confidence, intelligence and an ability to reason problems. He happened to be the best pitcher in the world for probably two years. I’m saying it matter of factly because that’s just how he is. He’s matter of fact.”

Last September, Dodgers pitcher Ross Stripling was tipping his pitches in three ways. Since becoming a surprise All-Star, he had been both hurt and ineffective, and he was in danger of missing the playoff roster. One afternoon, Prior found him at his locker and enumerated everything he was doing wrong.

“You’ve gotta work on it,” he concluded. “Let’s throw a bullpen today.”

So they went. When Stripling threw a few successful pitches, he stepped off the mound with satisfaction, believing he had fixed the problem.

“Yeah,” Prior said. “But you’re still doing the other two.”

Stripling stepped back on the mound and threw a few more pitches. He thought he had it figured out now. He stepped off again and voiced his hope.

“Yeah,” Prior said. “But you’re still doing the other one.”

Stripling was too tired to recover his form. He became the rare All-Star to be left off one of his team’s postseason rosters. But, he said, Prior told him the truth throughout. Many Dodgers tell similar stories.

“If you throw a slider in the bullpen and it sucked and you ask him how it was,” said rookie reliever Tony Gonsolin, “he’s gonna tell you that it sucked.”

Prior knew he wanted to be honest and straightforward, but it sometimes had to be coaxed out of him. He began to reveal that sensibility to his players more down the stretch last season. Then, when pitching coach Rick Honeycutt missed two weeks this spring because of back surgery, Prior spoke up more out of necessity. He has not stopped. He demands frequent, honest communication from his relievers.

“If you were available,” he might ask one who has pitched a lot of late, “would you really be able to do it?”

Rookie catcher Will Smith said Prior generally approaches their conversations with a question. They start there and produce an answer together.

“It’s never: ‘This is what I say, so go do this,'” Smith said. “It’s always a discussion.”

Prior believes that to be necessary in the modern game. “I don’t think it can be my way or the highway anymore,” he said. And directness helps find a road for two.

“Assumptions just get people in trouble, because they think one thing and you’re thinking another,” Prior said. “With some people, you can be point-blank: ‘You stink, we gotta get this better.’ With other people, you still gotta be direct, but you just gotta find how they listen without turning them away from the message.”

Typically, bullpen coaches are among the least impactful on a staff. They tend to be holdovers from regime to regime. In some organizations, they are more babysitters than instructors or gurus. The Dodgers demand more from Prior.

“We joke that he’s supposed to be the fluff coach,” said first-year game-planning coach Chris Gimenez, “and he’s the exact opposite of a fluff coach.”

At 39, Prior takes the same exacting approach to life. He keeps a list on his iPhone of third-wave coffee shops across America, referring to it on every road trip. He used to drink Starbucks before he became enlightened. Now he will not touch it.

“It’s just burnt,” he said. “I don’t even want to drink it.”

At home, he brews with an automated Technivorm Moccamaster, rated by America’s Test Kitchen as the best in its class. On the road, he and a few Dodgers coaches use a Hario V60, a simple contraption. Prior’s workdays do not allow for the amount of free time many players enjoy, but he allows himself the indulgence of pour-over coffee.

Moving between his many tasks, he operates with unspoken intensity. On one June afternoon, Joc Pederson tossed an empty bag of corn chips to the dugout floor as he headed onto the field for pregame stretch. A trash bin loomed five feet away.

For 10 minutes, the bag remained on the ground as players shuffled in and out. When Prior reached the dugout, he picked it up and discarded it without a word.

He is not much for small talk.

“Is your real name Marcus Prior?” rookie reliever Caleb Ferguson asked him one day last year.

“No,” Prior said.

“Can I call you Marcus?” Ferguson asked.

“No,” Prior said, and then walked away.

Prior senses which players can handle his shade. After Rich Hill once threw errantly to first base, Prior hounded him. “You could’ve kicked it better,” he said. How, he teased, had all the spring-training fielding practice they did failed him?

“Mark’s pretty dry,” said Walker Buehler, the Dodgers’ foremost wisecracker. “He’ll say stuff to me where even I can’t tell if he’s joking.”

But Prior is not a bore. He still wields his trademark outsized calves, a subject of outsized interest during his prime. All season, the Dodgers eschewed the standard dress clothes for team flights and opted for Nike sweatsuits. Leaning into it, Prior often rolled the sweatpants up to his knee, forcing his calves into the spotlight. “Dude,” several Dodgers told him, “you’re gonna cut the circulation off on those things.”

Neither is he afraid of confrontation. Men who have witnessed it say he has gotten on wavering closer Kenley Jansen at times this season. Prior dislikes when pitchers veer from an agreed-upon game plan without explanation, and he makes that known.

“You wouldn’t think it, because he’s very stoic most of the time, but he gets the ass every now and then,” Gimenez said. “He is super fiery.”

In mid-summer 2000, Prior visited Haarlem, a compact Dutch city outside Amsterdam, with Team USA. He was the Americans’ ace as they pursued a world championship. His junior season at USC encroaching, he was already considered one of the sport’s best prospects. But he treated the two weeks in the Netherlands like a professional.

Early every day, he found assistant coach Tim Corbin and headed to the tiny hotel gym. For more than an hour, the two worked out alone. Now the celebrated Vanderbilt head coach, Corbin then was an assistant at Clemson. He thought he was in the presence of a future Hall of Famer.

Reflecting recently on those days, Corbin detected the makings of a demanding coach. The teenager he accompanied to the gym each morning, he reasoned, would not accept unexceptional effort.

“When he sees guys like Clayton (Kershaw), like Walker, it’s easy for him to saddle up to that person because they’re driven by the same thoughts and desires as he has,” Corbin said. “I also think your patience level for others can be different. You get frustrated by others’ actions that don’t align with the same thoughts and desires that you had. But when you find a similar guy, you find yourself encouraged.”

In retirement, Prior came to understand how he motivated himself through the fear of failure. It was a valuable habit. He sought to soften it, not eradicate it.

“I put a negative twist on it, pushing myself,” he said. “I’m able to step back easier now than I used to. But when I’ve gotta work, I just work.”

That ethos guides how he advises the Dodgers’ relievers each day. A scoreless inning, he reminds them, is not the same as a productive outing, nor is a loss necessarily an unproductive one.

“Because, ultimately it’s not about hits,” Prior said. “It’s about sustainability.”

The 2019 group proved sustainable. Despite their substandard start, despite fans’ continued frustration, despite the front office’s decision not to add much in July, Dodgers relievers finished the season among the best in baseball. Their 3.85 ERA was tied atop the National League. Their 2.94 September ERA stood alone as the NL’s best, second in MLB to the Tampa Bay Rays.

“The bullpen has been able to, sometimes painfully, learn through experience,” Prior said.

As has he. Prior used the season to learn what each reliever wanted from him. Did it help them to know where opposing hitters were most likely to chase? Did it help to know where they did the most damage? Some preferred only to know, ahead of each series, which of their pitches they could throw and where they could throw them. Here and there, Prior made little fixes to pitch mixes.

“If you can pick out a deficiency and help it, the return on it is incredible,” coach Danny Lehmann said. “Mark does a great job making sure guys know what they’re good at and what they need to do to continue to be good, rather than pump them up all the time.”

Prior began his coaching career with the Padres. (Mike Janes/Four Seam Images via AP)

Prior began to study preferred pitch mixes when he worked for the Padres. As sort of a special assistant, he declined an office, accepted a desk at a shared cubicle and reported daily to Petco Park. Soon after A.J. Preller took over as general manager, he promoted Prior to minor-league pitching coordinator. It became his job to set the course for the farm system’s pitchers and guide what they would learn and how they would learn it.

Junge was his No. 2. Between their careers, the two men had played for 17 organizations. They had heard so many of the same platitudes and niceties from player-development and front-office officials, and they set out to be different.

“There’s some sort of fictionalization to the whole thing,” Junge said. “We just wanted to cut that out and be honest and direct with players. I think they can handle information more than we give them credit for. The truth may sting, but when you look back, you realize it was helpful. We lost some players along the way, but the majority of them, we gained trust.”

Now, the Padres’ farm system is rated the best in baseball, buoyed by talented young pitchers the two men helped develop.

When the Padres hired Prior, Roberts was their bench coach. He was impressed by how seriously the recent retiree treated the commonly unserious assistant role. Then, before the 2018 season, Roberts and the Dodgers hired Prior to work with their relievers. They quickly overwhelmed him with their advanced data — data he had not known existed, data he had to learn to synthesize.

“We just piled on so much stuff where you almost suffocate him at first,” Stripling said. “He thought he was going to just come in and coach a really good bullpen and it was going to be great. Then we just hammered him with information.”

On the afternoon each series begins, Prior sits with his relievers to share scouting reports and recommendations. But before he could comfortably disseminate it, he needed time to process the information himself.

“Last year, I would have to go up to him and be like, ‘OK, what are we doing on (Nolan) Arenado this series?'” Stripling said. “Now, he comes up to me and he already has something ready to go. It’s super fluid.”

Roberts said he has come to trust Prior’s opinion on relievers’ readiness. Prior’s advisories guide the manager’s decisions on which men to bring in on a given night and when to bring them in.

“Mark is very honest with his opinions, and they’re very well thought-out,” Roberts said. “I think sometimes he apologizes for his honesty, but I urge him time and time again that that’s something I need to hear, something that we as an organization need to hear.”

At his peak, Prior was one of the best young pitchers baseball has ever seen. From his debut until the Bartman game, he owned a 2.72 ERA over 52 starts. He struck out nearly 11 per nine innings and averaged more than 111 pitches per start. The statistics say he should have won the 2003 NL Cy Young.

Not that most of his players understand. The night Prior couldn’t finish off the Marlins, standout rookie Dustin May was 6.

“These guys don’t remember how good he was,” Hill said. “They are too young.”

Hill is not. Six months older than Prior, he was his teammate in 2005 and 2006, when injuries were already sapping his strength. Even then, Hill gaped at the intensity with which Prior threw between every outing.

“So it doesn’t surprise me that he is as detail-oriented and well-prepared in the bullpen as he is now,” Hill said. “You’re getting the same guy, just different title.”

Prior’s is a skillset that would translate to a front-office role. Instead, he has opted for the traveling grind of a coaching job.

“He must really love baseball,” Baker said. “Because this guy, I could see him being a CEO someplace. Or a GM, or a farm director, some upper-echelon thinking position.”

The irony to his current position is that Prior never actually pitched out of the bullpen in the big leagues. He is one of nine retired pitchers to start at least 100 games and never once relieve. But, at some point soon, Honeycutt is expected to retire, and Prior would be a logical choice to replace him.

“I don’t necessarily know if he’s the guy to take over for Honeycutt,” Stripling said. “But I just know that if he did, everyone would like it.”

Two years in, Prior has created himself a niche in the Dodgers’ organization. He is the pitcher who was so spectacular and then so unspectacular. He is the coach who bridges gaps between relievers and starters and between Honeycutt’s feel-based techniques and the front office’s data-driven methods. He is the middleman.

“Dude, you know there’s some people in the world that transcend all generations?” Baker said. “That’s how I thought about myself, even though I got the rap of being old school. And that’s how I see Mark. He’s somewhere in between the new school sabermetrics and old school.”

Baker made the postseason in each of the final four seasons of his managerial career. He understands the pressure the territory presents, what it demands of its decision-makers. Maybe, in retrospect, he would’ve pulled Prior from that Wrigley Field nightmare. He has always felt awful about how his pupil’s career halted. But he made the decision he deemed best in that moment. Knowing what he knew then, there was little reason to think it would be the end.

And, out of the end, a valuable coach emerged. Prior has become a man suited for the stress of October.

“He’s both calculated and spontaneous at the same time,” Baker said. “The calculated part comes from being highly intelligent. The spontaneous part comes from being a ballplayer.”

As much as some fans increasingly desire every bit of managing to be calculated ahead of time, Baker said, it is not possible. Spontaneity will always be necessary. “No matter how good your game plan is, something’s gonna happen,” he said, “and you’re gonna have to react.”

Sixteen years ago, Baker reacted by leaving Prior in the game, and the Cubs lost. To win this year, Roberts and Prior must repeatedly make the right bullpen decisions.

Top photo of Mark Prior: Keith Birmingham / Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images

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