Favorite Players: Dan Quisenberry

9/8/1983- Close-up of Kansas City Royals relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry before a game.
By Joe Posnanski
Apr 2, 2020

With baseball’s Opening Day delayed and all of sports on hiatus, we thought it would be a good idea to spread out the Baseball 100 essays. Going forward, the countdown will appear Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And on off days, we will feature short baseball essays about some of your favorite players and their greatest moments. Here’s one of my favorites: Dan Quisenberry.


It lasted so long
it went so fast
it seems like yesterday
it seems like never

— Dan Quisenberry, “A Career”


Dan Quisenberry died more than 20 years ago, which makes me sad all over again. He was my friend. His wife Janie, his kids Alysia and David, they are my friends, too, though it has been too long since I’ve spoken with them. Time races away. It’s like Quiz used to say, the future is much like the present … only longer.

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Quiz was the closest thing to me being in the big leagues … and maybe you, too. That is to say that his talents seemed more accessible than anyone else’s.

He threw a fastball that might have gone 80 mph.

Curveball? When he first showed up in the big leagues, Kansas City manager Jim Frey watched him pitch and saw that sorry fastball and shouted, “Show me your curve.”

“I don’t throw a curve,” Quiz said sheepishly, which sent Frey into a rampage of comic-strip expletives.

He had a Monty Python cheese shop pitch repertoire. Curve? No. Slurve? No. Slider? No. Cutter? No. Change-up? How do you throw a change-up with an 80 mph fastball? Splitter? No. Forkball? No. Spitball? No. Knuckleball? Yeah. Really? Well, he tried it a few times but he wasn’t too good at it. Screwball? Yeah, Quiz could be a screwball, but he didn’t throw one.

Quiz wasn’t drafted. That goes without saying. He wasn’t even scouted. His college coach Ben Hines recommended him to a Royals scout named Rosey Gilhousen. It so happened that Rosey had once scouted Dan’s brother Marty, so he said, “Yeah, actually, I have an opening in Waterloo. But I need to fill it now. You tell your guy if he can get to my house in the next hour, I’ll sign him.”

Quiz raced to Rosey’s house — as much racing as you can do in an AMC Gremlin — and signed with the Royals for 500 bucks, a Royals button and a bag of chewing tobacco.


rattled window frames
columbus 182 miles
unflushed piss reeks from the johns
colognes and sweat mix
join deep throated voices
laughing, dreaming, lying
on a divided highway of youth

and america rolls by

— Dan Quisenberry, “Minor League Bus Rides to Dubuque, Chattanooga, Bluefield, Amarillo, Savannah, Pawtucket, Bakersfield, 1975”


Do you know where we met? It was at a poetry reading. Quiz had set it up at a public library in Overland Park, Kan.; it was a place where aspiring poets could come and read their work and get some positive feedback. “We’re here to support each other,” Quiz said. In my memory, he read just one of his own poems, but he sat in the front row and said generous things about everyone else. “You made me feel something that came from deep inside you,” he would say.

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I was not there to read poetry … I was there to write about him. It had been years since he retired, but his name still inspired smiles in Kansas City. It is a joyous name, isn’t it? Quisenberry. It sounds like a sort of fruit that will make you smarter. I had come to interview him, but that’s not exactly how it went. Instead, we just sat down and talked, like we had been friends for 20 years. He asked me about writing. I asked him about pitching. He asked me about marriage — Margo and I were about to get married. I asked him about marriage — he and Janie had been together since college.

I asked him if he missed it, the game, and I’ll never forget what he said. He said that sometimes he did miss it but what he would do when that happened was go to the ballpark, close his eyes, listen to the cheers and pretend they were for him.

Honestly. How can you not love someone like that?

You know what Quiz used to do with Royals announcer Denny Matthews? Before every game, they would exchange words, obscure ones, words like “plenary” or “mellifluous.” And then Denny would have to use his word on the air during the broadcast and Quiz would have to use his word in his postgame press interviews.

Honestly. How can you not love someone like that?

Quiz used to do a radio show with Bill James for a while. One person called in — Bill never forgot this — and said that when he was 10 years old, he had met Quisenberry in a supermarket. They talked for a moment or two and then Quiz suddenly said, “Do you have your glove with you?” The kid did. So they played catch in the parking lot.

Honestly.

When Gilhousen sent Quisenberry to Waterloo to pitch, something wonderful and unexpected and magical happened: Quiz got outs. He wasn’t throwing submarine-style yet; he was more like a three-quarter, side-armed pitcher then. But his ball still had a natural sink on it, and he always threw the ball over the plate (always — he had six walks in 44 innings). He got a whole bunch of outs, and the Royals didn’t believe it, so they sent him back to Waterloo the next year. He was even better, giving up three earned runs in 42 innings.

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What could they do? The kid had nothing. It had to be a fluke. They sent him to Double-A Jacksonville where he was equally untouchable — a 1.34 ERA and .973 WHIP in 74 innings. What was happening? They sent him back to Jacksonville because they still didn’t believe any of this, and he did it again. He was just as good, and now the Kansas City Royals started wondering if they should take this guy seriously.

But how do you take seriously a guy who throws 80 mph and doesn’t have a curveball?

They sent him up to Omaha, Triple A, and he kept on getting people out, and then in July, Kansas City infielder Jerry Terrell broke a finger during infield practice and Royals manager Whitey Herzog had been griping all season that he needed a right-handed reliever. The Royals called up Quiz. Herzog threw him into a game almost immediately — put him in against the White Sox with a runner on first and one out in the seventh.

Quiz got Lamar Johnson to hit into a 4-6-3 double play.

And his brilliant career was off.


I come into a one out, one on jam
score three to one
good guys ahead
fans hootin, hollerin and buzzin like hornets
in the newer town of york

Skipper says
“get us a grounder and let’s get the hell outta here”

— Dan Quisenberry, “The Double Play”


He did everything right. That was his secret. That was his magic. “There has never been a pitcher,” Bill James wrote, “who made fewer mistakes than Dan Quisenberry.” That’s why he was the closest thing to me or you being in the major leagues. We are certainly never going to pitch like Ryan, like Unit, like Syndergaard. We could never make the ball dance like Niekro or make it turn like Mariano or make it disappear like Pedro.

But could we throw 80 mph sinkerballs exactly where we wanted every time?

Maybe not. But at least we could dream about it.

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Quiz unintentionally walked 92 batters in 1,043 innings over his entire career. That is an absurd .79 walks per nine innings. Nobody since the mound was moved back to 60 feet, 6 inches has been even close to that precise.

Do you know how many wild pitches Quiz threw in his entire career? Four. From 1981 to 1987, his best seasons, Quiz threw one wild pitch — it was in the ninth inning of a White Sox-Royals game in 1982. He threw the wild pitch with Jim Morrison at the plate. The Royals were leading 11-4 at the time. The run did not score.

You think that’s crazy, well, how about this: He hit the glove with such reliability that his catchers had — you won’t believe this — zero passed balls. Zero.

Quiz hit seven batters total in his career — more than half of them in 1986 and 1987 when he began to decline a bit. He gave up just 59 home runs in more than 1,043 innings — that’s fewer homers per nine innings than Nolan Ryan. Among the greatest relievers, only Mariano Rivera gave up fewer home runs.

He got an astonishing 130 double-play grounders in 1,043 innings. That’s one double play for every eight innings or so, one of the highest rates in baseball history.

No mistakes. No misses. Lots of groundballs. Quiz had this fantastic confidence … not in his ability exactly, but in the universe. He had a deal with the baseball. He promised not to throw it very hard — he would deliver it with that sunny, submarine-style that he learned from Kent Tekulve — if the ball promised to move when it got close to the plate. “I’ve always felt when I throw it,” he told the writer Roger Angell, “something wonderful is going to happen.”

And wonderful things did happen, again and again and again. I’m not going to tell you that Quisenberry belongs in the Hall of Fame, but I am going to tell you he was as good as some of the pitchers who are in there, including his contemporary, reliever Bruce Sutter. Quiz led the league in saves in 1980, ’82, ’83, ’84, and ’85. The Royals won two pennants and a World Series over that time. Quiz finished second or third in the Cy Young voting each year from 1982 to ’85.

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His 146 adjusted ERA+ ranks him eighth in modern baseball, and that includes two active players (Clayton Kershaw and Jacob deGrom) who still have a lot of career left.

Quiz was beloved in his time, but, I’d argue, he was underrated. He was seen as more of a gimmick pitcher than a great one. That wasn’t right, he was great. But it’s OK: I don’t think Quiz would have traded in his career for anything.


He asked
microphone in hand
bright star camera
sighted in behind
something like
“How do you leap tall buildings
& fly faster than speeding bullets?”
I said
“well my daddy used to say”
Then
I realized
my daddy said a lot of things

— Dan Quisenberry, “Q&A”


It was only a few weeks after we became friends that doctors told Quisenberry that he was going to die before the year was out. I remember the day vividly. It was my birthday. Quiz had a brain tumor. There had been no warning signs. There was nothing hopeful the doctors could say.

He held a press conference. He still had faith. He was a faithful man.

“Do you ever ask, ‘Why me?’” he was asked.

“No,” he responded. “Why not me?”

What I remember most about that press conference, though, was not anything he said. No, what I remember was the way he and Janie held hands throughout. “It’s a neat love,” Janie said, and those words, which sounded so curious in the moment — I had never heard anyone describe their love as “neat” — have become a sweet touchstone in our lives. Janie and Dan had been married for 21 years. Margo and I have been married for 21 years.

I think we have a neat love, too.

There was a lot of pain for Quiz in those final months. But he did what he always did — try to see the best in things. The last time we spoke, he talked about feeling at peace, and he talked about how maybe I could understand a little bit because he could see himself in my writing. It was too overwhelming a thing to hear, to be honest, him comforting me. He wished me and Margo the best in our new lives — we were married shortly after that.

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He died two months later, at age 45.

Quiz was always saying such funny and beautiful things. He called his fastball “Peggy Lee,” because — like her song — you had to ask, “Is That All There Is?” He talked about how natural grass is a wonderful thing for little bugs and sinkerball pitchers. When someone asked him what the best thing about being a baseball player was, he said, “There is no homework.”

He said that he never gave up anything but groundballs his entire career — it’s just that some of those groundballs didn’t bounce until going 360 feet.

But when someone asked him if he joked with God, he said: “No.” There was a depth to his feelings about the world. A few times a year, I’ll pull out Dan’s beautiful book of poetry “On Days Like This” — it’s warped now, dog-eared — and I will just turn to a page and read. Like now. I turn to the back of the book. And there’s a poem called “What If.”

What if you decided
you could feel good
and do things
you really liked
and gave yourself freedom
to make a mistake or two
and said out loud
God really loves me
a whole lot?

Each year, at least once, I do something for Quiz. I hope I can do it this year, too. I go to a game. I close my eyes for a few seconds. I listen for the cheers. And I pretend they’re for him.


View the rest of the ‘Favorite Players’ series here.

(Photo: Bettmann)

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