Goose's way: The baseball life of a Colorado Springs Hall of Famer

Oct. 2, 1978. Fenway Park, home of the rival Boston Red Sox. The New York Yankees can either win and continue in the playoffs or lose and go home. Their fate lies in the right hand of a young pitcher from Colorado Springs, Richard “Goose” Gossage.

In the ninth inning, he’s holding on to a 5-4 lead when he spots the mighty Carl Yastrzemski stepping to the batter’s box.

Suddenly, Gossage struggles to breathe.

“My knees shook. My palms sweated,” he later recalled.

He stepped off the mound for a moment. And like so many moments before and like so many that would come later in his Hall of Fame career, Gossage reminded himself of where he came from.

He was 8 years old, playing ball in the alleys of his poor neighborhood in Colorado Springs, riding with his buddies in the back of his dad’s pickup, arriving at the field under the sun.

That was him at Bonny Park, nothing but the big, blue sky in his eyes. Life was hard back home. But here on the mound, there was nothing but joy in the boy with an uncanny arm.

That’s what Gossage thought about there beside the mound at Fenway Park. Up one, Yastrzemski approaching, nearly 33,000 fans watching.

“Relax, Rick,” Gossage told himself. “You’ve always played the game for fun, so enjoy the moment.”

It was a moment that would go down in baseball lore: Gossage’s pitch bouncing high off Yastrzemski’s bat, into the glove of Gossage’s teammate at third.

Two weeks later, Gossage would be at the center of another celebration. He and the Yankees were World Series champions. Another unforgettable moment.

But getting Yastrzemski out was “perhaps the defining moment of my entire career,” Gossage wrote in his autobiography, at the end of a 22-year run hardly matched by any relief pitcher in history.

“Had I not gotten Yaz out, had he delivered the winning hit in the one-game playoff, it’s quite possible that I would have had only a mediocre-to-good career. Who knows? Careers in baseball are that fragile.”

Instead, all these years later back in Colorado Springs, Gossage can say he made it.

“Twenty-two years in the big leagues,” the 73-year-old says here at his home in the Broadmoor neighborhood. “I still can’t comprehend I had this kind of career.”

The mementos help him comprehend — binders of grainy pictures and yellowed newspapers chronicling perhaps the most legendary athletic career to come out of the Springs.

Gossage’s mom collected all this over the years. There’s everything from those Little League days at Bonny Park, to Wasson High School, to his first pro faceoff against Ernie Banks, to his pitching Pete Rose’s final at-bat, to a 22-year rise up Major League Baseball’s all-time leaderboards.

Just imagine his mom’s pride upon picking up The Gazette Telegraph that morning of Nov. 23, 1977. “Yanks Make Gossage a Wealthy Man,” read the headline.

The 1970 Wasson grad was a millionaire. He was seemingly a long way away from the one-bedroom home of his childhood.

And yet he always kept his childhood close. Always reminded himself of the 8-year-old boy he was back in the Springs.

He shoots upright in his chair now. “I’m still 8!”

Becoming Goose

Youthful thinking was always useful.

The game would be more complex than he ever imagined, in psychological ways that threatened the existence of relief pitchers then and now. Gossage was among baseball’s early “firemen,” those specialists tasked with entering games late to either put out fires or inadvertently cause them.

“I’m walking that tightrope between hero and goat every night,” he says, thinking back. “And I’m just this young kid.”

A kid who would have to grow up fast, never mind the business and politics of the league he’d grapple with later. He’d grow into one of the game’s more controversial, charismatic characters.

But first he needed to add more to his arsenal than just that 100 mph fastball. He needed to suppress self-doubt and the sound of adoring or disgusted fans. Packed stadiums rang out: “GOOOOOOSE.”

“It was nice,” he recalls, “because I never knew if they were booing me or cheering me.”

The nickname came from a teammate observing how the lanky, 6-foot-3 kid’s neck craned like a goose at the mound. Gossage was, indeed, a physical sight to behold, his long arms and legs flailing like crazy with every exploding pitch.

It was always as if he was that kid getting egged on by his older brother. “You’re throwing like a little girl,” Jack would say, as Rick threw harder and harder.

“I’d get so mad,” Gossage says. “That’s where my delivery came from, trying to maximize every inch of my body into this ball.”

He was similarly intimidating off the mound.

Just as his pro career is marked by three World Series appearances and nine All-Star selections ahead of his 2008 Hall of Fame induction, it is also marked by fights. They were physical in the infamous case of teammate Cliff Johnson, but otherwise verbal in the case of other teammates, managers and club owners.

Gossage maintains the fu manchu mustache that came to symbolize his gruff demeanor. He grew the mustache in New York, amid a feud with the Yankees owner who preferred his team clean-shaven.

“I grew this to piss off Steinbrenner,” Gossage says.

Later, pitching for the San Diego Padres in 1986, he pissed off that team’s owner, Joan Kroc. His autobiography, “The Goose is Loose,” recounts a swearing match with her stemming from a comment he made over a locker room beer ban and the “poisonous hamburgers” of McDonald’s. Kroc’s husband was McDonald’s CEO.

Gossage’s personality was as fiery as his fastball. That was apparent early, in 1974, approaching his third season as a Chicago White Sox draft pick.

He struggled the previous season. Manager Chuck Tanner told the kid he’d be off the major league roster.

This led to a “nose-to-nose and jaw-to-jaw” spat, Gossage wrote later, quoting himself: “I got the best arm in this (expletive) camp. Just give me the ball and let me prove it.”

Maybe it was all instinct, he thinks now. “I was fighting for my (expletive) life.”

Humble beginnings

Reflecting on his childhood through the ’50s, “We couldn’t rub two nickels together,” Gossage says.

Maybe he’d get one in exchange for glass bottles he scrounged up. This was in helping the family income; his dad worked in landscaping, and his mom picked up shifts as a waitress.

One of six kids, Gossage also helped by hunting alongside his dad around town. They’d hope for a deer — daily meals of venison were not uncommon — or a rabbit for stew.

Everyone had to be busy. But come Saturday afternoon, everyone stopped for the game of the week broadcast by Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese.

Almost always, it was the Yankees. Gossage’s dad loved the Yankees almost as much as he loved watching his boy play.

“Dad used to tell me, ‘You’re gonna play in the big leagues someday,’” Gossage says. “He was my biggest fan.”

A former life of mining, smoking and drinking caught up to the man.

Sue Gossage returned home from the hospital one day. “Dad’s gone,” she said.

Goose was a junior in high school. He never got to say goodbye.

About a year later, the summer after graduating, Gossage ran through the door to tell his mom he got a job coaching Little League. She motioned to a man sitting on the couch.

“This gentleman has a job for you, too,” she said.

He was a scout with the White Sox. Congratulations, he told Gossage. The team just drafted him in the ninth round.

“I was completely caught off guard,” Gossage says.

Excitement gave way to dread as the days drew closer to the flight to camp in Florida. He’d never been on a plane before. Never been out of Colorado. But that was not his biggest worry.

He thought about Mickey Mantle and those hitters he watched on TV every Saturday afternoon. He thought about them as he hiked near Garden of the Gods. He hiked to a favorite spot of his dad’s.

Gossage remembers coming to that ponderosa pine. “I’m sitting there crying,” he says. “What have I done?”

He couldn’t strike out the likes of Mantle, he told himself. He couldn’t face those superheroes on TV, he told himself.

And then “it was like the world had been lifted off my shoulders,” he says. “The tears stopped flowing.”

He told himself something else: “I’m gonna give it everything I got.”

He took the league by storm, finishing 7-1 as a rookie. He would soon garner comparisons to Nolan Ryan.

Before his first game at Yankee Stadium that rookie season, Gossage remembers standing alone on the field. He looked to the sky.

Finally, four years later, he said goodbye. “This one’s for you, Dad.”

The fight within

Gossage married his wife of 50 years, Corna, amid his career’s first rough patch. It was amid that “nose-to-nose and jaw-to-jaw” spat with Tanner, heading into year three with the White Sox.

“Standing up to Tanner that day convinced (him) that I had the competitive fire he wanted to see in all his pitchers,” Gossage wrote in his autobiography.

That’s how Gossage rationalized his abrasive behavior that rubbed others the wrong way — competitive. He took a militaristic approach to the mound. Reads his Hall of Fame bio: “I don’t like anybody with a bat in his hands, because he’s trying to hurt me with that thing.”

Pre-game rituals in New York involved a stadium attendant who was willing to be cussed out. “If I didn’t feel mad enough warming up, I’d call out the catcher and verbally abuse him,” Gossage wrote.

Controlled rage was necessary, he determined. But doubt would often fester beneath — especially early into his first year with the Yankees.

Losses were piling up. Here he was with his childhood team, the champions the year prior in 1977, and his pitching was not helping.

He’d be “grinding” over losses, he recalls, “until I got to bed at whatever time it was, 2 or 3 in the morning.” He’d finally fall asleep with “a sick pit” in his stomach. He’d reluctantly wake. “The monster in the room was still there.”

A nervous breakdown followed a blown game in Toronto. In the locker room, he curled up and cried.

Why was he shaking on the mound? he wondered. Why did he throw this pitch instead of that pitch? Why was he pitching at all?

“Why did I start playing the game?” he remembers asking himself. “And it was like, boom: For the love of the game. For the fun of it at 8 years old. It was simple. It was innocent.”

His turnaround — he lowered his ERA to 1.01 — coincided with that of the team in one iconic chapter of the “Bronx Zoo” era.

Gossage would carry that youthful thinking to the mound to face Yastrzemski, and again, two weeks later, to a World Series victory.

A kid at the park

Gossage was incorrect in his dynasty prediction. The Yankees returned to the World Series but lost in 1981, ahead of his departure. (He’d pitch in the Padres’ first World Series in 1984.)

Ego and jealousy notoriously plagued the Bronx Zoo. “I had a big hand in the Yankees’ problems,” Gossage later admitted.

He’d keep the mustache grown in rebellion of Steinbrenner. He’d keep that brash attitude that made him adored and scorned.

He addresses this in the opening page of his autobiography: “My mother and father taught me to tell the truth no matter what, even when it hurts. ... [F]or the most part I’m a straight-shooting, no BS, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may kind of guy.”

The chips have fallen in recent years.

In 2018, the Yankees banned him from spring training for his unrelenting criticism. Gossage is on the record for calling team executive Brian Cashman “a disgrace” and worse things.

“I knew I burned that bridge,” Gossage says now, “but I didn’t give a (expletive).”

Gossage has continued to bash “the nerds” behind baseball’s analytics movement — those opting for data over real baseball knowledge, as he sees it.

“I am angry at the way that the torch has stopped being passed. Respect the game,” he said on the Bret Boone Podcast last year. “It’s like they have cut my heart out. That’s how passionate I am about this game. It’s not bitterness.”

He has had choice words, too, for modern players he sees as overly paid for their limited pitch counts. More than once, he has publicly referred to coaches as “overpaid babysitters.”

He thought he’d be a coach. But “I don’t fit in with what’s going on today,” he says.

It’s not bitterness, he insists, but the business and politics of baseball clearly irk him. His career started with MLB’s first labor strike in 1972, and his career ended with a work stoppage in 1994.

At the time, Sports Illustrated called him the game’s “last dinosaur.” So much had changed, he reflected. “The innocence is gone.”

Upon retirement, his 1,002 games pitched ranked third most all time. He played for 10 teams, including one in Japan.

He kept playing and playing, into his 40s. The reason was simple, he says: “I loved the game.”

Simple. That’s how the game should be, he says.

That’s how it was for that kid at Bonny Park. The field is still here in his hometown.

And sometimes, the kid is still there, too.

“I parked and sat there the other day,” Gossage says.