Here’s a Man Who Prefers to Give Relief

“I have to find someone named Harvey and I don’t know what he looks like,” I told my friend, Dynamite Page.

“That’s easy,” he soothed. “He’s a 6-foot white rabbit, and you’ll find him in the company of Elwood P. Dowd, otherwise known as Jimmy Stewart.”

Well, Bryan Stanley Harvey turned out not to be your basic 6-foot invisible rabbit, even though the California Angels did pull him out of a hat.

When a man comes to organized baseball, it’s usually on the heels of a long, distinguished career in the sandlots and schoolyards of his home town. He usually was the big star in his own little world. Scouts had their eyes on him in grade school. The local papers were well aware of him. He might even have an agent.

Bryan Harvey broke into baseball on the basis of one game. It was in the summer of 1984 in the little borough of Denver, N.C., which is not to be confused with the one with bus lines.

Harvey hadn’t pitched in two years when he took the mound that day. He was really doing a favor for some pals. It was a semipro game, one of those where you wear the name of the local diner on your uniform.

Harvey was a truck driver, not a prospect. His baseball career had consisted mainly of playing the outfield for a slow-pitch softball team back in high school.

That day, he looked like the reincarnation of Christy Mathewson. It was a story right out of a 1940 Warner Bros. movie. It had elements of Elmer the great and Joe Hardy. All it needed was a guy who could light cigarettes with his fingers and a part for Gwen Verdon. Or Robert Redford.

Harvey, it seemed, was a natural. Fluid, easy motion, blistering fastball, control. The scout didn’t believe it. He invited Harvey to a tryout camp the next week.

There, Harvey took on guys who had been pitching all their lives. He made them look as if they were dealing junk. He threw 20 pitches into a radar gun, each one of them faster than the last. And all of them over 90 m.p.h., and all of them in the strike zone.

The Angels signed him. They didn’t lose their heads--$1,500 was what they came up with. They knew there was a catch in here some place.

There wasn’t. Harvey was right where he belonged. In a baseball uniform.

Relief pitchers are made, not born. Hardly anyone sets out to be a relief pitcher. Relief pitchers are usually worn-out starters, canny old parties whose specialty is out-guessing, not overpowering, the hitter, getting him leaning, looking the wrong way, out of sync.

Bryan Harvey became a reliever on purpose. And right away. Here’s the way it worked: When he was sent to Quad Cities, the Angels’ Class-A farm team at Davenport, Iowa, the club started him in 7 games. They thought a guy with a 95-m.p.h. heater deserved star billing.

Bryan Harvey didn’t care for it. He was not dealing with an arm that had been shaped, conditioned, pampered over the years. He was dealing with an arm that had been used to shift gears, not shift speeds.

“I would go three, four, even five innings,” he said. “But by five innings, I would have thrown 100 pitches already. My arm was tired. I was tired. My arm wasn’t conditioned for it.

“They asked me if I could be moved to relief. I said, ‘You bet!’ ”

And that is how the visible Harvey became one of the best relief pitchers in the game and a prime prospect for American League rookie of the year. At the ripe old age of 24, he’s playing the role usually reserved for the patriarchs of the game.

A relief pitcher has to have more than an out pitch. He has to have control, poise, imperturbability.

Control is supposed to be something that comes with hours and weeks and months and years of pitching.

Harvey seems to have rolled out of his crib with it. His strikeout-to-walk ratio would do credit to Goose Gossage. In 55 innings, he has struck out 45 while walking only 16.

“He never gets shook,” explains Marcel Lachemann, Angel pitching coach. “He doesn’t brood, he doesn’t gloat. He acts as if he’s been pitching for 15 years.”

Comedians want to play Hamlet, crooners want to sing Carmen--and relief pitchers are supposed to want to start and strike out 20 a game.

Not Harvey. Harvey would rather pitch several days a week than several innings a game. He can warm up with a hair comb.

He was taught to throw a fork ball by the bullpen coach, Joe Coleman, and he revels in short relief. No more five-inning marathons. No more 100-pitch arm-achers.

It is the short relief man’s responsibility to get the last three outs in a game and put the win in the hangar. Harvey does this as well as anyone in the league at the moment. He has finished 24 games this season, registering saves in 10.

Pretty good for a guy you might confuse with the figment of Elwood P. Dowd’s imagination.

He may not be real, either. His career defies all baseball logic. For him to be getting out major league hitters with his limited to non-existent background is like a guy putting out oil well fires whose only previous experience was trimming kerosene wicks.

It may be that, underneath that uniform with 34 on it, there is just a big, fluffy, 215-pound Easter bunny. They should check to see if his eyes are pink.