Welcome to the major leagues

Published 11:32 pm Wednesday, January 14, 2009

If you’ve seen it happen, you gasp and then hold your breath for a moment — as you watch the shattered baseball bat fly into a crowd.

Don Long didn’t see it coming. No time to gasp. No time to hold his breath.

The hitting coach for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Long was in the visitors’ dugout at Dodger Stadium that night last April when Bucs outfielder Nate McLouth stepped to the plate.

McLouth swung and hit the ball down the right-field line. Long turned to watch where the ball went.

Little did he know that the bat had shattered and the barrel was headed toward the left side of his face.

“It was helicoptering,” he said, “and as it rotated down, the broken end cut down through my face.”

Then came the blood. On his shoes. On a card he keeps during a game. On the dugout floor. As gruesome as it sounds, the bat didn’t score a knockout.

“I didn’t go down either,” he said. “Which I was proud of.”

Rushed to the Dodger clubhouse, Long required 15 stitches to get patched up.

The next day, he was back at the batting cage, ready to resume his duties when the players came onto the field.

“Kind of an awful looking mess,” he said with a laugh, “bruised, swollen and a jagged scar.”

Better to look like he had just gone 10 hard rounds than the possible alternative.

“I was very thankful that it hit me here,” he said, touching just below his left eye. “I’m not trying to traumatize it, but the way it cut my face, if it had hit me in the eye, it would have been real bad.”

After 21 years in the minor leagues, 12 as a manager and eight as the Philadelphia Phillies’ hitting coordinator, he gets to the major leagues last year and in the second week of the season — Bam! His face gets tenderized by a maple bat. Part of his upper lip is still numb but he can smile where once, for the first six or seven weeks after the accident happened, he couldn’t.

You have to look hard to detect a scar. “I’m old enough that it kind of blends into the other lines,” the handsome, mid-40ish gent joked recently as he sat in a coffee shop in downtown Edmonds.

Spring training was still a month away, and you could sense that Long — a former Meadowdale High School and Washington State University athlete — was eager to get started.

And, yes, he has become more circumspect about errant missiles after what happened last season.

As he recalled, there were “projectiles flying all over the field” last summer. “In a two-month period, close to 2,000 bats were broken,” he said, “and I think a majority of them were maple. It was every night. It was unbelievable.”

Some of the Pirate players even stopped using maple bats after Long got hit, but it wasn’t anything he urged them to do. If a ballplayer believes a maple bat helps him hit the ball farther, no coach is going to discourage him from using it. Even if there’s no irrefutable evidence that maple makes him a better hitter.

“If you go to the plate believing that you are going to be stronger or more productive or more effective with a particular type of bat in your hand, I’ve got to buy into that,” he said, speaking as a hitting coach who knows you don’t mess with a player’s mind.

After all, trust is the key connective between a player and his coach. Long learned that from a wise old hitting coach by the name of Lee Elia.

It was 1999 and Long had just been named the Phillies’ minor-league roving instructor, and the man who was his boss and who had encouraged the Phillies to hire him was Elia.

Long was fired up to get the season started, excited to put his hitting program in place. Just before he went on his first road trip to all the Phillie minor-league cities, he got a call from Elia.

“We’d gone through spring training and he’d seen me work,” Long said. “He calls me up and he says, ‘Do me a favor. When you go to all these towns your first time through, don’t worry about whether or not your program’s going to be followed.’ Of course, I’m thinking, ‘It’s got to be followed, it’s my program.’

“He said, ‘Just go in there, get to know them, talk to them, laugh with them a little bit, because if they trust you, then they’re going to do whatever you want them to do.’ And I really took from that going into this job.”

One of the Pittsburgh players he reached out to after he got the job in November of 2007 was All-Star outfielder Jason Bay, who was living in Kirkland. “This guy (Bay) was just ready to talk and bounce stuff off of me and work a little bit,” Long said. “I think that helped start the (trust-building) process, him being able to go to other guys (and say) ‘This guy’s all right, he’ll listen, he’s got some ideas.’

“It’s like anything. If you build trust in people, and you realize what they need and you teach them what they need rather than what your ego desires, you can reach some common ground and create a good relationship.”

In assessing Long’s first year as a big-league coach, Pittsburgh General Manager Neal Huntington said he “did very well. He hit the ground running and had a positive and immediate impact.”

To let the Pirate hitters have the first word, Long prepared a paper with 14 questions and handed it out on the first day of spring training. “Anything from what’s the source of your confidence to what’s your routine in the cage to what’s a productive at-bat?” Then he sat down with each of them to discuss how they had answered the questions.

He had watched tapes of them batting, had studied their swings, had an idea of what they could do and what they needed to do to improve. But he wanted to hear from them first. Thus the questionaires and the one-on-ones.

Smart move. But then, intelligence is one of Long’s strengths, as Elia found out when he interviewed him for the Phillies’ roving job in ‘99. “He was intelligent and he had a hell of a (hitting) plan,” Elia said. “I interviewed a lot of guys and he overshadowed everybody else I talked to.”

Elia had a word to describe him: complete. “If you hang around him long enough, stay by his side during a 10- to 12-hour workday, you won’t believe how complete he is. Everybody feels pretty doggone happy when somebody is putting that much energy into them. The irony is, he’s putting that kind of energy into 15 players and that’s a lot of work.”

Always learning, always trying to find ways to do his job better, Long is big on preparation. Even before he discussed a contract with the Pirates, he had figured out what it would cost him to have his family fly out to Pittsburgh for a couple of visits during the season. He had a salary figure in mind and, independent of him, his wife, Dian, also had come up with a number. They were exactly the same.

“I had seen friends of mine work for a lot of years, work their way up, and then get the opportunity to get to the big leagues, and then actually lose money,” Long said, “and I told Dian I’m not going to do that.”

And he didn’t.

The Pirates liked him enough to give him a two-year contract, which, for a coach, is unusual in baseball.

Now if he can just avoid flying bats.