Les Carpenter / Times staff columnist
Yankees' Stottlemyre still strolling to mound

Mel Stottlemyre

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

Yesterday, in the stillness of a Safeco Field afternoon with the stands empty and the roof pulled shut, Mel Stottlemyre sat in a dugout just as he has for most of the past 40 years. The New York Yankees' pitching coach looked down at the gray baseball pants and the blue sweatshirt he wore and a smile broke wide across his face.

"You know, it feels good to wear all this," he said.

Then he rolled a fishing magazine in his hands, breathed in deeply and laughed.

Four years ago, it was so different. Four years ago, on a spring weekend just like this, there was a hushed news conference in a tiny room behind this very dugout. And inside the tiny room, Stottlemyre was talking about cancer, and the faces were ashen, and his words seemed to hit like a sledgehammer.

He said the disease was called multiple myeloma.

"The doctors used the word 'cure,' so my prognosis is good — very good," he said that day.

Then everyone went to look for a definition of multiple myeloma, a disease of the bone marrow, and a single frightening fact glared from the pages. The median life span for someone with multiple myeloma is 2½ to three years.

At the time, it seemed Stottlemyre was putting a brave face on the worst news. There are not many important baseball names in the state of Washington, the way there are in California or Texas or Florida. In fact, Mel Stottlemyre and sons Mel Jr. and Todd, out of the Yakima Valley, might be the closest thing the state has to baseball royalty. The tales of their toughness have become a part of their lore.

But this was so much bigger than pitching a game with a sore arm. Cancer? The word hung cold.

And yet Mel Stottlemyre sat in the Yankees' dugout again yesterday afternoon. He is 62, in another season as New York's pitching coach, and he said he felt better than he has in years.
 
"I can't say I'm completely cured, but everything is under control," he said.

Cancer has been an awful intruder on the Stottlemyres, taking Mel's 11-year-old son, Jason, in 1981 and his brother in that dreadful fall of 2000. Asked about Jason yesterday, he nodded slowly.

"It's been a tough thing on the family, and I think our whole family gained a lot of strength in the battle he fought," he said. "He fought it for five years. We talk about him often, even though it happened in 1981. It's something that never leaves you."

Nor do you forget that moment they tell you that you have cancer, too. For Mel Stottlemyre, it came 13 months before he publicly announced his illness.

"It just drops you to your knees," he said of hearing the doctors deliver the words "multiple myeloma."

Sometimes you can make bad things disappear by the force of will. When the diagnosis first came down, Stottlemyre made a deal with his doctor, Stephen Nimer, at New York's Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

"You be the best doctor you can be," he told Nimer. "And I will be the best patient I can be."

Stottlemyre smiled.

"He says I am," Stottlemyre said.

Each time Nimer came to him with a new drug — and ultimately a new list of potential side effects — the doctor would introduce it with the phrase, "Now this thing will cause you to ... "

Stottlemyre would cut him off with the same response: "Nope, not me, doctor. It won't happen to me."

This was not an easy fight. There were the 13 months he kept the diagnosis a secret and then the months of chemotherapy, which came while he worked during the 2000 season, tucking the bottle of medicine to his side and hiding the contraption under his warmup jacket. Then in September of that year, when he was finally ready for the stem-cell treatment that would ultimately save his life, he was confined to a floor at Sloan-Kettering for 20 days to protect his immune system.

He missed the pennant drive and the playoffs. The doctors let him slip into Yankee Stadium for the first two games of that year's World Series, but he had to sit with Steinbrenner in manager Joe Torre's office and watch the games on television.

That winter, he managed to convince Nimer to let him slip off with Mel Jr. and Todd for their annual hunting trip in the woods of Eastern Washington. He could only pull himself outside for a couple of hours a day, so weak was his condition, but this was the start of living normally again.

"Looking back, I don't think I would have wanted to do it any different way," he said.

Now he and Torre, a prostate cancer survivor himself, make sure to find each other once a month. This is when their regular checkups come along, when the doctor draws blood to see if their cancer is still in remission. The results take two days to come back, and this is always the worst time, filled with the dread of not knowing what they'll return.

"We're both very comfortable asking the other what we're going to find out in those tests," Stottlemyre said. "I would say it's a club, just the two of us; he knows exactly the feelings I have at that time."

Eventually, Torre will leave the Yankees. And, when he does, Stottlemyre will go with him. He does not want to work for another manager. He does not want to work for someone who won't understand the waiting that comes every month.

Instead, he wants to retire to his Sammamish home, to his grandchildren and mornings fishing on the lake.

"I just go year to year now," he said.