The Mystery of Rob Dressler

The 1980 Seattle Mariners were an ugly team.  They lost 103 games, one game off the team record posted two years earlier.  Only one hitter on the entire team managed an above-average season: the underrated Bruce Bochte.  The team’s star and designated hitter, Willie Horton, cratered in his final season. Starter Rick Honeycutt was caught scuffing a ball and suspended for ten days.  Skipper Davey Johnson was canned halfway through the season and replaced by Maury Wills, who not only had no managing experience but apparently had failed to notice what his managers were doing during his playing days.  The stink of failure clung to the team like a Vanillaroma air freshener.

A week before the 1981 season started, the Mariners released swingman Rob Dressler.  Dressler had gone 4-10 the previous year.  No backlash occurred.

Rob Dressler was an ugly pitcher.  At the age of 26, he made Kirk Reuter look like Mark Langston.  A first round pick of the San Francisco Giants, Dressler was eventually purchased by the Mariners halfway through the 1979 season.  Over the course of his career, he averaged a strikeout every three innings.  In thirty-four years, only six other M’s starters have eclipsed that ratio in a single season. Dressler overcame this handicap with pinpoint control, sporting a BB/9 ratio of below 2 during his time with the M’s.   Overall, the result wasn’t fun to watch.  But he got the job done, at least barely: despite his losing record, Dressler had a 3.98 ERA (and a comparable FIP), and his 1.8 WAR ranked him as the sixth most valuable player on the team.  Six months later, he was gone.

Adding insult to injury is Mike Parrott.  After a brilliant 1979 season (4.2 WAR), Parrott split time with Dressler as the fifth starter in 1980 and held onto the job for 1981.  How he accomplished this is somewhat of an enigma: Parrott managed a record of 1-16 in 1980 with an ERA of 7.28.  He and Dressler were both the same age.

Dressler typically pitched poorly in spring training; in 1980, it cost him his spot in the starting rotation, and in 1981, it cost him his job.  There are a couple of reasons for this: first, for a pitcher who rarely missed bats, the Arizona climate is murderous.  Perhaps more importantly, it is the imperative of poor managers to overmanage, to look as busy as possible.  Wills, later charged as demonstrating below-average communication skills, had already clashed with Dressler in the past over the latter’s role.    It’s easy to imagine that the manager conducted a Stalinist sweep of dissention in the last days before the season, and making change for its own sake.

Imagination is what we’re left with, however.  Dressler’s exit earned two inches of ink in the Seattle Times:

Dressler, a native of Portland, said he would sell his Scottsdale home and move back to Oregon.  He said, "I think I can still play.  And I’m still young enough to start in something else.  I’ll talk to my wife.  I thought I’d be all gray when I would be released.  I did not expect this."

The Times goes on to note the important fact that Dressler had an ERA of 8.09 that spring.  Thirty year-old sportswriting can, at times, inspire a touch of disequilibrium to the modern reader.  Exhibition games were treated with the same fervor and immediacy that might be seen amidst a pennant run today.  The beat reporter, seeking to fill columns, must delve into every angle, see every pattern, even when there is none.  Without the statistician chanting his or her mantra, "small sample size", each new day took on its own weary significance.  And after 145 innings of above-average ball in 1980, Robert Alan Dressler was fired because of 16.2 spring innings.    As Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

This is where the trail goes cold.  Was there a reason (beyond general incompetence) that Rob Dressler was cut from the Mariners in March of 1981?  Why was he waived rather than reassigned, knowing that Mike Parrott would pitch like Mike Parrott and that his services would be required shortly?  Did he walk away from the game, or were 27 other teams really uninterested in a 27 year-old pitcher with a career 97 ERA+?

I hope that Rob Dressler wasn’t too young to start over, and that he found success in whatever he chose to do.  The game of baseball, as it turns out, didn’t treat him the way it should have.