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Oliver Perez's unpredictability part of his charm

Johnette Howard

July 25, 2008

If you're a baseball general manager, an opposing hitter, even Oliver Perez's own catcher or manager, the ever-changing charm and danger of the quirky Mets lefthander is that you never know what you'll get.

Will it be the space cadet who has some whacked-out lapses on the mound and suddenly can't find the strike zone, or the flamethrower who looks almost unhittable when he's on, as he was against Philadelphia yesterday?

This has created a bit of a problem throughout baseball: How do you describe Perez accurately?

But you can credit that great philosopher, Oliver Perez himself, for suggesting "The Real Ollie" to settle the debate. Like his 95 mph on a good day, genius is what it is.

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The Real Ollie works because Perez isn't either person. People should just accept that he's guilty of nearly everything he's accused of.

The Real Ollie label fits when he's as absolutely awful as he was earlier this season, a contract year. And it fits when he's as terrific as he was yesterday, when he struck out 12 with a fastball that kept flying by them at 95 mph and a 83-mph-or-so slider that the Phillies kept double-clutching at and swinging through as if the ball were invisible.

"His slider today was nasty," Mets catcher Ramon Castro said, whistling to underline just how good Perez was.

The Mets were playing the last of a big three-game series at Shea that started with their dreadful ninth-inning loss Tuesday and improved with a bounce-back win Wednesday. That set up yesterday's noon matinee as the swing game that would decide who would be first in the NL East.

For the fourth time in four meetings this season, the Mets took the series from their archrivals and improved to 9-4 against them, after a 3-1 win.

Usually, noon is an indecent time to start anything for chronic night crawlers like baseball players or jazz musicians. But Perez, whose focus tends to swing wildly, looked like the locked-in guy in the house. The only Met who seems hotter right now is Carlos Delgado, whose two-out, two-run double in the eighth broke a 1-1 tie.

The resurgence of Perez and Delgado has dovetailed almost perfectly with the firing of Mets manager Willie Randolph and pitching coach Rick Peterson. That's a fact that Delgado didn't miss an unsolicited chance to rub in yesterday when told his on-base percentage for the month of July is .489.

"I guess I'm getting my uniform dirty now," Delgado said and winked, mocking a criticism that Randolph leveled at him back when Delgado was struggling badly.

Perez can be humorous as well. It's just not always intentional. The staff changes that brought new pitching coach Dan Warthen to the Mets a little more than a month ago have helped Perez, too.

Though it sounds like a small thing, Castro said that six or seven games ago, Warthen had some advice for the always-excitable Perez. Warthen suggested that when Perez gets in tight situations, he should take a timeout to pause, to think, even take a quick walk around the back of the mound.

And sure enough, that's what Perez was doing again and again yesterday. He was stalking around and around - but it wasn't to fire himself up.

"No, no, it's to try to settle down," Perez said. "Before I would try to overthrow everything with two strikes." And then? "Not good," Perez added, his expression now serious.

Now? Perez has allowed five earned runs in 33 2/3 innings in his last five starts. In four starts against the Phillies, he is 1-0 and has allowed one run in 26 innings, which is why inside the Mets' clubhouse, another label - "Big Game Ollie" - has caught on more than his suggestion, "The Real Ollie."

Along the way, teammates have gotten used to Perez's many tics and goofball antics, deciding he is what he is.

Yesterday, Mets manager Jerry Manuel joked that while he did indeed call Delgado an "enigma" earlier this season, he has him figured out now - "now that he's hitting." But Manuel didn't dare make the same assertion about having solved Perez.

"He reminds me a little bit of a guy that played in the '70s for Detroit, Mark Fidrych," Manuel said. "Ollie's not quite as animated as Fidrych was, but he's got all those little things of his going on out there, too."

The Real Ollie would've really liked The Bird. He was a big-game pitcher, too.