No relief pitchers in bowling

It was Tuesday morning at the South Point Bowling Center but for a little while, it looked like Candlestick Park, 1993. John Burkett, the big right-hander, was reaching back and throwing strikes.

And a few spares.

Burkett, who went 22-7 for the San Francisco Giants in ‘93 during what has been called major league baseball’s “Last Great Pennant Race” — Giants vs. Braves, both with 100-plus wins, down to the wire, one season before the wild card took effect — is now 49, a part-time pro bowler on the PBA Tour.

He had strung together games of 241, 202, 235, 225 and 221. For a brief time, Burkett was flirting with something.

Not a perfect game, no. Those are almost impossible to come by with the lanes all slicked up. He was flirting, however briefly, with advancing to the next round — with making the cut at the PBA Scorpion Championship at the GEICO World of Series of Bowling.

Then, like the swirling winds of Candlestick, the oil pattern changed.

Burkett’s last two games were 158 and 167.

It had been another quality start for the big right-hander. But you can’t bring in a relief pitcher in pro bowling. This is only one of the reasons the PBA Tour is so much more difficult than it appears on TV, when you are watching from your couch sipping a cold one and munching on chips.

“I always was a six- or seven-inning pitcher,” the amiable Burkett would say afterward.

John Burkett was an excellent major league pitcher, an Opening Day starter six times, with four different teams. You could rely on Burkett. He won 166 games in the bigs and lost 136 with 1,766 strikeouts and an earned-run average of 4.31. Not too shabby for a guy for whom baseball was a second love, because bowling always was his first.

Burkett grew up setting pins, and knocking them down, at Wedgwood Lanes in his blue-collar hometown of Beaver, Pa. Bowling was a big deal for the guys who worked in the steel mills, and the local bowling center was almost as popular as the tavern just outside the main gate.

When Burkett was 10 or 11, he remembers Joe Namath, from nearby Beaver Falls, and Namath’s brother walking into the bowling center one night. Namath was wearing sunglasses.

This would have been around 1975. After Joe Namath had won the Super Bowl with the Jets.

So bowling was big back in Beaver, Pa. Burkett’s dad had been a pretty fair league bowler, and so John grew up wanting to be Pete Weber or Norm Duke or Walter Ray Williams or Parker Bohn III, instead of Dock Ellis or John Candelaria or Bob Moose or Las Vegan Jerry Reuss, who also pitched for the Pirates then.

This was before scouts determined that Burkett could throw a baseball better than he could a bowling ball and that the big club was willing to pay him up front, which they don’t do in pro bowling, not even on the PBA Tour.

But isn’t it funny how what goes around often comes around?

No, Broadway Joe Namath did not wander in while wearing sunglasses to watch John Burkett bowl on Tuesday morning. But Parker Bohn III, in his third decade on tour, was rolling strikes right next to him. Burkett said he learned a lot from Bohn, even if the latter rolls left-handed.

“They want to talk about baseball when I want to talk about bowling,” he says of the reaction he often gets from the touring pros.

The bowlers want to know how he pitched to Barry Bonds after Burkett got traded to the Marlins and signed with the Braves; Burkett wants to know how you adjust when the oil pattern changes five games into a seven-game block.

In baseball, if the umpire is consistent, a strike in the first inning is still a strike in the sixth or seventh. The outside corner doesn’t change, unless maybe Greg Maddux was pitching

In bowling, with the changing lane conditions, what were strikes in the first frame can become spares in the sixth or seventh. Or worse. If you can’t figure out the oil pattern, sometimes balls that had been strikes become splits.

One or two of those will send you back to from where you came without a check, and marveling at what awesome bowlers Pete Weber and Norm Duke and Walter Ray Williams and Parker Bohn III truly are.

Next year, John Burkett will be 50 and eligible to compete with the PBA seniors, which is why he’s out with the flat bellies this year, getting his game in shape.

After our chat, I asked if was going to watch Game 6 of the World Series, to see if the Giants could clinch against the Royals.

Not a chance, he said.

The pros in the late group would be bowling at the South Point. So that’s where he planned to be, watching the other right-handers, and the lefties, too, reaching back and throwing strikes.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski