The NBA is replete with characters and I’ve met many of them. Baseball is a bit more subdued, hidebound by ancient etiquette, demanding of public deference. Yet A’s closer Liam Hendriks stands out. He might even be the most interesting person I’ve come across in sports.
“We had a cat on the leash out recently, Winnie Cooper,” so said the relief pitcher, as he relaxed in the A’s spartan clubhouse last weekend. “She walks a lot better with my wife than she does with me.”
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“Cat on a leash,” is not a metaphor or a slang term from Hendriks’ native Australia. He and his wife, Kristi, own five felines and they quite literally take their cats on walks alongside their two dogs.
“Two of the cats can walk pretty well on leashes, two are in between and one is just a no-go, Hendriks said.”
Winnie walks well but can be temperamental.
“Cat’s have their own personalities as do people,” Hendriks explained. “She is pretty good most of the time. She’s a little ditzy some of the time, so if she’s over it she’s over it.”
My interest in baseball is recent, so I keep learning of aspects that either surprise or puzzle. One such aspect is the sport’s extreme variance in relief pitcher performance, season to season. Naively, after watching Blake Treinen dominate 2018 with comically unhittable pitches, I assumed he had the sport figured out. Last year’s performance would more or less repeat in 2019. It was simple physics. Treinen threw too hard, with too much movement, to be cracked.
And yet, reliever variance came for Treinen, as well as hard-throwing setup man Lou Trivino in 2019. With those two scuffling, the A’s have badly needed the boost provided by Hendriks, who transformed into a surprise closer and All-Star this season.
The struggles of Treinen and Trivino have been confounding, but progress can be equally mystifying. How does a guy like Hendriks go from being talented but inconsistent to what he’s finally put together at age 30?
There’s an explanation, but even if there weren’t, its absence would fit the man. Not much about Hendriks makes complete sense, far beyond the basic fact that he’s a professional baseball player from Australia. Nicknamed “Slydah,” on account of Hendriks’ accent when calling up his wipeout pitch, the A’s closer doesn’t really look like a relief pitcher.
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“I don’t have the prototypical baseball body,” said Hendriks, who is listed at 6-foot but appears somewhat compacted, a stout square of muscle when he crouches down to tie his shoes in the A’s clubhouse. “I’m a little stockier set. A little bit thicker. I’ve gotten ‘catcher’ before. I have more of a football look to me.”
By “football,” Hendriks means Aussie Rules, a sport he showed professional promise in as a teen. He teases the American version as being “throwball.”
The Aussie heritage gives Hendriks a certain perspective on America, right down to its relative fauna dangers. In a discussion about cat-walking safety, he mentioned the alligator living by his Fort Myers, Fla., home. “I grew up in Australia. Florida’s nothing. I mean, we have a gator in the back, but don’t piss him off. It’s like any other predator.”
When it comes to the handling of creatures, Hendriks expressed praise for his late countryman, Steve Irwin. The fictional Crocodile Dundee draws his ire, however. “Crocodile Dundee screwed us,” Hendriks said of Australian’s reputation within the United States. “That guy set us back about 20 years in stereotypes.”
Hendriks reads, constantly, averaging a book a week. Most sports people I’ve come across tend to prefer non-fiction. Hendriks prefers fiction. He’s been burning through Book 5 of the “Red Rising” series, which he reads, as he reads everything else, with heavy metal music blasting into his eardrums. “That’s a bit odd,” Hendriks admitted, in a moment of reflection.
So what was the idiosyncratic man’s secret on the mound? It was mostly to stop thinking. This season, with his career seemingly hanging in the balance, Hendriks elected to relax and let it fly.
“I wanted to at least go down on my terms,” he said. This meant a rejection of fear and a rejection of granular analysis.
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“The more I think, the worse I am,” Hendriks said. “So I don’t think I am about anything. I’m not going up there and thinking about mechanics. I’m just going up there and trying to throw as hard as I can and beat the game.”
Hendriks wishes he had this mindset back when he was a rookie with the Minnesota Twins in 2011. Looking back, he feels that the coaching he received was actually detrimental.
“If I had the same mentality back then as a starter that I have now, I think I’d be fine,” Hendriks said. “I got called up at 22. All of a sudden they tried to fix a couple things with my mechanics and I went down into a rabbit hole. I started giving the hitters too much credit, I started nibbling around the plate, I started trying to make the perfect pitch. It wasn’t my game plan. I need to go up there and throw strikes.”
In theory, pitchers should be aware of batters’ strengths and weakness, in an effort to place pitches more optimally. Hendriks now eschews this approach, instead now favoring “no approach.”
“This year, I don’t care who’s hitting,” he said. “I don’t care who’s in the box. It’s just a guy with a bat and a number and I’m going to beat him.”
It’s a blunt approach for a man whose words certainly get to the point. For example, when local teams across sports mention one another, it’s usually with some form of canned admiration. It’s an open secret that these franchises tend to dislike each other, as they are frequently in a competition for resources and fan attention. Hendriks is different. He just violates the taboo with a shrug.
“I don’t follow the Warriors,” Hendriks said of the A’s wildly popular ex-neighbors. “They treated us like sh*t over here so we don’t care for them much.”
His reasons have nothing to do with the on-court product.
“When the Warriors sucked and the A’s were good, the A’s would give them tickets,” he said. “When the Warriors became good they decided to cut all ties and become assholes. So, no love lost for them leaving.”
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Hendriks recalled with a laugh: “I got told I’m not as important as a player for the A’s as a fan for the Warriors is by a Warriors security guard. He wouldn’t let us out of the F Lot. We’re trying to get out and he wouldn’t let us out.”
Still, Hendriks sees more profit in the Raiders’ imminent exit than the Warriors’ recent one.
“We can make some improvements after they leave,” Hendriks said with a smile. “We can take their clubhouse because their clubhouse is way nicer than ours.”
Whether Hendriks will get to enjoy himself in that post-Raiders future might be dependent on how sustainable this all is, whether his improvements are the kind that variance can’t cruelly wrench away. The A’s are thinking about this, but Liam Hendriks isn’t. That’s the key, of course, if not the point of all those books. He will, however, mull the general question of whether it’s easier to control a cat or a slider.
“Depends on the day,” he mused with a chuckle. “After an off day, commanding a slider. General days, walking a cat.”
— Reported from Oakland
(Photo: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)
