Jenkins not impressed with today's pitchers

In Ferguson Jenkins's day, pitchers wanted the ball in their hand until the baseball game was over.

Those days are long gone.

In the era of sixth-inning relief specialists and managers with bigger hooks than a weekend duffer, starting pitchers rarely get the opportunity to finish what they've started anymore.

Jenkins, a 1991 hall of famer with 284 wins to his credit, completed 267 games in a 19-year-career. Randy Johnson, the active leader, has a 100, 47 more than

Boston's John Smoltz, his next closest rival. Jenkins, a Chatham, Ont. native and the first Canadian to enter the hall of fame, blames pitch counts.

"Ball clubs are trying to protect their players. Every player has an agent, they don't want their client to get hurt. I think because of the fact there are so many arm injuries people are trying to protect individuals. But I threw as much as anyone else in my era -- Tom Seaver, (Steve) Carlton, you name it -- and I never had any arm problems."

The now 67-year-old Jenkins began his career with Philadelphia in 1965, but made his mark in Chicago with the Cubs, where he won 20 games or more for six straight seasons and won the National League Cy Young Award in 1971, a year he went 24-13 with a 2.77 earned run average in a remarkable and unheard-of-by-today's-standards 325 innings pitched.

By the end of his career, which wound down in 1984 in Chicago after two trips to Texas and a brief stay in Boston, the writing was already on the backstop. Relievers like Goose Gossage and Dan Quisenberry owned the late innings and starters found themselves coming out earlier and earlier. Bred to think that way for more than a generation, Jenkins says today's pitchers couldn't go the distance very often, even if they wanted to keep the ball.

"You have to use (your arm) more to make it strong," said Jenkins, the featured speaker at Monday's Northwoods League all-star dinner, a prelude to Tuesday's all-star game festivities at Port Arthur Stadium, home of the Thunder Bay Border Cats.

"I think putting a category, like pitch counts or quality starts, we never heard about that in the '60s and '70s. Now they have it because so many of these young men are getting hurt."

Jenkins, time having added a few pounds to the 210-pound frame he carried during his playing days, said modern pitchers don't compare to the stars of his era. His contemporaries included the likes of Seaver and Carlton and fellow hall-of-famers Bob Gibson, Nolan Ryan, Don Sutton and Jim Palmer. He's not impressed with most of what he sees in today's game, which he follows closely enough to know the his Cubs just swept a four-game set from Washington this weekend.

"These kids are not going to get in the hall of fame. Believe me. (Toronto's Roy) Halladay might. He's a horse. He could probably pitch in the era we played in. But when you look at (Sandy) Koufax, (Don) Drysdale, Gibson, Seaver, Sutton, these guys are all in the hall of fame because they went to the mound every fourth day and played. You just have to go out there and deal with the situation, and that's what makes you a better ballplayer," Jenkins said.

More than two decades removed from his last big league pitch, the Order of Canada member these days oversees the Fergie Jenkins Foundation, a charitable organization that supports a number of charities in both Canada and the United States, including the Boys and Girls Club and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

Tuesday's NWL all-star game is scheduled to start at 6:05 p.m. The homerun derby goes two hours earlier. Jenkins, with Jordan Staal of the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins, who is bringing along the Stanley Cup for a brief appearance, will throw out the ceremonial first pitch.