In his playing days, Rick Langford was a master of finishing what he started. Now he’s the man the Blue Jays trust to put the final touches on their future aces.

By Jeff Blair in Toronto and Dunedin, Fla.

ick Langford used to see all the Toronto Blue Jays’ pitching prospects at their worst. He was the man the Jays sent you to if you were broken down. Now, he sees them at their best—and tries to make them better.

Finding itself with a treasure trove of young starters over the past two seasons, the organization turned to Langford, a wiry, perpetually tanned, 63-year-old Virginian who pitched 11 years in the majors, to create what amounts to a finishing school for pitchers. “I pick your game apart,” Langford says before making his rounds one March morning at the Bobby Mattick Training Center in Dunedin, Fla. “I find out what your game is, and it’s all coaching from a major-league perspective. I’m not interested in getting you from single-A to double-A.”

Blue Jays assistant GM Tony LaCava says the organization gave Langford a group of about 20 pitchers and asked him to “give them the little things that can help them be successful at the big-league level . . . to finish them off.”

Langford knows a little something about finishing. Thirty-five years ago this summer, he accomplished a feat that has yet to be repeated and most likely never will. From May 23 to Sept. 17, 1980, Langford, a masterful but hardly overpowering right-hander, finished every game he started: 22 of them, including a 14-inning win over the Cleveland Indians on July 20. Hall of Famer Robin Roberts’s run of 28 consecutive complete games is the most comparable modern stretch, but it came with a catch: Roberts’s run was split over two seasons, eight games to close out 1952 and 20 to start 1953. “I didn’t realize what I was doing, not at the beginning,” says Langford, who finished 1980 with 28 complete games. “I just put combinations of games together. It wasn’t hard. There was nothing difficult about it except the competition, the grinding. I never looked over my shoulder. Never peeked into the bullpen to see who was warming up. I just knew it was my ballgame—first six innings, then get to the seventh. I counted them down. Go out in the seventh and get the first guy. ‘Hey, eight more to go.’”

It seems odd, doesn’t it? His hallmark was a season in which he was a human metronome. He never iced his arm after a game, and had no idea about pitch counts (nobody did). He now talks about how his rhythm and tempo were essentially designed to hurt his body. And now he’s in charge of perfecting modern-day aces-in-waiting with pitch counts and innings limits and surgically repaired shoulders and elbows. Odd, but effective.

odgers ace Clayton Kershaw led the majors with six of the 118 complete games thrown in 2014, and it’s three seasons and counting since James Shields became the last pitcher to hit double digits in the category. “Today, there’s a different mentality with pitchers,” says LaCava. “We’re teaching them to sprint—to go as hard as they can—and we have specialized bullpens to finish the game off. Guys are maxing out on every pitch. In Rick’s day, there wasn’t the scrutiny over every pitch and its velocity.”

There certainly wasn’t any scrutiny on Billy Martin’s 1980 Oakland Athletics, the team on which Langford compiled his streak. Martin might be remembered as the scrappy New York Yankees manager, but the truth is that few of his teams channelled him like the ’80s A’s. “Billy Ball” was an Athletics invention, and one year after a 108-loss season, the A’s under Martin rode complete games and stolen bases to an 83-79 record. True, they finished 14 games out in the American League West, but the foundation was laid for their 1981 division title, and they drew 500,000 more fans to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum than in 1979, which helped convince Levi Strauss CEO Walter Haas Jr. to buy the beleaguered franchise from Charlie O. Finley for $12 million. Having come within hours of relocation at the hands of Denver industrialist Marvin Davis in the spring of 1980, Oakland was instead able to celebrate World Series appearances in 1988, ’89 and ’90 (winning in ’89) and serve as the setting for Moneyball—in no small measure because of Martin’s club. “We kept baseball in Oakland,” says Mike Norris, who, like Martin, was a Bay Area native and who, at the age of 25, was the best pitcher on the 1980 A’s staff, tossing 284 1/3 innings and finishing with an ERA of 2.53. “But [the 1980 A’s] rarely get talked about. Maybe it’s because Billy was the manager, or because I’m black and I was the ace of the staff. Maybe it’s because they accused us of throwing spitballs. It’s just something we won’t know.”

One thing baseball does know about the 1980 A’s: Martin and pitching coach Art Fowler shredded the arms of their starters. “As an institution, I think baseball decided that’s what happened,” says Brian Kingman, a member of the A’s staff who spent much of his time in Martin’s doghouse. “Occasionally, I wonder what would have happened if, say, Tony La Russa had come in instead of Billy. He was in Chicago with the White Sox when Charlie was looking for a manager, and while Billy was the right pick as an instant fix, if La Russa or somebody who used a bullpen had come in, our group might have pitched three or four years, met Canseco and McGwire . . . and had another dynasty. But Billy and Art weren’t thinking of hurting anybody’s arms. Billy maximized our talent for a short period of time, and I don’t think we’d change any of it for the world.”

Maximized? I’ll give you maximized: Langford, a 28-year-old sinker-slider pitcher in the mold of Jim “Catfish” Hunter, racked up 290 innings en route to a 19-12 finish. In addition to Norris’s 284 innings, 24-year-old Matt Keough threw 250 innings and 20 complete games, bulldog Steve McCatty tossed 221 and completed 11, and Kingman pitched 211 and lost 20 while recording 10 complete games. Even closer Bob Lacey had a complete game—a seven-hit shutout of the Milwaukee Brewers in the second-last game of the season, after Martin got tired of hearing him pine for work. “Billy had no choice, really. All he had was three great outfielders—Rickey Henderson, Dwayne Murphy and Tony Armas—a serviceable infield and five strong starting pitchers,” says Kit Stier, whose first of 12 years covering the A’s for the Oakland Tribune was in 1980. “That was the team. He had no bullpen, and his closer, Bob Lacey, was nuts.”

Stier describes the relationship between Martin and his players as “love and fear,” as opposed to love and hate. The manager’s two most frequent foils were Kingman and Lacey, who kvetched incessantly about the lack of work. Langford was one player with whom Martin was comfortable. Martin never called pitches in Langford’s starts, which wasn’t the case for anybody else. Kingman, for example, would sometimes chafe at Martin’s “no 2-0 breaking pitches” edict. “That’s why Rick’s games were usually faster than ours,” he says.

Ask Langford’s rotation mates about his stock-in-trade and the word “consistency” usually comes up. “Every time he went out that year, we just figured we weren’t going to need the bullpen,” says McCatty, now the pitching coach with the Washington Nationals. “He wasn’t overpowering, but he had great command and he’d make pitch after pitch. It was ridiculous; he just painted everyone to death.”

They were like a comet, that A’s staff, blazing through the baseball skies and then dissipating into bizarre post-playing existences, their careers strangely unsatisfying and incomplete for a group who made such a habit of finishing what they started.

McCatty and Langford stayed in the game, but Norris had shoulder surgery after the 1983 season. He battled cocaine addiction and now lives by himself in an apartment in Oakland where he uses walkers and shopping carts to get around and works with at-risk youth in Oakland, Calif. Shoulder pain forced McCatty and Keough out of the majors in ’85 and ’86, respectively. Keough stayed in the game as a scout and became a B-list celebrity for a time when he and his Playboy Playmate wife, Jeana Tomasino, were featured along with their family in The Real Housewives of Orange County. (Keough and Tomasino have since separated.)

Kingman, meanwhile, has been in and out of trouble with the law, including being caught in an FBI sting operation in December 1992 for trafficking in stolen art with a pair of Las Vegas bookies who used him as a go-between in the purchase of a Picasso that had been stolen nine years earlier but ultimately turned out to be a fake. You can’t make this stuff up.

Kingman said it took five years to realize it was the 20-loss season that had eaten away at him. He can tell stories about Martin now. There was the night the two almost came to blows outside a bar in Kansas City, or the time Martin brought an obviously hungover Kingman on in relief in Langford’s final start of 1980 after Langford, working on two days rest in a bid to win 20, had to come out in the 10th. Kingman had been sleeping off his hangover and puking intermittently on a catwalk behind the scoreboard in County Stadium. To this day, he wonders if Martin didn’t deliberately want him to lose a 21st game. That didn’t happen, but no other major-league pitcher lost 20 until Mike Maroth of the Detroit Tigers went 9-21 in 2003. No one has done it since. “There’s a saying that an athlete dies twice,” says Kingman. “Everyone gets out of the game at some point, and it’s usually involuntary. It can be traumatic when the thing you love and have been doing so long comes to an end. It took me some time to come to peace with losing 20 games.”

Norris’s exit from the game was bitter, if predictable to some. To this day, surrounded by pictures and memorabilia from his career, including one of his two Gold Gloves for fielding, he bears the scars of institutional prejudice so common in African-American players of his vintage. Norris came back in 1990 as a reliever and had an ERA of 3.00 when he was released by the A’s. He claims he was blackballed. But his issue isn’t with his former manager. “Billy was a street guy,” Norris says, referring to Martin’s roots growing up in Berkeley. “He had a real understanding of the black man’s plight in the game.”

The reason for Langford’s departure was surprising, considering his workload: He was hit on the elbow by a line drive in 1983 and tried to pitch through it, tearing a muscle in the process. “I pitched my next start, had inflammation, then surgery. It took me a year to get over the surgery, and by then, I just couldn’t compete any more,” Langford says. “Youth took over.”

Langford’s streak started on May 23, with a 3–1 loss to the Texas Rangers. It ended on Sept. 17 at old Arlington Stadium, and the way Langford tells the story, Martin walked out of the dugout with two out in the ninth inning, his hands in his back pockets, scuffed the mound with his foot and said: “It’s time.”

Langford, who had just served up a grand slam to Toby Harrah, handed him the ball with a simple: “Yes, I think it is.” For the first time in almost four months, he left the field unaccompanied by his teammates, who won the game 6–4 with Lacey closing. “I recall just kind of sighing,” Langford says. “It was like: ‘Well, it’s over.’ The effort had been made. I think it was probably more difficult for Billy than it was for me. I don’t recall a situation where I thought I should have been taken out and wasn’t. From my perspective, [Martin] had nothing to do with my injury. I never felt pressured or pushed. It all worked perfectly for me. I just wished I had more time at it.”

Langford went on to record complete games in his next three starts following the end of the streak. No wonder his walkout music for the season was the theme from Chariots of Fire. “There was no big deal made about it. We won the game, so it was, ‘Hey, great game tonight—on to the next game,’” Langford says. “There just wasn’t as much coverage back then. There was a lot of talk about some things—that was the year George Brett was going for .400—but there was nothing about consecutive complete games.”

angford has been on the Blue Jays’ major-league coaching staff twice. The first time, he was fired as the organization’s major-league pitching coach in the middle of the 2000 season and replaced by assistant GM Dave Stewart. The second time, he was replaced by Pat Hentgen to start the 2011 season under new manager John Farrell. Around those jobs, he has been pitching coach at three minor-league levels, starting in 1996 at double-A Knoxville. “We’re fortunate to have Rick,” LaCava says. “He mentors all of us—and he doesn’t have to do this. He chooses to.” Langford just shrugs. “I enjoy this side very much,” Langford says. “I met a lot of great kids and watched them develop. The Jays have been good to me. I owe them. I’ve been fortunate, you know?”

Drew Hutchison met Langford for the first time when he threw for the Blue Jays after being drafted in 2009. The pair renewed their acquaintance in Instructional League and saw each other again—too soon for either of them—when Hutchison was beginning the slow process of rehabilitating from Tommy John surgery. It was Hutchison who made Langford stop and think about the impact he was having when the pitcher thanked him “for being with us at our worst time.”

What is it like to rehabilitate from surgery? “It’s Groundhog Day,” says Hutchison. “You play catch, throw in the bullpen, take comebackers—I did all that stuff with Rick. Every day. Rick was huge for me, through all the ups and downs. He just has that understated way of relating to you. He’s not loud. It’s what I needed at that time.”

For an old-school guy who needed to have the ball pried away from him, Langford has an uncommon level of sensitivity to the reality of today’s young pitchers. “They have such great arm speed that they throw too hard for their body chemistry,” says Langford. “They hurt themselves because they’re so talented. We try to dial them back; just try for solid routine.”

For Langford, it requires more patience to work with rehabbing pitchers than their healthy counterparts. “It’s uncharted waters for them,” he says. “It’s the toughest discussion you can have—to let them know that we don’t expect a lot of them, that they shouldn’t expect a lot of themselves and that nobody is judging them. It’s just ‘Be happy you’re out here throwing the ball.’ I’m more in tune with watching what they do or how many first-pitch strikes they throw—getting the ball down, mixing pitches. We want strong reps: If they’re in the strike zone and getting hit? That’s a beautiful thing, because we can work from there. If we need to get them back in the zone because they’re afraid or the mechanics are off, then we’ll take it a ways back.”

As for his new responsibilities: “I try to focus on each of [the pitchers] individually and develop their game a little faster,” Langford says. “The idea is to talk to them a little earlier about what it’s like at the major-league level.” In a way, to complete them.

This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. (Photo credits: Reinhold Matay/USA TODAY SPORTS; Daniel Shirey/USA TODAY Sports)