Dontrelle Willis grew up in the shadow of the Oakland Coliseum and became a star pitcher but it is golf that gets the competitive juices flowing these days
By Adam Schupak
Former Major League Baseball pitcher Dontrelle Willis can thank his ex-wife for his love of golf.
While he was on a road trip after being dealt to the Arizona Diamondbacks, she bought them a house in Scottsdale, Ariz., that was located on a golf course and so Willis decided he had better figure out this game. Playing golf with D-Train is a lot like watching him broadcast baseball these days on TV – he’s upbeat, informative and entertaining. Like Charles Barkley, he speaks in exclamation points but there’s one big difference: Willis, a single-digit Handicap Index, can golf his ball.
Golf has become his passion, but it was the farthest thing from Willis’s mind growing up in the shadow of the Oakland Coliseum, and attending Alameda’s Encinal High School, which has a rich baseball history. The field is named after Hall of Famer Willie Stargell and former All-Star and MVP Jimmy Rollins is another prominent alum.
Willis, 44, didn’t really have much of a choice in the sport of his childhood, learning baseball from a grandfather, Frank Guy Sr., who had been an excellent amateur player himself, and a mother, Joyce, who became enamored with the Oakland A’s in the era of Campy and Blue Moon and Vida and Reggie. Willis, who still owns a place in the Bay Area, learned to hit as a 6-year-old by wielding a Carney Lansford giveaway bat. Later, in his neighborhood games, he’d crouch down low at the plate to mimic Rickey Henderson.
“You got to understand, this was the 80’s,’’ Willis said. “The A’s were great. They were huge.”
So, his days were filled with honing his game by imitating the A’s with his friends, firing fastballs into a red strike zone spray-painted onto the siding of their apartment building on Taylor Avenue, a site not far from the tube that separates Oakland from Alameda, and his nights were consumed with watching the A’s with his family. He became good enough that the Chicago Cubs selected Willis in the eighth round of the 2000 MLB Draft, and he signed for $200,000.
As a 21-year-old in 2003, he went 14-6 with a 3.30 ERA in 27 starts for the Florida Marlins. Willis was an All-Star, then a World Series champion, and he completed the trifecta with the National League Rookie of the Year Award. With his high kick and quirky delivery, hat pushed to the side and high black socks, he became a fan favorite and perhaps the biggest spark on the Marlins’ World Series title team in 2003. The Marlins shocked the Cubs to make the World Series despite poor pitching from Willis, and the team sat on the runway watching the decisive Game 7 of the American League Championship Series between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox to find out where they’d fly to for Game One. When Aaron Boone of the Yankees hit the game-winning home run, Marlins manager Jack McKeon stood up and gave the team a pep talk. He turned to Willis, who he’d stuck in “bullpen jail,” and said, “All right, Big D, you’ve been horse crap all playoffs but we’re going to have you go up against Jorge Posada and turn him around, you’re going to attack Derek Jeter and you’re going to handle Jason Giambi.”
Still, Willis, who’d barely bothered to tie his shoes sitting in the bullpen during Game 1, wasn’t expecting to get the call in the sixth inning to protect a tenuous 3-2 lead.
“At that moment in the bullpen, your heart stops,” Willis recalled. “You’re waiting to hear whose name is being called. I hear my name and I’m like, ‘What?’ I go up there, runners on second and third and I jam Giambi and get him out. They’re booing me, Jeter comes up and I work the count to 3-2. I had the advantage that he had never faced me before. My hardest pitch to him was 95 mph and I tied him up. Every time I want to get on him, I’ll say, Jeter, remember that time I threw it by you in the World Series? He’ll say, ‘Shut up!’ He’s still mad.”
Willis’ best individual season was 2005, when he set a franchise record for wins, going 22-10 with a 2.63 ERA. He finished second to Chris Carpenter of the St. Louis Cardinals in the N.L. Cy Young Award voting, but he became part of an exclusive fraternity of Black pitchers to win 20 games in a season.
“Being an African American man, only 15 of us have done it. I mean, you feel immortal,’’ Willis said. “It means the world to be in the same breath as Vida Blue and Mike Norris and Dave Stewart. Man, there’s no monetary value you can put on that.”
But Willis' prime as a player lasted just five seasons, from 2003-’07, when he went 68-54 with a 3.78 ERA in 162 starts. His career spiraled downward from 2008, when he began three injury-riddled years with the Tigers, followed by one-year stints with the D-backs and Reds. He mounted a comeback in the minor league system of the Milwaukee Brewers but retired in 2015.
Willis says his baseball career might have lasted longer if he had taken up golf earlier in his life. He learned that swinging ferociously can often backfire. It’s a lesson he wishes he’d known as a ballplayer.
“You have to have a certain type of tempo, a certain type of flow,’’ he said of golf. “And the harder you try, the more frustrated you get, the worse it gets. So I wish I would have played golf so I would have learned that and kind of implemented that.”
On a golf course, of all places, Willis found his new calling as a broadcaster. Playing a round of golf in 2015 with former players Aaron Boone and Jerry Hairston Jr., both of whom had made the transition to broadcasting – Boone, now the Yankees manager, was working at ESPN, Hairston as a Dodgers TV analyst – Willis was encouraged to give television a try.
“He's kind of a natural,” Boone said. “To see his career take off on that side has been fun to watch. You can tell he has a real passion for it. It's been a way for him to stay in the game that he's loved."
Willis started out as a television analyst for Fox Sports 1, bringing the same passion he had as a pitcher to the broadcast studio and in his debut got to work alongside Stewart, his childhood idol. Willis showed enough potential that Fox Sports hired him as an MLB studio analyst.
“I think he's a star,” Fox Sports host and play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt told MLB.com. “Dontrelle is at the point now where he can do it all. He's so good at what he's seeing from everything, especially from the pitching perspective, obviously. He's relatable to everybody. He's funny. It's a great dynamic.
“I think he's as appealing to the 17-year-old kid as he is to the 85-year-old woman. I really do. That's a hard thing to do, but I kind of think that's the beauty of him.”
In 2017, Fox Sports won the prestigious Emmy Award for Outstanding Studio Show, and Willis was part of the programming.
“It's surreal,” Willis said. “People come to my house. They don't even care about the World Series ring. They're like, 'You have an Emmy?' ”
In addition to his studio role with Fox and Apple TV+ as a game analyst, Willis is rejoining the Los Angeles Dodgers booth as a game analyst for SportsNet LA this season, for whom he has also served as a studio analyst in each of the previous four seasons.
Willis’s scouting report of his own TV career is as spot on as his ability to break down a pitching performance. “I can only be me,’’ Willis said, “and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. But the goosebumps are the same on every show, like I’m getting ready to pitch.”
At this stage in his life, there’s nothing better than being on the golf course. Hitting a bomb off the tee or rolling in a long putt brings the same level of satisfaction as striking out Jeter in a jam-packed Yankee Stadium once did.
“Golf is my jam now,” he said. “It’s what I like to do with my free time.”