Do you start with the look or the voice? The intensity or the dry sense of humor? The walk or the mystery that surrounds him?
With Dan Miceli, it seems, there is no bad place to start, so why not start with a story?
It was 1994 and Miceli, in his first full season in the majors, was warming up in the visitors’ bullpen at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. Pittsburgh Pirates bullpen coach Spin Williams stood behind him, arms folded, watching Miceli prepare to enter a close game.
Williams, admittedly, had a way of getting under Miceli’s skin. Perhaps the coach’s laid-back personality clashed with Miceli’s hard-driving nature. Whatever, Williams doesn’t even remember what he said to Miceli that day, but what happened next is the stuff of legend.
“Spin said something that ticked Miceli off,” Pirates reliever Jason Christiansen recalls, “and [Miceli] turned around and fired the rosin bag at him. Hit him right in the leg.”
Here Christiansen lowers his voice to a raspy approximation of Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
“Miceli says to Spin, ‘Don’t talk no [crap] to me anymore. I don’t like that,”‘ the reliever recalls.
Mention the story to Williams and he smiles. Actually, it gets even better. Turns out the rosin bag missed Williams entirely and plunked a rookie reliever named Mike Dyer flush in the back.
He was “The Missile” back then, a hard-throwing kid with an extremely short fuse and little clue where his pitches would end up. Life’s experience has taken some of the edge off Miceli but not much.
At 29, he has become an elder statesman in the Marlins bullpen, a “Godfather” figure — one of his new nicknames — willing to answer any baseball-related question and share from his deep bag of tricks.
What’s it like to pitch in a World Series? Miceli knows. He got five outs without giving up a run in the ’98 Series for the San Diego Padres.
What’s it like to be traded? Miceli knows. He has been traded four times since the Kansas City Royals signed him out of a tryout camp in March 1990.
What do you throw Mark Grace when the count is full and the game’s on the line? Miceli knows. He fanned the Chicago Cubs’ first baseman earlier this month with a changeup that Marlins manager John Boles unblinkingly calls the best pitch he’s ever seen.
Ask Marlins left fielder Cliff Floyd to name the biggest factor in the club’s fast start, and he doesn’t hesitate.
“Miceli,” Floyd shoots back. “Miceli is the man.”
The raw data support Miceli’s status in the Marlins clubhouse. He has appeared in half the Marlins’ first 26 games, compiling a 2-1 record and 2.40 ERA. In 15 innings, he has allowed 10 baserunners (seven hits and three walks) to go with 19 strikeouts.
Repeatedly he has entered games with runners on base. He has yet to allow an inherited runner to score. Just once in 13 tries has he allowed his first batter to reach base, and that came on an infield dribbler to third.
At $1.5 million, Miceli draws the third-highest salary on the Marlins, but so far he has been an absolute bargain. Gone is the biceps tendinitis that limited him last season in San Diego, a side effect of some experimenting he did with his changeup. Gone, too, is the 96-mph fastball he once brandished in his younger days.
In its place is an air of calm and a catalog of knowledge he wields to great effect.
“I’m getting older now, and I’m a little smarter,” Miceli says. “I’ve learned to hold back at times. … You learn to back off. You get a little wiser.”
And the old Miceli, what was he like? There’s a hint of a smile.
“Stubborn. Hard-headed. Kept doing the same things over again,” he says.
Even though Miceli fits the classic mold of the closer, he has just 31 saves in 51 chances in the majors. He went 21 for 27 in save opportunities in 1995 for the Pirates, but manager Jim Leyland moved him into the rotation the next season. He made nine starts with limited success, then settled into the role he’s had since: setup man.
Few do it better.
Some people pass their time on earth, and we hardly notice they were even here. Others, the spotlight seems to find them, even when they don’t seek it, even when they would rather be left alone to do their job in peace.
Miceli is one of the latter types. The Marlins relief pitcher has been a member of five organizations in his 11 professional seasons, and he has become an unforgettable figure, if not outright legendary, in each of them.
There are reasons for this, of course, reasons that extend beyond his 93-mph fastball and three complementary pitches. Former and current teammates rave about his intensity, the way he works himself into a smoldering anger on his way to the mound.
This mind-set even extends to less stressful times. The day after he threw that changeup to Grace, Miceli walked past the Cubs chatterbox and heard “Great pitch.” Miceli rasped back a quick “Thank you” and kept on walking.
“Pitchers are fine to talk to. Not hitters,” Miceli explains. “With them it gets personal if you get to know them.”
Just the way he says “personal” tells you this is no act.
Even though he spent the first 14 years of his life in South America, mostly in Brazil, Miceli’s voice is straight off the back alleys of Newark. Soft, yet menacing. Another of his nicknames with the Marlins is “Tony,” as in one of the main characters from the HBO Mob-spoof series The Sopranos.
“Every time I see that show I think of Miceli,” Christiansen says. “We sit down in the bullpen and ask guys, ‘You ever met Miceli?’ I’ve got his talk down. Whenever he was trying to talk to somebody one on one, his voice would get real quiet. You don’t know if he’s got a gun at your back or what. He’s definitely one of those old-school Italian guys.”
The air of mystery increases with Miceli’s refusal to reveal any personal details. He is the only Marlin whose media guide biography fails to list a birthplace. Responses are unfailingly polite but typically short and bland.
Could a reporter interview his wife, Lisa? Maybe ask a few questions about how fatherhood has changed him since a daughter, Danielle, arrived 15 months ago?
“Sorry,” Miceli says firmly. “Nobody talks to my family.”
Miceli’s father, Miguel, is a mechanical engineer from Calabria, Italy. He moved to South America as a young adult. Miceli’s mother, Martha, is from Montevideo, Uruguay. Both raised their sons as soccer fans, and it wasn’t until Miceli moved to Indiana at 14 that he even knew baseball existed.
In Pittsburgh he used to practice martial arts at the ballpark with fellow reliever Jim Gott. Both are experts at Muay Thai kickboxing, although Gott once said of Miceli: “I do mine as a hobby. This guy could kill you.”
Does Miceli have a black belt? Others insist he does. He says he doesn’t. It’s his three older brothers who have the black belts, he corrects.
Oh, so then they must tease him about that hole in his resume? He stares back, unamused.
“Nobody,” he says, “teases me.”
His off-the-field exploits are legendary around the game. His tough-guy image is well-honed in the late-night culture of ballplayers and watering holes. There was a 1996 arrest and DUI charge in Orlando, where his family moved when he was 15. Miceli later pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of reckless driving.
That story he concocted at the start of spring training, the one about four thugs — one brandishing a knife — jumping him in a parking lot outside a seedy Orlando-area bar? It could easily have been drawn from personal experience, say those who know him. In truth, he was merely covering up for his family, trying to hide a late-night squabble at his home with his brother Richard.
“I’ve got a lot of stories about Miceli, but a lot of stories you can’t tell,” says the Pirates’ Williams, who managed Miceli in Double-A when he was a Carolina Mudcat. “He was a fun guy, put it that way. … Fearless. Tough guy. A guy you don’t want to mess with.”
Watch Miceli walk in from the bullpen during a tight situation. The glove is tucked onto his left hip. His right arm sways as he moves, promising unspoken danger. The broad shoulders are hunched as if to ward off an arctic blast only he can feel. The head bobs ever so slightly. He exudes confidence, machismo.
Once he takes the ball, the show really begins. He finishes his warmup tosses, then circles the mound in a Goodfella swagger. His eyes narrow. His square jaw sets. There is energy. There is anticipation.
An image flashes to mind: Michael Madsen in the warehouse scene in Reservoir Dogs, right before he slices off the poor snitch’s ear. Good thing batting helmets have ear flaps.
“He’s definitely intense,” Marlins reliever Braden Looper says of Miceli. “He’s taught a lot of guys in our bullpen to be more intense and not so easygoing. He has presence on the mound. You can tell a lot of hitters don’t like facing him or get angry at him. That’s because he’s got presence.”
This presence is only heightened by the new Fu Manchu mustache Miceli is growing. Put that with his “one-eyed jack” stare, and you have a nasty combination.
“What’s the name of that guy with the eye patch? Captain Hook?” catcher Mike Redmond says. “He looks like he should be wearing an eye patch out there.”
The patch would go over Miceli’s right eye. He keeps it scrunched shut from the moment he looks in for the sign until he releases the pitch. He does this not out of affectation, he says, but habit.
“I’ve just always closed one eye on the mound,” Miceli says. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve pitched that way. I’m not the only one. Dennis Eckersley did it. [Red Sox reliever] Tom Gordon does it. I can’t pitch with both eyes open. I just can’t.”
Looper laughs when he considers what must run through a batter’s mind with Miceli on the mound.
“You want hitters to have some kind of second thoughts,” Looper says. “They’re going, ‘What’s he doing out there? He’s got his freaking eye closed? What’s going on here?'”
A little mystery, a little confusion. Exactly the way Miceli likes it.
Mike Berardino can be reached at .
