It’s the moment for which Dickie Noles is best known. It’s the one play for which the former Philadelphia Phillies pitcher is revered in these parts.
The pitch – one the right-hander threw up and in during Game 4 of the 1980 World Series to send Kansas City third baseman George Brett tumbling back into the dirt – has been called by many the turning point of that series, one won by the Phillies in six games.
Yet, Noles said he refused to watch video from that October day for nearly 39 years.
Those were days Noles, now 63, didn’t want to relive.
“After I got sober I would not watch anything prior to when I got sober,” Noles said before the recent Reading Hot Stovers banquet at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Reading. “I wanted that (to be) history and that’s a crazy way to think.”
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Dickie Noles was a fourth-round pick by the Phillies in the June 1975 draft.
As an 18-year-old that summer, he went 2-2 with a 3.60 ERA in nine games for Auburn in the New York-Penn League. And he got arrested.
“One of our Latin players, he orders a soda,” Noles remembered, “and the bartender goes, ‘Soda?’ And he put a cherry in it. The guy goes, ‘I don’t want the cherry in it,’ and the bartender took it out with his hand. So the kid said, ‘I don’t want that one. I want another one.’ He said, ‘Take that one.’ So I looked at him and said, ‘Give him another drink.’ The guy said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’ll bust your friggin’ rear end, give him another one.’ And we’re fighting.”
The next year in Spartanburg, S.C., Noles was arrested, he said, after pulling a fire alarm.
The year after, he said, the arrest came for driving the wrong way down a four-lane highway in Virginia Beach.
He got arrested outside a bar in Kutztown while pitching for the Reading Phillies in 1978.
In Oklahoma City in 1979, he got into a fight in a bar with “a bunch of cowboys, rodeo guys,” he said.
He was arrested at the Jersey shore after getting into a fight, trying to hit a guy with a shovel and breaking his jaw.
In 1981, on the last night of spring training, after finding out he had made the team as the fourth starter, Noles brawled with a bunch of bikers in a bar. When the Phillies brass found out, they sent Noles to the minors.
“Oh man, you talk about being crushed?” Noles said. “But I didn’t stop.”
He didn’t stop until April 9, 1983. That was the night that Noles, then a member of the Chicago Cubs, was arrested in Cincinnati, charged with hitting a police officer and sent to jail.
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When Noles first went to rehab, he was stubborn and in denial. He only went, he said, because then-Cubs general manager Dallas Green, who had been his manager with the Phillies, threatened to suspend him if he didn’t.
“I go in and he (the counselor) goes, ‘You ready?’ ” Noles said. “And I go, ‘No. You know, I got to be here.’ And he goes, ‘Well, you need to get sober.’ And I said, ‘Look, I got 28 days to pull. I’m going to pull my 28 days and leave me alone.’ And of course on the third day I realized I had a problem.”
Noles’ turnaround began with a simple question during a therapy class: Have you ever been in a fight sober?
“So I started telling them and then it started to hit me, I’ve never been in a fight sober since I’ve been a kid or on a field, a guy charging the mound,” Noles said. “I said, ‘Man, I don’t control my emotions very well when I’m drinking.’ So that started my recovery that day, and I realized I needed to stop and see what kind of person I really was.”
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Noles, a North Carolina native who now lives in Aston, Delaware County, was hired by the Phillies on April 1, 1992, as a member of the community relations department. He has been an employee assistance professional for the organization since 1996.
“It’s dealing with human life,” Noles said of his job. “You can’t swing and miss. If you swing and miss, you can’t sleep at night. And you don’t always connect. It’s got me more appreciative of life in many ways. Much, much more appreciative of the baseball players that play this game.”
The impetus for becoming a drug and alcohol counselor came from his time in rehab. He wanted to work with youth, and ended up going to summer school at Rutgers, taking one- or two-week courses, and attending conferences. He said he did that for about five years until he got his license.
Since then, he’s been nationally recognized in the field. He’s served on the Pennsylvania Drug and Alcohol Board and the Keystone Drug and Alcohol Center. He was named the Humanitarian of the Year by the Sunshine Foundation in 1997 and won the Humanitarian Award from the Philadelphia Sports Writers Association in 2010.
“I think the most important thing about what I do is confidentiality and also, whoever you’re working with, to let them know you have their best interests at heart,” Noles said. “If they don’t know that, you’re not going to get very many clients. I don’t want a lot of clients. I want none. Everybody asks me my goal coming up every year and I say to have no clients. To have nobody to come to me, because that would be awesome. But it doesn’t work that way.”
Despite all the success and accolades that Noles has received, he still looks back at his younger self with regret.
He remembers the 95 mph fastball – one he said he lost following a bar fight in Montreal in 1982 that he can’t remember except for the fact that he tore his ACL and MCL – and the days lost to alcohol.
He ended up 36-53 with 11 saves and a 4.56 ERA in 277 major league games from 1979-90, but wonders what might have been.
“Somebody else has told me that many times, that it made me who I am now,” Noles said of his being a recovering alcoholic and becoming a counselor. “And sometimes I don’t like who I am now. I mean, I think we all try to get better. But, you know, I know I’m scarred forever in my heart for knowing what kind of stuff I had.”
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Noles catches a glimpse of that stuff when he watches video of his performance in Game 4 of the 1980 World Series. He was given that video, he said, at the the Phillies’ last game of the 2019 season when he received the Richie Ashburn and David Montgomery Special Achievement Award.
The honor is “presented annually to an employee who demonstrates the same loyalty, dedication and passion for baseball as the award’s namesakes.”
“I realized that I was stupid because I had much better stuff than I thought I did,” Noles said. “I had great stuff. Watching that game, I was like, ‘How could I not win?’ And the second thing that came out of it was, hot dang, I did throw it right at his head.”
Ah, the pitch to Brett.
Noles had entered the game with one out in the bottom of the first inning and the Phillies already down 4-0, but had settled in after allowing a solo home run to Willie Mays Aikens in the second.
In the fourth, Noles retired Frank White on a pop-up, then went 0-2 on Brett before the knockdown pitch.
“If I didn’t knock Brett down, I don’t know if anybody would have ever known I played for the Phillies,” Noles said. “That’s all everybody wanted to talk to me about, and I wouldn’t talk about it for a long time, then it became a painful talk, then it became a joke, then it became everywhere I went people asked me about it, then I was enhancing it and all that stuff, so I just said why not, if people want to hear it.”
Royals manager Jim Frey shot out of the dugout immediately, protesting to home plate umpire Don Denkinger.
“ ‘Stop it. Stop it right now. Stop it right now.’ ” Noles remembered Frey saying. “You know, I’m standing there watching George. George turned around, looked at me, like he wasn’t happy. I think if Frey doesn’t run out, George probably comes to the mound. I believe the way he looked at me, if I would have said anything, he’s coming. But I wasn’t going to say anything. I was just looking at him.
“And (Phillies first baseman Pete) Rose ran in and goes, ‘Get off the field Jim. Get off the field.’
“All of sudden you hear Pete say, ‘He wasn’t throwing at him. And then Frey goes, ‘How do you know?’ He says, ‘If he was throwing at him, he’d have hit him.’ ”
Noles struck Brett out on the next pitch in what became a 5-3 win for the Royals, which tied the series at 2-2. The Royals would score just four more runs following that pitch, hence the turning-point talk.
“A lot of players were upset over that,” Noles said. “Mike Schmidt might be my biggest fan. Mike Schmidt says that pitch changed the World Series. I think he likes me and says that because of some of the work that I do. I don’t think Mike really believes that at all. I don’t believe it, and I threw the pitch. I don’t think it changed the World Series.
“I mean, how can you say it changed the World Series.”
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One thing Dickie Noles can talk about with certainty is change: from a hot-shot prospect to a World Series champion; from an alcoholic sitting in jail to an award-winning counselor.
At the center of it all has been baseball.
“Baseball straightened my life out, not sent me down that road,” Noles said. “Baseball saved my life.”
