Willie Mueller

 

Willie Mueller was a relief pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers, briefly in 1978 and even more briefly in 1981, who is better remembered for his role in the 1989 motion picture Major League.

Willard Lawrence Mueller, Jr., (pronounced Miller) was born August 30, 1956, in West Bend, Wisconsin. He graduated from West Bend West High School in 1974, lettering in baseball, basketball, football, track, and wrestling. In July 1974, not having been drafted, he was signed as a free agent by the Milwaukee Brewers. He was sent to the Newark Co-Pilots of the New York-Pennsylvania League, Class Short-Season A, where he had a 6.00 ERA in 15 innings in seven relief appearances.

In January 1975 Willie filled out a questionnaire in which he said that his off-season job was construction, his hobbies were hunting and cards, and he was 6-4, 180 pounds. In a 1978 story Willie said that he was 5-11, 150, when he signed with the Brewers:

But between his decision to turn pro and the following spring Willie did something about his vital statistics. “I went on a weightlifting program, got a job on construction and really built myself up,” he disclosed. “I must have been a late height bloomer, too. Anyway, when I reported, I was 6-4 and weighed 220 pounds. That’s when I stopped relying on the curve ball I used for four years in high school and went to the fastball. And I’ve been throwing hard ever since.”

Willie spent 1975 with the Burlington Bees of the Class A Midwest League, missing some time to an unspecified injury. He made 25 appearances, ten of them starts, and had a 3.12 ERA in 98 innings.

In 1976 Willie injured his right thumb during spring training. In late April he was assigned to the Newark roster, which seems strange given his good 1975 season, but on May 6, still recuperating from the thumb injury, he was moved back to Burlington. 

On July 20 he was loaned to the Clinton Pilots, a co-op team also in the Midwest League, in order to get more relief work, though on August 9 he started and pitched a one-hit shutout. For the season, between the two teams, he had a 1.75 ERA in 72 innings in 29 games, three of them starts,

For 1977 Willie ended up back with Burlington, despite having pitched well there for two straight years. Though he was used mostly as a reliever he was leading the league in wins in late August and ended up with the second-most; he was 15-7 with a 3.85 ERA in 124 innings in a league-leading 55 games, four of them starts. After the season he pitched for the Brewers’ Arizona Instructional League team, where he had a 4.38 ERA.

In 1978 Willie finally moved up a notch, to the Holyoke Millers of the Class AA Eastern League. On August 10 the Brewers finished a series in New York and headed to Boston, while General Manager Harry Dalton arrived in Holyoke, 90 miles away from Boston, for Harry Dalton Night festivities. While there he arranged for Willie, the league leader in saves, to go to Boston for a tryout with Brewers manager George Bamberger before the game the next day. Thomas A. Hawley reported on the 12^th in the Madison Wisconsin State Journal:

…”They told me—just for one day,” said Mueller. “They just told me they wanted to check me out.”

Mueller is 8-5 with an earned run average of about 2.70 with Holyoke. Mueller, a big kid at 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds, spent the last three seasons in the Class A Midwest League, meaning that Class AA ball is the highest level he’s ever played.

“People sit around and talk about the big leagues,” he said. “You always think that if you’re in the minor leagues you can play in the big leagues. If you don’t think you can be in the big leagues, you shouldn’t be there.”

…Bamberger said Mueller probably would get another 15-minute workout today.

Cal McLish, the Brewers’ pitching coach, seemed impressed with Mueller’s efforts Friday.

“I definitely like him,” said McLish. “His delivery is good. That means he’s going to be around the plate all the time. He’s got a good fastball, good slider. His changeup wasn’t that good, at least today, but a changeup is a pitch he’s only going to throw on the sidelines. In a game, the manager is going to want to see the hard stuff. I was just talking to him; the way he throws, I said, he should be trying to get guys with hard stuff, get ‘em in one or two pitches.”

McLish stopped short of saying that Mueller could help the team now. “With a lot of young pitchers, it’s emotions,” he said. “You can’t tell.”

Mueller went along with the characterization of himself as a fastball pitcher. “I like to blow the ball by people,” he said. “Just come in and throw strikes.”

Obviously, he’d like to stick around. “I hope, I hope,” he said. “All you need is a chance.”

Will he get it? “It is a possibility,” said Bamberger. “But I’ll say this: it is a slim possibility.”

One thing Mueller’s got going for him is his home town, Bamberger said, laughing. “I live in Silver Lake (Wis.),” the manager said. “That’s only three miles from West Bend. Heck, bring him up. I don’t know if we need him to pitch, but I need somebody to drive me into the stadium every day.”

The Milwaukee Sentinel added:

“He probably throws harder than anyone in our bullpen,” said Bamberger after watching the 21 year old Mueller pitch before the Boston game. “And he throws as hard or harder than anyone on our staff. He’s got a chance to make it as a big league pitcher.”

The Brewers had Willie stay over in Boston the night of the 11^th, rooming with Moose Haas. He didn’t get to throw before the next day’s doubleheader because it was raining, but Bamberger decided to keep him anyway—and used him in the second game. Willie relieved Mike Caldwell in the fifth inning, down 8-0, and pitched the last 3 2/3 innings, allowing three runs, two of them earned, on three hits, striking out four and not walking anybody. The first batter he faced was Rick Burleson, who tripled, but he pitched very well after that except for a two-run homer by Jim Rice in the eighth.

Willie didn’t get into another game until the 22^nd, as reported on the next day by UPI’s Michael V. Uschan:

The Milwaukee Brewers swept a doubleheader from the Cleveland Indians Tuesday night, 3-2 and 5-4, and the nightcap had a script right out of Hollywood.

Willie Mueller, a rookie from West Bend, Wis., pitching for the first time in County Stadium before family and friends, came on in relief in the sixth inning with his team trailing 4-2.

He shut down the Indians and his teammates dramatically rallied for three runs in the ninth to give him his first major-league victory.

“It was one of those dreams I had as a kid to pitch here. But it’s unreal that I’m here right now,” said Mueller, who was in Double A ball in Holyoke, Mass., before being called up Aug. 12.

“It was wonderful but unreal. My parents were there and a lot of my friends When I came in all I wanted to do was pitch strikes. I couldn’t believe it.”

The Janesville Gazette added:

“I’m just floating around in space like the U.S.S. Enterprise,” Mueller, 21, said, referring to the space ship in the television series “Star Trek.”

“I mean, it’s unreal, a dream, doing this for the home state team before an awful lot of people from my home town,” he said. “But these guys played great behind me. They played major league defense. I just threw the ball and let the hitters hit it to somebody.”…

“I was very impressed with Willie Mueller,” Brewers’ manager George Bamberger said. “He pitched just like he did in Boston that game. He went out and threw strikes and took charge. I’m going to try to pick my spots for the kid, but the way he’s looking I may be able to pitch him any time we need him.”

Willie got into just three more games, allowing eight runs in 5 2/3 innings, which raised his Milwaukee ERA to 6.39. His teammates voted him a one-third share of their portion of the World Series money, which amounted to $175.26.

Willie went to spring training in 1979 to compete for a spot in the Brewers’ bullpen, but ended up being sent to the Vancouver Canadians, their AAA team in the Pacific Coast League. He got mentioned in the Portland Oregonian of June 24, in an article about the Portland Beavers’ mascot, Round Tripper:

…Round Tripper has already got a lively slapstick feud going with the Vancouver Canadians in general and relief pitcher Willie Mueller—whom he calls “Buckethead”—in particular. It all started when he issued a fake challenge to the Canadian dugout between innings earlier in the season and got his answer from Mueller in the form of a bucket of water.

It escalated from there. “I was caught by surprise by that bucket of water,” said RT. “So I tried to think of something quick. The bat boy pointed out the hose, so I used it.”

To spectacular effect. He turned the hose on and cleared out the entire Canadian dugout. Now every time the Canadians come to town he spends hours preparing for them—no doubt it’s mutual, judging from the happy hijinks which have occurred.

In Vancouver Willie was used in a mixture of starting and relieving roles, starting 12 times in 41 games, with a 4.47 ERA in a career-high 131 innings. He was on the Milwaukee 40-man protected roster until his contract was sold to Vancouver in late November—making him eligible for the December 3 minor league draft, though he was not chosen.

Willie was invited to the Brewers’ 1980 spring training as a non-roster player, to again compete for a spot in their bullpen, but he wound up spending the season in Vancouver again. He had a 4.02 ERA in 112 innings in 57 games, just two of them starts.

Willie returned to Vancouver for 1981 and had an excellent year, with a 1.78 ERA in 81 innings in 31 games, two of them starts. In what seems like a strange move, he was lent to the Denver Bears, the Montreal Expos’ AAA team in the American Association, near the end of the season. He pitched two scoreless innings for a save, then in the playoffs he started and won game two as the Bears swept the Omaha Royals. After that series ended, ten days went by and then on September 16 the Brewers called him back up. On September 20 he pitched the sixth and seventh innings of an 8-2 loss in Baltimore, allowing the final run.

Milwaukee kept Willie on the 40-man roster over the off-season, though he was one of the last Brewers to sign a 1982 contract, in mid-February. 

Toward the end of spring training he was optioned to the Wichita Aeros of the American Association, who were replacing Denver as the Expos’ AAA affiliate. From the Janesville Gazette, April 1:

The Brewers have a backlog of relievers on the parent club and in Triple A, so Mueller was expendable. Mueller pitched for the Expos’ Denver farm club briefly at the end of last season. They liked what they saw and would like to see more this season.

Before he left, the 220-pound Mueller got into the following exchange with 200-pound reliever Rollie Fingers. It started as Fingers loped after a fly ball during a morning batting practice.

Mueller: “It’s like watching ‘Wild Kingdom’ when you run—like a walrus on the beach.”

Fingers: “Double-knits are the only thing that’s saved you.”

Mueller: “Take your number (34) and multiply by two and you’ve got your waist size.”

Fingers: No reply.

Mueller: “You’ve got Gilligan’s head and the skipper’s body!”

Mueller declared the winner by a clean knockout.

There was talk that Willie would likely be traded to the Expos, but for some reason that never happened. But he did spend the year in Wichita, pitching 75 1/3 innings in 56 relief appearances, with 12 saves and a 4.66 ERA. In 1983 he reverted to Vancouver, where his ERA ballooned to 6.87 in 40 games, and then he was out of baseball.

In 1988, though, he returned, in a way. He got a phone call from a man named David Ward, the writer/director of an upcoming movie called Major League, which was to be filmed in Milwaukee. As Willie put it in a 2019 interview for Milwaukee television station WDJT:

“So, one night around 9 o’clock I got a telephone call from David Ward. He says, ‘Well, we were doing a screenplay of the actor that’s going to play the Duke and he ain’t doing real well. And I said to Pete Vuckovich, you know anybody real big and ugly that can throw the ball real hard, he said try Willie Mueller out of West Bend.’”

Willie got the part of Duke Simpson, the Yankee relief pitcher brought in to face Tom Berenger’s character in the climactic scene. The movie was released on April 7, 1989, a few days after the following appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in an article about Indians’ reliever Doug Jones:

…The change-up changed people’s minds.

It’s called the “OK change” because when a pitcher grips the ball, his index finger and thumb form an “O” on the right side of the ball.

“When I was at Vancouver (Class AAA) in 1982, I saw a guy named Willie Mueller throw it,” Jones said. “He was a big, loudmouthed ox that nobody cared for that much. I didn’t start throwing it, but I kept it in the back of my mind.”

This was fleshed out in an AP story that appeared in papers in early June, after Major League had become a hit:

Jones credits changeup to star of movie

Cleveland Indians pitcher Doug Jones says one of the stars in the baseball movie “Major League” helped him develop his changeup.

In the movie’s climactic scene, the Indians face the Yankees, and the pitcher for the Yankees in that game is in real life a person named Willie Mueller.

In 1982, Mueller pitched for Vancouver in the Pacific Coast League, and one of his teammates was Doug Jones.

“He wasn’t a real good pitcher,” said Jones of Mueller. “I don’t think he even made it to the big leagues. But he was the first guy I saw that threw the changeup the way I do now.”

The way Jones throws it is without using his forefinger. The ball is held between his thumb and the last three fingers of his hand.

“Willie didn’t teach me to throw it, but he did put the idea in my head because I had never seen anyone throw it that way before,” said Jones.

It took Jones six years to perfect the grip for that pitch, but it was worth the wait. He was an American League All-Star last year and is the Indians’ all-time save leader.

Jones said he did not know Mueller was in the movie.

“I was just sitting there watching it and all of a sudden there was Willie,” said Jones. “I was shocked.”

In November 1996 Willie was among the former Brewers and Braves who attended the groundbreaking for Miller Park in Milwaukee. A 1999 article in The Province of Vancouver choosing an all-time Canadians team included the line, “Brad (The Animal) Lesley and Willie Mueller were named to the all-nutbar team.” Two months later it was announced that the Canadians would be moving to Sacramento, and Lowell Ullrich of The Province reminisced about the 22 years of the franchise:

…There were dozens of other memories that luckily never made it to public consumption, until now.

There were the players, like relief pitcher Willie Mueller, whose pre-game warmup once consisted of firing a ball of shaved ice in the clubhouse at the back of a very surprised reporter’s head.

“You pest-imist,” bellowed the gargantuan Mueller, evidently confusing the writer with a negative-looking rodent…

In June 2004 Willie was one of the former teammates seated on the field at Miller Park with Paul Molitor for a ceremony honoring Molitor for his Hall of Fame induction. In 2011 Willie was added to the Wall of Fame at Regner Park by the West Bend Baseball Association. In 2019 came the story on the 30^th anniversary of Major League quoted from above; in it Willie also said:

“It’s a bittersweet deal, you know I worked my hind end off to try to be a professional ballplayer and get to the major leagues, which of course I achieved for a short period of time…even the cards I get in the mail for signatures is mostly asking if I can sign “The Duke” because everybody knows the movie.”

In 2020, Willie is an assistant coach at Concordia University of Wisconsin, and an instructor at RBI Baseball & Softball Academy in West Bend.

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