Chris Jones / Esquire

Barry Zito has just woken up, his thick hair a tangle, his dark eyes wide, when he comes to the door of the square white house he calls catharsis, high in the Hollywood Hills. From the outside, it looks like just about every other house in this upmarket vortex, apart from the empty Styrofoam cooler outside the door and the well-worn Land Rover with the Deadsy sticker parked out front. Zito, however, is probably the only local resident presently wearing Lycra baseball underwear poking out of the bottom of a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt from the 2006 All-Star game in Pittsburgh.

He’s about to start packing for another trip east, this one to Iowa. His suitcase is already open on the floor in his dimly lit bedroom, down in the basement, wall-to-wall black shag. He has done up his entire house retro cool, having torn out the stark maple floors and tubular railings — “It was really bad, like Miami Vice” — and replaced them with chocolate-brown walls and bowl chairs and a baby grand in the sunken living room, placed as if in tribute to his musician father, Joe.

Throughout Catharsis (“the purging of emotional tension,” he says helpfully), Zito has scattered several such totems to people and places. Dropped with seeming randomness, they have been laid out in fact with measure and care, according to some internal blueprint of his, this network of spiritual way stations. “I call them anchors,” he says, beginning a tour. It’s as though looking at these things, living with them, grounds him; they are reminders of who he is and who he wants to be. “Just little things,” he says, “that give me a good feeling.”

Hanging eye height on his bedroom wall, just inside the door, is his Cy Young Award from 2002, black and pewter. “That’s one of one,” he says. “They told me that if I lose it, they won’t make another one. I was like, What? I better hide that.”

To the left of it, there is a shrine built to Sandy Koufax, a patchwork of photographs and autographs and the back of an old stadium seat that witnessed history worthy of the Hall of Fame. “I really look up to him,” Zito says. “You’re talking about a World Series ERA of 0.95 in fifty-seven innings pitched. There’s no better.” The twenty-eight-year-old Zito has an ongoing dialogue with the famously reclusive Koufax about how to pitch, just as he has tapped into Steve Carlton, the three generations of southpaws having formed a kind of left-handers’ caucus.

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