This is what it feels like to walk on the edge of the volcano -- or sprint on the edge of the volcano, if you prefer: John Rocker bursts out of the bullpen as if uncaged, a rockslide about to gather momentum. He has worked himself into quite the frothing fury, screaming and grunting and throwing every pitch as hard as he possibly can, his spittle and sweat flying everywhere. This is just him warming up, mind you, figuratively and literally. He'll have to climb higher to reach the flames.

So when the bullpen door swings open, the tranquil game of baseball turns into something out of the rodeo. Twitching and spasming, a convulsion in cleats, Rocker runs full-throttle toward center stage, scorching the earth en route, a lit fuse looking for a place to explode. It's hard to say whether Rocker can see straight or even clearly at this moment, the pupils of his eyes bouncing around like two light-blue marbles in a shaking glass jar.

Rocker himself won't let you look into his soul -- he isn't saying much of anything these days, scarred and charred as he is by the last time the rage got out of his grip. Suffice it to say that, blister or no blister, when he has squeezed that baseball to punctuate his maniacal sprints this season, he has left it covered in blood.

Even Rocker's lifelong friends -- the people who have known his temper, desire and competitive insanity ever since he walked into a new school as a third-grader and demanded a race with whomever was considered the fastest -- have asked him if he makes this kind of entrance into games for flamboyant show, as if he were a professional wrestler trapped in a reliever's body. They don't understand. Not at all. A polite Rocker, who scored 1,270 on his SATs and had a 3.8 grade-point average at Mercer University before choosing baseball's rush, explains himself to his friends patiently and honestly: He is merely in a major league hurry to get to that mound, the place in the world where he feels most alive. "Something is wrong with him," Mets pitcher Al Leiter says with a shrug. But then again, Leiter doesn't have to go to the same deep, dark place to find his high-octane fuel -- a place Rocker apparently feels the need to visit even when he's hunting in the off-season with a reporter there to hear his every word.

This is what it feels like to walk on the edge of the volcano -- or sprint on the edge of the volcano, if you prefer: Rob Dibble, who was Rocker before Rocker, ate a cheeseburger at 2 p.m. on game days, but the bubbling volatility in his stomach wouldn't allow him to eat anything else for the next nine hours. "I felt so physically ill," he says today. Dibble would push the pedal to the heavy metal during games, listening to Megadeth to fill his head with angry noise, and there were a lot of times he wasn't controlling his emotions nearly as much as his emotions were controlling him.

Dibble still can't explain, for example, why it was that after one unspectacular, regular-season game -- it's not like he entered with bases loaded and nobody out, not like he broke a record or saved the season, not like it was the first time he was doing any of this -- he sat down and started sobbing so hard that his shoulders shook. He can't explain why he threw a ball from the mound over the centerfield fence after giving up a home run, why he barely had the strength to hold a cigarette after games, why he once told good friend Barry Larkin to get the bleep back to his position and never come near his mound again. But Dibble can explain this: He has searched all over to find something that elevates him as high as that mound did -- weightlifting, karate, religion, Harleys, tattoos -- and he hasn't found anything that comes even close.

"It's the unleashing of your inner id," Dibble says. "When I was closing games, I didn't know who or what I was, but I could have been an ax murderer. I don't recognize that guy when I look back. You get possessed by the adrenaline, euphoria, power. I was very scary to be around, like a lion that hadn't eaten in a month. I went to an evil place, man. I was everything that scares people at night, but I felt three times as strong as normal. It gave me ulcers. I started throwing up blood in Dodger Stadium one time ... "

Dibble pauses here. "Man," he says, "I miss it."

Michael Jordan, the ultimate closer, had plenty of extreme in him. He frolicked with cartoon characters and packaged himself perfectly in cuddly commercials, but that's not who he is. He revealed himself to us, teeth bared, when Chris Childs threw a basketball at him once. What came over Jordan's face at the moment he realized what this nobody had done was like George Brett flying out of the dugout in a pine-tar boil and Bryan Cox challenging the entire Bengals bench to a fight and a young Mike Tyson making his bad-self march to the ring. It was real, and it was raw, and it was most assuredly not something brought to you by Nike.

And then it was gone, just like that, in less time than it took you to read this sentence. On his own, against his instinct, Jordan suddenly jumped away from Childs as if he had been pulled off by all his teammates. "A killer in control," Pat Riley calls him with profound admiration, because he knows what Jordan figured out on the way to all those rings: It's impossible to master your rage if you make it possible for your rage to be your master.

This isn't an easy walk, the one on the edge of the volcano. Eleanor Roosevelt warned that "anger is just one letter short of danger," but Eleanor didn't know spit about throwing 100 mph or winning something as violent as a football collision. Sometimes athletes have to reach into that gurgling lava to extract what they need -- deep down, as Colonel Jessep thundered in A Few Good Men, in places you don't talk about at parties.

That's why former linebacker Chris Spielman envisioned such horrific images of violence befalling his wife and kids that he would actually come to the line of scrimmage crying. That's why Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis talks to his murdered college roommate in the locker room minutes before every game, remembering the way his roommate's face was bludgeoned more than 20 times by the butt of a rifle, and then stares icily into that backfield in search of revenge. That's why veteran boxing trainer Lou Duva will grab his weary fighter's face with both hands between rounds, remind him of the way the overflowing toilet in the apartment overhead keeps leaking all over the fighter's family and shout, "Do you love your son? Do you? Then fight for him!"

This kind of insanity makes some sense in a rabid sport like football, where the object is to win collisions. Heck, Dolphins defensive end Trace Armstrong, as deep a man as you'll find in the NFL, hears about Spielman conjuring visions of rape and making tackles in tears, and he shrugs it off without any reaction whatsoever, as if you'd just informed him Spielman uses protein supplements. Told he is reacting to this as if it were the world's most normal thing, Armstrong says, "No, it's not normal or healthy at all. But the game we play isn't normal or healthy either."

Jets linebacker Bryan Cox knows. Do you understand everything he brings into that backfield with him? The father who dealt drugs? The poverty-ravaged childhood spent gathering trash? The legs made strong through workouts that involved pushing cars through a junkyard's stink? None of it is enough. Cox needs more. And more. And more. So when the kids at school ask Cox's daughter if her crazy daddy has been smoking cocaine, he takes that with him, too. Cox has no explanation for his wife when she asks what the hell he becomes on game day, but whatever he is might be hitting running backs with a wrath concocted from pretending she is cheating on him.

"It's not always mentally fit to want to ram your body into people, so you have to manufacture stuff," Cox says. "You personalize it. You can always do something better when you have more of a passion. You just manufacture something in your mind, so that you can be pissed off and ready. I used to get real close to the edge. I used to get real bad, because I would be right at the break point of being committed. I wanted people to be afraid."

Cox routinely went flying right over said edge, actually, perpetually leading the league in fines, doing such things as leaving Buffalo's field with his middle fingers ablaze because he couldn't always control that fire he had in his hands. But what in the name of Cal Ripken Jr. is Cox's lava doing seeping into a game as pastoral and pristine as baseball, possessing John Rocker like something out of The Exorcist? Isn't baseball all about keeping your emotions in check, about taking deep breaths before getting into the batter's box, about stepping off the mound and gathering yourself in times of trouble? Every time Rocker sprints out of that bullpen, it feels as if someone has dropped a live electrical wire on a Sunday picnic, but there he was in last year's playoffs nonetheless, flipping off Mets fans and spitting at them and, not coincidentally, pitching more dominantly than he ever has.

Rocker needs the edge of the volcano. The edge gives him an edge. He wants the crowd's hissing and says the worst thing he can be greeted with is indifference. Boos are his gas in more ways than one, the angry sound helping him distill and distill and distill his world until it is so small that it fits exactly into the place where the catcher has put his mitt.

Rocker, like Dibble, is at his professional best when returning hate, or using it as his foundation. That's why his first statement seeking penance for his now-infamous racist rant included him saying, "I want everyone to understand that my emotions fuel my competitive desire. They are a source of energy for me." As much as apologizing for his comments, he was explaining where they came from -- namely, a dark place he has not yet learned to control but loves to visit, an emotional crack house.

Rocker, for example, told his teammates that he very badly wanted to hear the boos when venturing into New York in late June, and that he was excited about getting his command back in that hostile an environment (he'd lost it to the tune of an absurd 33 walks in 22 1/3 innings). The Braves laughed this off as false bravado, shortstop Walt Weiss admitting that "we all thought the wheels were going to come off" when Rocker, doubting his control and surrounded by a stadium full of police, made his maniacal sprint into that Mets game, not knowing whether there was some lunatic in the stands intending to shoot him.

"How do you pitch and concentrate under those conditions?" Weiss asks now, but Rocker gave him the answer emphatically, mowing through the middle of the Mets order 1-2-3, striking out two and not allowing a ball out of the infield. Rocker's veteran teammates, no strangers to success, were flatly awed. Rocker wasn't. He walked off the mound slowly after that inning, staring into the crowd with a look that resembled defiance, the lava bubbling at its very highest temperature. Chipper Jones, scared of what might come next -- from Rocker, not from others -- shouted at him to please, please get the hell in the dugout.

It is a unique job, putting the punctuation on baseball games, the closer's role being as much about attitude as arm, because you have to be perfectly comfortable with the pressure that comes with every one of your teammates quite literally placing the game in your hands. Rocker wasn't much of a starting pitcher -- he was incapable of pacing himself, unable to let a bad inning go -- but he became overwhelming when he could pour nine innings' worth of intensity into just three outs. Closers tend to be different animals -- all of them wired differently, many of them wired, period -- but you'll find plenty who reach down from that edge and immerse more than just their pitching hand in the lava.

San Francisco's Robb Nen throws his last bullpen pitch as hard as a human can, not caring where it goes, trying to put his mind, not the ball, in the right place. Nen says he gets angrier and angrier with every step toward that mound -- "putting wood on that fire" -- and adds, "Some guys don't need anger, but I do. It's an intensity that's hard to explain, but it takes me a while to come down from it. It'll be 10 or 15 minutes after a game before I can smile." On more than one occasion, long after a game is done, Nen has tried to drink bottled water and seen it dribble down his chin because his hand was still trembling.

Florida's Antonio Alfonseca, baseball's save leader, is the same way. He says, "I'm always angry in the ninth inning, very angry. I'm like a snorting bull. When I strike someone out, that's when I feel most like a man." Alfonseca has infuriated many baseball veterans with his fist-pumping after strikeouts and his screaming at the sky upon finishing games. But Marlins manager John Boles says Alfonseca must let the emotion spill out the same way a too-tight valve must finally loosen to release hissing steam. If he didn't let some of that go, Boles says, Alfonseca would undoubtedly suffer migraines.

Not all hard-throwing closers are like this, of course. Lee Smith ambled in from the bullpen with a studied nonchalance, making the game wait for him. Dennis Eckersley, very vulnerable, admitted he was petrified before and during his appearances -- and that he was going to miss that fear terribly when he retired. But Armando Benitez of the Mets says that the closer's role is "a grand job of grand emotion and grand responsibility and grand results, and a lot of people summon grand discord to complete it."

Joe Sambito can tell you. He's Rocker's agent, and he closed major league games once upon a time too. He doesn't want Rocker to get incinerated by all his smoldering, fried at 25, which is why Sambito preaches to him the benefits of channeling all that heat. Good emotion will put three or four miles on your fastball, see? Bad emotion will send it sailing right out of the strike zone.

"You want to use adrenaline, but you don't want it to spill all over the place," Sambito says. "It's like a golf swing. If you swing too hard, you aren't going to hit it as far. You can't muscle your way through pitching. You've got to remember, John is 25 years old. I didn't know who I was at 25 either. There's an evolution. John has tremendous high and lows. He has to learn to harness that. Has to. That's difficult, but he's learning."

Weiss wonders: "Controlled rage? Can there be such a thing?"

It would be nice to have Rocker explain all this, but he isn't much in the mood. Asked if there'd be a good time, any good time, over the course of a few days to ask him baseball questions, only baseball questions, Rocker politely says, "probably not," and then sits down in the clubhouse to watch a movie. Everyone around him has been scalded, clearly -- friends declining interviews or not returning calls, Sambito asking that his words be read back or faxed to him, and Rocker's father, Jake, declining to talk while adding, "It's almost like the media aren't going to stop until they destroy my son," and, "Our comments right now are being recorded. I've recorded all of my telephone conversations since January."

Clearly, though, oxymorons be damned, Rocker had controlled rage last year, when he saved 38 games. Kerry Ligtenberg, the man who has taken his job for the moment, would marvel at how Rocker could get himself so angry, feeding off the loud pop of the glove in the bullpen, going higher and higher and higher emotionally while still putting those 98 mph fastballs where he wanted.

"In control while being out of control," says Ligtenberg, Rocker's teammate since 1996. "He's high-strung, short-tempered, and he's always been on that borderline between in control and out of control. Last year, he tapped into rage because he wanted to get the job done so badly. Now he feels like he needs it to get the job done, and that's totally different. He's tapping into that rage toward you guys in the media because he feels like he was wronged. He's trying to prove a point, and it's working against him, because he's trying to be superhuman, trying to throw each pitch harder than the last one. You keep reaching for more, more, more, more until you can't reach up that high anymore, you know?"

That's how it can be as you climb toward the pinnacle in sports, higher and higher and higher, right to the edge of that volcano. Sometimes you can dip into all that energy and heat and power, consuming it. Or sometimes everything erupts, consuming you.

This article appears in the August 7, 2000 issue of ESPN The Magazine.