Wherever I Wind Up (17 page)

Sure, Trigg says. But I hope you aren’t ready to pull the plug on baseball. You are still a young guy with a lot of potential.

I’m not sure if Trigg fully believes what he’s saying, I’m not sure if I do, either.

You know me, Trigg. I don’t give up. I want to be tenacious but I also don’t want to be stupid if this doesn’t go anywhere.

I finish 2002 with an 8–7 record and a 4.09 ERA. I give up 176 hits in 154 innings, which, if not pitiful, is pretty darn lousy.

Another off-season arrives and I return to Nashville, wanting to be hopeful but mostly feeling discouraged. I’ve spent my whole life hearing country singers warbling about guys with dead-end jobs and hard-luck lives. I don’t want to be one of them. The more I think about it, the YMCA might be a pretty good option.

I DECIDE
to play winter ball after the 2002 season, for a familiar reason: we need the money. I get a deal worth about $10,000 and become a member of the Zulia Eagles in northwest Venezuela, a region that is home to Lake Maracaibo, one of the largest lakes in South America, and massive oil and gas reserves as well.

Venezuela is far from the most stable place in the world; President Hugo Chávez was ousted by a military coup earlier in the year, only to force his way back into power forty-eight hours later. By the time I get there, the country is still in plenty of turmoil. At the U.S. State Department’s urging, I check in with the U.S. embassy upon my arrival, and the consul general or whoever I talk to doesn’t sugarcoat it: This is a dangerous place and you need to be careful at all times.

It’s not an outright military coup that is going on that winter, but it’s close, brigades of protesters and marchers taking to the streets, and machine guns as ubiquitous as the street-corner carts selling
cachapas
(corn pancakes). I hear gunshots all the time. Two U.S. pilots who stay in the same hotel as me tell about having to dodge bullets on their way from the airport.

Because I am a person who swims in lagoons with alligators, I walk around the streets a couple of times to observe the commotion firsthand. I go to a bullfight and sample the local cuisine, and try to assimilate into Zulia life as best I can. But people are angry and there’s no getting away from them.

The protesters want to try to force a new election. They don’t succeed, but midway through the schedule they do succeed in shutting down the baseball season, the spasms of violence just making the whole thing untenable. A day later, after the season officially gets called, I get a letter from the U.S. embassy telling me to stay in the hotel until further notice. For once I heed the warning. I stay confined and eat pizza with pork and pesto, the only available food option, for the next five days, reading and watching TV and looking out at the platforms and oil derricks in the distance.

The flights back to the States are full, so they are trying to free up some seats to get the Americans out of the country as soon as possible. Finally I get word that I’ve got a seat on an American Airlines flight. My team arranges a two-car escort to the airport, vehicles on either side of the one I am in. I get to the airport with no bullets buzzing around me, no problem at all. On the flight back home, I decide that as much as I like extra income, I am going to do my best to have a coup-free career from this moment forward.

SHORTLY BEFORE THE 2003
season, I’m at home, getting ready for spring training, when my phone rings. I have our baby daughter, Gabriel, in my arms. The caller is the Texas Rangers’ new manager, Buck Showalter. I’ve never gotten a call from a manager in January before. My first thought is that something bad must’ve happened. Buck asks me how the off-season has been and I say fine and decide not to tell him about the near coup and dodging bullets in Zulia.

I just wanted to let you know we’re going to give you a good long look in camp this spring, Buck says. I know you’ve kind of been swept under the rug and that you may not have always gotten a fair shot to show what you can do. But you bring a lot to the table and I think you have a lot to offer this organization, and you are going to get a chance to prove it.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your calling, Buck. All I want to do is help the club and I believe I can do that too.

When we hang up, I tell Anne what Buck said and I’m so fired up for the spring that I wish I could report that afternoon. I have to wait a month. I spend it going on long nighttime runs through the quiet streets of Green Hills, visualizing myself on the mound as I go, getting big-league hitters out. I am in as good a shape as I’ve ever been when I arrive in Port Charlotte in mid-February. I am going to get a fair shot and you can’t ask for more than that.

CHAPTER TEN

REQUIEM FOR MY FASTBALL

I
am in a small space, surrounded by concerned faces, an inquisition without the bright lights. The topic of the day is my lifelong run as a conventional pitcher. It is not being decided on a mound.

It is being decided on a sofa in Buck Showalter’s office. The sofa is comfortable but I am not.

I wonder why they’ve called me in here.
Have I run out of road? Could they finally be giving up on me?

Across from me are Buck, pitching coach Orel Hershiser, and bullpen coach Mark “Goose” Connor. It is mid-April 2005, a full nine years after the Rangers drafted me. I’ve been a member of Buck’s staff for the last two seasons, a spot starter and long reliever, my first extended time in the big leagues. I hate to say those Baseball Prospectus writers were right, but the truth is that I am probably not even as good as marginal. My ERA is 5.09 in 2003 and 5.61 in 2004, and I give up a bunch more hits than innings pitched. I have enough promising moments to convince the front office to keep me around—I throw a complete-game, six-hit shutout against the Tigers in late ’03—but as hard as I compete, I just can’t seem to sustain any success against major-league hitters.

And now Buck and Orel and Goose want to talk to me about it.

Two days earlier, pitching in relief against the Angels, I’d thrown a sinker to Garret Anderson and felt as if I’d been stabbed in the right shoulder. The pain landed me on the disabled list and now on Buck’s couch. My senses are on high alert, noticing everything from the tight weave of the carpet to the reddish, round contour of Buck’s face. His desk is obsessively neat, with a tidy stack of papers and game notes, a well-ordered lineup of framed photos, and a row of books about warfare and leadership. Behind him is a whiteboard with the names of the Rangers’ top minor-league prospects. Buck likes being a general, on top of everything, no detail escaping his ever-darting eyes. But this time he lets his lieutenant, Orel, do most of the talking.

I like it when Orel talks. He knows a lot about pitching. He is a man with a good heart, a man I trust. He gets right to the point.

After you finish rehabbing your shoulder, what would you think about going back to Oklahoma City to learn how to become a full-time knuckleball pitcher? Orel asks. I’m sure you don’t want to go back to the minors, but we think it’s your best chance for success. You have a good knuckleball already. You have the perfect makeup to make it work, because you know how to compete and we know how hard you’ll go after it. We think it can be a great thing for you and for the ball club, but we want to know what you think.

I squirm on the sofa and make eye contact with all three of them, one after another. It doesn’t feel as I’m being ganged up on. It feels as though they are all on my side.

Orel and I have had some general conversations about this, but nothing concrete. I’ve done bullpen sessions for him in which I’ve thrown nothing but the knuckleball, a pitch I throw once or twice a game, if that. He’s always been positive and supportive of me. So have Buck and Goose Connor. Positive is exactly what I need right now, because I’m full of doubts and short on hope, a thirty-year-old journeyman whose career is hanging by a glove string. I’ve never been a guy to obsess about stats, and I believe the game has gone berserk with all its number crunching and slicing and dicing of statistical metrics. But I cannot run from my numbers. Over parts of four big-league seasons, I have pitched in seventy-two games. My record is 15–17, my earned-run average 5.48. I’ve given up 293 hits in 239⅔ innings. Those are some ugly numbers.

Fringe big-leaguer numbers.

Later, Goose confirms for me just how precarious the situation is.

They aren’t going to bring you back to the big leagues as a conventional pitcher, R.A. You’re going to come back as a knuckleball pitcher or you are not going to come back at all.

I fidget on Buck’s sofa and contemplate the end of one career and the beginning of a new one. It’s hard to wrap my mind around it. Okay, so not many people have ever confused me with Nolan Ryan. I get that. But still, I’ve always been able to throw a hard sinking fastball, at 92 or 93 miles per hour. I became an All-American and an Olympian and a first-round draft choice because I had stuff—a big-league fastball and a big-league changeup to play off it.

Now I am supposed to say good-bye to all that and join the lineage of Hoyt Wilhelm and the Niekro brothers and Charlie Hough?

That’s exactly what I am supposed to do. And it is what I have to do, because radar guns don’t lie, and this whole spring, my fastball has been topping out at 85 or 86. My arm feels fine and I cut the ball loose, and what?

Nothing.

Your fastball isn’t coming in the way it used to. How’s your arm feeling? Goose would ask.

It feels fine, Goose. Really. I don’t know what’s going on.

Throw it again, Goose would say.

I’d throw it again and again, waiting for the gun reading to change or for someone to tell me the gun was busted and it was all a big mistake. The reading never budges. The gun isn’t the problem. I try to rationalize the predicament any way I can. I’d hurt my arm at the end of 2004; maybe it’s just taking longer than usual to get my strength back. Maybe I’d fallen into some bad mechanical habits that Orel and Goose and I can sort out. Lots of pitchers go through little dead-arm periods.

Don’t they?

It could be a lot of different things, I keep telling myself.

I want to run from the truth. I want to escape, the same way I did when I slept in empty houses. But in my heart I know what is going on. Know I am feeling good and throwing freely, and throwing slop.

I know my arm is spent.

As we break camp and the season starts, my fastball remains AWOL. Bleakness sweeps over me. Anne and I now have two little girls and I have no backup plan if the Rangers let me go. No family business. No standing job offer. Nothing. Worse still, I have lost all belief in my ability to get big-league hitters out. Every time Buck calls for me, I feel as if I’m showing up for battle without a single weapon, using a peashooter against guys carrying bazookas.

Baseball isn’t fun anymore, I think. I feel overmatched. I don’t even want to come to the ballpark. I imagine a future making widgets on an assembly line.

So I look at Buck and Orel and Goose from the sofa, and I tell them:

I’ll do it. I’ll go to Oklahoma City. I’ll become a full-time knuckleball pitcher and I promise you I’ll give it everything I’ve got.

I stand up and shake hands with all three of them, a life-changing, seven-minute meeting complete. I feel as if a weight has been lifted, as if they’re throwing a lifeline to me. Lightness doesn’t come easily to me, but I walk out of there feeling almost buoyant, reminded of a quote from Romans 5:3–4 in the New Testament: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope …”

Hope is good. Long-term hope is even better. Packing up for my trip to Surprise, Arizona, the Rangers’ winter home, to rehab my shoulder, I pause to Google every knuckleballer I can think of. I’m not looking for tips. I am looking to find out how many games they won after turning thirty years old. A few clicks yield the astounding truth:

Phil Niekro won 287 games after the age of thirty. Charlie Hough won 182. Phil’s brother, Joe, won 163. Tom Candiotti won 122 and Wilbur Wood 105. Tim Wakefield has 156 and he is still going.

Add them all up, and the best knuckleballers of the last three or so decades have won over one thousand games in their thirties and beyond. Phil and Charlie weren’t far from pitching with AARP cards in their pockets. It is one of the best perks about life in the knuckle world: because you don’t throw it hard and you do no twisting or contorting, the knuckleball puts almost no strain on your arm. It enables you to not only eat innings but inhale them.

The same week that Buck and Orel and Goose sit down with me to redirect my future, Tim Wakefield dominates the Yankees twice in five days. Not that I need any more convincing, but it’s good to know. I leave behind my career as a conventional pitcher with the paltry fifteen victories and the farcical 5.48 ERA, the precise reasons why the knuckleball is my only option.

I tell myself:

Who cares about throwing 90 miles per hour? I’m tired of being average, or worse. Tired of being lost, hiding on the margins of life and the Texas Rangers’ roster.

Tired of pretending that I am something that I am not. I have no idea how this experiment is going to go, but I can’t wait to find out.