I GOT OFF to an inauspicious start. On the drive from Florida to West Virginia in the second week of June, we stopped at a gas station to fill the tank and get some food. I was starving, and I wasn’t sure we were going to stop again, so I ordered a huge amount of gas- station fried chicken. This was my first big bonus splurge, I guess, and I ate like there was a hole in me somewhere. Within a couple of hours, I was sick as a dog, with vomiting and diarrhea like I’d never had before. My momma took one look at my green face as I walked out of a restroom at a gas station somewhere down the road and said, “Josh, you got food poisoning.”
That was my first lesson as a professional athlete: Gas station fried chicken is a bad idea. I lost about eight pounds in three days and ended up in the hospital. The newspaper in Bluefield, West Virginia, had a big headline the next day: “Hamilton Hospitalized.” If I thought I left the attention back in North Carolina, I was wrong.
The next day, my second day in Princeton, I saw the paper in the morning and noticed my picture on the front sports page. The story was about my expected debut that night, and the headline mentioned the “Record Signing Bonus” I received from the Devil Rays. I read the beginning of the story and that’s when I found out how much money I had made — $3.96 million, a record for a number-one pick.
I sure didn’t look like a multimillionaire. I walked into professional baseball wearing clothes bought at Sears and a gold necklace Granny gave me when I was in the tenth grade. My suitcase had a strip of masking tape on it with “J. Hamilton” written on it.
And my first home away from home turned out to be the Ramada Inn Limited in Princeton. The Devil Rays took up the first two floors of the motel, and my room was on the second floor, overlooking a family of skunks that lived in the field below. We bunked two to a room, and my roommate was a pitcher named Scott Vander Meer. He was probably the luckiest guy on the team; I was a great roommate because I was almost never there.
My parents rented a place close by, in a budget-suite type hotel. That had been the plan all along — since I was twelve years old — for my parents to accompany me to the minor leagues and for the three of us to live together when I got there.
Everything was new. Everyone on the team was either drafted or signed in June and sent to Princeton together to start our careers. Most of us were just out of high school, a few were out of college, and some of us were just out of the Dominican Republic.
The team had some of the brightest prospects in the organization playing alongside players they term “roster fillers” because every team needs to sign enough players to fill a roster. Some of the roster fillers wouldn’t last the summer.
Our manager was Bobby Ramos, a former big-league catcher whose job was to be patient and firm at the same time.
We were paid $212 a week and given $20 a day for meal money on road trips. We traveled through Appalachia in an old, loud bus that sputtered and groaned like an infected lung. We had to wear polo shirts to the ballpark every day. We’d never been happier.
My clothes were always clean. Some of the guys didn’t have a lot of extra clothes, and some of my teammates weren’t fanatical about doing their laundry. My mom would take my clothes and make sure they were laundered and folded for the next time I needed them.
Some of my teammates tried to save money and eat one or maybe two meals a day. Some of the guys were sending a big part of their check home to the Dominican, and there were stories about some of my teammates’ eating unbelievable amounts of food after being invited to eat dinner with some of the booster families. One newspaper reporter from the
St. Petersburg Times
followed me around for a series on my first weeks of pro ball, and she reported that one of my teammates ate twenty-seven pork chops one night at someone’s house. That’s got to be some kind of record, both for eating and for cooking.
Me? I always had plenty of food, and my bonus money made it easy for us to eat good food and not worry about setting aside the per diem to make ends meet. I was different. I was fortunate. My parents could afford to be there with me, and that worked to my advantage. I didn’t have to worry about many of the things my teammates worried about. I could get to the ballpark early — I was always either the first one there, or very close behind the first one there — and I worked harder than anybody else. I wanted to be great, and I was willing to put in the work to get there.
My parents went to the ballpark every day when I did. They watched us work out on the field and take batting practice. They watched the grounds crew roll away the batting cage as it got closer to game time and line the field so everything looked sharp for the first pitch.
There were times when Ramos sensed we were dragging or that guys hadn’t been eating properly. He would call one of my parents down to the screen behind home plate and ask them to head out to McDonald’s and get thirty cheeseburgers or breakfast sandwiches for the team. He’d always try to hand my daddy some money through the screen, and my daddy always waved him away and went out to buy the food himself.
I can’t count the number of times my parents got into the truck and drove one of my teammates who needed a ride back from the ballpark to the hotel, or someone who forgot something and needed to run back to the hotel to get it. In the Tar Heel League we always had team moms, and it seemed to me like my parents served as the team parents for the Princeton Devil Rays.
Even without Granny, I continued the tradition of kissing my momma on the cheek before every game for good luck. It was also a way of thanking her for being there. I saw no reason to change just because I was being paid to play. The place changed, but the particulars of my life didn’t. In high school, my momma would get off work and come to the field to watch practice. And now, in Princeton, my parents came to the park early to watch batting practice and then waited for me in the parking lot after the game. From there, we’d get something to eat, usually at Applebee’s, and talk about the game. I’d either head back with them and sleep in their suite or go back to the Ramada.
Most of the time — no, almost all of the time — I stayed with my parents. I didn’t have any clue this would be seen as a bad thing, but after a few weeks I got the vibe that it was. The folks who ran the Devil Rays thought my parents’ involvement was getting in the way of my becoming a man and learning to cope with life on my own. They also thought it was an obstacle to my bonding with my teammates.
One of my teammates, a pitcher named Charles Armstrong, was quoted in the
St. Petersburg Times
as saying, “This is the time to step into manhood. What are they doing here?”
I looked at it differently. They were here to make the transition easier, and we couldn’t see how that could be seen as anything but positive. There was no doubt it was good for me; it was also good for the Devil Rays. They paid me nearly $4 million to play baseball and be as good as I could be. This was the best way for me to make their investment pay off.
We spent a lot of time in a corner booth at Applebee’s. We’d talk about the game and go over each of my at bats. It gave me a lot of comfort to be able to do exactly what I did in high school, even though I was nowhere near home.
One of my Princeton teammates asked me how I handled having my parents around all the time. I told him I was fine with it, and he said, “Man, I couldn’t stand having my parents around.”
“That’s you,” I said.
Minor-league baseball can be a grind. You don’t think about that when they’re patting you on the back on draft day, but day after day, night after night, bus ride after bus ride — it wears on you. We’d get our twenty-dollar- a-day meal money on the road and eat at Wendy’s or McDonald’s or Po’ Folks. We’d play three games in one small town in the Appalachian League — Johnson City, Tennessee, or Bluefield, Kentucky, or Pulaski, Virginia — and then move on to the next. We’d wake up and have to check a schedule to see where we were.
Some guys couldn’t hack it and got cut. Some guys couldn’t hack it and just left. They’d say good-bye to the skipper and head for home. They gave it their shot and made up their mind. A lot of guys got to pro ball and discovered their limitations. They saw how good other guys were and had to assess their own abilities.
If you came to the conclusion this was the highest level you could hope to reach, that your career would never advance past the dingy motel rooms and smelly bus rides, it wasn’t a hard call. Sometimes we’d go out to play on a Sunday afternoon and there’d be fewer than fifty people in the stands. For the first time in any of our lives, baseball could feel like a job.
There were several Dominican players in Princeton, as there are at every level of baseball, and for the most part we all went our separate ways. Baseball is kind of that way, mostly because of the language barrier. I got frustrated because I couldn’t communicate with these guys — I knew no Spanish and they knew very little English. I talked to a high school Spanish teacher and had her teach me how to say some simple Spanish phrases. I wanted to be able to tell my teammates good game, or maybe be able to call off the second baseman to avoid a collision on a popup.
My parents and I talked about the language difficulties, and how fortunate I was to be able to spend all this time with my parents while easing my way into pro ball. My daddy would say, “Put yourself in their shoes, with no one around to look after you so far from home.” Many were homesick, and I know they would have loved to have had their parents around.
Carl Crawford was a second-round pick from Houston, a bundle of raw talent who ran so fast your eyes had to work to keep up with him. He signed for $1.5 million, also out of high school, so between the two of us we accounted for almost $5.5 million worth of bonus money the Devil Rays paid out in the draft. They expected to see a lot of the two of us, as well as top prospect Rocco Baldelli, in the outfield at The Trop for many years to come.
Despite our different backgrounds, Carl and I became friends and hung out some on the bus trips. Carl was good for my ego. Now a regular All-Star in the American League with the Rays, he is a fun, demonstrative guy who doesn’t hold much inside. I’d make a play in the outfield or hit a booming home run and he’d say, “Hammy, you’re the best I’ve ever seen.” Sometimes it was simpler: “Boy, you can flat play.”
From the first week we played together in Princeton, we talked about playing together in the big leagues. “Imagine how much ground we could cover in the outfield,” Carl would say.
Carl had amazing energy, especially as an eighteen-year-old loving life in the minor leagues. He could get the whole bus rolling in laughter talking about his neighborhood back in Houston’s Fifth Ward. I loved listening to Carl go on and on. Baseball had taken me out of my cocoon in Raleigh, but this was something different. I was spending most of my time with guys from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Houston’s Fifth Ward.
Carl kept his eyes open for the ladies. He’d look around the stands before a game, assessing the situation, then he’d let us know what kind of night it was going to be. Once, in a scene recounted in the
St. Petersburg Times
, he assessed the crowd in Princeton and said, “So many goddamned women.” And then he said, “All the girls do anyway is ask, ‘Where’s Josh?’ ”
During a food stop on one of our bus rides, he and I shared a table at Wendy’s. We were wolfing down fries and burgers, and I was looking at the tattoo he had on one of his arms. It was a Rottweiler’s face, and I told Carl I had been thinking about getting a tattoo myself. It was the first time I had told anyone that, but I had been looking at the tattoos of some of the other guys on the team and it seemed like a cool thing to do.
“Well, get yourself one,” Carl said. “I know you’ve got the money.”
“Nah, my parents wouldn’t like that,” I said.
Carl looked at me. It was like we came from different planets. He didn’t understand why my parents would have anything to do with it.
“You can do what you want,” he said. “You’re an adult.”
I gave him a look that made it clear I wasn’t too sure about that. We laughed and changed the subject. I was an adult? I don’t think I’d ever thought of it that way before.
The scene: a night game at Hunnicutt Field in Princeton, West Virginia, during my first summer as a professional ballplayer. A thunderstorm was moving in from the west, and I was playing center field in the late innings. Typical of ballparks in the low minors, the stadium lights were adequate but nothing like the big leagues, where it can seem like midday at midnight. Our manager walked to the mound to make a pitching change, and as our new pitcher was warming up I watched the clouds moving toward me.
There was lightning in the distance, and the clouds lit up every few seconds as they bounced our way. I watched, interested in the formations and curious about whether they would arrive and wash out the game.
I have difficulty describing what happened next. The clouds kept moving, and suddenly a demon’s face appeared, superimposed on the clouds. It was jumping out at me, and it made me rock back on my heels. I got chills. The face was grinning, almost taunting.
The vision stuck with me the rest of the game. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I didn’t feel I could ignore it. There was something there for me, some message or warning.
After the game, I told my parents I was tired and wanted to head back to the room and get some sleep. My roommate Scott and I walked back to the Ramada together. It was a quiet walk, but as we got within range of our room, I could see a blue flicker bouncing on the curtains. A light was on in the room, also.
“Didn’t we turn the television off?” I asked Scott.
“Yeah, we did. And the lights.”
“That’s kind of strange.”
Scott shrugged, obviously not giving it much thought. I unlocked the door and walked in. After what happened at the game, I was on guard. Scott walked straight to the bathroom, obviously figuring we just forgot to turn everything off when we left for the ballpark. To him, it was no big deal.