Imperfect: An Improbable Life (18 page)

The flag felt heavy in my left hand and in the curl of my right wrist. I couldn’t quite get over the notion that Greg Louganis, the Olympic gold medalist in diving, or David Robinson, the All-American basketball player from Navy, should be out in front, or so many others. And I continued to be nagged by thoughts that the recognition went beyond what I’d done on baseball fields. Really, I assumed when I’d arrived in Indianapolis I’d be somewhere amid the swarm of white fedoras with my friends and teammates.

Still, of course, I was touched. And proud.

In the hours leading to the opening ceremony, I’d been led into a press conference, where I was asked about the personal significance of carrying the flag, and about our growing rivalry with Cuba (mostly in our heads, I speculated, not theirs), about our chances for gold, and, of course, about my physical situation. From the back of the room, a reporter had posed a lighthearted question, given I’d met Castro only weeks before: What would Michigan’s iconic and old-school football coach Bo Schembechler think about me consorting with the communist leader?

“Actually,” I answered, not really thinking but willing to go along, “they have a very similar presence, except that Castro is bigger and wider. They both have a dictatorial presence.”

It got a laugh.

I surmised, playing to the crowd, “It’s about even.”

At ivy-walled Bush Stadium, we won eight games in the tournament,
and lost once. The loss was in the gold medal game to the Cubans, whom we’d beaten earlier in the week. While disappointing, the silver medal assured Team USA a place in the 1988 Summer Olympics, where baseball would be a demonstration sport. In two starts I hadn’t allowed a run (the first batter of my first start, a Nicaraguan, bunted, of course), a pleasant conclusion to a summer of USA Baseball in which I’d won eight games in ten starts. More important, we had rewarded USA Baseball’s courage in assembling a team of mostly sophomores in college. The organization’s intent was to build toward the Olympics, where it would field a team that had grown together, through the trials of the Cuban series and the Pan Am Games. A more veteran team perhaps would have qualified with greater ease, but also would have been stripped down by the next major-league draft. In spite of our youth, we’d left the summer convinced we could compete with the most talented amateur teams in the world, including Cuba, no matter the venue.

From mid-June to late August, we’d played forty-three games, from Millington, Tennessee, to Havana, Cuba, to Indianapolis, Indiana. We won thirty-four of them. Mike Fiore had hit .398 and now he was returning to Miami. Tino Martinez, who had hit nine home runs, was going back to the University of Tampa. Cris Carpenter and his 1.39 ERA were headed to Georgia, Ed Sprague to Stanford, Ty Griffin to Georgia Tech, Scott Servais to Creighton, and Dave Silvestri to Missouri.

We’d grinded through a lot of innings, filled up on a lot of buffets, and logged a lot of miles in yellow school buses, so much so that our arrival in Indianapolis was a relief, and in itself was a victory, like we’d survived so much. When we pulled into the athletes’ village and then our dorm parking lot, a synchronized swimming team practiced its moves on dry land. The women were dressed for summer,
in Dolphin shorts and T-shirts. We gazed from the bus windows, happy to be there. Ed Sprague married one of those girls.

And I returned for my junior year at Michigan, which, due to the June Major League Baseball draft, I knew could be my last. Most of us would meet again the following summer in preparation for the Olympics. I’d miss them. The experience had been roundly rewarding. We parted with the knowledge that we’d grown as ballplayers and with the confidence that, together, we could not be intimidated.

Feeling pretty good about myself back in Ann Arbor, I began the fall semester. I returned to my routine, beginning with classes and then afternoon workouts in the weight room, the path to which led me directly through the athletic department. A voice boomed from behind me.

“What the
hell
?”

I turned. It was John Falk, trainer for the football team.

“Bo is
pissed
,” he spat.

“What? Why?”

“Compared him to
Castro
?” he said, his eyes wide. “You
gotta
be
kidding
me. He’s looking for you.”

I flushed, thanked Falk for the warning, and avoided the athletic department for a month. When I figured the smoke had cleared, I took my chances and returned to my regular route, through the athletic offices.

“Abbott!”

Like he’d been lying in wait for a month.

“Abbott!”

He stomped down a flight of stairs, walked straight up to me and thrust his face to within inches of mine.

“What is this Castro stuff?” he demanded.

“Coach, I dunno. I didn’t mean it.”

Schembechler had always been so nice to me. Once, in a newspaper story, he’d said I could probably play quarterback for him had I wanted to. It wasn’t true, but I’d appreciated the sentiment. Now … 
this
.

For ten seconds—it seemed like a month—he didn’t move. Just stared at me, his face taut and his eyes hard, and had he risen up and bitten my head off at that very moment, leaving my headless corpse on the floor of the athletic department for the cleaning crew to bag and discard, I would not have been surprised.

Finally, he blinked.

“Are you getting to class?” he ordered.

“Yessir.” Meekly.

“Then get out of here,” he commanded, and flung his hand in the direction of one exit or another.

Dismissed, I weaved toward the door.

The coming months seemed a buildup to amateur draft day, June 1. Even through the summer, idle chatter on the buses and in the hotel rooms was filled with speculation on who would go where. We dreamed of big signing bonuses, the towns we’d play in, and someday making it to the big leagues. We’d never been closer, yet it all seemed still so far away, as if one of those clunky yellow buses were carrying us there. Up a long hill. In first gear. With a balky clutch.

Before long, I was back in Indianapolis for another banquet. It was early March, when the Sullivan Award was announced. The award honored the top amateur athlete in the nation. Properly, I thought, my seat was at the farthest end of the dais. A baseball player had never won. This was for elite athletes, most often individual athletes, and while I appreciated the gesture of the nomination—which came with the Golden Spikes Award—I figured I was there to fill out the front table. Between the trophy and me sat the likes of boxer Kelcie
Banks, hurdler Greg Foster, David Robinson again, swimmer Janet Evans, volleyball player Karch Kiraly—all deserving. Me, I was just hoping the food was good.

The gentleman from my host family who had picked me up from the airport mentioned that the last time he’d hosted, it was for the eventual winner. I apologized ahead of time for breaking his streak.

So I was astonished when the previous year’s winner, the heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, read the name of the honoree: Jim Abbott.

Honestly, I was so far away I could barely hear her. Then I didn’t really believe her. The Sullivan honors athletic achievement, along with “those who have shown strong moral character.” I assumed they hadn’t known about the duck.

When I arrived at the microphone, other than thanking my parents, who were in the audience, along with my teammates and coaches, I could think of only an old joke, one that always got a laugh: “I’m not an athlete. I’m a baseball player.”

I won nine games my junior season, bringing my three-year record at Michigan to 26-8. The team won forty-eight games in 1988, won the regular-season Big Ten title, and lost—again—in the NCAA regional. With the draft coming, and with another long summer of baseball ahead, this time in preparation for the Olympics, I believed I was done pitching at Michigan. Part of me wished it could go on forever, but the time had come for another fateful step.

I knew Scott Boras a little. At Coach Middaugh’s request, he’d spoken to the team during the season, educating us on an agent’s responsibilities, what to look for in an agent, and how to protect one’s amateur standing through the draft process. He represented Cris Carpenter, as well as a number of players on the USA Baseball team, guys whose opinions I respected, and he was impressively informed. Before the draft, Boras traveled to Flint to meet with my
parents and me. He was young, polished, smart, and sure of himself, and very sure of me.

“You could pitch in the major leagues tomorrow,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said.

We went back and forth like that.

“Jim,” he said, somewhere between impatient and amused, “I’m not just being nice. You have an out pitch, the cutter. You have big-league velocity. Not only could you pitch in the big leagues, you could win there.”

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

Mom, a lawyer herself, liked that Boras, in 1988 relatively new to the field of sports agents, had a law degree. And Mom and Dad liked that Boras explained precisely how he could advise us while not risking my final year of eligibility at Michigan, were it to come to that.

He was thirty-five, but already had begun to challenge baseball’s long-standing draft paradigm, in which the professional franchise told the player what he was worth, and the player, after some halfhearted negotiating, reported to work. The idea was the player was supposed to be thrilled and flattered to be offered the job. Boras, who’d played four seasons in the minor leagues with the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs, had other thoughts and already had rankled some big-league brass with his own ideas. He was aggressive and tough in ways I was not, kept the conversation on baseball and away from marketing my “story,” such as it was, and would be deft at filtering out the distractions peripheral to the baseball side of things.

“I don’t know Jim,” he told us. “But I know the ability.”

While I was naive about the draft and what came after it, Boras was persuasive on the topics of a young player and his leverage. In
that way, and given that the major leagues still seemed a distant reality, a signing bonus represented the only guaranteed money I’d make in baseball. And that was Boras’s specialty.

On that perhaps thin requirement, I hired Boras, beginning a relationship that was not unlike a marriage, and that ultimately would disappoint both of us.

O
N
J
UNE
1, 1988, the day of baseball’s amateur draft, Bobby Fontaine, the scouting director for the California Angels, stood in a doorway in the executive offices at Anaheim Stadium and told Tim Mead, the Angels’ PR man, “We did it,” just like that.

Mead knew immediately what Fontaine was saying. He’d overheard enough of the deliberations prior to the draft. After weeks of debate, analysis, debate, general agreement, and more debate, the club had taken the left-hander from Michigan, the Olympic hopeful, the Sullivan Award winner, the one-handed guy.

Not in the second or third round, as many had projected, but in the first round, eighth overall.

The phone rang in the living room on Maxine Street in Flint. A reporter wanted to know what it felt like to be a pro ballplayer and an Angel, the first I’d heard. I didn’t really know, actually. The Tigers, where my heart was and who carried the unimaginable dream of playing at Tiger Stadium, had the twenty-sixth pick, and speculation held that they might select me. In my neighborhood, they were professional baseball. The Angels weren’t one of those teams people in Michigan thought much about, but I was thrilled to go so high. Eventually the Angels’ general manager, Mike Port, called. It was true, I was going to get paid for playing baseball, which I’d only recently begun to consider. I’d been 26-8 with a 3.03 ERA in three
seasons at Michigan, but the big leagues, any pro ball, seemed a long way off, until the phone rang, and then I was never so happy that the battery held up on that old remote receiver.

George Bradley, one of the team’s scouting coordinators, had been around the Michigan team earlier that spring. In Austin, Texas, for one of my earlier starts, he’d run into Don Welke. He shook Welke’s hand, nodded toward the lefty on the mound, and said, “You knew what you were looking at three years ago, didn’t you?”—more a statement than a question, really. On draft day, Bradley told the newspapers that the club was not concerned with my condition.

“We didn’t even look at it that way,” he said. “Over the years he has overcome that handicap. It’s like a guy with glasses. He uses glasses to correct his vision. Jim has overcome his problem. He won’t have a problem fielding. He’s mastered fielding.

“Take a look around the big leagues and see where the left-handed pitching is. Our club needed left-handed pitching and there were only a few in the draft.”

The Angels set up a conference call and the questions were predictable.

“I always grew up playing baseball and liking it,” I told reporters. “I never thought about anything holding me back. I was going to play until someone grabbed my spikes away from me and told me to sit down, you’re not good enough anymore. As I look back on it, I guess it was a different situation and if I had any common sense, I probably would’ve stopped. But growing up, playing with one hand never entered my mind as holding me back.”

It was mostly true.

While Andy Benes, another Boras client and eventually an Olympic teammate, was chosen first overall by the San Diego Padres, the headlines the following day generally focused on the eighth pick.

The New York Times
was representative enough:
ANGELS GET ABBOTT, ONE-HAND PITCHER
.

The rest would be left to Boras and the Angels, for two weeks later I was back in Millington, Tennessee, with USA Baseball, back in the same bunk with the same thin mattress, back for fifty-one more games that would lead to a medal stand on the first-base line at Jamsil Baseball Stadium in Seoul, South Korea. The summer of ’88 saw us tour from Tennessee to Japan to Boise, Idaho, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Battle Creek, Michigan, and many other U.S. stops, to seven cities in Italy, back to Japan, and then to Korea, with dozens of ballparks in between. Along the way, Cuba was lost as an Olympic antagonist because of its boycott for political purposes, but we played the Cubans nine times between a U.S. barnstorming series and the World Cup in Italy. We lost six of them, five by one run.