Imperfect: An Improbable Life (22 page)

I kept throwing, lapped up every suggestion from Lach, and threw
again. In between, I’d report to the media mobile home and do my duty there, as well. The place was getting crowded. So eager was I, when a reporter—Jerome Holtzman, the veteran baseball writer from the
Chicago Tribune
—rather bluntly informed me I was not physically equipped to execute rundowns, I dedicated hours to practicing rundowns. Fortunately, the security guard at the clubhouse entrance offered no tips; I’d have been on the field all day.

I was eventually assigned to Parrish, which I considered a kind of promotion. I threw well. My cutter was firm and sailing. Twice when the ball ran harder than he anticipated, Parrish sprang from his squat, scraped off his mitt, and shook his howling left thumb. Generally, bullpen sessions rate just above shoe polishing when it comes to spring training events. This, however, was affirming. The cutter—its velocity and late run—was unusual here, in big-league camp, too. When the Angels began their exhibition schedule, when we bused to Yuma, Arizona, and carloads of reporters and photographers trailed behind, I pitched a morning B game, bringing another revelation. The cutter was going to be better against professional wood than it had been against college aluminum. The hitters were better and stronger, but their bats were not. I broke a few bats that morning, then four or five in my next game. Right-handed hitters couldn’t keep the cutter off their hands, so I kept throwing it, and rode it deeper into spring training.

Near the end of camp, one starter was injured. Another wasn’t pitching well. When the Angels picked up and moved to Palm Springs to finish their spring schedule, Lach had an idea what Rader was thinking. He suggested they not rush the Abbott kid, to allow some time for the curveball and slider to come, to at least let him get a feel for the pro game.

“Bullshit,” Rader told him. “Let’s see what he can do. What’s he
going to learn that he hasn’t? What’s he going to learn in the minor leagues? Is he emotionally resilient? Is he physically capable? What other prerequisites do you have to have to pitch at the major-league level? So, all spring he’s in Jose Canseco’s kitchen and Mark McGwire’s kitchen. What more do you want?”

The unthinkable was unfolding.

T
HE TELEPHONE RANG
just after breakfast in my room at the Gene Autry Hotel. It was Lach. He asked me to meet him in the lobby. Kind but firm, Lach could be counted on to do the right thing, and generally not the risky thing. He had been a relief pitcher in the major leagues back around the time I was born and clearly knew what he was talking about and understood the mind of the pitcher. The older guys respected him and the younger guys—Finley, Harvey, McCaskill—adored him. I’d grown to share their loyalty to him. All I knew was that he was waiting. When I turned the corner he looked serious. I wondered how many players had been sent to the minor leagues in this very lobby. I sat down. He leaned toward me, elbows on his knees.

I’d begin the 1989 season in the major leagues, he said, in the starting rotation, behind Blyleven, Mike Witt, McCaskill, and Finley. He said I’d made the team on ability, not to sell tickets for a starved franchise that had rarely measured up to the Dodgers up north. He said the team was put together to win, and that’s why I’d be on it. He said that no matter what happened, good or bad, that I should not panic, because the club wouldn’t. I refrained from hugging him down there in the lobby in front of all those people. Lach, a sentimental guy, looked closer to tears than I was.

I walked to my room a big leaguer.

Floated, actually.

All those levels, from the playground, to Little League, to high school, to college, to the Olympic team, like my mother said, had been gifts. From where, I didn’t know. From my parents, I guessed. From the people who didn’t give me a chance, and the many more who did. From this thing that I was born with, and my refusal to give in to it, or my obsession with it, or my fight for it, I didn’t know which. All three, maybe.

Now there were no more levels, only big ballparks and grown men who played baseball for a living, who put roofs over their families by hitting pitchers like me.

Now there was only making something of it.

Tim Mead gave me number 25. He said Don Baylor had worn it and that he admired Baylor when he had been an Angel. Rader gave me the locker between Blyleven and McClure, so there’d be no quiet corner for me to dissolve into. When the crazy stuff happened, it would splatter all over me. Finley gave me the spare room in his Newport Beach condo. A car dealer gave me a Toyota to drive to the ballpark, a somewhat boxy sedan that more than once earned the observation “That your dad’s car?” More often, then, we took Finley’s Nissan 300ZX.

Anaheim was a bit of a circus.

The idea that I might be a decent way to sell tickets wasn’t new. The media had us surrounded on that topic. No one from the club mentioned it to me, and when reporters questioned Rader, he was pointed in his response. First, he was angry at the callousness of the accusation. Then he got madder.

“Never,” he said, “never has that been brought up. Never. What a bunch of crap that is. He is better than anything we have. He is one of our top five starters. So, start him.”

My first Opening Day, Chicago White Sox and Angels, Anaheim Stadium, and I was captivated by the sun (96 degrees at game time), the crowd (nearly 34,000 in the old ballpark), the matchup (veterans Mike Witt versus Jerry Reuss), and the start of my professional career, which for the moment meant soaking in all the cool stuff going on, digging my first big-league uniform, casually scanning the stands for hot girls, and occasionally keeping one eye on the game.

So I’d been pretty distracted when, confronted by White Sox catcher and tough guy Carlton Fisk three hours later, I was unsure if I was supposed to punch him, grab him and hope somebody else punched him, or go find a middle infielder and rethink the whole thing.

It all happened fast. One minute we were in a close game, the next we weren’t, and then White Sox cleanup hitter Ivan Calderon was heaving his helmet and charging the mound, where McClure waited.

With a frantic clamor, and led by Rader, teammates raced past me and onto the field. I obediently followed. There, we met an equal number of White Sox, as their dugout—and both bullpens—had also cleared out. It was in that crowd near the mound where I met Fisk, who seemed cranky, and I quickly decided to do nothing that would provoke him. Meantime, Rader was in the middle of everything, and not as a peacemaker. That, as I learned, was his nature. There was only one way to play the game—and only one way to conduct yourself. Rader would defend both to his last breath. I’d never played for such a man.

McClure had taken the ball in the ninth inning. We were down, 4–2. The top of our order would be up in the bottom of the ninth. We had hope. But the White Sox scored five runs against McClure. He’d seen a lot of baseball, been in every situation, and had his own ideas about hardball decorum. The White Sox were taking some
good rips against him, the last being Harold Baines’s long home run to right field. Mac believed their hitters had become a touch comfortable in the batter’s box. Actually, “they were swinging out of their asses” is the way he put it. So, he reared back and threw a fastball that hit Calderon square in the back. And all hell broke loose.

We had more brawls that season under Rader than I had in the rest of my career combined, probably. Maybe he was establishing a team demeanor. Maybe he had a group that leaned toward violence, or maybe we simply built a reputation for it. But it kept happening, and Rader kept leading us out there, and a team that wasn’t supposed to do much spent some time in first place that summer and stayed in contention to the end of September.

They gave me the ball on April 8, on a Saturday night at Anaheim Stadium.

Without a day in the minor leagues, in a clubhouse of strong-willed veterans and big personalities who would have significant and lasting influences on my life and my pitching, I embarked on a big-league career that few could have seen coming. Certainly I hadn’t, and certainly not this soon. In defiance of Rader, it would be written that I was a publicity stunt, that I was on the opening-day roster to juice the gate, that the Angels needed a gimmick.

I didn’t believe it and the Angels denied it and no one in the clubhouse seemed to think so. Even so, there certainly was a lot of interest. Nearly 47,000 people piled into Anaheim Stadium for my debut, which was against the Seattle Mariners. I lost, which didn’t seem to matter to anyone but my teammates and me. The club had credentialed 150 writers. Photographers trailed me to the bullpen and policemen stood guard outside the gate while I warmed up. I didn’t pitch well—the Mariners had six hits, drew three walks, forced us into a couple errors—and didn’t make it out of the fifth inning.
Mark Langston—who a year later would be a teammate—shut us out for nine innings.

We lost, 7–0, and yet I had to sit in front of all those writers and television cameras afterward and be the story, which I hated. The elevator doors opened on the third floor and the area outside the press conference room was crowded with cameras and reporters and security guards holding them back, all to get a glimpse of the guy who’d given up six runs in 4 2/3 innings. I smiled the best I could, but told Tim Mead, “I lost. Here I am going to do a postgame press conference.”

I’d been so excited. Against its reputation as a late arriver, the Anaheim crowd had been thick and loud before the first pitch. Cameras had flashed everywhere.

I made it, I’d thought. Four years before, I’d been a senior at Central, all elbows and knees and spotty mechanics. Now I was on a big-league mound, in a ballpark so big and crowded I couldn’t find my parents, grandparents, Chad, anyone who’d come see me pitch, for all the others who’d come see me pitch. By the time I’d meet with them postgame, I’d already discovered that playing in the majors was beyond satisfying, but that losing in the majors was a dark and very humbling experience. So Mom and Dad smiled and I smiled and none of us really believed in the others’ smiles. I was mad I wasn’t better.

The experience changed me, or at least changed what baseball was for me, except I had no idea at the time. I’d walked in naive enough to believe that the pages of the script would keep turning and the story would remain happy. Fourteen outs later, I’d walked out carrying not just a glove and some regrets, but an urgency to succeed like I’d never felt before. Because I wanted to stay. I’d lost before, sometimes bitterly, but the taste was more pungent here.

Strangely, in a game I’d played for what seemed forever, everything had felt off. My emotions had been out of balance. I was overwhelmed by the day, by what it meant, by the expectations of the people who came to see the new kid, so at times it seemed I was outside of my body, watching like everyone else. Worse,
hoping
like everyone else.

The game moved too fast for my brain to translate, a blur from the other side of a train window, and nothing I did would slow it down. I knew I was heaving the ball with no touch and no plan, what we called “gorilla pitching,” muscling the ball to the glove. I’d pitched big games in big moments, and this felt like those, up until I got up on the mound and tried to get an out. Then, I was inexplicably in a game that was beyond my ability. My focus was shot, my thoughts and strategies spun out of control, and I spent the better part of ninety minutes begging for the ball to find the strike zone, then hoping batted balls would at least aim themselves at somebody.

During spring training, I’d been amazed at how indifferent players were to the games’ outcomes. When I mentioned it to my roommate, the bullpen catcher Rick Turner, he’d been amazed at my amazement.

“They’re just getting their work in, Jim,” he had said, and I wondered just how different the games would be come April. So far, they were very different, mostly because I’d been a wreck.

From the days of camp, when my cutter was boring in on the winter-rusted bats of the Cansecos and McGwires, suddenly I’d felt like a one-pitch pitcher, maybe two. My slow curve was mediocre. Same with the changeup. The slider was okay, but for one night it looked an awful lot like my cutter.

As I sat in that press conference, sounding resilient, eager for the
ball again, what I was really thinking was, “Man, I gotta lot to learn.” I had to get back out there.

It was a while before the swirl slowed long enough for me to process the details, in part because the attention made more of my starts than I would have liked. After two of them, my record was 0-2. The offense hadn’t scored a single run. The defense had committed four errors. My earned-run average was greater than 4. My third start, which would have been at Chicago’s old Comiskey Park, was snowed out. Lach told me I wouldn’t be bumped to the next night, but skipped entirely. I wouldn’t pitch for another six days. With a friend in town, I needed to take a breath, and went for a beer on Division Street, in an old-school, peanut-shells-on-the-floor joint called The Lodge, and stayed for more.

Some lessons come cheap. This wasn’t one of those.

Chicago is a late town and I shut it down. When I opened my eyes again in the hotel room, the clock said it was coming up on four.

P.M
.

I looked again, squinting at the tiny red letters.

P.M
.

My head hurt. My stomach rolled. My hands shook. And the last team bus to the ballpark would leave in eight minutes.

Alert enough to recall we’d be flying out after the game, and as gently as I could while still hurrying, I threw anything that looked familiar into my suitcase, pulled a pink shirt over my head, covered myself in a multicolored sport coat that, admittedly, looked more like a horse blanket, and stumbled toward the lobby. Outside, where a cold rain fell, there was only traffic where a bus should have been.

Two weeks into my big-league career, having been handed the greatest responsibility of my life, I stood on the curb on Michigan
Avenue hungover, matted by rain, and hoping not to throw up. There wasn’t a cab in sight.