Imperfect: An Improbable Life (25 page)

CHAPTER 15

B
y the end of a warm afternoon in Oakland, on the final weekend of April 1991, two seasons and a month in the major leagues had my record at 22-30, my ERA at 4.34. For 1991 alone, I’d made four starts and lost them all. My ERA was 6.

On the bright side, my quest to be recognized as simply a pitcher was fulfilled.

The fresh public angle on Jim Abbott was that he was in over his head. More specifically, my command was poor, my curveball was spotty and, as a result, hitters had figured me out, primarily because two years before I’d been rushed from college to the big leagues. There were, however, fewer questions about how many hands I had.

Nice story, decent guy, not getting enough outs. I’d given up more hits than anyone in baseball in 1990 and lost 14 games.

After the promise of ’89, the Angels had fallen into mediocrity. We weren’t pitching or scoring runs like we once had, the team was aging faster than the calendar could keep up, and management answered by acquiring veterans past their primes. We were getting older, not younger, and worse, not better.

By 1991, we were headed for a last-place finish in the AL West. Doug Rader would be fired in late August and replaced by Buck Rodgers. It was then I first considered the cold side of the game, when Rader—wearing a cowboy hat and a forced smile—returned as the former manager and hugged every man in the clubhouse. He’d believed in me. In late spring, I wasn’t winning. The issues that led to 246 hits allowed and 14 losses the season before hadn’t dissipated. In the club’s front office, serious consideration was given to sending me to the minor leagues.

Asked his opinion, Marcel Lachemann told the baseball operations staff, “Well, that’s a bunch of bull. There’s no way he deserves to be sent out. In fact, you send this kid out, you send me with him.”

Years later, Lach recalled, “I think they thought I was kidding, because they never put me to the test. When I left the meeting I thought, ‘What did I just say?’ But, it never came to that.”

The game can be moody. It is cool and then comforting, warm and then entirely unjust. For no apparent reason, it began to like me again. There was no explanation, and I didn’t ask for one.

Over the next five months, I was 18-7 with a 2.55 ERA. I shut out the New York Yankees in the Bronx in mid-May, shut out the Milwaukee Brewers over seven innings in mid-June, beat the eventual World Series champion Minnesota Twins twice in August, and won 9 of my last 12 starts. My curveball was effective. I worked the outside half of the plate to righties. I’d never been better.

In the midst of coming back from 0-4, I told
Sports Illustrated
, “It was the toughest thing I’ve gone through, baseball-wise, in a long time. In the back of your mind you think, ‘Maybe I just don’t have it. Maybe every lousy pitcher thinks that someday he’s going to get good.’ And then all of a sudden, your worst fears are out in the open, in public debate.”

I still had Lach on my side, McClure in my ear, a developing feel for pitching on my fingertips and, if any of that failed, Harvey Dorfman in my head.

Harvey was a sports psychologist. He was in his mid-fifties when Boras, intrigued by advances in the mental side of baseball, introduced us after my rookie year. By then, Harvey had served on the Oakland A’s staff for six years, as the brain coach sitting on the bench not far from the hitting and pitching coaches. Before that, he was an educator and coach and before that a soccer player and before that a child so stricken with asthma he could barely get out of bed to play with the other children.

I didn’t know why Boras came to believe I was in need of a sports psychologist. When he suggested I go see Harvey, I looked at him so blankly he assumed he’d offended me. In fact, Boras had been considering bringing Harvey and me together for more than a year. Standing just off to the side of my first season in the majors, Boras had watched the stadiums fill when I pitched, he had watched the media swarm and the fans rush to me when I entered a hotel lobby. It was daunting, and it wasn’t commensurate with my performance so far. And Boras believed I’d be tested one day, when my performance did not match the expectations of the public or myself.

On the night of my very first start, he’d looked around Anaheim Stadium and thought,
Oh my God, how is he going to be able to put this in perspective?

Performance fluctuates. Results fluctuate.

As long as he’s on top of his game
, Boras thought,
all this works. What happens when he’s not? What happens when life gets serious? He was so strong climbing up the mountain. What happens when he gets to the top and has to look down?

Eighteen wins looked to Boras like the top of the mountain.

Harvey and I met over lunch. A month later, I flew to Phoenix, where Harvey picked me up at the airport, two hours south of his home in Prescott, a small town in the Bradshaw Mountains. I’d spend the weekend with him.

Harvey wasn’t one of those touchy-feely therapists. We drove an hour before he pulled into a diner where he could get a bowl of chili, and by the time we left I could tell he would never ask me what kind of tree I’d be and I wouldn’t be writing haikus describing my childhood. If he was sympathetic to the way I was born, he hid it behind the edginess of a New Yorker (he was born in the Bronx) and the demeanor of a coach (his old job).

Harvey thought I was too nice. I knew that because he said, “You’re too nice.”

When we returned to the car I told him, “You have made me talk more in an hour about my hand than I have in my entire life.”

“Isn’t that why you’re here?” he said.

We pulled out of the parking lot and Harvey shot me a look that said,
That’s the freakin’ problem, pal
.

I couldn’t help but smile.

For two days Harvey asked questions, I answered, and he took notes. He’d arrived at the sessions knowing what I was and what I’d done, if not who I was. He assumed the weekend would be more painful for me than it was for him, and he was correct.

He asked if, as a kid, I’d ever been in a fight. When I said I hadn’t, he nodded as if he’d already known the answer. I’d been mugged in a stairwell in high school. And there were fights I should have taken up that I didn’t. I wasn’t proud of it.

His observation: “You would do nothing to antagonize anybody into a confrontation. The last thing you wanted to hear was, ‘Ah,
screw you, you stump-handed kid.’ You did not want to be disparaged. You placated people so there would be no name-calling. You didn’t want to hear the words.”

I nodded, even if I wasn’t sure I agreed, which probably was his point.

“There are a couple things to consider,” Harvey continued. “One, you can’t please everybody. Two, if you believe this perception of you is valid, you are living your life based on what other people believe you to be. You wear the mask long enough, it becomes your face.”

Harvey had a lot of clients. More than a few had asked him to teach them to be jerks. It was the baseball thing, the competitor thing, the killer-instinct thing.

But he and I talked about balance, about being strong without being insensitive, compassionate without being weak. My need to be liked, he determined, was so ingrained I’d become deferential to everyone. Had I continued on that course, he believed, I might have taken to deferring to hitters, as well. Even hitters. Imagine.

We all have a sense of our own vulnerability, he said, and to that end we fake it till we make it. I couldn’t fake mine, he pointed out, because my vulnerability extended beyond my shirtsleeve. The best I could do was to put my hand in my pocket. By doing so, of course, I drew more attention to it, to the fact I was hoping to hide it.

I hid my hand a lot, maybe unconsciously. I believed everybody was looking. And they probably weren’t. If so, maybe momentarily. But, I struggled with it. In nearly every photo from childhood, I’d buried my right hand in my pocket, or covered it with my left hand. Not even my parents had noticed. Even in childhood, I’d have rather avoided the subject, ducked the questions, and eliminated the expressions of pity.

Harvey was right about these talks. They were painful. I hadn’t thought I was faking anything. I guess I thought of it as “coping.” Or “overcoming.” Or just
pitching
.

Prodding, Harvey was continuously drawn to my tendency to, as he said, “Give myself away”—that is, to ignore the insults and slights of others. He concluded that such a lack of self-esteem could manifest itself in the amount of trust I took to the mound. He was right, though I wasn’t completely adrift. With the ball in my hand, I felt I had a direction—to show people I wouldn’t give in to my quite obvious vulnerability. It was not forward thinking, but a regular and reliable ambition. I didn’t understand it. It just was.

The level I strove for as a boy and the challenges I took on through college, by the big leagues I wondered at times if they were enough. I wondered again if I belonged. Those voices might sink in over time, along with those questions, and I might be in serious danger of answering, “I don’t know.” I think that’s what Harvey was getting at. Whether I was 10-14 or 18-11, did I trust I was good enough? Did I have the conviction? Would I continue to believe in myself come those times when the greater of two wills would win?

I liked Harvey. My career had sped off so quickly over the previous couple years I’d barely had a moment to make sense of it, and that’s when Harvey came along. He seemed a wise man who possessed a broad sense of the world and an ability to place baseball within it. Being twenty-two, I was searching for myself and looking in all the usual places, hoping to stumble into a truth by pulling random books from library shelves. None of it was deep enough for Harvey. But he provided an ideal outlet for points of investigation and discovery.

It was just easier for me to sacrifice my self-interests if that meant peace and harmony—mine, my parents’, my teammates’, anyone’s.
Of the messages I took away from Prescott, not the least was that I did not have to apologize for the way I was born, least of all to myself. And it was not for me to comfort others because of it.

Harvey’s lessons would be easy to conjure in the few days immediately following our visits, but nearly out of reach amid the rigors of a baseball season. To that end, we stayed connected through books he’d recommend. Harvey was exceedingly literate and a bibliophile, and over the years he sent me dozens of books, or handwritten lists of works he believed worthwhile. I’d read them, at times searching for Harvey’s coded messages reinforcing the conversations we’d had. I’d grin at the passages clearly intended for me, such as the Cormac McCarthy line “It is always himself that the coward abandoned first.” Or another McCarthyism: “… those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but … it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”

I was all over the place, thinking something would make sense somewhere.

Harvey enjoyed my discoveries, even if he’d not intended a direct hit at all.

“Sometimes,” he told me, “I use the musket mentality.”

Where we diverged, however, was at the pitcher’s mound. Years after I’d earned my way onto it, I would not yield to those who tried to knock me off. Baseball still gave me the venue to fight back against all the other stuff in my head, and against what I assumed to be in other people’s heads. If anything, I evaluated my performances through the prism of my insecurities. I did believe I was letting people down when I didn’t win. And I did take losses hard, though not much harder than pitchers with two hands. I’d once heard of a pitcher who’d lost badly and afterward sat at his locker, silently carving up a baseball with a hunting knife. A little disappointment and
reflection—a run through downtown Cleveland, say—seemed tame by comparison.

I returned from the weekend feeling somewhat raw but unburdened, and I continued the self-examination. Maybe I was too nice, and maybe that was unusual in professional sports. But, maybe it wasn’t an act—or a mask—but a way to make me happier. Harvey probably wouldn’t buy it. Later, I sent him a photo. He hung it on his office wall at his home, alongside those of other athletes he’d counseled. I wrote, “Harvey, thanks. You are an inspiration to me.” And, of course, that made him laugh.

“It was nice,” Harvey once said. “But, me? Inspirational? I appreciate it, of course. But, the choice of words. Say thank you. Can that other stuff.”

He’d inspired me to think of who I was and what I wanted to be in ways I’d never thought of before. He inspired me to think of people and the journeys they have taken. He recognized that sports, to me, were validation. He told me, “You don’t need to validate who you are. You don’t need that. This is who you are without this.” I don’t think he even cared much about the pitching.

So, yes, he was an inspiration. Sometimes where he saw “other stuff,” I saw genuine feeling. That would piss him off, too, probably.

I maintained my relationship with Harvey through the rest of my career, and until he passed away in the spring of 2011, mostly through our love of books, sometimes when I needed a kick in the rear end, and occasionally just to say hello. But I carried that weekend in Prescott with me, and maybe it was coincidence and maybe it wasn’t, but in the period of my life leading into and through my times with Harvey, I met my future wife. She just didn’t know it at the time.