Imperfect: An Improbable Life (26 page)

D
ANA
D
OUTY WAS
a senior at UC Irvine, a college basketball player and a person grounded enough to be dubious of the whole professional baseball player thing. She came from a family of firefighters. Her brother had been a college pitcher who, two years before, was drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies.

I should have been at spring training, but a labor impasse resulted in the owners’ lockout of the players until early March. So, I was at a party—hosted by a friend of a friend of Chuck Finley’s—instead. Dana was smart and beautiful and athletic, all of which had me quite nervous for our first date, dinner a few nights later with those somewhat mutual friends. It went well enough that I was somewhat torn when the lockout ended the following day. I packed up that morning, drove to Arizona for my second spring training, and the moment I returned asked Dana for a second date. We shared childhood and family experiences; we both saw the world as a good place, and I realized early on that she was far too decent of a person for me.

She never asked about my hand. In that, I felt her strength, her certainty. Maybe she believed in me, but I translated it as a belief in herself. I admired her acceptance of it, and me. As I fell in love—it took moments—I became thankful she would take it on, to endure the second glances, to wonder what our children might have to overcome, and to make my life ours. Love, as a concept, to me means personal concessions. In our case, Dana did nearly all of the conceding. She wanted to come along, but not to nurse me; to stand alongside me. In many ways, she embodied the person Harvey was trying to teach me to become. I liked that in her, and I believed I was closer to being that person with her.

I proposed—originally enough—on Valentine’s Day in 1991 and we were married after that season.

In many ways that year was perfect. Dana’s love, and her company, and her calm, helped me to believe in myself. My pitching matured with the rest of my life. I won 18 games and finished third for the American League Cy Young Award. People were talking about my ability to pitch again, this time not to opine that I was terrible and should be sent to the minors, but to say I stood with the best pitchers in the league.

The best part of it was not the validation of me (though I didn’t hate that), but the vindication for those who stayed with me: Rader, Lachemann, Finley, McCaskill, even Jimmie Reese, who—whether I’d won or lost—would drag his fungo bat into the outfield the next afternoon and hit me a hundred more. I recall every one of those afternoons as sunny and warm, the two of us camped in right field, me standing between two baseball caps and him sixty feet away, a half-dozen baseballs at his feet. It was Jimmie who transformed me from a decent fielder to a better one. He’d draw two batting gloves over his hands and give me a nod. I’d pantomime my delivery to the plate and with perfect timing he’d snap toward me a ground ball—crisp, like he’d hit the sweet spot of the bat every time. In his day, they’d say, Jimmie could pitch batting practice with that fungo bat. It was in these sessions I developed a greater rhythm for transferring the glove from my right hand to my left, and I was proud of the work we did. Jimmie would try to shoot balls inside the ball caps and past me. He bet me cans of Coke he could. I think maybe he owes me a six-pack or two.

Rader used to say that Jimmie and I were put on earth to meet each other. Jimmie hung around almost ninety years to make it happen, and by then he was stooped and frail and angular, like he’d been
carved from the very lathe he kept in his Westwood workshop. There, he made picture frames—he framed almost everything he came across—and his own fungo bats, cleaving them the length of the barrel so they were flat on one side and rounded on the other. Jimmie helped me to assimilate into the big leagues, then to survive them once I was there. I’d sit next to him on the bench during games, which he’d chart for Lach and the pitching staff. And in the spare moments Blyleven wasn’t sliding under the bench to hotfoot him or spitting sunflower seeds on the chart so Jimmie would have to tear it up and start over, we became friends. When I told him I’d become serious about a girl, he insisted on meeting Dana, afterward saying, “Beautiful smile, kid. Beautiful smile. Nice teeth.” He was kind and made me laugh and paid for every early-bird buffet meal we ever had together, during which he would remind me to watch my money and to invest in T-bills. He loved the T-bills.

Jimmie died in 1994, at ninety-two. Because he hadn’t much family, I always thought of him as being survived by baseball. I didn’t keep much from my career, but I have two of his handmade fungoes, one signed to me, the other to Dana.

The beauty of Jimmie, he was the same gentleman in 1991 as he had been the season before, when I lost 14, and was the same guy in 1992, when I pitched as well as I ever had and was 7-15, and the same again in 1993, when I was no longer an Angel.

I’d miss him.

From the moment I was drafted, I figured I’d be an Angel forever, like Al Kaline was a Tiger forever, and Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker certainly would be. Growing up in Michigan in the era of free agency and Marvin Miller and rising salaries, I admired players such as Trammell who played for one team. I never heard about his contract negotiations. And every Opening Day he ran out to shortstop
like there was no place else he could ever be. On the back of his baseball card, under TEAM, there was just a tall, endless stack of TIGERS. I wanted to be that guy, to be that reliable. Yet after my fourth season with the Angels I was in the middle of a very public contract negotiation and being portrayed as another greedy ballplayer rejecting money most people couldn’t fathom. Heck,
I
couldn’t fathom the money.

It was the winter after the 1992 season, in which I’d lowered my ERA from my 18-win season and still lost 15 games. The Angels’ offense finished last in the American League in nearly every important category: we lost 90 games, finished 24 games out of the lead in the AL West and clearly were in transition. So, I wasn’t alone on the staff. As a team we had the third-best ERA in the league and yet Mark Langston lost 14 games and Chuck Finley and Bert Blyleven each lost 12 games. Little had gone right. Rader had been fired in late August the season before and the organization was finding its way under Buck Rodgers, a popular former Angel with a big personality who’d managed the Expos for a half-dozen seasons. Even a bus trip down the New Jersey Turnpike proved too much of a challenge for those Angels. In late May the first of two buses carrying the club from New York to Baltimore crashed into the woods, seriously injuring Rodgers and battering and bruising a dozen players and team personnel. I’d pitched into the eighth inning that night at Yankee Stadium, allowing only one run, and we lost anyway, and I left the Bronx thinking things could hardly get worse. Two hours later we were pulling guys out of a bus that was on two wheels and threatening to tumble sideways down a hill, the manager was moaning in pain, the second baseman’s ankle was the size of an ice bucket, the traveling secretary’s ribs were cracked, the bullpen catcher was bleeding
like crazy, and the right fielder had punched the bus driver in the jaw.

We were never in the race. The season ended, mercifully, but over the summer team general manager Whitey Herzog, Boras, and I had begun discussing a contract extension, two years before I would become a free agent. Boras was by nature opposed to contract extensions—he preferred the free-agent market, where teams drove up the cost of players on one another—but it was my desire to remain in Anaheim, and there was no harm in negotiating. We’d seemed to settle on the contract extending for four years, which would cover two arbitration years and two years of free agency. Now it was about the money. When the team was in Baltimore in late August, Herzog placed a piece of paper in my locker, folded once. I opened it. He’d written, “$16 million.” At the time I would have been the highest-paid four-year player in the history of the game. I should have accepted.

Just a couple weeks earlier, we—Boras, Herzog, co–general manager Dan O’Brien, and I—met for lunch and to decide my future, at McCormick & Schmick’s, a seafood place on Main Street in Irvine. Officially—and, it seemed, confidently—Herzog offered $16 million over four years. I nearly choked, it was so much money. Boras was somewhat cooler. He responded by sliding several pages of statistics across the table and countering at $19 million. It wasn’t what Whitey was hoping for, though I’m sure he half expected it. He barely looked at the packet Scott had prepared before tossing it dismissively back at him.

“This type of shit,” Herzog announced to the table, “is what’s wrong with baseball nowadays.”

That didn’t sound too good to me, but I left the meeting believing
we were close, that a deal was likely, that we’d settle at $17.5 million, that I’d still be an Angel forever. I was thrilled and rushed home to tell Dana about it. Turned out, the Angels weren’t negotiating. They’d given us their best—and only—offer. I had no idea, but we’d way overshot what owner Gene Autry would pay and what Herzog had the patience for.

After the note from Herzog in the clubhouse and lunch in Irvine, I would never again hear from the Angels about that contract. The season went on, September passed, and it hung in the air, neither agreed upon nor dismissed. And on a rainy night in early December, that contract was the furthest thing from my mind when Dana and I stood curbside at LAX, watching Dana’s mother approach in her car. We’d been in Hawaii on vacation. We were exhausted from the long flight. The weather was terrible. When I opened the car door, I knew something was wrong. Something had happened. Dana’s mom had been crying.

“You’ve been traded,” she said.

In a hotel room in Louisville, Kentucky, where baseball’s annual winter meetings were being held, Tim Mead opened his window and felt the cold air whip against his face. Before he would write the press release Herzog had ordered him to write, Mead screamed his frustration into the night, a primal profanity that jarred loose his own tears. As he sat at an unfamiliar desk and typed the words—Jim Abbott … Yankees … pitchers Jerry Nielsen and Russ Springer, first baseman J. T. Snow—his phone rang. He said hello. I asked if it was true. He said it was.

I was stunned. Dana and I both were. And hurt. It wasn’t about going to the Yankees yet, it was about leaving the Angels. I rolled it all around in my head countless times—the faces of my teammates, my friends, Dana’s family, her mom, the contract negotiations, Herzog’s
biting words. I didn’t think we had rejected their offer and they never actually said, “Sign it or you’re gone.” I would have signed it. I would have stayed.

The following days were muddled, an eddy of regret and anger that eventually slowed and then stilled, leaving acceptance. Mead set up a press conference so I could answer some questions, which I showed up for and immediately regretted. As hard as I tried to keep it upbeat, I felt I’d sounded whiny about the failed negotiations and the trade. It all seemed so terribly wrong, like first I’d gone along with Boras’s negotiation strategy and then with Mead’s media strategy, and they’d both meant well, but I should have known better. Not only would I not be an Angel forever, but it was ending disgracefully. Instead of keeping my mouth shut and moving on, I kept trying to justify the negotiations, trying to get Angel fans to like and forgive me.

When I arrived late morning there were twenty-five reporters in a small ballroom at the Doubletree Hotel, a few blocks from Anaheim Stadium. Mead believed the fans needed to hear from me, that it was the right thing to do. “Closure,” he kept saying. “People need closure.”

He felt so strongly about it that he organized the media event without the Angels’ permission, and he was scolded by senior management when the morning newspapers carried the accounts of it.

A few days later the letters to the editor in the
L.A. Times
were so hurtful. To the people who’d penned them, I’d become the player I never wanted to be. I was greedy and selfish and ungrateful.

Jackie Autry, owner Gene Autry’s wife, called a few nights later. It was late and it seemed she had been crying, blaming it all on Boras, saying she and Gene didn’t like him very much, which put them in the majority of baseball owners.

I had chosen Boras when I was twenty, when all that was guaranteed was that very first check. Fairly new to the industry, he’d negotiated a big bonus for Cris Carpenter, a right-hander out of Georgia, in the 1987 draft. The first pick of that draft—Ken Griffey Jr.—signed with the Seattle Mariners for $160,000. Carpenter, taken fourteenth overall by the St. Louis Cardinals, also received $160,000. That was good enough for me.

But this seemed wrong.

Later on, Boras’s style sometimes bothered me. As he built his firm and reputation, there came clubhouse talk about his aggressiveness both at the negotiating table and in pursuit of other clients. I defended him. Almost immediately the Autry-owned Angels had problems with him and hinted I was wrong for employing him. Boras called their tactics “the oldest trick in the book,” but I wasn’t so sure. I know that I probably disappointed Boras, too. His refusal, I believed, to consider what other people thought of him (or me) didn’t match up with my hypersensitivity. In the end what attracted me to him—the unyielding toughness that bordered on antagonism—also pushed me away. And maybe that’s why he thought I needed Harvey.