Imperfect: An Improbable Life (29 page)

T
he flagpole at the old Yankee Stadium—the tallest one with the American flag on it—was in left-center field, where it rose out of and towered over Monument Park.

In there, monuments to Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and Miller Huggins were on red marble slabs, while other legends were depicted on reverential plaques. Not only was it a nice place to visit, it was a pretty good place to pitch to. The fence was almost four hundred feet from the plate and the ball didn’t carry well to left-center field, which is why left-handed pitchers were at something of an advantage: More right-handed hitters meant fewer lefties knocking pop-ups into the right-field bleachers.

Just beyond the outfield fence, the pole stood in front of the frieze and the banners spaced perfectly along the top rim of the ballpark and the buildings of the Bronx beyond that. There were scoreboards and advertisements on the back wall, and pennants whipping in the breeze—a lot to meet the eye.

But with two out in the eighth inning, a runner at first base and a little time to kill, it was the flagpole that drew my attention—or,
more precisely, the golden ball at the top of it. In that moment, with the crowd crying out and clenching its fists, with so much seemingly at stake and four outs to go and Sandy Alomar Jr. taking forever to pine-tar and resin his bat and then take his warm-up swings, I reassured myself in a place fifty feet in the air. This was my habit. When my confidence ebbed or I found myself giving the hitter or the situation more than I should, I would step off the rubber and find that focal point, imagining the word
TRUST
written confidently in sturdy block letters across the golden ball. It was a reminder to myself to return to my strengths, to what I do best. It was about presence and awareness, being in the moment, living with the result because the process and the journey were sound and pure.

Anyway, it had always made sense to me.

Ten minutes before, I’d dropped a seventh water cup on my dugout stack, laid my jacket on the bench, and exhaled hard. This was the inning I’d lost my no-hitter to Bo on an elevated cutter he flared into center field. I wanted to win. I wanted the no-hitter.

So I went after Manny Ramirez with cutters early, which got me to a 2-and-2 count. The crowd groaned every time plate umpire Ted Hendry ruled a ball and applauded every strike and shrieked at every swing whether the ball was put in play or not, all of which was fun and scary and so thrilling.

I was trying to stay in the game, trying to keep my mind on executing every pitch. I was thinking, “Outs. Just get outs,” which is a little broad, but better than having my thoughts dart all over the place. Throughout my career, a no-hitter almost never entered my mind because I didn’t have what baseball people would think of as classic no-hit stuff. I gave up hits and then I got ground balls and double plays and moved the game along that way. But, you come a certain distance, you get twenty-one outs, and you might as well go
get it. So I threw a changeup Ramirez swung over the top of and got my twenty-second out, which led to an odd moment. Ramirez’s follow-through was long and, because he’d been fooled on the pitch, a bit wild. The bat crashed into Nokes’s left shoulder. Nokes winced and rolled to the ground, and I, thinking the ball had gotten free on the strikeout, dashed toward him before realizing the ball was in his mitt. Okay, so I was jumpy.

By then, pockets of fans were standing and shouting for every pitch. And so a first-pitch strike to Candy Maldonado, a cutter that sliced through the middle of the strike zone, brought thundering applause. The next pitch—another cutter, this one up and in—jammed Maldonado, who fisted a routine grounder to Randy Velarde at shortstop.

There were two out. Four to go, starting with Jim Thome, the dangerous left-handed hitter. He took two cutters, both away, the first a strike and the second a ball. On the third pitch, thinking Thome had already hit the ball hard once against me and was looking kind of comfortable, I dropped my arm angle to three-quarters for a fastball that Thome missed by six inches. I hadn’t used that near-sidearm delivery for the previous twenty-five hitters and would do it only once more, but it seemed right for Thome. Ahead 1 and 2, I missed with two cutters and then with a curveball, none all that close, so I walked him, which bothered me, because I’d followed the best pitch of the day with three that lacked faith or precision, that lacked trust.

The moment, I knew, had crept into my head, alongside hope. Hope would do me no good. Because he’d hit a line drive in the sixth inning, Thome was a threat. I pitched to miss his bat, so I had become a contact pitcher pitching away from contact, deserting the aggressiveness that had gotten me this far.

Which was when I found the golden ball. Junior Ortiz wasn’t going to hit. Sandy Alomar Jr. was. Alomar came out of the dugout and slathered up his bat. Waiting, I stood off to the side of the mound, seeing
TRUST
across that ball in the sky. It seemed so easy. The plan was the same, to throw the ball to the strike zone and let its natural movement carry it to the end of the bat, or toward the handle. Yes, trust.

When Alomar was ready and I was again on the mound, I took one more look at the flagpole, turned, got the sign from Nokes—curveball—and threw a good one that Hendry must have thought was high. Alomar then fouled off a cutter, took another curve for a ball, and then hit a cutter toward third base. Wade Boggs snared it on an in-between second hop and threw to Mattingly. I was again headed to the bench, again untouched. I broke into my Kamieniecki routine again, because I needed everyone to laugh, myself included. I sat down and thought,
Here it is
. For the first time, I think ever, I rooted for the team not to score. I wanted to get back out there.

CHAPTER 17

O
nce, when I’d known I’d let down the Angels and the people who wanted to believe in me because I couldn’t get enough outs, when I was so frustrated I no longer could pretend I believed in the next pitch or the next start or the next anything, I took a baseball bat in my hands and beat an inanimate object until I reached exhaustion.

The heavy bag, the kind boxers practice on, hung in the tunnel behind the home dugout at Anaheim Stadium. It was soft from years of abuse, and it was red like the faces of those who abused it.

When the bat splintered, I flung it to the ground, found a second bat, and continued to thrash until that splintered, too. Then I got a third bat, which died similarly, in a rage I’d never felt before.

I’d pitched poorly before and would again. I’d gotten hit and misplaced the strike zone and lost before. But sometimes a guy has to beat something, because hitting myself with the bat would have looked foolish. I was finished in the fifth inning that day.

Head down, legs heavy, Lachemann had come for the baseball.
And I went for the bat rack. Then to the heavy bag. I stopped because my reaction was an embarrassing display of immaturity and selfishness, and because it could have been construed as showing up Lach, and because it went against all that my father had instilled in me in childhood about dignity and composure. And because I couldn’t find a fourth bat.

That was September of 1995.

The following season was worse. Every day was worse. Every game, every restaurant meal, every night I came home to a quiet house, every time the phone rang, it was worse.

The promise of the previous season—heavy bag excluded—ran off in spring, in the Arizona desert, and never really did return, not for long enough.

There is perhaps no better job in the world than being a ballplayer, and no better position than starting pitcher. In fact, professionally speaking, if I had to live one day every day for the rest of my life, it might be the day after a win. Any win. The sun is warmer and the laughs are easier. The clock is meaningless. Lunch stays down. The next day of work is forever away.

Lose, however, and I would have rather done anything else. Lose, and the next day my arm didn’t feel quite right, and the traffic to the ballpark was exasperating, and all those guys getting ready to play again were the lucky ones. Lose, and the four-day wait for redemption was interminable.

Lose a bunch, and the impatience to win again becomes the very grounds to lose again. Rather than concentrating on executing a single pitch, the focus becomes winning a ballgame or three, and that’s far too big. Or, actually, it becomes not losing another ballgame. The cycle can be murderous to a baseball season, then to a career.

Lach used to tell us, “Trust your stuff.” Believe in your pitch and
throw it to the mitt, he said, and think of nothing else. In a losing streak, however, the single thought in a pitcher’s head—at least this pitcher’s—was, “Don’t lose.” Sometimes, “
Please
don’t lose.” I’d get a perfectly good sign from the catcher and risk it by thinking, “Don’t let this be the pitch that beats me.”

Obviously, that’s not conducive to pitching well. And I didn’t.

I lost 20 games in 1996, 18 of them in the big leagues, two of them when the Angels had seen enough and sent me to the minor leagues. Unlike the last time team management considered demoting me, no one put his career on the line and threatened to go with me.

It wasn’t simply a bad season. It was an epically, historically, hide-the-women-and-children bad season. On May 1, I was already 0-4. From the middle of May to late June, just to take one particularly imprecise period, I was 0-6 with a 12.72 ERA. By August 10, I was 1-15. I was losing by football scores.

By the time they counted up the big-league numbers at the end of the season, all based on at least 141 innings pitched (which I somehow managed to accumulate), my win-loss percentage (.100) was the ninth-worst in history. And my 7.48 ERA—again, based on at least 141 innings over a season—was the worst ever. Those numbers don’t come by accident. There aren’t that many bad breaks in a season.

At twenty-eight years old, and feeling mostly strong and healthy, I had perhaps the ugliest season in baseball’s modern era, which spanned thousands of pitchers over three-quarters of a century.

Generally, I viewed my seasons in the context of the areas that could have gone better. Even the good seasons—12-12 in ’89, 18-11 in ’91, 11-8 in ’95—I tended toward underselling the high points, at least to myself.

There was no underselling 2-18. I was 0-8 in Anaheim, in front of
Angels fans, family, and people who mattered the most to me. And they were so nice about it. I’d walk off the field down five runs in the fourth inning, and get an ovation for it. It was painful.

Left-handed hitters batted .347. I couldn’t keep the ball away from their bat barrels. Had they been one guy, they would have finished third—behind only Alex Rodriguez and Frank Thomas—in the American League batting race. And when there were runners on base, when I really tried not to lose rather than simply making a pitch of some passable quality, the league batted .358 against me. And, speaking to my dearth of confidence, I walked 78 batters, the most in my career, and five more than I’d walked in 1991, when I’d pitched 101 more innings. I even threw 13 wild pitches, none of which, it should be noted, were hit off the left-field wall for a two-run double.

As a pitcher, the season had been a breakdown of body, mind, and, hard as I fought it, spirit.

Tim Mead would find me after games in the weight room. A sweat puddle chased me from machine to machine. We’d stand there looking at each other and I’d ask, “What would you do?”

What would anyone do?

Remarkably, Lach and general manager Billy Bavasi stuck with me for as long as they did. Second-most-remarkably: Dana stuck with me all summer without making me sleep in the garage. Hard as I tried, I often failed to leave the hurt and frustration of the season at the ballpark.

I lifted more weights, threw more bullpens, threw more fastballs. When that didn’t work, I lifted fewer weights, threw fewer bullpens, and threw fewer fastballs. Then I’d start over. I couldn’t figure it out, and neither could Lach or his pitching coach, Chuck Hernandez.
Without a good fastball, my secondary pitches were not effective enough to get me through a game. Bob McClure was right, all those years ago. He’d told me I had to learn to pitch, that I wouldn’t have a fastball forever, and now it was gone and I had nothing to turn to. From the days of softball-toss competitions in elementary school, I’d always been able to throw hard; I’d assumed I always would.

For the first time, Dana and I discussed the possibility that my career was over, or discussed what we’d do when it was over. Something was wrong that couldn’t be fixed, and maybe I would not have the twenty-year career—and the lifestyle that came with it—we had assumed. Dana, ever protective, dragged these notions out of me. When I was home, I couldn’t talk about the games, because my failure in them was consuming. I couldn’t face old friends, people who shared a baseball connection, because they, I was sure, would want to help, or—worse—feel sorry for me. Going to dinner was torture. When I walked into a restaurant, I thought people saw not Jim Abbott, but the guy who was approaching 2-18, like a neon sign was hung over my head. Back in Orange County, I believed my entire world was wrapped up in my struggle. I tried to balance the joy and uncertainty of Dana’s pregnancy against my job, but never did. The pit in my stomach that came as I left for the ballpark was as painful as it was relentless.