Imperfect: An Improbable Life (33 page)

She’d always just wanted something good to happen, knowing how hard I’d take the alternative. She dared not hope for anything like this, only for a good game and a win, then maybe some contentment.

By this ninth inning, Dana was alone. None of the other wives wanted to be the one who said something to jinx the no-hitter, so one by one they’d gone off to the restroom or for a soda and never come back. Dana’s brother had played some college baseball, so she’d grown up with the game and its etiquette. She’d also known the disappointment of having Bo Jackson break up my last shot at it, so she sat on the edge of her box seat and didn’t eat, didn’t drink, and barely moved, as desperately as she too needed to run to the restroom. She also knew enough about the game to think Fermin had gotten an awful lot of that curveball. In fact, she thought it was a home run. Me? I was thinking double. There was a groan from the crowd. That ball, everyone thought, was going to get down.

Along came Bernie Williams. Running hard from straightaway center field, Bernie, a middle-distance sprinter in his youth in Puerto Rico, appeared to be in mid-440. With his right hand extended behind him feeling for the fence, he caught the ball coasting onto the warning track. Fermin, robbed by Gallego five innings before, had lost another hit.

One more out.

The place was going crazy. Really crazy. So was my head, my heart.
Thirty-seven years before, Don Larsen had thrown a perfect game in this very ballpark, from this very spot, in the World Series. Bob Feller threw a no-hitter here for the Indians. Allie Reynolds had a no-hitter. A decade ago, another lefty, Dave Righetti, threw his no-hitter here, won 4–0, then had sweetly and memorably laid his head on the shoulder of his catcher, Butch Wynegar.

I knew the feeling. These are not solo flights.

Carlos Baerga stood in, the switch-hitter still batting left, still defending against the cutter. Gene Michael, the Yankees GM who’d traded for me, stood up in his box behind home plate, no longer able to sit still. Willie Randolph sat to his right. Brian Cashman stood to his left. From the television booth, the voices of Dewayne Staats and Tony Kubek tightened. Dana gripped the bottom of her chair.

My brother, Chad, twisted the volume knob on the radio of Mom’s Honda Accord, straining to hear the play-by-play above the ambient crowd noise. He was in Harbor Springs, Michigan, in the driveway of my parents’ condominium, the car key turned to accessory. One of his college friends was in the passenger seat, another in the backseat. A family acquaintance had called the condo from Flint in the seventh inning, asking if they’d heard what was happening that afternoon at Yankee Stadium, and Chad and his buddies had dashed into the driveway in search of a radio.

With each of the last nine outs, he’d yell to Dad. Eight more! Seven more! Finally, one more!

In the stands, the middle-inning lines at the pay phones—people calling their dads and sons and friends to turn on the TV—had thinned to nothing.

Behind me, Mattingly worked the dirt at first base with his spikes, scraping at it like a hockey goalie would the ice in front of his net. The energetic Gallego bounced on the balls of his feet near second
base. Boggs, whose defensive plays had helped get me here, pounded his glove expectantly at third. At shortstop, Velarde shook his legs. They felt heavy, a little sluggish. The grind of the game, day game after a night game, had settled in his thighs.
Don’t hit it to me
, he thought.

They’d only just gotten over the Fermin scare when I threw the first pitch to Baerga, the next-to-last pitch of my afternoon, a slider. He couldn’t have seen many breaking balls from the left side all year. He took it for a strike, then gestured with his left hand like the pitch was too high. From there, the up-and-in slider, we went down-and-away with the same pitch. Baerga pounded it toward shortstop and Velarde. He rolled forward off those tired legs and gathered up the ball.
Hit him in the chest
, I thought from memory.
Hit him in the chest
. Velarde threw to first, hard and true.

At first base, Mattingly caught the baseball with a hard
thwack
and raised his arms.

“He did it!” Staats cried from the booth.

The crowd, all those people, rejoiced. Dana stood among them. Michael, his tie loosened, Randolph, and Cashman exchanged handshakes and fist pumps.

Cloninger and Showalter jumped to their feet, mindful of the low dugout ceiling, grinning at each other.

Nokes, who’d backed up first base on the throw from Velarde, rushed in from my left, his hands in the air. Boggs charged in from behind.

All I could think of was,
Yeah, baby! Yeah, baby!

So I yelled it over and over. I yelled it to Nokes and toward the stands and into the gray sky. I yelled it so Dana could hear it twenty rows up, so my mom and dad would hear it in Michigan, so the Angels would hear it in Anaheim. I’d been practicing that last pitch,
that last out, since my dad first knelt in the backyard, since I’d peppered that brick wall in Flint.

Taken in itself, beginning with that horrible start in Cleveland, living with it for going on a week, hating it, preparing and then sticking with a completely different plan, then living it for almost three hours, for all that, the final moment arrived with shocking suddenness.

I’d survived all the little bounces that could have changed it. We’d survived it, Nokes and I, the nine of us in all. It had come true. What remained was this very cool celebration, hugs from Nokes and Cloninger and Williams, from everyone, in a place like Yankee Stadium. It took a long time to leave the field, in part because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anyone picking up the trash just yet, or hosing this moment away.

Amid all those bodies, feet stomping around, various gloves and gear strewn on the infield, I found my cap on the ground near the first-base line, randomly. I wasn’t really even looking for it. I tipped it to the crowd.

“One of the most wonderful moments,” Kubek was saying in the booth, “for as sweet a man as there is in any uniform in a major sport.”

More important for this afternoon, I’d managed a great result from the pitcher’s mound. We’d won. I’d held together and, by the ninth, was throwing the ball with conviction. I descended into the dugout, thrilled so many people were still in the park. Over the dugout, Yankee fans hugged and shouted and laughed, and I felt just like they did. Someone had scooped up my jacket. The cups were still there, stacked just so. Passing along the bench, I made a left into the tunnel that led to the clubhouse, and the cheers chased me up that narrow, dark, and musty passageway.

There would be champagne. And there would be another trip to the field, where I’d raise my arms to the people behind the dugout, and then I’d summon Nokes, who needed to share in that. He’d been so good. He’d believed.

There were writers everywhere in the clubhouse, asking questions between the phone calls, the hugs, the laughs.

In Anaheim, Tim Mead grinned. “Every time Jimmy succeeded after he left,” he’d say, “I wanted to say out loud, ‘Look what Jimmy Abbott did today.’ I can remember all you naysayers, whoever you are, well, screw you. For all the individual accomplishments I was privileged to be around, and I wasn’t around for that, I may have felt as happy for Jim Abbott doing that as for any athlete. He did it.”

In Florida, Doug Rader was charmed.

“I’ve seen a ton of no-hitters,” Rader, who then was a coach with the expansion Marlins, would say, “and I’ll never forget Abby’s. Most no-hitters are almost clinical. They’re just so aggressive. Jim’s, I don’t know, it touched me emotionally.”

In California, Marcel Lachemann nodded and smiled. Cloninger had come to him in spring training, wondering where my big fastball was, wondering about the velocity. Tony told him he wasn’t sure I could pitch anymore.

“Next thing you knew,” Lach would say, “he was throwing a no-hitter at Yankee Stadium.”

In Michigan, Mike and Kathy Abbott celebrated with Chad, who’d come up from the driveway and burst through the door with the news. And in homes from Anaheim to Baltimore, in places where children wished only to be normal, to fit in, maybe the world took another step toward them, not away.

Amid the cheering and the toasts (George Steinbrenner sent the bottle), the best moment of the day came in the hallway outside the
clubhouse. Normally she would wait in the family room, but Dana had been led to the big metal door. I came out in my uniform, unbuttoned to the middle of my chest. Her expression was of pride, disbelief, and joy, ultimately a reflection of all that had gone on in our lives for the past couple years.

In that dingy cement corridor, where New York sent its reinforcements to feed on the news of the day, we stood for just a few seconds alone in the swarm of lights and gazes.

“How about that?” I said, smiling.

“How about that,” she whispered, smiling back.

We’d come all this way, from California to New York, from familiar to foreign, and seemed to hit every bump along the way. Now we laughed and held each other in the clamor of the hallway, and for a moment all the cameras disappeared, and it felt a lot like we’d made something of it all. I left her with a promise that I wouldn’t be long.

Back in the clubhouse, twenty-five men raised plastic cups to the occasion, to the 234th no-hitter in major-league history, the eighth by a Yankee, and the sixth by a Yankee in this ballpark.

The cab ride home, back along the Major Deegan, over the Third Avenue Bridge, then to the FDR Drive and onto the surface streets of the Upper East Side, seemed less rutted and jarring than they’d been eight hours before.

In the backseat, Dana and I relived the final outs: the Lofton bunt that skewed foul, the Fermin drive that on another day and in another ballpark might have changed everything, and the clamor that chased Baerga’s ball straight into Velarde’s glove.

In the apartment, the red bulb on the answering machine blinked impatiently. And the phone was ringing.

“Big Jim,” Chad shouted from Michigan, “with the no-no!”

We dialed the phone and shared the good news, and in between picked up the phone and apologized for the busy signals. Our view was of the East River and a sliver of the skyline downtown. Sitting twenty-seven stories high and looking out over a small slice of the city, opening another bottle of champagne, we marveled at the way the world turns over anew again every day, and then was kind enough to include us. In the clinks of our tulip glasses, we shared a wish that this was the start of something very good. Neither of us dared dampen the night with the words.

We took the two-person party downstairs and into the streets of the Upper East Side, and to Cronies, a bar that felt a little like home. Mattingly sent a bottle from across the bar, as did strangers in Yankee caps, and we celebrated as dusk turned to night. This was the New York we’d longed for, as I’m just as sure this was the Jim Abbott for which New York had yearned.

In most other cities, the people identify with the local team. They cheer and they boo and then they go home to their lives. In New York, allegiances are tauter than that. The Yankees and their fans are bound by history, by the men who wore the uniform and the fathers and grandfathers who witnessed their greatness and failures. The relationship bordered on obsession for each other, so that on special days in that ballpark, tens of thousands of people in the stands and the players on the field seemed to share a single heartbeat.

I’d had a day like that.

Not just a game, but an entire day. When we left Cronies, the streets were alive on a Saturday night. Corner vendors already were selling copies of the next morning’s papers, and people called to me and waved the early editions of the
Post
and the
Daily News
, their back pages trumpeting history at The Stadium. I signed autographs
as we walked, feeling for the first time that I belonged among these people—Yankee fans, New Yorkers, those who worshipped the pinstripes.

Dana and I slept that night feeling as close to New York City as we ever had, and probably ever would. It wasn’t home, exactly, but a place familiar and comforting, like we were starting to fit in, like we’d justified our presence there. It was good to belong.

The alarm shrieked mid-morning. There was a game in four hours, and a flight to Texas after that. Through the mild thumping in my head, I filled a suitcase with ten days of wardrobe and supplies. No matter the game, the routine always won.

Downstairs, the doorman grinned his congratulations and nodded toward the sidewalk, where a television crew stared back through the glass. The headache kicked up a notch, maybe two. A yellow cab took me past the usual landmarks, into the Bronx, along the perimeter of the stadium and to the back gate, where more cameras waited. It hadn’t occurred to me the story might creep into another day, after the box seats had been wiped down, after the mound had been re-groomed. My footsteps echoed in the corridor where the afternoon before I’d had to turn sideways to navigate the mass of people. On the other side of the metal door, my locker was surrounded by reporters, some of whom had come from Philadelphia and Boston and Baltimore to sort through the day after. The Advil was all the way across the clubhouse.

I went along with the storylines because, I guess, the moment had earned them. The story for the story’s sake, the one-handed pitcher making his way, I never liked. The story with achievement, however, seemed more relevant. That had been the goal—to be a good pitcher. To win games. I’d needed to earn my way, to be good enough, to hold on to the hope that more was possible. I’d wanted to lift my arms to
a gray sky, to honor a victory, to feel the approval in my heart. The stories could say what they wanted, but two-handed guys or one-handed guys don’t throw no-hitters. Pitchers throw them. Eight other men share them. And maybe occasionally one of those nine doesn’t look exactly like the others, but the game doesn’t recognize that.

Boggs kept looking at me, smiling genuinely, like he hadn’t put yesterday away yet, either. He was a touch offbeat, Boggs was, but he loved the game, its history, and the way it evolved a little every day. I thought he was enjoying the memory as much as I was.