Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  “I went home, packed my stuff, and went to Elmira,” Koza will later say.

  Rookie ball in Elmira, New York, along the Empire State’s southern tier, led to Single-A ball in Winter Haven, Florida, which led to Double- A ball in Bristol, Connecticut, which led to Triple-A ball here in Pawtucket, which led to this moment. Seven years of chasing baseballs for a living—a fourth of his lifetime—culminates now in this pop fly at the pitcher’s mound. Dave Koza drifts to his right, looking up, ready to catch a ball he believes is his.

  Mine, he thinks. Mine.

  Wade Boggs is twenty-two years old, with a devoted wife named Debbie and a two-year-old daughter named Meagann—both of whom are at the game tonight, as usual. They live on one floor of a triple-decker a few blocks from McCoy Stadium, but when the season ends, they will return to live with his parents in Florida. They drive a red 1975 Dodge van, bought used. The carpeting on the walls and ceiling suggests that the van once accommodated parties; now its purpose is to transport the belongings of an itinerant baseball family.

  Debbie, cute, with round cheeks and blondish hair that curls at her shoulders, grew up poor in Tampa, so poor that, for a while, she dreamed of becoming a nun. It seemed so glamorous; that is, until she learned that the job required you to be Roman Catholic. Still, there was something about watching her Catholic girlfriend don a lace veil for Saturday-night Mass, looking so very much like a princess.

  She and Wade began dating at H. B. Plant High School. Though he was nearly three years younger, his mature, chivalrous ways won her heart. She cheered him on at his high school baseball games, often tallying his eye-popping statistics for him (he batted .522 as a junior!). But the competition adjusted to his talents when he was a senior, and his batting average plummeted. His father, an air force master sergeant, hustled to the public library to check out a classic—The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams and John Underwood—and ordered his son to study the master’s tips and observations: how to hit to the opposite field; how to coordinate hip and wrist action; most of all, how to hit your pitch—how to swing only at the pitches in your “wheelhouse.” The boy’s batting average quickly returned to its rarefied level, a level that he thought would justify a first-round selection in baseball’s amateur draft.

  Instead, the Major League Scouting Bureau rated Boggs a non-prospect; supposedly, he didn’t run well enough. The Boston Red Sox drafted him in the seventh round, and then only because one of its scouts, George Digby, argued that hitters this gifted are a handful in a generation. “I was crushed,” Boggs will later tell Sports Illustrated, but he signed—for just $7,500. “I knew what I wanted,” he will tell the magazine article’s author, Peter Gammons. “I knew the other scouts were wrong.”

  In 1976, two days after graduating from high school, Boggs traveled twelve hundred miles north to Elmira, New York, to play in the New York–Penn League. After the end of an unremarkable season, he returned to Florida to marry Debbie in a Baptist church. Their two-day honeymoon in Clearwater began with a romantic night of shared vomiting, courtesy of some microwave cheeseburgers bought at a convenience store.

  After Elmira came Winston-Salem, then Bristol—and now, the beginning of a second season in Pawtucket. If you ask Debbie, they are happy, living in a more spacious apartment than, say, that two-room place in Winston-Salem, where their only furniture was intended for lawn use. Wade’s job is to play baseball, and Debbie’s job is everything else: wife, mother, statistician, you name it. Over the years she has operated a switchboard, managed a beauty salon, swept up at a florist’s, tarred and shingled roofs, and worked the overnight shift at a ware-house. Her earnings have helped to finance his baseball education, giving him the time to concentrate, to practice. Without Debbie, there is no Wade.

  And who is Wade? He is a man who swears that he wanted to be a major-league baseball player ever since he was eighteen months old; whose father tied his ambidextrous son’s left hand behind his back to force him to throw with his right hand, broadening the number of baseball positions he could play; who has not forgotten how high school classmates signed his yearbook with “See you on ‘Game of the Week’” who is so driven by statistics—his own—that his teammates claim he begins recalculating his batting average a nanosecond after hitting a ball into play.

  One story. Last year, on the final day of the 1980 season, the PawSox were losing 6–0 in the 9th inning to the Toledo Mud Hens, with Boggs leading Toledo’s Dave Engle for the International League batting title by less than a percentage point. If he didn’t bat again, the title was his.

  But players in the Toledo dugout, possibly equipped with a pocket calculator, determined that if Boggs made one more out, their teammate would win the batting title. So, with two outs, Toledo’s pitcher purposely walked Pawtucket’s Ray Boyer, hardly an offensive threat, to force Boggs to come to the plate. Boyer, understanding what was happening, tried to get thrown out. He strolled to second, sauntered to third, and then began a leisurely jaunt toward home. But the Toledo pitcher purposely threw the ball into the backstop, committing Boyer to score and forcing Boggs to remain in the batter’s box.

  Boggs grounded out to first, lost the batting title by .0007 of a point—and broke down.

  Say what you will about Boggs, and some of his teammates clearly do, but he has worked extremely hard to be on the field tonight. Just ask the grounds crew. Or the batboy. Or some of the hangers-on from the neighborhood. They know.

  They know that he arrives at the ballpark several hours before a game—before any of his teammates—to prepare. They know that someone has to hit dozens of ground balls to him at third base, and so they swat him ball after ball in an otherwise empty ballpark, helping him to quiet the rumors that he can barely field his position. They also take turns pitching to him as he fine-tunes that godlike hand-eye coordination of his, the loss of that batting title ever-present in his mind. It could be a groundskeeper pitching batting practice one day, a mope from the neighborhood the next. Boggs doesn’t care if you’re a Little Sister of the Poor, taking a break from that home for the indigent elderly you help to run in Pawtucket; if you, dear sister, can throw strikes consistently, have at it—but be careful. Somewhere around here there is a groundskeeper who floated on air after Boggs told him he had just thrown the best batting practice Boggs could remember. The next time out, so the story goes, the groundskeeper hit Boggs in the helmet with a pitch. Grab a rake, pal, you’re done.

  What these people behold is a captive to ritual. He wakes up at the same time every day, arrives at the ballpark at the same time every day, and essentially fills out a curious checklist of things to do, each one connected to the other, every day. When to dress. When to take his first pinch of smokeless tobacco. When to warm up his arm. When to field grounders, and for how long. When to touch each of the three bases, in order. When to visualize the four at bats before him. When to take batting practice. When to take wind sprints. Everything has to be just so, down to the placement and use of the pine tar, weighted doughnut, and resin in the on-deck circle. But of all his superstitions, the strangest and most off-putting is this: Whether as a joke or in complete sincerity, he refuses to allow any of his bats to touch the bats of his teammates, supposedly out of fear of contracting their bad batting habits.

  These daily, time-consuming rituals, eighty or so of them, reflect in part a rigid upbringing in a military household in which you were at the dinner table by 5:30 or you didn’t eat. But more than that, they represent Boggs’s commitment to preparation; to dividing his day into specific segments of time so that he knows exactly what he ought to be doing—what he needs to be doing—at any given moment. This melding of mind and body, then, takes hours to complete, down to the moment that he carves the chai sign, the Hebrew symbol for life, in the dirt with his bat before stepping up to the plate. Boggs is not Jewish, but when he was about eleven years old he read in the back of a comic book that the chai sign signaled luck. The thought lodged in his Little League mind.

 
“It’s having positive energy and positive karma all around you,” he will explain three decades after this game. “I was a firm believer that if you kept the same momentum going, everything follows. I’m not one for spontaneous effort.”

  But for all the emphasis he places on daily order, there are some things over which the Wade Boggs of 1981 has no control. He cannot prevent the Boston Red Sox from acquiring the gifted third baseman Carney Lansford from the California Angels during the off-season, any more than he could have prevented the Toledo Mud Hens from conspiring to deny him the batting title. Nor can he stop the whispers within the Red Sox organization that he is a powerless hitter; that he is an unremarkable fielder; that he is not a team player. By the end of the 1980 season, after five years in the minors, Boggs had an impressive career batting average of .313, but there was something about him that the Boston front office did not like. The winter before, the Red Sox chose not to protect him from being bought at a nominal price by any of the twenty-five other major-league clubs, but no team considered him worth the cost. And so Boggs returned to Pawtucket, where, it seems, only he realizes how extraordinary he is.

  Until he is summoned to the major leagues, what else can Boggs do but follow his rituals, draw ancient Hebrew symbols in the Pawtucket dirt, and wait. Just as he is waiting now for this ball falling like an over-ripe apple from the sky.

  Mine.

  Koza and Boggs do not see each other, their heads tilted so far back that Boggs’s cap tumbles to the ground. Even as they collide at the mound, even as their upraised arms become entwined, their gloved and bare hands seeming to form two birds, brown and pink, about to take flight, the two men only have eyes for that falling ball.

  It plops into Boggs’s jostled glove, pops out, and plops for good into Koza’s lobster claw of a first baseman’s glove. The batter is out. Koza pirouettes to keep the Rochester runner honest at first, then turns back to face Boggs. The teammates speak for a fleeting moment. What do they say? Maybe “That was mine,” or “One out,” or, simply, “Are you okay?” Neither will remember.

  Koza taps Boggs on the chest with the ball. A tender gesture: We’re in this together.

  A cameraman for WPRI Channel 12 sits behind home plate, on the other side of the billowing netting between fans and field, quietly recording a few scenes for the end of the eleven o’clock news.

  The footage captures a small part of one game’s incremental, even ordinary, progression: the 5th, 6th, and 7th innings. But the passage of thirty years will strip this B-roll snippet of its deadline urgency, imbuing it instead with an almost meditative, art-film quality. The needs of a late-night newscast in Rhode Island will have long passed, along with the baseball careers of these assembled men, leaving only a few minutes of sounds and images from a strange April night: the ambient lights and music of the ballpark, the cacophonous rumble of murmurs and cheers, come-ons and taunts.

  The backstop netting behind home plate sways in and out of focus to lay blurry crosshatches across the unfolding scene, as if to underscore the impenetrable barrier between past and future. Beyond the outfield limits, streetlamps lend the soft romance of the boulevard to drab, industrial Division Street. Out there, past dead center field, a light that brightens a warehouse’s loading dock also shines directly into the eyes of catchers, vexing Pawtucket’s two backstops, Rich Gedman and Roger LaFrancois. Somewhere behind you, an unseen concessionaire calls out “Ice cream heah,” his voice challenging the perceived insanity of a frozen dessert on such a cold night. Over your left shoulder, a few fans huddle in winter coats, their cheeks and noses flush, their legs covered with a green plaid blanket. And on the grass before you, players set aglow by stadium lights perform their quiet tics and habits between the brief and sudden bursts of action. Notice what happens, for example, when a Rochester batter hits a fly ball well foul of the left field line, somewhere in the direction of that bookmaker’s place, the Lily Social Club. Pawtucket’s left fielder, Chico Walker, jogs toward the foul line in that exaggerated trot known to all outfielders: an act of feigned hustle, perhaps, but also of faint distrust—of double-checking that the foul ball is indeed foul; that it’s not some trick of the eye. He returns then to his position in the dark, verdant grass, which seems to nearly swallow him.

  Watch Rochester’s Tom Eaton after he is thrown out trying to steal second base, possibly because the pitch that hit him on the right foot back in the 1st inning stole a step or two. He rises from the ground after receiving the shortstop’s thumping tag, on his injured foot no less, with his uniform dirty and his red helmet off his head, his pride spilled before him in the dirt. He cannot stay; he must leave. He picks up his helmet and trots off, chastened.

  Other little baseball moments reveal themselves. After each play, for example, Koza turns to remind the outfielders of the number of outs, raising two fingers in the top of the 6th inning, no matter that the scoreboard immediately behind them brightly trumpets the same information. Infielders are taught to do this in childhood as a way to keep everyone alert, on the fairly good chance that one of the Little League outfielders has been daydreaming again about that girl he likes in the fifth grade. One finger raised for one out, two fingers for two outs, and a closed fist for no outs—or, rather, still no outs.

  Rochester’s young third baseman, Cal Ripken Jr., approaches home plate with an unmistakable air of purpose. Standing six feet four, with a slender body destined to fill out, he rakes the dirt smooth with a sweep of his right cleat and then his left, cleats with Oriole-orange highlights that may well have been a gift from the Oriole hero Frank Robinson, a family friend. He peers at the pitcher with shoulders slightly hunched, suggesting mild curiosity about what comes next, then raises his thirty-five-inch-long bat, the fingers of his white-gloved left hand fluttering along the handle. Tonight he has warmed his bats by that fire in the barrel, in the belief that he can reduce the sting that follows bat-on-ball contact on a cold night. In his mind, he even sees his bat bending during his swing—having snap.

  He waits, a study in confidence rooted both in his undeniable talent and in the endless hours he has given to learning the game. “Singularly focused,” one of his Rochester teammates, John Hale, will later say. “He was at the ballpark all the time. He made no bones about it: ‘This is my existence. This is all I care about.’”

  There is also his bloodline. His father is Cal Ripken Sr., the intense third-base coach for the Baltimore Orioles and an experienced Schlitz-and–Lucky Strike traveler of the county roads of the minor leagues, both as a player and as a manager. The young man standing in the batter’s box is just twenty years old, but in many ways he, too, is a minor-league veteran, with a connection to major-league royalty that is evident in the cleats he wears. He spent many childhood summers trailing his dad, fielding grounders, shagging flies, and absorbing the levels of the game in ballparks up and down the Eastern Seaboard—in Miami, and Asheville, and Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Not long ago, Earl Weaver, the Orioles manager, watched young Ripken take fielding practice and thought: Baltimore’s next third baseman, or maybe, just maybe, its shortstop. The kid reminds Weaver of Marty Marion, the tall, gifted shortstop of the St. Louis Cardinals of the 1940s. At ease onstage; baseball mature.

  Ripken’s teammates know how determined he is to improve; how he studies opposing pitchers and hitters for any wink of information that might give an edge; how he wants to succeed so completely that his diminishing nickname of “J.R.”—a twinned reference to being the son of Cal and to the Dallas television show—slips from usage. Jim Umbarger, a Red Wings teammate and a former major-league pitcher, marvels at Ripken’s ability to wait on a pitch longer than anyone he has ever seen. His finger-snap reflexes grant him the extra millisecond to determine what kind of pitch is coming at him, adjust, and drive it to left, center, or right.

  His teammates believe that Ripken already knows he is destined for major-league glory, though their own destinies are nowhere near as certain. They gather around Floyd Rayford, th
e doughy catcher and infielder nicknamed “Sugar Bear,” like children at a campfire to hear his thrilling and somewhat unnerving tales of what it’s like up there, in the bigs. Last year, Sugar Bear got called up and had 4 singles and 5 strikeouts in 18 at bats (hell, he’s already assured mention in the Baseball Encyclopedia!). Now, amid the lull of the clubhouse or the hum of the bus, Rayford will tell his Rochester teammates how there’s no grace period. How it seems as though every game is 2–1, the scary manager Weaver is screaming again, and you’re just hoping the ball isn’t hit to you. Sugar Bear at least has been to the mountain. The others wonder whether they, too, will one day ascend. As for Ripken, he grew up on the mountain. He clearly has no doubt, his teammates think. He knows he’ll make it.

  Cal Ripken’s teammates are wrong, though—hoodwinked by his talent, his workaholic ways, his focus at the plate. He hopes to make the major leagues, but he would never describe himself as certain of it. In fact, he remains in awe of the prospect, no matter that he grew up on the fields of minor-league baseball, and knows the likes of Robinson and Weaver. Many years later, he will say that he found “no comfort in knowing what it’s all about.”

  Just consider all the anxieties the young man has had to contend with in the last two months alone. A few weeks earlier, at the beginning of Baltimore’s spring training, Bryant Gumbel interviewed the two Cal Ripkens, senior and junior, for a segment of the Today show. Then, after performing well during spring training, the younger Ripken was among the first players cut from the major-league squad. After that, while taking extra batting practice just before leaving to join the Triple-A team, he popped something in his right shoulder. The trainers ordered him not to swing or throw for a few days to allow the injury to heal, leading some teammates to whisper that the Chosen One had pulled an “attitude muscle,” and was fabricating an injury to express his displeasure at having been cut from the big-league camp. He soon corrected this misinterpretation—an indignity he will not forget—by gutting his way around being placed on the disabled list. And even when he did things exactly right, some humbling moment always followed, some reminder not to get ahead of himself. On Opening Day in Rochester, for example, he hit a home run, only to be removed for a pinch hitter later in the game. Something else he will not forget.