Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  The thirty-six-ounce bat in Russ Laribee’s hands may be the heaviest in the team’s rack, but he feeds off its intimations of power. He likes to envision the precise mechanical crush of all that weight propelling the ball, just as he likes to imagine the luck granted to him by the argyle socks he wears to the ballpark (Barrett, his roommate on the road, always asks him, “You got those diamondbacks on, baby?”). His other private tic: taking an uneven number of practice swings between pitches—one, or three, or five—so that any swing at a live pitch equals an even number of swings. Don’t ask why; he cannot explain.

  Now, as the pitcher raises his left leg to begin the delivery of the next pitch, Laribee’s analytical mind is whirring: Stay away from any sinker ball. Forget the wind blowing in. Drive the ball up in the air and into the outfield. Make contact.

  Contact. Laribee sends a fly ball deep enough to left field for Walker on third base to tag up and score. The official scorer up in the press box makes two blue-ink entries beside Laribee’s name: SF7 for sacrifice fly to left field, and RBI for run batted in. The score, in the bottom of the ninth, is now Rochester 1, Pawtucket 1.

  In the future, whenever this long night is revisited, Laribee’s humbling statistics (no hits, eleven outs, seven strikeouts) will invariably be brought up with there-but-for-the-grace-of-God glee. But Mr. East, the pride of Southington, Connecticut, will get to say this: “I tied the game.”

  With two outs and the game tied in the bottom of the 9th inning, the Pawtucket Red Sox take a sudden interest in offense. Dave Koza hits a single, Wade Boggs walks, Sam Bowen walks—and Larry Jones leaves the game, having given up a few inconsequential hits and just one run in 82/3 innings. He has pitched extremely well. But not good enough. It never will be.

  Nearly thirty years from now, he will sit in the living room of his high-rise apartment, the marina lights of Sarasota, Florida, winking below. As he watches a video clip of himself pitching in this game, so fluid, so young, he will say the names of the teammates who float in and out of the frame: “Dallas Williams. Eaton. Bonner. There’s Logan.” Then, in explaining the proper grip of a two-seam fastball, he will dig out an old baseball he just happens to have tucked in a baseball glove, tucked in a bag, tucked away in a closet. The ball will be dated like a document to stipulate that on June 18, 1979, in the Double-A Southern League, Charlotte beat Nashville, 3–0.

  Winning pitcher: Jonesy.

  The two managers adjust. Doc Edwards chooses Jeff Schneider, a left-handed short reliever who throws bullets, to pitch. Joe Morgan decides to remove his starting catcher, Gedman, from the game for a right-handed pinch hitter named Mike Ongarato, a clubhouse cutup of twenty-five whose career is nearly over. He is a gifted athlete, able to play almost any position, but his batting average has dropped in direct relation to his ascension through the minor-league system. He has found other ways to contribute to the team, though: filling players’ cleats with shaving cream; mastering the classic hot foot; wearing a fake nose and glasses around the batting cage to look like Groucho Marx in uniform. All silly stuff, but the pressure of conflicting dreams can build up in a clubhouse; sometimes you need a guy like Ongarato to provide release.

  This is not one of those times. Ongarato is thinking bases loaded, two outs, a base hit, we win; that is all he is thinking. But Schneider is throwing hard and high, and Ongarato often falls for that joke of a pitch. Before he knows it, he has two strikes on him and here comes another one, high and hard. He swings and misses.

  Strike three.

  Third out.

  Extra innings.

  Hundreds of fans head for the warmth of their cars. Players in both dugouts throw more wood onto their barrel fires. Hood, in the visitors’ clubhouse, scurries to save the chicken and pasta he has so carefully timed to be served at this moment. Easter approaches.

  And Mike Ongarato returns to the dugout, dejected, not yet aware of the historic distinction his cameo appearance will grant him. Someday, though, he will all but boast of his failure, describing his strikeout as the necessary plot device in the story of a historic night.

  “If I get a hit,” he will say, “it’s just another game.”

  INNINGS 10 TO 21

  Pawtucket Red Sox

  Ernie Orlando/Rochester Red Wings

  Like a boat slipped off its mooring, a baseball game in Pawtucket floats away upon the open waters of the night. The accepted length of 9 innings, established in 1857 by the Rules and Regulations Committee of the National Association of Base Ball Players, has provided no winner, no anchor of resolution. The players and fans have been cut loose by the swing and the miss of a clubhouse prankster, and are feeling the first stirrings of extra-inning excitement jumbled with extra-inning dread. They begin to wonder where this game will take them.

  The two pitchers in the game, Jeff Schneider for Rochester, Luis Aponte for Pawtucket, seem determined not to provide the answer; or, rather, not to be part of the final say. Schneider will pitch 51/3 innings and strike out eight batters. Aponte will pitch four innings and strike out nine, confounding Rochester batters with his herky-jerky delivery and nasty forkball, which is held as though Curly has wedged a baseball between the index and middle fingers of the pitcher—call him Moe—before Moe’s execution of a double eye-poke. When thrown with a snap of the wrist, the ball moves with deceptive speed before dropping at the plate like a shot bird. It is a fitting pitch for Aponte, whose craftiness on the mound seems born of decades of experience and tribulation. Five years ago he was pitching so poorly that he voluntarily left the Red Sox organization to spend three years in the baseball wilderness, where he developed a repertoire of deception—a forkball, a sinker, a slider, and what some say is a spitball. His hard work culminated last year in a late-season ascension to the major leagues, where he pitched in four games for the Boston Red Sox and kept everyone guessing about his age—perhaps to thwart the age discrimination so prevalent in the game. “He was about twenty-eight years old then,” his teammate, Roger LaFrancois, will later say. “But he was really around forty.”

  At the end of this season, Aponte will rejoin the Boston Red Sox, and begin to build a modest major-league career that will grant him lifetime man-of-importance distinction when he returns to live in Venezuela—where, according to teammates who have played winter ball there, he is a national hero, popular enough to be president. He will work for many years as a scout in Latin America for the Cleveland Indians, then devote his energy to growing the type of fruit you want to pitch as much as eat: oranges and tangerines, lemons and mangoes. At the moment, though, the domain of this presidential pitcher extends no farther than a patch of Rhode Island grass and dirt, where batter after batter cowers before him. In the 10th inning, he retires the last hitter to face him with what else but a third strike, completing what he will always consider to be the apex of his baseball career.

  Aponte returns to the clubhouse and huddles into a jacket, satisfied, but eager, too, to return home to the warm Pawtucket apartment he shares with his wife and two boys. This is not Venezuela weather.

  He is replaced by Manny Sarmiento, his fellow Venezuelan, roommate on the road, friend, and occasional adversary. Before season’s end, the two will engage in a brutal fight, supposedly over a card game, and supposedly including a Sarmiento bite to Aponte’s stomach.

  Quiet and withdrawn, Sarmiento seems to be the darkness to Aponte’s light, though this may be because he doesn’t really know anyone in the organization, and hasn’t detected an opportunity to open up—to demonstrate, for example, his lovely singing voice. Traded to Boston by the Seattle Mariners just a couple of weeks ago, he was immediately sent down to this someplace, this Pawtucket, where the air of the exotic that envelops him is intensified by his proud but foreign Cincinnati Reds pedigree. Nearly a decade ago, Dave Concepcion, the All Star shortstop for the Reds, saw the gangly sixteen-year-old Sarmiento dominate a game in the boy’s hometown of Cagua, and made note; within four years, the boy was pitching for the 1976 World Champ
ion Reds. Now, at twenty-five, Sarmiento has nearly five years of major-league experience, and he is working on a forkball, Aponte’s pitch, to find his way back—eventually to Pittsburgh, where one day, before a game, he will sing the national anthem.

  With one out in the bottom of the 11th inning, Dave Koza—the hero of that boy sitting on the third-base side, Danny Card, who is cold but resolved to honor that pact with his father to stay until the end—wants, again, to finish this game with a single swing, maybe with a shot that clears the army advertisement in right field that urges everyone to be all that they can be. Strange to think of it this way, but Koza tries to hit home runs for a living. At this point in his career, some of what he exhibits at the plate is muscle memory, but much of it remains his mind instructing his body. Smoothing the batter’s box dirt with his cleats. Planting himself perpendicular to the plate. Taking a slight step back in the box if the pitcher throws hard—and Rochester’s Jeff Schneider does. Trying not to be obvious in any adjustments; the catcher might spot the overcompensation and call for a pitch accordingly. Resting his wide-barreled bat on his right shoulder, then raising it up as the pitcher prepares to throw. Keeping the grip on the handle loose, trying to hold the bat with the fingertips, left pinkie resting on the knob. Keeping the hands in and the bat close to the chest. Telling himself to throw the head of the bat out toward the ball. Remembering what Ted Williams always says. Ted Williams, the greatest pure hitter who ever lived, wandering foulmouthed and single-minded through spring training in Winter Haven, perhaps taking comfort once again in seeing no one his equal among the latest crop of mewling man-children.

  Williams: Hips ahead of hands; hips ahead of hands.

  The outfield wall: Be all you can be.

  The pitch: Screw you.

  Koza hits the ball high and deep to right field, toward the outfield billboards for the Regina Pizzeria restaurant, and the North Kingstown Shell station, and the army’s come-on. But the Rochester right fielder circles beneath, waiting. He possesses this game’s most distinctive name and most impressive physique: Drungo Hazewood, six feet three and a lean, rock-hard 210 pounds. He is twenty-one years old, as fast as Mercury, with explosive throwing ability—but, in terms of major-league baseball, he is through.

  One evening nearly thirty years from now, in Sacramento, California, a knock on the dark screen door of a possibly vacant house will summon a large silhouette into view, the only brightness coming from the soft blink of a Bluetooth in his ear. Drungo Hazewood, the figure will say, and he will welcome the visitor inside, apologizing for the lack of furniture in the living room—the result of a relationship’s fresh breakup. He will sit at a kitchen table, fifty years old now and wearing a bathrobe, but formidable still. He will tell his baseball story.

  His mother, Catherine, was a housewife who gave her life to raising ten children and helping to rear who knows how many grandchildren. With her ninth about to be born, Catherine announced a dare: Whoever wins a foot race to the hospital gets to name the baby. Her son Aubrey won the challenge, and he had a good friend whose last name was Drungo. So Drungo Hazewood it was.

  His father, Leonard, was a welder and sandblaster who never missed a day of work at the old McClellan Air Force Base. If he didn’t feel well in the morning, he’d drink some strange Deep South concoction, sit there sweating for five minutes, then go out to earn another day’s pay. Leonard was not one for idleness. Shortly before he died, he told Drungo to join the military.

  But, Dad, Drungo answered, I’m fifteen.

  The boy found another path. A baseball standout and a football All-American at Sacramento High School, he was preparing to play football at the University of Southern California when the Baltimore Orioles chose him as their first-round draft pick in 1977, offering him $50,000 to play the game he loved more. His mother had to sign the binding contract for him because he was only seventeen. The next thing this black kid from Sacramento knew, he was playing rookie baseball in Bluefield, West Virginia, where part of his training was outrunning dogs. But he struggled in rookie ball, batting .184, averaging a strikeout every third at bat, and underachieving for the first time in his young athletic career. Still, he was promoted in 1978 to Baltimore’s Single-A team in Miami, where he hit a little better, and then to its Double-A team in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he hit 49 home runs in two years.

  In his autobiography, The Only Way I Know, Cal Ripken Jr. described his teammate Hazewood as the Olympian ideal, a breathtaking blur of muscle when scoring from first base on a double, and someone you did not want to anger. He recalled an infield brawl with the Memphis Chicks that ended with the ejection of several ballplayers, including Ripken and Hazewood. Though others managed to laugh off the incident, Hazewood could not calm down. He changed into street clothes without showering, grabbed a baseball bat, and, according to Ripken, snapped it in half. “I saw it happen, but don’t ask me how it happened,” Ripken wrote. “I’ve seen replays of guys snapping the bat over their knee, but Drungo didn’t snap this bat across anything, and he didn’t hit it against anything. He just twisted and it snapped like a toothpick.” With the bat’s broken barrel tucked into his pants, Hazewood ran down to the Memphis clubhouse and began pounding on the door, demanding to finish the brawl. His manager had to drag him away and lock him in an office until he settled down.

  Now, calm in his kitchen, Hazewood will smile at the suggestion that he could snap a bat in two with his hands. “Bat could have been cracked,” he will say. “Don’t make it sound like I’m Hercules.”

  According to Ripken, he and Hazewood were considered essential to Baltimore’s future at the time, along with the outfielder John Shelby, the pitcher Mike Boddicker, and the shortstop Bobby Bonner. “As much talent in one human being that’s ever played the game,” Doc Edwards will say of Hazewood, and Baltimore clearly agreed. At the end of Charlotte’s 1980 season, the Orioles summoned Hazewood to show what he could do in the major leagues. It did not go well. In the one game he started, he batted four times and struck out four times. For the last strikeout, in what would be the last at bat of his major-league career, he held his bat in check as the ball zipped past for a called third strike.

  The problem: Drungo Hazewood, a number-one draft pick for the Baltimore Orioles, could not hit a curveball. All the “if” clichés of baseball applied: He couldn’t hit a curveball if he knew it was coming; if his life depended on it; if it was gift-wrapped; if you put it on a golf tee for him; if he had a tennis racket, an ironing board, a car door. Hazewood recalls one spring training in which two coaches threw him nothing but curveballs: Here’s Uncle Charlie, and another Uncle Charlie, and another, and another. It did not take. Hazewood might have been able to compensate for this weakness in Double-A, where many pitchers lack the confidence and ability to throw curveballs for strikes. “But once you go from Double-A to Triple-A, there are pitchers who played in the major leagues and know now how to pitch,” Edwards will say. “They can throw a curveball for a strike anytime they want. And you get a steady diet of pitchers who are taught to throw what you can’t hit.”

  Tonight, one that he will remember as being so frigid “that when you opened your eyes, the insides of your eyes got cold,” Hazewood is demonstrating what he cannot do. In this strange game against Pawtucket, a place he has never even heard of, he is in the midst of going 0 for 4, with three strikeouts. Back in the 7th inning, against wicked Aponte, he tried lamely to bunt his way out of his curveball embarrassment. Then, with the count 2–2, he lunged at another curveball, missing so badly that his momentum carried him across home plate and, appropriately, toward the dugout. He trudged away, glancing briefly at right field as if seeking an answer, the bat held by the barrel in his large hand looking like—well, as Ripken would have it, looking like a toothpick, and about as useful.

  Not long after the night is up, Hazewood will be sent back down to the Double-A team in Charlotte. He will play in the minor leagues for two more years, take a break from baseball when his belov
ed mother becomes sick with breast cancer, and never return. His mother will die, he will quickly have two children, and, he will say, “The next thing I know I’m working construction.”

  Hazewood will turn bitter. He will come to believe that the Baltimore organization gave up on him prematurely. “I should have been in the big leagues by nineteen,” he will say. “I never would have been a .300 hitter, but home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, runs scored. If I get on base…” His voice will trail off to the quiet place of what-if.

  So the Drungo Hazewood of baseball will disappear. His former teams and teammates will not be able to track him down for the occasional reunion. And if a fan’s Drungo Hazewood baseball card somehow reaches him by mail, with the standard request to please autograph and return in the stamped and self-addressed envelope enclosed, he will just keep the card. In the hothouse environment of Baltimore Orioles fandom, people will adopt his name as their online handle, or invoke it whenever they want to discuss failed prospects, or say it out loud just to be funny: Drungo Hazewood. Rumors will circulate that the butt of this joke is homeless, or dead.

  All the while, the Drungo Hazewood of Leonard and Catherine will be working, anonymously, like the rest of us. For a while he will load and unload the belongings of others for a moving company, traveling across the country, passing through the hometowns of ballplayers he once knew. Then he will get his commercial trucking license and begin making deliveries for the Sara Lee Baking Group. He will rumble and jostle his way to Fresno and Reno, to Carson City and Yuba City, passing the interstate hours by thinking about his children, his grandchildren, and the best time of his life: the days he spent playing baseball on nights like this, as cold as it is, with got-your-back teammates close by, and the Baltimore organization invested in his future, and Koza’s fly ball coming to him as if it had found him. So easy to catch.