by Dan Barry
His bottom of the 28th inning: groundout; strikeout, looking; strikeout, looking. Thank you, Lord.
In that ice chest of an owner’s box along the third-base line, the open-air, cheap-wood domain of Ben Mondor, the remaining members of the PawSox family gather. Here are Ann Koza, Debbie Boggs, and one or two others, shivering in their theater chairs, watching a play without end. The toddler Meagann Boggs continues to sleep under Ben’s used desk in the back, undisturbed by the constant jingling of the telephone. But the caller is never Harold Cooper, the president of the International League, who has yet to respond to Mike Tamburro’s frantic message, left with Cooper’s wife, that We’re STILL playing baseball here in Pawtucket! Instead, time and time again, it is a worried someone looking for an absent someone yet to come home from your stupid minor-league ball game, and don’t you know that it’s after three on Easter Sunday morning? Still playing, Tamburro explains. Still playing.
At one point, the caller is Joe Morgan’s wife, Dottie, who will not accept Tamburro’s explanation that the game is still in progress, and who suspects that her husband and his baseball buddies have been raising their glasses to toast a win or drown a loss. So Tamburro summons Morgan from his peephole perch to convince his wife that, yes, we’re still playing.
Mrs. Morgan: Oh yeah? Then how come you’re answering the phone?
Mr. Morgan: Because I got kicked out in the 22nd inning, and—aw, forget it.
Mondor, ever the gracious host, offers his guests a beverage not available at the concession stands of McCoy: that fine blended Scotch called Chivas Regal. Take a swig, he urges. It’ll keep you warm. So they pass the elegant bottle around, sharing glorious, chest-warming swallows, before someone with a sense of etiquette distributes a few plastic cups. These people are so tired that they cannot help but laugh, and so cold that they cannot stop from spilling the precious amber liquid in their trembling hands. Ann, who later jokes that she saw the Easter Bunny hopping through the outfield, keeps her cup under the blanket that cocoons her. It is the bottom of the 29th, her husband is leading off, and she prays again:
Come on, Dave. Get the hit. THE hit.
This is Koza’s twelfth at bat of the night—three games’ worth. He has a double and three singles so far, but he is not thinking about the uptick in his batting average right now. He is thinking about getting on base, starting something, getting the hell out of here. Unlike Boggs, Koza does not obsessively calculate his batting average, though Boggs might say that he wouldn’t, either, if he put up numbers as low as Koza’s (.239 in 1979, .235 in 1980). This is a touchy subject for Koza. Three years ago, at the beginning of the season in Pawtucket, he was sitting in front of his locker, lost in his depressing thoughts, trying to process the difficult news that he had been sent back down to Double-A in Bristol.
Just then, a voice spoke to him: Hey, kid, whattaya hitting?
The kid from Torrington, Wyoming, bound for Bristol, looked up and saw the Kid, Ted Williams, with that handsome box of a head, that once splintery body filled out with the weight of retirement, and those eyes, those piercing, 20/10 eyes. The greatest hitter who ever lived was working for the Red Sox organization as a hitting instructor, lecturing on the applied sciences to anyone worthy or talented enough, and now he was staring at Koza with those eyes that were said to see all. And the depressed kid from Torrington mumbled: What?
I said, whattaya hitting?
I don’t even know.
Williams exploded. He screamed for maybe a minute, maybe an hour, who knows how long, because Koza can hear the man still, yelling that you should fucking know your fucking batting average at all fucking times. Then the god continued on through the clubhouse, having reduced this poor baseball mortal to tears. Yes, it was true: Ted Williams had made Dave Koza cry. But what do you do with this anecdote? Do you tell your children someday about the fleeting but intense emotional moment when one of the most famous Americans of the twentieth century made you weep? Do you learn from it? Do you vow from now on to know what your batting average is at all times, as well as you know your own date of birth?
No. Better to say: It is this at bat that counts. This moment, now.
Koza swings at Umbarger’s first pitch and sends a ground ball skipping toward Rochester’s shortstop, Bobby Bonner, arguably the best defensive player on the field, possessed of a baseball awareness you cannot teach. Occasionally someone on the bench will ask Rochester manager Doc Edwards why the hell Bonner’s playing out of position, behind second base, or in shallow left center field? Doc will just say that Bonner must sense something the rest of us do not, something based on complex variables: the pitch about to be thrown, the stance of the batter, the shift in the wind. Don’t worry about Bobby Bonner.
Bobby Bonner waits, his body crouched in what he describes to kids as his sitting-on-the-toilet position. But in keeping with the impish nature of this night, Dave Koza’s ground ball takes a sneaky, screw-you hop, then rattles around Bonner’s hands like a thing come to life.
“Bonner bobbles it, fires to first, in time,” says the radio announcer, Bob Drew. “And Koza’s out of there, six to three.” Then Drew’s radio-booth partner, Pete Torrez, adds: “Bob, that was a good play by Bobby that time.”
A good play by Bobby that time. But everyone in Rochester knows about the other time, last year, in Toronto. For all his defensive prowess, it is a single ground ball that will forever elude him, and prove to be his undoing in baseball. But for that one ground ball, just one of many thousands that Robert Averill Bonner was born to catch, he would probably not be here in Pawtucket tonight, fussing with the disposable hand warmer in his back pocket and focusing on this early-morning absurdity. Instead, he would probably be asleep in a luxury hotel in Kansas City with the rest of the Baltimore Orioles, resting up for a Sunday game and another day as heir apparent to the team’s brilliant but aging shortstop, Mark Belanger.
A single ground ball.
Bonner is only twenty-four, but he has already lived several lives. Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, all he wanted to do was play ball, ball, anything with a ball; ball was the first word he uttered. He developed his extraordinary hand-eye coordination by bouncing a golf ball off the walls of Richard King High School and imagining that each carom was a baseball in play. He would compete against himself, and not stop until a full 9 innings had been played. After starring in several sports at King, he focused on baseball at Texas A&M University, and did well enough to sign with the Baltimore Orioles, for $9,000, in 1978. He eased right in with the other baby birds, as they were called, playing hard, drinking hard, rarely passing up the chance to smoke a little dope on the side. He was a wild Texas mustang, and proud of it.
By the fall of 1978, though, Bonner seemed determined to compromise his talent and break up his young family. He was making more money in the oil fields than on the ball field, he was partying as much as ever, and the wife, the two little kids, the tiny apartment—it all seemed to conspire against him. He told his wife, Becky, that he wanted out of their marriage, but in the emotional tug-of-war that followed, she convinced him at least to join her for a service at the revival church she attended. And something happened. The fiery preacher invited to the altar those who were ready to accept Jesus as their personal savior, and Bobby Bonner went up, his athletic body convulsing with sobs, as he asked, again and again, forgive me. With his burdens lifted, he will later say, peace came.
Imagine what went through the minds of Dave Huppert, Brooks Carey, and all the other baby birds when Bonner, their good ol’ drinking buddy from Texas, appeared at Biscayne College in Miami for spring training in 1979, baseball glove in one hand and a Bible in the other. Word got around in the Baltimore organization that something had happened to Bonner, something strange. All of a sudden he’s talking about eternal salvation. What’s more, he’s not drinking!
Bonner wound up spending many nights alone. But his newfound religious devotion, now competing with baseball for his attention, did not seem to
affect his game. As the starting shortstop for the Rochester Red Wings in 1980, he was voted the International League’s rookie of the year, even though he hit only two home runs and batted just .241. He was simply that good in the field, so balletic that people said they’d pay to see Bonner take infield practice. His defensive ability sometimes took away the breath of Cal Ripken Jr., the up-and-coming kid at third. “One day I was playing in close at third when a high chopper bounced over my head,” he later wrote. “When I looked back expecting to see the ball roll into short left field, there was Bobby, catching it while running full speed toward the line. Then he threw back across his body on a dead run to nail the fast runner at first. Amazing.”
Executives in Baltimore’s front office had all but chosen him as the shortstop of the future, with Ripken seen as the successor to the great Brooks Robinson at third. But Earl Weaver, the crabby, foulmouthed Orioles wizard, did not like being pressured into decisions. Not so goddamn fast, he was saying. Not so goddamn fast! This would explain the manner in which Weaver greeted Bonner when the rookie was called up to the major-league club in September 1980. Bonner will never forget the skipper’s first words to him, although his Christian propriety will require that he sanitize the salutation in its retelling.
To wit: “Who the blankety-blank do you think you are?”
A few days later, on September 14, 1980, a ground ball changed everything.
Here are the once-vital, now-forgotten particulars: The second-place Orioles were hoping to gain ground on the division-leading Yankees with a win over the Blue Jays in Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium, a challenging field of Astroturf more beloved by the scrap-scavenging seagulls of Lake Ontario than by those endeavoring to play baseball on it.
In the top of the ninth, Baltimore’s first baseman, Eddie Murray, future Hall of Famer, hit his second solo home run of the game to tie the score at 2–2. Then, in the bottom of the inning, the rookie Bobby Bonner, sitting on the bench and minding his business, heard:
Bonnicker! Bonnicker!
Bonnicker? Or was that Boddicker?
It was Weaver, conflating Bonner’s name with that of another rookie, the pitcher Mike Boddicker, but ordering this Bible-thumping, front-office favorite onto the field as a defensive replacement. Bonner hustled out to shortstop, where he normally felt at home, but at that moment did not. For one thing, he would always smooth the dirt in front of him—his left foot sweeping, then his right—partly to ward against bad bounces, but also to give the batter no sense of which way he was leaning in preparation for the next pitch. This was Astroturf, though; not much to smooth.
In the top of the 11th, Murray hit his third solo home run of the night to put Baltimore ahead, 3–2. All the Orioles had to do was get through the bottom of the inning, and Murray would own a night for the ages. But with one out, Toronto’s Lloyd Moseby doubled to left field. Then Barry Bonnell, a decent right-handed hitter, planted himself in the batter’s box, right foot first, then left, then a tap of the outside corner of the plate with his bat.
These next few moments never leave Bobby Bonner. Thirty years later, he will rise from his chair in the library of the Decatur Baptist Church in Decatur, Alabama, where he is working after decades of missionary work in Africa, and crouch like the shortstop he was, waiting for the pitch, his hands down, palms tilted slightly toward the imaginary plate, wracked knees bent as best as he can. At fifty-three, he will have been through two heart attacks, many bouts of malaria, and a spell of blackwater fever, all endured while building Christian schools and spreading the Good Word in various African outposts. And yet a wet night in Toronto will be with him wherever he goes. Here, in this church library, he is once again the shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles, an untested rookie, his body crouched in anticipation, his mind thinking one out and a runner on second.
The batter, Bonnell, was also a man of deep faith, a Mormon who, in Single-A ball in Greenwood, South Carolina, would tape a flashlight to the back of the school bus seat in front of him to read scripture on those long nighttime rides to somewhere. A few years ago, while he was playing for the Atlanta Braves, some young fans he knew from church in his hometown of Milford, Ohio, greeted him at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati with a banner that read, “Give ’em hell, Barry.” He went over to the youths, told them that the sign’s language was inappropriate, and strongly suggested they take it down, which they did. For this and other reasons, Bonnell’s nickname is said to be “Preacher,” although no one has ever called him that to his face.
Holding the bat upright and at the center of his chest, Barry Bonnell waited for Tim Stoddard, Baltimore’s impossibly tall right-handed closer, to begin his motion. Then, as Stoddard started, he cocked his bat and bent his knees, just as Bonner opened his glove and leaned forward. Pitch, swing, connection. The baseball shot across the plastic field, just to Bonner’s right. With the runner breaking for third, he was thinking, because he was always thinking: Catch and throw to third. This was his, all his.
But the line drive skipped on the wet Astroturf and zipped past Bonner, skidding into left center field to tie up the ball game and all but explode the white-haired head of Weaver in the dugout. The official scorer’s debatable decision was E6, error on Bonner, and of course the Blue Jays went on to win the game in the 13th inning, 4–3.
After the game, Toronto’s manager, an old shortstop named Bobby Mattick, expressed sympathy for Bonner, saying: “I’ll tell you, that was a hard-hit ball. It skipped on him. It was a tough hit to come in cold and handle.” And Cal Ripken Sr., a Baltimore coach, would tell his namesake that it was nearly an impossible play to make. But Weaver did not call the rookie over, put his arm around the young man’s shoulder, and say, shake it off, we’ll get ’em next time. No. That would not be Weaver. Instead, he bellowed profanely to the locker room, to the media, and to all of North America that this kid Bonner is a worthless front-office mistake, a so-called hot prospect at shortstop who can’t even catch a fucking ground ball.
Even now, long after Baltimore players stopped referring to errors as “pulling a Bonner,” this single ground ball, this single fucking ground ball, remains in play. If you talk to any of Bonner’s contemporaries from the Baltimore organization, they will assert that the moment broke his confidence and wiped away his desire; whether they mean the actual error or the Weaverian fusillade of abuse that followed, it still comes down to this ground ball, which they vividly describe, whether they were in Toronto that day or not (a few will even insist that the ball went through Bonner’s legs; it did not). Some argue that Weaver was cruel and out of line; others say that in his Darwinian style of managing, he was testing Bonner’s ability to handle big-league pressure, and Bonner failed.
The ground ball has come to be seen as the bouncing embodiment of destiny, the catalyst for profound change—not just for Bonner, but for all of baseball. With that error, Bobby Bonner allows Earl Weaver to challenge the front office’s contention that Bonner was the Orioles shortstop of the future. Then, in 1982, Weaver will make perhaps the most fateful decision of his storied career, moving Cal Ripken Jr. from third base to the open position at short, where Ripken will play without stop for what seems like a millennium, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games and laying the statistical groundwork that will ensure his first-ballot induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. All of which will add considerable value to the 1982 Topps baseball card No. 21, which features the photographs of three Baltimore Orioles “Future Stars”: shortstop Bob Bonner on the left, pitcher Jeff Schneider on the right, and in the middle, third baseman Cal Ripken. (“I use that card sometimes when I preach, because there were three guys who were crucified: the one on the right, the one on the left, and the One in the middle,” Bonner will later say. “The One in the middle is the One you need to look at.”)
No right-thinking person can argue that Ripken would not be in the Hall of Fame if he had remained at third and Bonner had become the everyday shortstop. But a right-thinking person might
say that Ripken’s singular career at shortstop came about because of his exceptional talent, his indefatigable work ethic, his keen competitive streak, the foresight of Earl Weaver—and a certain ground ball hit in Toronto in September 1980, nearly a year before Ripken’s first major-league game.
A single ground ball. Thirty years later, Barry Bonnell will have no recollection of even hitting it.
The ball well behind him now, Bobby Bonner will sit back down in the church library in Alabama to express satisfaction, not regret, over his life’s journey since that defining evening in Toronto. He will not become the Orioles shortstop of the future, of course. He will hit .194 in 61 major-league games over four years, then retire in 1984 after a successful final season with Rochester. Of his old teammates, he will say, “I’d die for those guys.” Of his first major-league manager, the irascible Mr. Weaver, he will say that the men met at an Orioles reunion a few years ago, and their teary conversation focused on forgiveness, and how some things happen for a reason.
Still, Bonner will sometimes question whether, in addition to that fateful error, his career was affected by his open commitment to live as a Christian. After all, his superiors often complained that his born-again ways were disrupting the clubhouse, and that he was violating baseball code by bringing his religion onto the secular field. Bonner will deny doing so, but at the same time he will not be shy about sharing his feelings.
“Jesus lives in my heart,” Bonner will tell one manager. “He is with me wherever I go.”