Salty language and diminutive stature aren't the only things he has in common with the likes of Sparky and Earl. Manny doesn't hold grudges, at least not against his players. He'll scream at a kid in the second inning then give him a pat on the back in the bottom of the third. That's how it was when I covered Earl for five years in Baltimore and Washington. He'd chew out your ass for something you wrote but offer you a beer before you left his office. He did not want to end things badly. It was the same with his ballplayers, who were sometimes united in their hatred of Earl, but it helped get him into the Hall of Fame.
Happily for Sam, Manny took one look at Sam in the cage and decided that Sam was a hitter. Nothing would ever change that. There's a lot of this in sports evaluation. Most coaches and scouts are guilty. They get a first impression of a player and stick with it, regardless of subsequent performance or failures. It has something to do with pride in one's own ability to evaluate talent. It has been the undoing of hundreds of scouts and coaches through the years.
Manny's confidence in his own evaluation didn't flag when Sam struck out four times in one varsity game. When the Legion's summer season started, Manny put Sam into the seventh spot in his batting order, and—Durocher-like—he never took him out.
Safe at the bottom of the order, surrounded in the lineup by bigger, older, more imposing hitters, Sam got a steady diet of fastballs down the middle. He didn't get any hits in his first game, and I figured he was bound for the bench ... but not with Manny in charge. In his fourth game, Sam legged out an infield chopper for his first Legion hit. Any hitter will tell you, sometimes that's all it takes. Next time up, Sam crushed a long triple to right-center.
After that, he didn't slow down until his Legion team reached the state tournament in Worcester. Starting with the infield hit, he had nine consecutive hits. He finished with 28 hits in 60 at-bats (.467). He went to a college showcase at Bentley and hit a home run and a triple. He took fifteen swings against a pitching machine at Fenway, part of a Jimmy Fund promotion, and hit a ball eight rows over the visitors' bullpen. He developed a keen sense of the strike zone and would not go after bad pitches. He was almost too selective. He could pull the ball and hit it the other way. He was faster than he looked. A couple of college coaches told me he had "recruitable" bat speed.
Downer dad that I am, I've always been there to remind Sam how many great hitters there are in places like Florida, Texas, and California. Not to mention the Dominican Republic. Too many parents get caught up in the dream of college scholarships and professional contracts. I know better. There are hundreds, thousands of 18-year-old baseball players with better skills than my son. I see them every year at spring training in Fort Myers: the kids who dominate their high school leagues, sign professional contracts, get the write-up in the local paper, receive the shaving kit from their parents, and shove off to jerkwater minor league towns where they struggle to hit .200 against 6-6 lefthanders who throw 95 miles an hour but can't hit a billboard from twenty feet. And that's why the message for Sam has been to have a Plan B. It's okay to dream about playing professional baseball, but the strategy is to see if baseball will help him get the education he needs to get a fair start in the professional world.
Sam attended several college and professional showcases in the summer before eleventh grade and was suddenly mindful of his competition for college baseball slots. He converted from first base to outfield, where his relatively weak arm and poor instincts were exposed. Most of the kids at the showcases threw better and went back on the ball with more confidence. A few of them even hit the ball harder and farther, a humbling but necessary education for my baseball-centric son.
"Dad, some of these guys are really good!" Sam observed.
It was with this newfound perspective that Sam went into his junior year of baseball, and it was clear from the start that he was putting too much pressure on himself. Every at-bat became a make-or-break experience. He'd set ridiculous goals for himself and feared that every at-bat would determine his entire future. He started off the season 0-8 and was something like 2-15 when he went to Walpole and had a chance to play in front of the former Red Sox manager Joe Morgan and a scout from the Dodgers. It was painful. Sam went 0-5, striking out three times, and after the game looked at me and asked, "Why can't I hit?"
Tough question. I told him what I always told him at times like that, a string of clichés that spilled out of me as if they were coming from a tired old sportswriter hack: Relax. You'll always be able to hit. The best hitters fail seven out of ten times. Remember what Tom Hanks said in A League of Their Own: "It's supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everybody'd do it." And finally, try to go back to your earliest days of baseball and remember what it is you love about it.
He wrote about this internal battle, the bane of all athletic performance, in the spring semester of that same year. The school essay served nicely as his college application writing sample a few months later when he formally applied to Boston College. Entitled "Life Is a Silly Game," it read:
My life is a silly game. The game I play is in my mind. For the most part, I play against myself. This is not a game like Chutes and Ladders or musical chairs. The game I play is a puzzle, like a challenge. I have worried that I might be legally insane. I over-analyze everything. And not just in a comical Seinfeld way either—in all aspects of life. I see everything ten steps ahead. I drive myself nuts.
My biggest challenge is not to think myself to death. If I get a 78 on a math test, I instantly think: I want to get a 90 for the term for an A-, a 7.7 towards the grade point average at Newton North High School—there will be four tests this term—I need 360 points out of 400—360 minus 78 equals 282—divided by three equals 94—and that is what I must average for the next three tests. Another example; baseball. I know what my average will be if I go 0-4, 1-3, 2-5, 3-4, and so on. How does all this over-analyzing hurt me? It crushes my confidence.
On any given day I could go from thinking that I am not going to be able to get into Dunkin' Donuts University all the way to thinking I am a shoo-in for Harvard. I do not understand why this happens, but I cannot seem to do anything about it. I struggle to stay consistent and not get too down. Now there is the game connection. Mind game. My mind's a game.
I love baseball. But it might kill me. If I go 0-4, I want to hang myself in the closet; conversely, if I go 3-4 with a home run, I want the Red Sox to select me as their first draft pick. I love to play, I just hate when I suck. It is harder for me to stop myself from bashing my helmet against the wall after striking out than it is for me to hit an 88-mile-per-hour fastball. The challenge in my life is all mental. The mind game I play over and over. When something goes wrong, preventing myself from thinking my life is over is the only way for me to win.
Fortunately, Sam knows nothing of the mind games that are played in the third base bleachers and beyond the chain link fence in right. Watching can be more nerve-racking than playing. The kids get to use their bodies to release tension and aggression. Parents just sit in the stands and die a little every time they see their kid fail. Detroit Tiger manager Jim Leyland said that watching his teen son play baseball was far more stressful than managing against the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2006 World Series. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have a son who is saddled with the responsibility of pitching. It's awful and can be awkward. What do you say to make the pitcher's dad feel better when he just walked home the winning run? Like Sam, my life is a silly game when I'm watching him hit. Superstitions abound. If he gets a hit his first time up, I'll be sitting in the same spot, holding my hands in the same place next time he bats. If he strikes out in the first, you'll see me standing someplace else when he comes up again in the third. And woe to the well-meaning stranger who tries to ask me something about the Red Sox when my son is hitting. The kid only bats four or five times a game. A little quiet. Please.
Sam came out of his April slump in grand fashion, and by the end of the year he was back where he wanted to be with his
name in the Globe among the statistical leaders and four homers and a steal of home to beat Brookline. He was good enough to make the All Scholastic page in the Boston Herald, though not quite good enough to get the same recognition in my own paper. Ever mature, I posted Sam's Herald photo and the accompanying article on the wall of my cubicle at the Globe.
Then came the State Tournament and the best day of Sam's life. He hit three home runs in a first-round upset victory over Malden Catholic.
It was surreal. We might not yet believe it if not for home video captured by Kate: a laser over the fence in right-center, a high fly to center—carried over the wall by wind and metal—then a well-crushed ball over the fence in left-center. After he was intentionally walked in the eighth, Jarred Amato, a dedicated senior, the hardest-working player on the team, delivered a game-winning, bases-loaded double. Several hundred fans attended, including a Boston College coach, and Red Sox scout Jeremy Kapstein. Best of all for Sam, his uncle Bill was visiting from Arizona, watching him play for the first time since Little League.
"Unbelievable," Bill told Sam, "Three homers in a game. I think I only did that twice."
Sam got a kick out of that.
Already connected by bloodlines and life in the batter's box, Sam and his stockbroker uncle have been a club of two since that day. Sam calls his uncle Bill's 800-number with instructions to buy or sell, and then they talk about hitting.
Life changed for Sam after that magical afternoon at Newton North. Letters from colleges started coming to the house nearly every day, and it was clear that the coaches at Boston College were taking him more seriously. His exploits were covered in the newspaper and briefly became a topic for the local sports radio station. One of the commentators mentioned the fact that Dan Shaughnessy's son hit three home runs in a high school tournament game. The cohost said, "Wouldn't it be great if the kid made it to the big leagues and then fell flat on his face?"
I warned Sam about this. My job gave him rare exposure to big league baseball and major league ballplayers. He'd seen the stars up close and had conversations with a few. He'd had a chance to hit at the Sox minor league complex and got some instruction from the Sox's hitting coach, Ron Jackson. But the downside was that he would sometimes be a marked man. He'd have to demonstrate uncommon restraint, and he'd probably have to be a little better and tougher than the next guy in order to avoid the appearance that he was being favored because of his dad.
About a month after the high school season ended, Sam got a letter from a Red Sox scout inviting him to a professional showcase in Wilmington, North Carolina. He would be one of three Massachusetts boys on a team of players from the northeast in a tournament involving five other major league clubs and a couple hundred of the top high school players on the East Coast.
He'd done a bunch of college showcases, including a week at Stanford where he received a woeful evaluation ("average high school ability, not draftable, junior college ability in future"). This was different. The pro showcase cost virtually nothing and was attended by serious college and pro scouts. Most important, it was by invitation only. This was not something you could buy for your kid, and they weren't interested in who Sam's dad was. The competition would be far more difficult than anything Sam had experienced.
Naturally, the opportunity also presented us with one of the greatest scheduling conflicts in family history. I'm still bitter about missing a 1967 Pony League playoff game because I had to serve as an altar boy at my sister Mary's wedding. Since that day, I have always been an advocate for team over family—unless it's a funeral or an emergency involving a parent or sibling. Marilou feels quite differently, and through the years there've been a few tempests over family trips not taken in the name of sports.
As soon as I saw the dates of Sam's potential big trip to North Carolina, I knew there'd be a bad moon risin' over the House of Shaughnessy. The pro showcase was scheduled for the same dates we had already booked for a family reunion trip. And not just any trip. Marilou's parents, nearing 80, were taking all of their children and grandchildren—a tidy gang of twenty-three—to Sicily for a week. This junket had been in the works for over a year and fell under the category of command performance. No weekend passes. All furlough canceled. It was shaping up as Dan Shaughnessy and the cast of The Godfather for seven sweaty days in Palermo, and it was not to be missed. All of us were looking forward to it and the plane tickets had already been purchased.
Still, in my mind, Sam had to skip the family trip. For him, this tryout could be a life-changing experience. He was almost ready to turn 18 and had decided that baseball was his ticket to college admission. It was the thing he cared about more than cars, girls, poker, instant messaging, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Our house looked like a Louisville Slugger outlet, with bats of every size and color littering just about every room on the first and second floor. Intruders risked getting whacked by Sam's 33-inch, Manny Ramirez X-Bat.
We kept Sam in the dark while the issue was resolved. Like his dad, Sam lacks intellectual curiosity, hates sightseeing, and doesn't care much for travel in general. I feared that if we made the decision for him, and he later found out he'd missed the try-out, he might have wound up in a Sicilian jail for assaulting his parents.
I resisted the temptation to declare "Sam's going to North Carolina and that's that." Any veteran husband will tell you that this gets you nowhere. The trick was to make Marilou arrive at that inevitable conclusion on her own. So I started floating the question whenever we were around trusted friends and family members—people who knew Sam's passion for baseball. In the end, of course, even Sam's grandparents knew it was the right thing for him to do. Sicily, with all of its Greek ruins, has been there for centuries. Sicily would always be there.
So we went to Sicily and Sam went to Wilmington, North Carolina, and he did pretty well. He saw a high school kid who threw 98 miles per hour. He saw a lot of guys who'd be drafted in the spring of 2006. And he held his own. Globe baseball writer Gordon Edes left me a message saying that he'd spoken with a scout in Wilmington and the scout told him Sam was a Division I–caliber player. At the very least.
The night we returned from Sicily, we were preparing to go out for a family dinner when Sam got a call on his cell phone from a coach at Notre Dame. Boston College wanted to see him, also.
The tryout in Wilmington changed the course of Sam's life. He suddenly had chances to attend schools that would have had no interest in him if not for baseball. He had performed at his best against the best competition. And he had done it when Dad was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Probably no coincidence.
September
School started on Thursday, September 8, and Sam was out the door by 6:30 A.M. Marilou and I are blessed with kids who get up and go to school on their own. They learned this the hard way when they were young. I'd stand in Sam's doorway at dawn, toss a football into his bed, yell "Fummm-ble!!" in my best Keith Jackson voice, then dive on the mattress and scramble for the ball in a steroid-rage, play-offs-at-stake frenzy. Sam started getting up on his own after a few months of forced fumble treatments.
Sam's transcript and his (non)reading habits demonstrate that he is not the student his sisters were. Still, though he can often be lazy, he will never be late. I take some pride in this trait. Woody Allen noted that 90 percent of life is about showing up (and showing up on time), and I've worked in an on-time industry for more than three decades. Children pick up on that.
Sam had another incentive to get to school early, and it had nothing to do with girls, grades, or class registration. It's all about parking at Newton North. Space is limited and teachers and staff are guaranteed spots. Kids have to pay $180 per semester and enter a lottery in order to get a campus parking sticker. Early birds, however, can get coveted spots on Hull Street, and Sam knew that the $180 would be coming out of his pocket. So most days he was out the door before either of his parents brushed their teeth.
Newton North, home to 2,200 students, is a monstrosity�
��a gigantic, confusing, worn, and almost windowless building. North has daunted many a freshman as he or she first tried to navigate its maze of corridors. Few parents spend enough time in the place to learn their way around, which is why student monitors serve as guides any time there's a back-to-school night for the folks. Built in 1973, urban legend holds that North was designed by someone who built prisons. The kids love that one.
The building was considered obsolete just a few years after it opened, and the class of '06 worked and played through three years of uncertainty while school and city officials debated the future of the structure. When Sam was a freshman, we were told that a scheduled renovation would force the school to transport underclassmen to other towns on buses. This caused a parental revolt only slightly less dramatic than the marches in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s. After some lengthy and loud meetings, the relocation plan was scrapped. This led to a blue-ribbon, bipartisan, rainbow-coalition, ad hoc, multiflex-offense, fact-finding panel that debated the merits of building a new school versus renovating the existing building. State money was sought, architects were interviewed, and the process dragged through Sam's entire tenure at North. In January 2006, as projections for a new high school lurched toward $160 million, the principal, Jennifer Huntington, wrote, "Newton North is in terrible shape. The roof leaks; winter daily classroom temperatures range from 45 to 85 degrees, depending on classroom location; mold inhabits many parts of the school; the HVAC system has never worked properly. Students and faculty—and the city—need a new school."
Senior Year Page 5