The closing of the Star was a neighborhood event. Patrons took photos in front of the place, and the Newton police sent a sheet cake, thanking the owners for forty years of great service and free meals. The last day of the month was the last night at the Star, Sunday, April 30. I picked up Sarah at school while Kate and Sam delivered uncle Eddie so he could have one more dish of his favorite Chicago chicken chow mein. Marilou was in Detroit, visiting her dad on his eightieth birthday, and we teased her about skewed priorities. Dads turn 80 every day, but the closing of the Star happens only once.
Vinnie had our circular booth waiting when we got there, and Kate took a million photos as we went through the paces of our family routine one last time. Along with the post-meal pineapple and fortune cookies, Vinnie gave us a doggie bag filled with Golden Star menus, mai tai glasses, scorpion bowls, and a duck sauce cup.
Walking out the front door of the Golden Star for the last time, posing for a photo in front of the big yellow sign, I realized this was both a passage and a harbinger. This is what I was going to feel like when Sam played his last game of high school ball. It was happening too fast and I wasn't ready yet.
May
Baseball America and Perfect Game, reputable organizations of amateur baseball scouting, released a ranking of the top fifteen high school players in Massachusetts, and Sam was listed fourth. At the same time, the Boston Globe listed the pitching-powered Newton North Tigers as the fourth-best team in eastern Massachusetts, Sam was back up over .300, and it looked like it was going be a fun ride to the state tournament.
And then I saw Sam throw his bat while he was still in the batter's box after getting called out on strikes.
On May Day.
Monday, May 1, was another truly horrible spring day, the kind that sometimes makes New Englanders ask themselves, "Why do we live here?" There seemed to be a lot of these in 2006. The Red Sox were preparing to play host to the Yankees for the first time all season and frosty, tarp-covered Fenway was bracing for the return of Johnny Damon. The bearded, shaggy-haired face of the 2004 champion Red Sox, Damon had permanently tarnished his reputation in Boston by taking Yankee money in the off season of 2005–2006. He went from Jesus to Judas with one stroke of a pinstriped pen.
In 1992, when he was a senior at Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando, Damon had been rated the top high school baseball prospect in the country. At a perfectly sculpted six foot two and 190 pounds, he had speed, power, aggressiveness, and good baseball makeup. He played hard but didn't smash helmets when he made outs. It was all natural. And he didn't have his dad spending money to show him off to college coaches and pro scouts. Johnny's parents barely knew about his athletic gifts. Sergeant Jimmy Damon was an American serviceman from Illinois who met his bride in Thailand. When Johnny was playing his high school ball in Florida, both of his parents were working two jobs. Johnny's folks got somewhat annoyed when those college coaches and pro scouts started calling the house during his senior year. The folks hadn't really seem him play and didn't know what all the fuss was about until the Kansas City Royals drafted him in the first round and paid him a bonus of $250,000 to report to the Gulf Coast League. Fourteen years later, Damon came back to Fenway Park, a traitor superstar with a $52 million contract.
J. T. Ross got the start at Walpole on May 1, and it was clear that this was going to be a pitcher's day. It was about 42 degrees and the wind was whipping toward home plate. Parents froze as a succession of hitters from both teams trudged back to the dugout after whiffing. Sam had been hit by a pitch and struck out when walked to the plate to face a hard-throwing Walpole lefty who was painting both corners. Sam worked the count to 3-1, then took a pitch that appeared to be high and away. But umpires get cold, too, and every hitter needs to expand his strike zone when the weather sucks.
"Strike two!"
Frustrated, Sam committed a cardinal sin of sports: he allowed a questionable call to impact his next moment. And it was obvious that he was still stewing over the 3-1 pitch when he looked at the next one, which was right down the middle.
Rightfully rung up, but still convinced he'd been wronged, Sam wheeled out of the box, raised his bat over his shoulder with his left arm, and spiked it into the ground in the direction of his own team's bench on the first base side. It did not go near anyone, but had it slipped out of his hand, it could have hit one of his teammates or coaches. Equally bad, he'd shown up the umpire with this demonstration. A coach and a couple of players on the Walpole side objected briefly, but no one else said much of anything as Sam stalked toward his bench, picked up his useless bat, set it down where it belonged, and sat.
Had I been working behind the plate, I'd have ejected him.
The whole day went pretty much like that. Newton had a run taken off the board when it was ruled that a base runner left too early on a sac fly and lost 2–1 in eleven innings. Sam whiffed three times and left several in scoring position. Ross, emerging as one of the best pitchers in the state, struck out fourteen.
After the game, I drove to Fenway like a madman and called Sam from the press box after the boos rained down on Johnny Damon.
"Sam—the bat," I started.
"I know, I know. I apologized to Sis. I apologized to the ump."
"Don't give me 'I know, I know.' This cannot keep happening. Word gets around. This has to stop."
We never talked about it again. I was worn out and giving up. As a baseball lifer, I'm ever mindful of how the game should be played. One has to respect the game and play by its rules, written and unwritten. Seeing Sam repeatedly violate the tenets of the game depressed and discouraged me. He was at times the personification of that which was wrong with today's game. It hurt and embarrassed me that he hadn't learned better, that he couldn't put the essence of the game ahead of his own self interests. At times like this, I reminded myself that Sam was going to have to figure it out on his own, or just stop playing baseball.
The humbled Tigers enjoyed a couple of blowouts when the weather turned summerlike later in that week. They slaughtered Weymouth and Needham. I felt bad for the Needham kids. One of their teammates had committed suicide in April. The Need-ham players had his number 5 on the backs of the game day hats and several had served as pallbearers. It was going to be a long, gloomy spring for the Rockets.
Late in the Friday afternoon blowout against Needham, Sam stepped to the plate for his final at-bat of the day and got drilled in the right foot with the first pitch. You could hear it from the parking lot. He wheeled out of the box, filled the air with a non-expletive ("ARRRRRGGGGG"), and slammed his bat into the ground. No crime against baseball there. It was a standard response from one who'd been hit in the bone with a fastball. Clearly in pain, he limped down the line, then came out for a pinch runner. The customary high school ice bag was produced from the standard high school medical kit. After the game, Assistant Coach Tom Donnellan recommended that Sam get the foot x-rayed. Running around with a cracked bone in one's foot is guaranteed to sabotage a promising athletic career.
Even though it would have meant the end of his high school year—just when the mighty Tigers were enjoying their best season in twenty years—Sam wasn't worried about a potential broken bone. High school kids believe they are athletically bulletproof. It has always astounded me how few of them actually do get hurt. Three-sport stars throw their bodies into two-way football, then live to play basketball and baseball without missing a game. In my sophomore and junior years of high school basketball, we had the same five players start every game. Two years. No broken bones. No torn ACLs. Not even a bad case of the flu. Infinite good health: it is something we take for granted in our teens.
Seeing Sam hit the deck and grimace in pain reminded me how fragile all this is. I pondered the possibility that this was it. What a way to finish. The Golden Star, then Sam, both shut down in the same week.
At ten the next morning we drove to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, where Dr. Bill Morgan had agreed to meet us and give Sam a quick x-ray. This was
a big favor. I'd befriended Morgan when he was medical director of the Red Sox. Sox management had since replaced him, but he still ran one of the top orthopedic clinics in New England. Sam was going to get an instant analysis from the same guy who stitched a dead man's body parts into the ankle of Curt Schilling to get Big Schill on the mound for those two bloody sock games in October 2004.
Funny, but I don't recall getting any personal treatment from the Red Sox team doctor when I cut off the tip of my thumb while making coleslaw with an electric slicer at Johnson's Drive-In during my senior year.
Dr. Morgan met us in the lobby, took us upstairs, and within seconds was looking at live video of Sam's skeletal foot. Great news. No break. He told Sam he'd be able to play on Monday.
"Pretty good," Sam said as we walked to the car. "It was especially cool that he was wearing his championship ring."
We went to breakfast to celebrate the unbroken foot. Sam devoured a bacon and cheese omelet, half a loaf of bread, and a side order of French toast, all washed down with a Coke.
"He's like a dog," Sam's mom noted when I replayed the breakfast menu. "He wolfs down a ton of food in a matter of minutes, but he only eats once a day."
Sam went to practice that afternoon but didn't run or put any weight on the foot yet. After the game, the entire team walked over to the girls' softball field to cheer for their classmates at the annual Newton North versus Newton South softball game. Good tradition. Good camaraderie. It's somewhat standard to see the kids coming together in the last days of high school. In 1971, our class of gypsies, tramps, thieves, and abject losers totally bonded as we neared graduation. Cliques broke down, and we stopped making fun of the kid with the white socks and the bad complexion. The reality of the finality washed over us and brought us together. The small stuff, the pettiness born of our own insecurities, ceased to matter anymore. There were kids I'd hardly ever spoken with, kids I'd shared corridor space with for twelve or thirteen years ... and only at the end did I make an effort to know them; only when it was almost over and I knew I'd probably never see them again.
In mid-May, Jonathan Holmes, one of those classmates from 1971, asked me to come back to Groton to speak to the 2006 Groton-Dunstable Regional High School senior athletes at the old Groton Country Club. Jon had a senior daughter on the basketball team and he was involved with an athletic Boosters Club, which certainly didn't exist when we were in high school. The old Country Club was around in my day, however, and I had some serious flashbacks as I pulled into the parking lot by the first-hole tees. This was where my sister's wedding reception was held in 1967 when I had to miss that Babe Ruth playoff game. This was where the grownups held the infamous "country club dances," semiformal events where a few handpicked "town" kids got to mingle with the private school snobs who always seemed to have better skin than we did (Stephen Stills's "Change Partners" covers it nicely). The Country Club was also the training site for our cross-country teams, and it was on the second and third holes of the course that I'd staggered up those ski slope hills, wheezing and gasping with every step. As kids we'd waded into the golf course's water traps to score Titleists that we'd later hit out of our hands with baseball bats. Hit a golf ball square with the barrel of a Louisville Slugger and for that moment you knew what if felt like to be Mickey Mantle. I could hit those suckers clear over my neighbor's red barn, halfway to the tower atop Gibbet Hill.
The Groton Country Club was also the site of our junior and senior proms, and our 1971 Senior Bash. The Senior Bash was an overnight event, produced and promoted by our parents, and held the night before commencement. The idea was to keep us out of trouble in those final dark hours before they officially cut us loose. After the diplomas we'd be on our own, but before graduation we were still under the watch of our parents and teachers. The Bash went from 8 P.M. until 4 A.M., where we drank cola, danced, signed yearbooks, made out, and slept in corners of the dark country club ballroom. One of our classmates, Rod Smith, was not there on the night of our grand farewell. Rod was a kid who rarely said anything and once wore the same red shirt to school for twenty-three consecutive days. In our yearbook, he'd bragged about never having attended a single after-school activity in four years of high school. Full of our own insecurity, we'd made fun of him behind his back, but we had only ninety-one seniors in our class and we wanted him there for the Senior Bash, so we got some of our prettiest girls to call him on a country club pay phone. They begged him to attend but had no luck. Rod kept his record intact while the rest of us finally got to know one another—the way people stuck in an elevator might get to know one another. At 4 A.M., we caravanned to the high school, where our parents made us breakfast. Then we went home to bed. By the time we got up the next afternoon, it was just about time for graduation ceremonies.
In early May 2006, parents of Newton North seniors received a letter from the cochairs of "Celebration 2006," the all-night party slated to be held after the prom. Making no attempt to veil the message, the missive stated, "The underlying reason for having the party is to keep our young people safe on a night that is historically perilous for prom-goers."
The Shaughnessy family had been lucky regarding prom-night problems. More than broken hearts or drunken driving, it was state softball tournament conflicts that had topped our list of troubles. The better your team was, the more likely you'd end up with a tournament game on the same day as prom night. Early in the twenty-first century, the Newton North softball coach Lauren Baugher was not too happy when a couple of her players elected to get their hair done before a state tournament game because they wouldn't have time to do it after the game on the way to the celebrity ball. I'll not soon forget the image of softball players sitting on the bench with crowns of perfectly styled curls piled atop their heads. Try squashing a size 7¼ batting helmet over that. Not pretty.
Looking ahead in '06, the Newton North Tigers figured to be playing their first tournament game around June 1. The prom was June 5, graduation was June 7, and the state tourney didn't end until June 17. Good thing Sam didn't have to worry about getting his hair done.
The Tigers stopped hitting and came back to earth with a couple of losses in the rain-soaked second week of May. Big Nick Wolfe extended his season-long scoreless inning streak to thirty-three innings before giving up a pair of runs in the Brookline game, which was played at the home field of Northeastern University in Brookline. Sam was up to .325 by the end of the week but only had four extra base hits and zero homers through the first thirteen games of the season. Those bats I'd brought back from Florida were hardly looking like weapons of mass destruction. I remember Derek Lowe once telling me, "I hit .500 in high school, but doesn't everybody hit .500 in high school?" Not in the cold, rainy, Bay State League in 2006.
In the midst of more carwash rains on Mother's Day weekend, Sam went to City Sports to buy new batting gloves. Reluctantly, I gave him some cash.
"No more called third strikes," I urged. "If I'm paying for batting gloves, I want my money's worth. Swing the goddamn bat!"
He laughed. Sort of.
When the new Globe rankings came out in the middle of the month, the 9-4 Tigers had slipped to number ten. They'd lost four games by a total of five runs and, like every other team in the state, they were facing a lot of games in a short amount of time if the rain ever stopped.
This was no ordinary rainfall. It was historic. It was biblical. No one had ever seen anything like it. In a period of three days, greater Boston received more than a foot of rain, and by the fifteenth of the month it was already the second-wettest May in more than one hundred years of record-keeping. It was the worst local flooding in seventy years. Roads were closed. Schools were closed. A state of emergency was declared, rivers overflowed, and there were fears that dams might burst. Some North Shore towns canceled school for three straight days. People were evacuated and lives were endangered. Senators Kerry and Kennedy sought federal relief funds. We went eight days without seeing the sun. It was a true local crisis.
&n
bsp; And all I could think about was how the rain was screwing up Joe Siciliano's pitching rotation. And what was this going to do to the state tournament? Some of the fields on the North Shore were under several feet of water. Would all the games ever be made up?
Newton North returned to the field in Braintree on Wednesday night, May 17. It was the Tigers' first game in seven days, and it was played under the lights in an effort to give the Braintree grass an extra three hours to dry.
Dear old dad got a little nostalgic making that final trip to Braintree. How many times had I been down those roads? Sarah scored her first field hockey goal in Braintree. I saw it from a window in a stairwell outside the Braintree gym, where Kate was playing a volleyball match at the same time as her sister's field hockey game. I'd seen Sam play freshman football on the Brain-tree gridiron, and our girls had engaged in vicious competition with the Wamp softball team on the same sprawling complex. North's basketball team always considered the Braintree players dirty and when Sam got ejected for breaking a kid's nose in a junior varsity scrum, he was privately applauded by the Newton basketball staff. It was the only time they were glad his temper got the best of him. A bustling town south of Boston, Brain-tree is one of the more inconvenient outposts in the Bay State League, and many a time I'd gotten trapped in early rush hour traffic while barreling down the Southeast Expressway toward a softball or baseball game. I'd also gotten lost a few times, but not in May 2006. By this time I could have given tours of Braintree, and the various sub shops and doughnut stores en route to the ball fields. It made me a little sad to be driving there for the last time as a parent of a Newton North ballplayer.
I had a pretty good idea which Newton parents would make the same trip through traffic. Ed Lee, father of our sure-handed second baseman, Alex, never missed a game. He'd played college baseball and ran many of the summer and winter baseball programs for the kids. He knew a lot about equipment and had furnished Sam with a first baseman's mitt for the 2006 season. Cheryl Cosmo would be there. Her son, James Greeley, had pitched in just about every game. Cheryl was famous for stalking the premises, talking on her cell phone, and fighting the inner battle that plagues every pitcher's mom and dad. She found it difficult to stay calm, and every time I looked up she'd be in another corner of the ballpark, pacing. Meg and Mark Ross were season-ticket holders, home and away. They had two boys starting for North and it wouldn't be an official game if we didn't hear Meg belting out, "Come on, J. T., little poke!" a couple of times in the course of nine innings. Larry Amato, dad of our shortstop, paced and chatted, went to the woods for a smoke, and admitted he was a Yankee fan. Catcher Ryan Mac's dad was a cop and never said much of anything. Third baseman Ryan Walsh's dad was similarly stoic and his mom was habitually late, but I'm pretty sure their presence meant something to the boys. The idea that parents existed who never saw their kids play completely amazed me. I realize not everybody can alter their work schedule to watch high school sports, but what could be more fulfilling than sitting in the last row of the bleachers by yourself and watching your son play high school baseball? Eighteen holes of golf ? Please.
Senior Year Page 18