by Jorge Posada
The country club my family belonged to was called Casa Cuba, and it was situated along the beach—none of the other clubs were. Because we had access to the beach, we’d play nearly every sport in the sand—American football, soccer, and even a version of five-on-five baseball that I loved. I made a bat out of a sawed-off shovel handle, and I’d cover a Wiffle ball completely with tape so that the shore breezes wouldn’t toss it around quite so much. We’d play sports all morning, getting sweaty, dash into the water, play some more, go to the cafeteria and tell them our member number, then pile our trays with all kinds of food. I can still taste and feel the gritty crunch of the sand I downed with those meals. I can’t say for sure that my dad chose Casa Cuba because it was along the beach, but playing all those sports in the sand really helped to build up my leg strength and endurance. I can’t say that eating some of it helped my jaw.
Though we belonged to Casa Cuba, my dad coached at Caparra, our biggest rival. Why didn’t he coach where he had a membership and where I played? Another one of those complicated things that I never really asked about. Besides all the kids at the club playing together informally, we also had organized sports teams and competed against the other clubs in the area. That was the only organized baseball I played until I was older and played some Little League and later American Legion ball.
Even though I played for Casa Cuba’s baseball team, my father took me to Caparra one day in 1980, when I was nine, to practice with his guys. I stepped into the box to take my cuts in batting practice. My dad stepped off the mound and took a couple of steps toward me. He nodded his head toward his left. I looked over that way, thinking that he wanted me to see whatever was in that direction. I guess you could say that we had a failure to communicate.
“¿Que pasó?” he asked me.
I shrugged.
He raised his index finger in the air and spun it.
I turned around in the batter’s box to see what was behind me. The catcher pulled up his mask and turned to do the same.
“No,” my father shouted. I looked at him as he took his glove off, stuffed it under his arm, and walked toward me, heaving a heavy sigh and shaking his head.
As he got closer I could hear him muttering, “El otro lado, el otro lado,” over and over again.
He took me by the shoulders and led me to the left-hand batter’s box.
“¿Entiendes?” he asked.
I did and I didn’t. I knew what he wanted me to do—to bat left handed—but I didn’t understand why. It wasn’t that I’d never hit from the left side before. In our Wiffle ball battles in El Estadio Jorge Posada, I’d done it a bunch of times. After all, Don Mattingly batted left-handed, and I’d imitated him with dozens of variations. But this wasn’t Wiffle ball. I’d never batted lefty when it actually counted for something.
My dad got back on the mound, I settled uncomfortably into a stance, my heart racing, trying to figure out which of the many variations of the Mattingly Method I should use. The ball came in, a fastball waist-high and on the outer half. I swung and felt my feet sliding out from under me as I whiffed (I guess this was Wiffle ball after all) and nearly corkscrewed myself into the ground. I felt my jaw tense and on the next pitch took another hack, missing completely again. I could feel tears welling in my eyes and the salty taste of blood in my mouth from where I’d bitten my cheek.
This is ugly. Really ugly.
I didn’t swing on the next two pitches, so I was down to one more strike. I finally managed to tip one weakly off the end of the bat. The ball sat there in the right-hand box as if trying to tell me that was where I belonged. My vision clouded by tears, I trotted to the bench, put my bat down, and jogged past my usual position at shortstop and went into the outfield. I kept my back to the infield and stood there grinding my teeth, my fists clenched, until the tears really started to roll out of me. I folded my arms across my chest and tried to suffocate myself to keep from crying.
Why is he doing this to me? I can’t bat left-handed. I’m a good hitter. What’s the point?
My sulking was interrupted when one of the other guys hit a ball that rolled just past me. I picked it up and turned toward home plate. My dad stood on the mound, holding his glove out to me. I reached back and fired the ball high and hard. It was as if I’d launched my anger and humiliation, and I felt a small thrill of pleasure and defiance as the ball arced over my dad’s head, over the catcher, and over the backstop. It came to rest in the dry grass beyond the bleachers next to a pile of mowed Styrofoam cup shrapnel.
Without thinking, I took off running—my dad was fanatical about always hustling—to shag my overthrow. My cheeks were burning when I crossed the first-base line, and I could feel my dad’s eyes stabbing into my back. I retrieved the ball, rubbed it up a bit, and tossed it to him. Meanwhile, the whole place had fallen silent. My dad caught the ball and then let it fall from his glove, like I’d thrown him something disgusting that he didn’t want staining his mitt. I started to make my way back toward the outfield, but he held up his hand and I stopped. He pointed to the bench, and I went and sat down. Through the rest of the practice, I sat there, writing “Yo te odio” over and over in the dirt with my shoe, erasing it and starting over, knowing that, in that moment, I hated myself as much as I hated my dad.
From an early age, I took losing and failing really hard—losing was like a physical presence. I could feel the weight of it on me, could hear its voice in my head taunting me. The older I got the less I imagined loss as a person, but that sense I got from losing, that I was being weakened or held back, was always there. I just had to dig deeper, work harder, to overcome the weight of it.
I wasn’t the best player out there, far from it, and I also wasn’t the worst—but I definitely looked like it in that left-hand box. Failure was horrible, but the feeling that I’d let my dad down was worse. It was hard to take my anger out on myself or whoever it was I heard in my head. My dad was the easiest target to hit—or in this case, to overthrow. While I sat on the bench and the practice went on without me, I tried to understand what my father had done and why. My nine-year-old brain couldn’t come up with a very sophisticated set of answers. It mostly came down to an attempt to humiliate me for some reason, to make me look bad in front of his players, who also happened to be my rivals. I see now that it was my inability and failure to control my emotions that was the real culprit. Back then I blamed my dad.
Why had my father made me switch to batting left-handed? There must have been something inside of me that he didn’t like. I reviewed everything I’d done over the course of the last few days, trying to figure out where that treatment came from. My dad didn’t like me taking the newer game balls out of the ball bag he kept in the closet, and I’d snuck one out and thrown it against the house, scuffing up both the ball and the house’s stucco. Though I’d put it back in the bag when I was done, maybe the scuff and the faint trace of paint I couldn’t quite rub out had given me away. As I sat there I regretted not cleaning the ball in milk the way my dad had shown me to get rid of grass and dirt stains.
I didn’t have long to think about it. Practice ended, and then there was the silent drive home with no explanation from my father about why he’d chosen that day to humiliate me. My bad thoughts ballooned and festered overnight. The next day I had a game with my Casa Cuba team against Ponce, one of the weakest of the five teams in our league. Again my dad made me bat lefty, and my performance was the same as at practice the previous day—I struck out all three times. After the last strikeout, I couldn’t hold it in any longer: when I got to the bench, I sat there and cried. My coach, “El Flaco” (his real name was Hector Fuentes, but we all called him by his nickname), came up to me and put his hand on my back and told me it was going to be okay. I went out to shortstop, and the first batter up hit a ground ball to me. I fielded it easily and for an instant thought about hurling it over the first baseman and out of the park.
I didn’t. We were only up two runs, thanks to my leaving a bunch of gu
ys on base, and I didn’t want to let the tying run come to the plate in the last inning. I gunned it to first and heard our fans screaming for me. I looked into the stands, and there was my mom pumping her fist and rising out of her seat. I looked for my dad, even though I knew that he had practice that day with Caparra. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him. He was standing with a couple of other coaches and fathers, all of them with their arms folded across their chests, rocking back on their heels. I couldn’t help but think that my dad’s smile meant that he was proud of me.
After the game, as we walked to the car together, he told me that he knew that it was going to be tough, but that if I kept at it, batting from both sides of the plate was going to pay off for me someday. It was okay to struggle, but I better not quit.
“We’ll get there. We’ll work at it. But every time you face a right-handed pitcher, you’re going to bat left-handed. That’s how it has to be. No question. Left-handed. Understood?”
I nodded. My dad was true to his word, both short and long term. We did work at it, and it did eventually pay off in a way that not even he expected and that I’m still not sure he liked. My consecutive strikeout streak would reach 13, but eventually it was my dad who was unlucky.
At the end of the season, Casa Cuba and Caparra faced off in the league finals. We hadn’t beaten them all season, and it was tough riding home in the car after they’d won yet again, sitting in the backseat next to my sister, seeing that look of satisfaction on my dad’s face reflected in the rearview mirror. It seemed like no matter what we did, the Caparra team found a way to win. We lost in every conceivable manner—blowouts, blown leads, blasts, bloopers, and bleeders. It was bad, bad, bad. I didn’t dare act like a sore loser in front of my father or his team. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing that they’d gotten inside my head.
There was a good reason why Caparra kicked our butts all the time—my dad. He would have his team show up for an hour before the game to practice. He’d hit ground balls and fly balls, work on infield plays—bunt coverage mostly—and then take batting practice. Casa Cuba players showed up 15 minutes before a game. We’d play catch and throw each other grounders or pop-ups, but it wasn’t the same. I was lucky that my dad took me to the field early to be with him and his squad. I’d participate in their practice for a while, and then sit and wait, the only kid on the bench until my teammates showed up. It was kind of weird, but I got used to it, and so did everyone else.
That final game in 1980, I came up in the fifth inning. We were down by two. When I dug in, two men were on—one on second and the other on third—two men were out, and there was a right-handed pitcher on the mound. I got in the left-hand box, adjusted my helmet, and leveled the bat over the plate. This was a possible turning point in the game, and I expected my dad to be looking on intently.
He wasn’t.
He sat there, his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands on top of his head like he was being held prisoner. The first pitch came in high, and I let it go, glad to be ahead in the count. Only I wasn’t. The umpire called it a strike, and I stood there blinking like I had to clear something from my eye. The next pitch was just as high, and one that I would have normally taken, but given what had just happened, I couldn’t. I knew I was going to have to get on top of it, so I stood as straight as I could, and while rising onto my toes and shifting my weight forward, I let loose. I had that satisfying feeling of making solid contact when no vibration at all is transmitted through your hands. I watched as the ball traveled on a trajectory a lot like the one traveled by the ball I’d thrown away in that earlier practice. It rose into the outfield, and I saw the numbers on the back of the jersey of the right fielder, who raised his glove in surrender as the ball bounced once and hit the wall. I came into second base standing up, knowing that the game was now tied. I didn’t want to show my excitement, so I bent over and pulled up my socks and tugged at the cuffs of my pants, smoothing everything.
I looked over at my coach in the third-base box, and he pumped his fist and smiled at me. I nodded and got into running position, one foot on the bag, the other spread out like a sprinter in front of me. I didn’t score, but in the top of the sixth we scored a run by taking advantage of a crucial Caparra error to edge into the lead. We had a tense bottom of the sixth, but when their number-three hitter grounded weakly back to the mound, it was over.
An enormous sense of relief and joy coursed through my veins. I felt like I had to pee really bad. I threw my hands up in the air, tossed my hat and glove down, and sprinted toward the mound. I dove into the dog-pile, screaming at the top of my lungs. I’d come up with a big hit when we really needed it—and left-handed!
You may not believe this, but of all the games I’ve ever played, I still get chills thinking about that victory. That wasn’t my first hit batting left-handed that season, but it was by far the most important. I remember running the bases and having no sensation of my feet touching the ground.
The whole car ride home I talked excitedly with my mother, saying again and again, “Can you believe it?”
After a while my cheeks hurt from smiling so much. My father hadn’t said a word to me after the game when we went through the handshake line. We’d just briefly slapped palms, both of us looking away. I turned to Michelle and said, “This is the best. I thought it would be good, but this is the best. Especially beating them. And did you see how they threw the ball away?”
Michelle nodded.
“That can’t happen! But it did!”
To his credit, my dad didn’t say a thing. He sat there expressionless the whole way home. When we pulled into the driveway, I scrambled out of the car, eager to tell Manuel and Ernesto my good news. Before I could run into the house, I felt my dad’s hand on my shoulder. I thought I was about to get a talking-to, but he just gave it a nice firm squeeze that was over in a second. I looked at him for a moment, expecting he might say something, but he didn’t. He didn’t need to. I could see that he was proud of me.
I don’t know if most kids competed with their parents as fiercely as my dad and I did, but the two of us went at it often, and neither of us would have ever given in or given up. I felt I had his approval after the victory over Caparra, but there were plenty of other times when I felt like my dad had ripped my heart out of my chest.
At home we had a Ping-Pong table, and my dad wanted me to play as often as I could. Lots of middle infielders develop quick and soft hands by playing table tennis, and I think it also eventually helped me as a catcher, but as a youngster and even as an adolescent, I struggled against my father.
He had a wicked serve, and he would dominate me most of the time. I never really came close to beating him, and he never let up on me. Once, when I was maybe 11 years old, he was on. A couple of times he hit big looping serves with a lot of top spin that hit the very edge of the table and fell at my feet. Lucky shots, really. Those got to me. Not only was I losing to somebody who was better than me, but I was struggling just to get the ball in play. A lot of times he wouldn’t even say anything; sometimes he’d trash-talk. “Look at that. Now that’s how you play the game. Perfect shot. You don’t stand a chance against me.” Losing to him was hard; having him rub it in like that was harder.
One day when I was 11, I got so frustrated that I started to cry. I wasn’t sobbing, but tears of frustration ran down my cheeks. I slammed the paddle down on the table. My dad held up both hands, the paddle in one, the ball in the other, as though he’d been interrupted midserve. Then he started laughing. That really made me mad. I was already so frustrated, at being unable to stop crying as much as hearing that voice in my head mocking me for my poor play. Now I had to deal with my dad laughing at me on top of that. It was almost too much. My dad set his paddle down and walked over to a shelf in the garage.
He pulled out a pair of boxing gloves and held them out to me. Okay, this was going to be good. I took them and pulled them on and then held them out to him so that he could lace
them up for me. He knelt down while he did them up, and visions of me knocking him out swam in front of me. The garage smelled of gasoline and motor oil and damp rags and car wax, a macho odor that blocked my tear ducts and gave me courage. My dad stayed on his knees as he tugged on his gloves, and then, holding them in front of his face, he gestured toward himself, letting me know it was time to bring it on.
We’d boxed since I was a very little guy, but somehow this was different. I knew that my dad wanted me to find a more appropriate outlet for my frustration than tears, but our bout started out like a lot of the rest of them. I charged in, and we engaged in a kind of bear hug mix of wrestling and boxing, with me landing ineffective blows on his back, my face buried against his chest and shoulder. I found something comforting about being that close to him. It wasn’t that my father wasn’t physically affectionate toward Michelle and me. He would give us hugs, but words seemed to fail him.
I don’t know what got into me that afternoon in the garage, but at one point my dad pushed his fist toward my forehead and held it there. He kept me at a distance like that, keeping me connected to him but unable to reach him with my swings. I felt foolish, like I was failing once again. I tried to move to the side, but still there was that glove feeling like it was glued to my head. Furious and frustrated, I stepped back, bulled my neck and ducked my head, and then put all my power into a low hook that caught my dad flush in the belly. I heard the air rush out of him, and I knew that I’d either surprised him or hurt him, or both. He rocked back and caught himself with his gloved hands behind him on the floor. He stayed in that position, vulnerable and exposed, but I knew better than to go after him. I kept my fists up and started to dance a bit, doing my version of the Muhammad Ali shuffle, a kind of taunting and mocking victory dance. Seconds later, I stopped the clowning and narrowed my eyes and furrowed my brow, still in the proper boxing position. My dad nodded his head and got back up into position.