by Rick Ankiel
They seemed nervous. I felt fine.
On the ride home, Walt asked me if I thought I was ready for pro ball. I smiled. Scott had told me he’d ask me that. The question was meant as a challenge, like I could step up and play with the big boys or go hide in college with the other seventeen-year-olds.
“I’m 100 percent ready,” I said.
Walt nodded.
“But you have to convince my dad,” I added. “He got me this far. So I’m going to trust what he says now.”
Just like Scott had told me.
That was the play. Lay it on my father, who would be the bad guy. The richer I got, the richer he assumed he’d get. The summer went on like that. I went to play ball. The last game I pitched, in the days before the deadline to sign, I struck out sixteen or seventeen guys, scouts all over the stands. Scott assured me that the Cardinals would come around, that the money would be there. I gassed up the car and filled a suitcase for the two-hour drive to freshman orientation.
Were I to enter a Miami classroom, there’d be no money until I was draft eligible again, years away. I’d be a college man. I’d have to study and take tests, which, in spite of assurances that I’d be seen through any difficulties, was a little intimidating. I also trusted Scott, who’d convinced me I was worth more than most anyone who’d gone before me. So if I were going to have to sit in lecture halls and continue with the aluminum bats for a couple years, then I’d dutifully report to freshman English at the appointed time and maybe find someone to help with my homework.
Matt Anderson, the first pick in the draft, didn’t sign with the Detroit Tigers until December 23. He was a college pitcher. J. D. Drew, another Scott client, was taken second by the Philadelphia Phillies, who offered $2.6 million. He did not sign; instead he played in an independent league, another loophole Scott had discovered. (The Cardinals got J. D. with the fifth pick in 1998. The signing bonus was $7 million.) Troy Glaus, the third pick, signed in late September. Jeff Weaver, a college pitcher and Scott client, went sixty-second, ten picks ahead of me, to the Chicago White Sox. He did not sign.
According to the rules of the draft, the moment I walked into one of those classrooms, I’d be ineligible to sign. That was the Cardinals’ deadline. I was packing to go and willing to live with either outcome. Hey, college might be fun.
Before I left, I spent one last night with my friends at a house not far from mine. My pager lit up. The Cardinals had offered $2.1 million. Scott believed he could get them higher still, and by the next day the number was $2.5 million, the fifth-highest bonus ever paid. The only job I’d ever had was helping a friend’s father tear up carpet and scrape floors. He’d pay me out of his pocket. I didn’t have a checking account. I didn’t have a savings account. Whatever money I had was in my wallet, maybe $50, but probably not.
And then I was rich. I was really rich. After taxes and fees, and after going to the bank, the number on the statement was something like $1,300,000. I went to the mall with my two best friends, strode into the record store, and said, “Whatever CDs you want.”
I got twelve. Rap, country, pop. One techno. I bought my mom a car. She was grateful. She was happy for me.
Then there was Dad, who, it seemed, was happy for him.
He had plans. A condo the next town over. A building in Melbourne he’d renovate. A whole building for just $900 grand, he said. Houses on the river. If not the building, he said, then surely one of these $400,000 houses on the river. You know, for the family. For us. My father, suddenly the real estate magnate. The family man.
“I’m the reason you’re so good,” he said. “I got you here. You owe me.”
I wrote him a check for, I think, $25,000. Called it a finder’s fee. His cut for his part in putting me on Earth, for playing catch against a few evening suns, for being a pitching coach when he didn’t have something better to do, for yelling at me when I was too small and not very good at fourteen years old, and for sitting out a few games of fall baseball. They say you can’t put a price on that, on the relationship between a father and son, on the years a father spends turning his boy into a man and refraining from calling him “you fat fuck.” I did and called us even. The stroke of a pen. Thanks for everything.
I rented a house, threw a couple suitcases in the back of the truck, told my mother I’d visit as often as I could, and went off—at eighteen—to become a professional baseball player.
CHAPTER
NINE
The Cardinals held their Instructional League in St. Petersburg, a three-hour drive west from Fort Pierce across Florida. I made the drive in the fall of 1997 and dragged my bags into an apartment I’d share with Bobby Seay and Matt White. You could have called it the house that Boras built.
Matt, the college guy who had $10 million in the bank, was often the adult in the room. He also left his wallet around occasionally, which was a mistake.
The days were filled with baseball, Matt and Bobby—they were Devil Rays—in one direction, me in the other. By early evening we’d return dusty and sunburned to the apartment, our heads clogged from learning new names and routines and mechanics. The first days could be confusing, but it was still baseball, and so it was fun, and the three of us would recount the early trials of learning to become big leaguers.
None of us was much of a cook, so we’d go for a steak or pasta and continue the conversation at a nearby restaurant. The meals were always on Matt, only he didn’t know it. See, Bobby and I had lifted a credit card out of the wallet Matt left unguarded. When the restaurant bill arrived, we’d let Matt offer, then one of us would insist, “Nah, I got this,” and pay with Matt’s card. When Matt went to bed, the credit card was returned to his wallet. A few weeks later, Matt opened his credit-card statement. While he stood staring at the page, his forehead crinkled, Bobby and I thanked him for all the dinners. Slowly, very slowly, Matt broke into a grin.
“Jerks,” he said, or something like it.
Therefore, I got what I probably had coming at camp. Karma and all. Some of the older guys saw me coming. We had to be in the clubhouse and in uniform for a meeting by 8 in the morning. A minute late brought a fine. My routine got me there—every day—at exactly 7:57. So, technically, I was early, and dressed by precisely 8 o’clock. Not early enough, apparently.
My habit of leaning into the tape caught the eye of a few of the veterans. One morning I arrived with a smile and some hellos, three minutes to spare, happy to start the day, got to my locker, and kicked off my flip-flops. No uniform. A lot of hangers but no uniform. I looked around and caught the eye of a clubbie, who shrugged. The rest of the guys were turning their chairs to the middle of the room for the start of the meeting, noticeably ignoring my little issue. Coaches filed in with clipboards and coffee cups in their hands, ready to run through the day. Everybody was in uniform, but not me.
I shot another glance at the clubbie, who shook his head and then, in an act of uncommon sympathy, glanced briefly upward. I followed his eyes and found my uniform. The jersey and pants hung from the ceiling, ten feet above my locker, like they’d been retired. That is why, in the first handful of mornings I was a Cardinal, during a team meeting, you could have found me in the equipment shed, then noisily unfolding a ladder in the clubhouse, then climbing that ladder to retrieve the clothes I had to wear that day, to the spray of helpful chatter—“All right there, Ankiel?” “You gettin’ all this, Ankiel?” “Change some lightbulbs while you’re up there, Ankiel?”
It didn’t stop there. So I laughed plenty.
Like after early running, when we had a couple minutes to change out of our sneakers and into our cleats and trot to the next drill, only to discover the laces in my cleats had been infinitely knotted.
“You in this, Ankiel?” while I feverishly picked and pawed at my laces.
Like when the day was done and we returned to the clubhouse to clean up, only to find my shower shoes nailed to the floor.
I wore it all because I was happy to be there and it didn’
t feel mean, except for maybe the shower shoes.
Instructional League passed quickly. I decided I liked the Cardinals. I liked the red. I began to understand who was in all those black-and-white photos, and some of the names even matched those on the backs of jerseys that walked past. The organization’s history seemed deep and fresh at the same time. The coaches didn’t seem too interested in making drastic changes to my delivery, so I dug in and threw hard and spun my curveball.
In the first game, it may have been against the Cincinnati Reds, I struck out eight of nine batters. In the second, seven of nine.
I thought, and did not say out loud, All right, this is easy.
A few months later, at nineteen years old, I was in spring training with the major leaguers and also a handful of guys like me who tried not to get in the way. The winter in Fort Pierce had been awkward. My father had a girlfriend my mother didn’t know about but Phil and I knew too much about, and in our efforts to stay neutral—or out of it completely—Mom discovered not only the girlfriend but our knowledge of her as well.
So, as usual, it was good to get out of town, leave the drama behind, and go live the game.
There was nothing about it I didn’t love, even the preparation for it. Big-league camp isn’t always a welcoming place for teenagers. There would be a lot of guys who’d worked long and hard for a locker in that clubhouse and maybe didn’t look too kindly on those of us who’d yet to throw a professional pitch. These were grown men with wives and children and mortgages, many with long careers, some trying to squeeze another few hundred grand out of bodies that weren’t so sure. I would do nothing to help the 1998 Cardinals, and yet I’d have a hook in a locker where my uniform would hang, and I’d have a place beside them at the lunch table, and a turn on the bullpen mound, and repetitions in the drills.
To fend off unnecessary judgments, I’d logged five miles almost every day in the weeks leading to the opening of camp. I was not going to be the kid who got $2.5 million the summer before and then threw up breakfast at the end of the first sprints. I arrived fit and eager and utterly awestruck that there, on the other side of the room, over lockers no bigger than mine, were placards that read “McGwire” (Mark) and “McGee” (Willie) and a dozen others I recognized.
Though I’d worn a facsimile of the uniform briefly the fall before, the first day in a real clubhouse—a spring training clubhouse, but still, surrounded by real major leaguers—buttoning that bright jersey and curling the brim of that new cap felt meaningful. This was who I’d be now. It wasn’t quite my time yet, but my time was coming, and I welcomed the organization’s expectations for me and my left arm. I’d keep my mouth shut. I’d throw when told to. I’d adhere to the caste system of the clubhouse. And when they said run, I’d run and then run some more.
On the first morning, the pitchers—and there were dozens of us—lined up for the first of those runs. A veteran nearby said to no one in particular, but made sure the young fellas heard, “Keep it easy. Don’t be the first ones out there,” meaning “No one’s making the team today. There are no heroes in February.” And so in the first hour of big-league camp, we ran ten five-yard sprints.
Five yards. And then rest. Then another five yards. The challenge was trying to lag behind over the course of five entire yards. But I tried.
My father called that afternoon.
“How was it?” he asked.
“Good,” I said. “We did ten five-yard sprints.”
“What?”
“Yep.”
“Five yards?”
“Five. I’m in the best shape of my life, and we ran a total of fifty yards. In sections.”
A journey of a thousand miles had begun with two steps. Slow ones. So as not to show up the veterans.
At the end of spring training, during which I’d been shipped off to minor-league camp, the Cardinals sent me to Peoria, Illinois, for A ball in the Midwest League. I was eighteen, youngest on the team by a couple years. The bus rides could be long, but I didn’t mind. The towns were small, and I liked them. The ballparks were sometimes a little ratty, but mostly charming, and I was happy to be there.
I made seven starts for the Chiefs, thirty-five innings worth, and moved on, leaving behind a record for consecutive hitless innings previously held by Doc Gooden, a hero of mine as a child. The rest of my first summer was in Woodbridge, Virginia, high-A ball for the Prince William Cannons, where the fishing was decent and the baseball was the same. In 21 starts and 126 innings I struck out 181 hitters and walked 38. My fastball and curveball were playing, and my confidence was growing, and nobody was messing with my shoelaces.
Beyond that, the life fit me. For a kid whose daily existence around the baseball had been choppy for too long, the rhythms of pro ball—and nothing but pro ball—were soothing. I made my start, prepared for four days for the next one, made that start, prepared again, threw another six innings, and kept at it, and threw strikes and won ball games and made friends. If I were curious about what it would be like to stand on a field with grown men and play the game that was supposed to be my career—and I was, a little—the answer came every fifth day. Nobody pushed me off my game: I hit twelve batters and felt bad for almost none of them. My mechanics, far from classic, held up without too much maintenance.
As the Cannons rolled through Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina, I began to suspect I could be good at this, that my stay in the minor leagues wouldn’t have to be long. It wasn’t because the baseball was easy but because everything about this baseball felt right. I could commit to this. I could love it enough to be great at it, a notion I hadn’t quite understood until the trees were passing on a bus bound for who knows where, with no sound but those big tires pulling us toward more baseball.
There’d been a lot of talk about the hardships of the minor leagues, where the life would thread out the weak before the baseball did. No money, except I had money. Long bus trips, except where else was I going to be? Homesickness, except I was free. Bad food, except I liked the food. Failure, except I kept striking out hitters.
Instead, I kept thinking about getting better. Getting stronger. Finding the mitt with the fastball. Getting more precise with the curveball. Washing it all down with a cold beer and moving on to the next town, see what was going on there, see if anybody was going to hit me there.
Mostly they didn’t.
The drive home in September, Virginia to southern Florida, was thirteen hours. The route passed not far from a few of the ballparks I’d pitched in all summer, past “Home of the…” signs touting the local Class A team. I recognized some stretches I’d seen before from the other side of a bus window, eyes half open, hoping to nod off for an hour or two and instead counting backyard swing sets. It all seemed very normal from my seat, and I was happy to be out amid the normal.
I turned nineteen in the middle of that season. By the time it was over, I’d racked up 161 innings, 222 strikeouts, a 2.63 ERA, and one long drive home. If I could’ve stopped in Jupiter, Florida, and started the next spring training right then and there, I probably would’ve asked for a couple weeks but not complained much more than that. I was tired, but that good tired where you’ve asked something of yourself and then overdelivered.
As it was, I returned to the house I’d rented on the golf course, picked up a fishing pole, and waited to report to what would be a familiar clubhouse, if not yet mine. I’d return a minor leaguer, yes. I’d return as the kid who’d drifted through the clubhouse a year before, cast off with the early cuts while the grown men went out to do the real work. Mark McGwire hit seventy home runs that summer. Sammy Sosa hit sixty-six. They were out there saving baseball, I kept reading, and nobody was really accusing anybody of anything yet. The Yankees were becoming the best team anyone had ever seen, in spite of their second baseman, who’d contracted a mysterious ailment they called “the yips.” He couldn’t throw straight. No matter what he tried—arm angles, footwork, drills, eyes open, eyes closed, talking about it
, not talking about it—he still had the yips. It was weird. I’d watch the highlights on television, watch his arm contort in some new way every throw, and think, What the hell’s wrong with Chuck Knoblauch? He’s a good player. Just throw the ball. How’s that ever happen? Then I’d go back to breakfast and not give it another thought.
I was gaining on my own time too. I knew I was. I hoped they saw it. I’d done what I could in A ball. I’d won. I’d played hard. I’d not gotten into any trouble. I’d done as I was told.
Five months is a long time. I threw some. I ran some. Maybe not as much as I had the winter before. I figured I had those five-yarders covered. And by the time I got to Jupiter for more baseball, Baseball America had me as the game’s number-two prospect. Number one would be a few lockers over: J. D. Drew. A few more people seemed to know my name. A few of the coaches would hold their gaze—and their conversations—longer. I still had a big number on my back. I still wasn’t on the big-league depth chart. I was still somewhere out there, something for another day, still nineteen and learning the game. So I’d wait.
I was assigned to Double A, in Little Rock, Arkansas, where once again I’d be the only teenager in the room. But at least the bus would depart from a different parking lot and end up in different places, so I settled in for a summer of the Texas League, from Tulsa to Shreveport to San Antonio and a lot of places in between. That was good by me. Chris Maloney managed those Arkansas Travelers, and he was a good man, and there certainly would be plenty of travelin’, and in that case, the more good men the better.
After eight starts in Arkansas, 49 1/3 innings’ worth, I hadn’t lost, my ERA was under 1, and in about six weeks I’d pitched my way out of there and into the rotation for the Triple-A Memphis Redbirds.