by Wayne Coffey
I make two more appearances over the next ten days or so, one good, one not so good. I’m throwing the ball pretty well, starting to believe that I can get big-league hitters out, slowly settling into the daily rhythms of life in the big leagues.
In the bathroom one day before a game, I turn to get a towel after washing my hands and notice something underneath one of the stall partitions. I take a step closer.
It is a syringe.
The sight of it makes me cringe, the shiny thin needle lying randomly on the tile floor. My mind races with thoughts about how and why it got there. I know as much about needles as I do about jewelry, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a sewing needle. I don’t know if this syringe injected a Texas Ranger with insulin or cortisone or B12 or anabolic steroids, though you can hazard a guess when you run through the roster of my muscle-laden teammates. I’d never seen a syringe in a baseball clubhouse before. I’ve not seen one since. It may have been used for the most benign of purposes, but the mere sight of it makes me feel as though I am looking straight at Evil—like seeing a weapon somebody left behind at a crime scene.
I walk out of the bathroom and never tell anybody about what I saw. I want to think the best, try hard to think the best, but whatever chemical residue is in that particular syringe, there’s no denying the scope of the wreckage caused by needles around baseball, by the so-called steroid era, and by all the artificially fueled feats that came with them. I know two things about performance-enhancing drugs: they are pervasive, and I hate them, because they have hurt the game, and hurt me too. How many long balls hit by juicers would’ve died on the track and gotten me out of an inning if not for the extra muscle? How many balls muscled over the infield would’ve wound up in guys’ gloves? Of course, I will never know. Nobody will know. I don’t stay up nights thinking about it. I don’t forget the sight of the syringe on the bathroom floor, either.
The bottom line for me on performance-enhancing drugs is simple: guys who used them cheated. Cheated their opponents, their fans, the game. But it’s more personal than that: they cheated me too. Cheated all of us who didn’t succumb to the temptation. So, yeah, I don’t stay up thinking about it. But when I do think about it, I get angry, because cheating is cheating. The guys who did it robbed me of the opportunity for fair play and fair competition.
WE’RE ABOUT TO START a weekend series with the White Sox at home when I find out that Johnny Oates has resigned as manager with an 11–17 record. His replacement is Jerry Narron. I’m sorry to see Johnny go. He’s not just a nice man who has been more than fair with me in my short time with the club; he’s a devout believer who balances his faith and the rigors of his job masterfully. Johnny used to joke that he had no idea how he made it to the majors as a catcher, because he couldn’t really hit and couldn’t throw a lick. He’s a man who was always willing to give an underdog a chance. The news gets much sorrier still six months later, when word comes that Johnny has brain cancer.
As for Jerry Narron, another ex-catcher, I don’t know him well—I haven’t had the chance to talk to him much—but I just hope he sees something he likes in me. That can be as important as anything. Baseball, I am learning, is a maddeningly capricious game. Sometimes whether a ballplayer gets a chance hinges on a coach or manager looking his way when he rips a home run in spring training or throws a nasty cut fastball on the black, or on a manager just liking the action on a pitcher’s ball or the liveliness of a player’s bat. I’ve seen fates be kind, and cruel. You can’t dwell on it, either way.
I believe Johnny saw something in me. Jerry, I have no clue about.
On the final day of the series, Darren Oliver is our starter. The first batter in the bottom of the first is Tony Graffanino, the Sox second baseman, who drills a ball up the middle that rockets into Oliver’s left hand, his pitching hand. It swells up immediately and Oliver can’t continue. Narron scans the relief corps and selects me to come in to take over. I get all the time I need to warm up, and proceed to get lit up like a gas can. Carlos Lee and Chris Singleton hit two-run doubles, and Lee and Paul Konerko hit back-to-back homers. My line is hideous—four and two-thirds, seven hits, six runs. I wind up with my first major-league defeat. My mood doesn’t improve much when I hear White Sox manager Jerry Manuel in a postgame interview saying that the Sox knew they had a good chance after Oliver got hurt because teams usually bring in one of their worst relievers in such a situation.
I file it away. You never know when you might need some extra motivation.
After the game, Doug Melvin asks me to come into Jerry Narron’s office. Dick Bosman is there too. It’s the Texas trinity, but they have not gathered to bless me.
We need another arm for tomorrow, since we had to use you for so long today, Doug says. We’re sending you back down.
The words send a chill through me, but I can’t say I’m shocked. I didn’t think I was a lock to stay up for the year. I don’t have a real high opinion of myself as a pitcher right now. Maybe they even picked up on that. After four appearances, twelve innings, and eighteen days, my first trip to the big leagues is over. I’m sad, but I’m not borderline homicidal, the way I was on the day of The Retraction.
Okay, I understand you need to do what you think is best for the club, I say. I thank them for the opportunity and shake their hands and walk out. I guess my gut feeling that Jerry may not be sold on me is not far wrong. He doesn’t owe me an explanation, and neither does Doug. It’s up to me to change their opinion.
I go back to Oklahoma City, to the apartment by the Dumpster, and Anne and I find out the best news: she is pregnant again. We thank God for this gift and make a decision not to tell anyone for at least three months; with the child we lost, we told everybody and that made it much harder when Anne had the miscarriage.
I wind up having one of my best years, going 11–7 with a 3.75 ERA in a notorious hitters’ league, using a fastball, a cutter, a changeup, and an occasional knuckleball—a pitch I’ve messed around with for years, ever since Granddaddy told me that he threw it. I wait for the call up to the Rangers when the rosters expand to forty players, but it never comes. This is a much bigger blow than being sent down in May. In September, clubs usually call up everybody who is remotely on the radar.
The Rangers not only don’t call. When I’m back in Nashville at the end of the year, playing for the RedHawks against the Sounds, Lee Tunnell calls me over in the outfield—I’m R.A. in this conversation, not Dewclaw—and tells me they have taken me off the forty-man roster, leaving me completely unprotected, free to get picked up by anybody. Lee breaks it to me as gently as he can. But he knows what it means.
We both know.
It means the Rangers think I’m worth about as much as a used resin bag. It means, one month from my twenty-seventh birthday, I am looking at an extremely murky future.
Or none at all.
Money is tight and getting tighter, so I take a job in the offseason working for a place called STAR Physical Therapy, doing ultrasound treatments. I work on middle-aged businessmen with balky hamstrings and eighty-year-old women with frozen shoulders, trying to convince myself I am something other than a 4A player. It is not an easy argument to win. By the time I start 2002 in Oklahoma City—and don’t even get a look at big-league camp—I am six years beyond the draft and doing a lot of wheel spinning. I look at the big picture of my career and it’s hard to see anything that resembles progress. When other RedHawks get a call-up that year, I find myself turning into one of those jealous types who thinks he should be the one getting the call.
I don’t like where my career is going—or not going. I do a lot of praying about it. I decide that I really need to start thinking ahead—and outside the baseball box. The fact is that at my age, with my track record, the end could be imminent.
I have to make plans for that contingency. In the middle of the season, I call my friends Trigg and Darlene Wilkes. I went to Trigg’s YMCA camps in Nashville for years as a kid, and he’s always been kind to me,
a good-hearted soul who you could always count on. Now he’s based in Jacksonville, overseeing operations of some eight YMCAs along the east coast of Florida.
I think I’d have something to offer the YMCA, I tell Trigg. I grew up in the Y. I know the difference it can make in kids’ lives. Can we talk about any job possibilities there might be in case baseball doesn’t go anywhere?
Sure, Trigg says. But I hope you aren’t ready to pull the plug on baseball. You are still a young guy with a lot of potential.
I’m not sure if Trigg fully believes what he’s saying, I’m not sure if I do, either.
You know me, Trigg. I don’t give up. I want to be tenacious but I also don’t want to be stupid if this doesn’t go anywhere.
I finish 2002 with an 8–7 record and a 4.09 ERA. I give up 176 hits in 154 innings, which, if not pitiful, is pretty darn lousy.
Another off-season arrives and I return to Nashville, wanting to be hopeful but mostly feeling discouraged. I’ve spent my whole life hearing country singers warbling about guys with dead-end jobs and hard-luck lives. I don’t want to be one of them. The more I think about it, the YMCA might be a pretty good option.
I DECIDE to play winter ball after the 2002 season, for a familiar reason: we need the money. I get a deal worth about $10,000 and become a member of the Zulia Eagles in northwest Venezuela, a region that is home to Lake Maracaibo, one of the largest lakes in South America, and massive oil and gas reserves as well.
Venezuela is far from the most stable place in the world; President Hugo Chávez was ousted by a military coup earlier in the year, only to force his way back into power forty-eight hours later. By the time I get there, the country is still in plenty of turmoil. At the U.S. State Department’s urging, I check in with the U.S. embassy upon my arrival, and the consul general or whoever I talk to doesn’t sugarcoat it: This is a dangerous place and you need to be careful at all times.
It’s not an outright military coup that is going on that winter, but it’s close, brigades of protesters and marchers taking to the streets, and machine guns as ubiquitous as the street-corner carts selling cachapas (corn pancakes). I hear gunshots all the time. Two U.S. pilots who stay in the same hotel as me tell about having to dodge bullets on their way from the airport.
Because I am a person who swims in lagoons with alligators, I walk around the streets a couple of times to observe the commotion firsthand. I go to a bullfight and sample the local cuisine, and try to assimilate into Zulia life as best I can. But people are angry and there’s no getting away from them.
The protesters want to try to force a new election. They don’t succeed, but midway through the schedule they do succeed in shutting down the baseball season, the spasms of violence just making the whole thing untenable. A day later, after the season officially gets called, I get a letter from the U.S. embassy telling me to stay in the hotel until further notice. For once I heed the warning. I stay confined and eat pizza with pork and pesto, the only available food option, for the next five days, reading and watching TV and looking out at the platforms and oil derricks in the distance.
The flights back to the States are full, so they are trying to free up some seats to get the Americans out of the country as soon as possible. Finally I get word that I’ve got a seat on an American Airlines flight. My team arranges a two-car escort to the airport, vehicles on either side of the one I am in. I get to the airport with no bullets buzzing around me, no problem at all. On the flight back home, I decide that as much as I like extra income, I am going to do my best to have a coup-free career from this moment forward.
SHORTLY BEFORE THE 2003 season, I’m at home, getting ready for spring training, when my phone rings. I have our baby daughter, Gabriel, in my arms. The caller is the Texas Rangers’ new manager, Buck Showalter. I’ve never gotten a call from a manager in January before. My first thought is that something bad must’ve happened. Buck asks me how the off-season has been and I say fine and decide not to tell him about the near coup and dodging bullets in Zulia.
I just wanted to let you know we’re going to give you a good long look in camp this spring, Buck says. I know you’ve kind of been swept under the rug and that you may not have always gotten a fair shot to show what you can do. But you bring a lot to the table and I think you have a lot to offer this organization, and you are going to get a chance to prove it.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your calling, Buck. All I want to do is help the club and I believe I can do that too.
When we hang up, I tell Anne what Buck said and I’m so fired up for the spring that I wish I could report that afternoon. I have to wait a month. I spend it going on long nighttime runs through the quiet streets of Green Hills, visualizing myself on the mound as I go, getting big-league hitters out. I am in as good a shape as I’ve ever been when I arrive in Port Charlotte in mid-February. I am going to get a fair shot and you can’t ask for more than that.
CHAPTER TEN
REQUIEM FOR MY FASTBALL
I am in a small space, surrounded by concerned faces, an inquisition without the bright lights. The topic of the day is my lifelong run as a conventional pitcher. It is not being decided on a mound.
It is being decided on a sofa in Buck Showalter’s office. The sofa is comfortable but I am not.
I wonder why they’ve called me in here. Have I run out of road? Could they finally be giving up on me?
Across from me are Buck, pitching coach Orel Hershiser, and bullpen coach Mark “Goose” Connor. It is mid-April 2005, a full nine years after the Rangers drafted me. I’ve been a member of Buck’s staff for the last two seasons, a spot starter and long reliever, my first extended time in the big leagues. I hate to say those Baseball Prospectus writers were right, but the truth is that I am probably not even as good as marginal. My ERA is 5.09 in 2003 and 5.61 in 2004, and I give up a bunch more hits than innings pitched. I have enough promising moments to convince the front office to keep me around—I throw a complete-game, six-hit shutout against the Tigers in late ’03—but as hard as I compete, I just can’t seem to sustain any success against major-league hitters.
And now Buck and Orel and Goose want to talk to me about it.
Two days earlier, pitching in relief against the Angels, I’d thrown a sinker to Garret Anderson and felt as if I’d been stabbed in the right shoulder. The pain landed me on the disabled list and now on Buck’s couch. My senses are on high alert, noticing everything from the tight weave of the carpet to the reddish, round contour of Buck’s face. His desk is obsessively neat, with a tidy stack of papers and game notes, a well-ordered lineup of framed photos, and a row of books about warfare and leadership. Behind him is a whiteboard with the names of the Rangers’ top minor-league prospects. Buck likes being a general, on top of everything, no detail escaping his ever-darting eyes. But this time he lets his lieutenant, Orel, do most of the talking.
I like it when Orel talks. He knows a lot about pitching. He is a man with a good heart, a man I trust. He gets right to the point.
After you finish rehabbing your shoulder, what would you think about going back to Oklahoma City to learn how to become a full-time knuckleball pitcher? Orel asks. I’m sure you don’t want to go back to the minors, but we think it’s your best chance for success. You have a good knuckleball already. You have the perfect makeup to make it work, because you know how to compete and we know how hard you’ll go after it. We think it can be a great thing for you and for the ball club, but we want to know what you think.
I squirm on the sofa and make eye contact with all three of them, one after another. It doesn’t feel as I’m being ganged up on. It feels as though they are all on my side.
Orel and I have had some general conversations about this, but nothing concrete. I’ve done bullpen sessions for him in which I’ve thrown nothing but the knuckleball, a pitch I throw once or twice a game, if that. He’s always been positive and supportive of me. So have Buck and Goose Connor. Positive is exactly what I need right now, beca
use I’m full of doubts and short on hope, a thirty-year-old journeyman whose career is hanging by a glove string. I’ve never been a guy to obsess about stats, and I believe the game has gone berserk with all its number crunching and slicing and dicing of statistical metrics. But I cannot run from my numbers. Over parts of four big-league seasons, I have pitched in seventy-two games. My record is 15–17, my earned-run average 5.48. I’ve given up 293 hits in 239⅔ innings. Those are some ugly numbers.
Fringe big-leaguer numbers.
Later, Goose confirms for me just how precarious the situation is.
They aren’t going to bring you back to the big leagues as a conventional pitcher, R.A. You’re going to come back as a knuckleball pitcher or you are not going to come back at all.
I fidget on Buck’s sofa and contemplate the end of one career and the beginning of a new one. It’s hard to wrap my mind around it. Okay, so not many people have ever confused me with Nolan Ryan. I get that. But still, I’ve always been able to throw a hard sinking fastball, at 92 or 93 miles per hour. I became an All-American and an Olympian and a first-round draft choice because I had stuff—a big-league fastball and a big-league changeup to play off it.
Now I am supposed to say good-bye to all that and join the lineage of Hoyt Wilhelm and the Niekro brothers and Charlie Hough?
That’s exactly what I am supposed to do. And it is what I have to do, because radar guns don’t lie, and this whole spring, my fastball has been topping out at 85 or 86. My arm feels fine and I cut the ball loose, and what?
Nothing.
Your fastball isn’t coming in the way it used to. How’s your arm feeling? Goose would ask.
It feels fine, Goose. Really. I don’t know what’s going on.
Throw it again, Goose would say.