Three Nights in August

by Buzz Bissinger

  Which is what made June 2002 so troubling. Kile had had arthroscopic surgery on his shoulder during the off-season. It had thrown a whack into his spring-training regimen, curtailing the amount of work he could put in. A lot of pitchers simply would have stayed down in Florida once the team moved north, get in four or five starts to put the wheels back in motion and then rejoin the club on May 1. But Kile didn't like the idea of putting his team in the hole like that.

  "Who are you gonna pitch in my place?" he asked La Russa.

  "That's not the way we look at it, Darryl. It's a six-month season. You come back May first ready to go, we'll still be in contention."

  Kile refused the opening offered to him. He had never spent a day on the disabled list, and he wasn't about to start now. He was a starting pitcher. He was paid to start. And that's what he did right from the beginning of the season. He pitched well, incredibly well given how much of the spring he had missed. But as much as he hated to admit it, because it implied some excuse, and he was from the old-time school where any excuse was just that, he was still recovering. By the beginning of June, his record was 2 and 3, including those two no-decisions against Houston. He pitched well against Pittsburgh—six hits in seven innings and one run—to get to .500. Although he struggled in his next start against Kansas City, he still got the win to push up to 4 and 3. La Russa and Duncan liked the way he was coming back physically from the surgery. They were pleased with his progress. They admired his progress. He was beginning to look right. But something wasn't right inside. He was quiet. He really wasn't saying anything, no foghorn blast to the assembled three hours before game time, not even that stupid little song about snow.

  "You okay?" they separately asked him.

  "I'm okay. Just trying to get my stuff right."

  And that's all he said. La Russa talked to Duncan about it, and Duncan thought that Kile's moody silence was simply an expression of frustration, that it was June and he wanted to be pitching great all the time and was barely over .500. La Russa let it go, but then came the Seattle game. His stuff was pretty good, but "within the ears," as La Russa described it, he simply didn't seem to be there. In the pregame meeting, Duncan had stressed several crucial points to Kile, including not to throw anything soft and breaking to John Olerud. But during the game, Kile was doing the exact opposite of what Duncan had told him. It happened a couple of times. From the dugout, La Russa, who had sat in on the meeting, watched and thought, What the hell was that? Why did he do that?

  Then Olerud came up, and Kile threw exactly what Duncan had told him not to throw, a soft breaking ball, and Olerud hit it out for a two-run homer. It was abundantly clear to La Russa that Kile's head simply wasn't into it. So in the fifth, he came out to the mound and took Kile out. Kile was surprised. He made a bid to stay, but it was too late.

  "I've already signaled from the bench. I've already got a guy coming in. Give me the ball."

  Kile gave him the ball, an act of surrender even more humiliating than an intentional walk. After the game, on the plane back to St. Louis, La Russa went back to talk to some of the players. He tried to make eye contact with Kile, but the pitcher turned away. La Russa let it go, because he knew that Kile was hard-wired with pride. A hook in the fifth was more than some glancing blow.

  Over the next several days, La Russa and Kile continued their dance of avoidance. When the pitcher saw the manager, he went the other way. Then Duncan called La Russa and said that something was wrong with Kile.

  "I tried to talk to him about a couple of things. He's not being rude. But he's not listening. He's not into it."

  He simply wanted to get his pitching in, which was entirely uncharacteristic of him. "He's bothered about something," said Duncan.

  There was a game against Kansas City that Sunday. La Russa waited until all the reporters had gotten their quotes and left the clubhouse. Then he tapped Kile on the shoulder and asked him to come into his office.

  "Look, you get the ball Tuesday and there's an off day tomorrow," said La Russa. "For you and for us, I want to have this conversation."

  Most times, La Russa would start off a conversation with a player by asking a question and listening to the player's response. But now he began differently.

  "I got three things I want to say to you, and I'd like to get all three things out. Then you can say anything you want to. Or say nothing if you want to. But I'd like to say those three things." Kile nodded.

  First, La Russa reaffirmed the fact that nobody believed in him more as a pitcher than La Russa and Duncan did and that nothing had happened this season, nothing, to change that. His second point had to do with why he'd hooked Kile in the fifth inning in Seattle. It wasn't to humiliate the pitcher but because of the mental mistakes Kile had made.

  "As a manager, there is only one way a player and a team improves—if something gets done wrong, you address it, unless it's a hiccup. It's common sense but it's hard to accept if you're the individual involved.

  "Do you think that's a bad philosophy?" he asked rhetorically. "If it was you, would you just let mistakes happen?"

  La Russa's third point, and perhaps the most important one, was to let Kile know just how important he was to the team—a core player, a core leader—and the responsibility that implied. "That means if you're in Seattle and something happens and you get taken out of the game, you can react however you want. This is America. You can get mad at me. You can dispute my decision. What I would challenge you to dispute is my intention to do the right thing for the team and for you. I think it's real important that you walk out of here today knowing that you're a key guy and that any decision I'm trying to make is for us and for you."

  Finished with what he felt he had to say, he asked Kile for his response. "This is totally about me," said Kile. "It's not about you guys. You address things. You work on stuff. You don't ignore things."

  "That means I can't ignore it when it involves you."

  "I understand that."

  "Well, you understand that you're a key guy?"

  "Tony, this is totally about me," he repeated. "It's been really hard for me to struggle like I've been struggling."

  At that moment, La Russa understood what was eating at Kile, and he respected him more than ever for it. "Darryl, do you understand how few pitchers could have gone through what you did with the arthroscopic surgery and would be determined not to miss a start?"

  "I just go out there," Kile lamented. "I pitch four innings. I pitch three innings. I pitch five innings."

  La Russa pulled out the legal sheet showing that Kile had also pitched six innings, seven innings, including those two no-decisions against Houston where he had worked his ass off.

  "Darryl, we still have four months to play. It's all in front of us."

  "It's hard for me. It's just hard."

  "Your arm strength is good. Your stamina is good. Cut yourself some slack. You've already gone through the hardest part."

  "I'm bouncing back good. I feel strong. Then I get these no-decisions."

  La Russa looked at him and said the only thing that was left to say, because no matter how much money you made and how much adulation you received for doing what you did, you could never hear it enough.

  "We can't make it without you."

  IV

  KILE PITCHED two days later against the Angels on a star-crossed night marked by the passing of Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck. He went seven and two-thirds innings, his longest outing of the season. He gave up six hits and one earned run. He was lights out, his best performance of the season, and the 7–2 win put the team into undisputed possession of first place. On a sad and painful evening—because losing Buck was to St. Louis like losing the Mississippi—Kile had been magnificent.

  Five days later, in mid-June, he was set to go against the Cubs at Wrigley. Flynn Kile felt that something was amiss as she talked to her husband in those days leading up to the start in Chicago. He suddenly asked her to remarry him. He seemed overly emotional and
affectionate, as if he were preparing for something, getting ready for something, even if he had no idea what it was. That Friday night, from his hotel room at the Westin off Michigan Avenue, he talked with her for an hour. He didn't want to get off the phone. She remembered him saying that. I don't want to get off. But he did because there was a game the next day, and Kile, just as he prided himself on never missing a start, also prided himself on never being late to the ballpark.

  There were so many things that happened the next morning, images that could not be erased no matter how much you wanted to erase them. You could see Mike Matheny urging someone, anyone, to check on Kile's whereabouts when he still hadn't shown up in the cubbyhole of the visitor's clubhouse of Wrigley after the team bus had arrived. You could see the head of security for the Westin breaking into room 1102 after repeated phone calls had gone unanswered and finding him there, still in his bed, wearing the black eyeshades that helped him sleep, with one arm across the pillow and the other across his upper torso. You could see Barry Weinberg rushing off the field with Walt Jocketty after a phone call. You could see Buddy Bates, then the equipment manager, fall into a chair in the clubhouse and cup his head in his hands. You could see reliever Dave Veres whispering, "They found D.K. They can't wake him up," then retreat into the tiny equipment room to sob in private. You could see Matheny pleading with Bates to tell him what was wrong, asking him, Is Darryl still alive? and lifting Bates by the collar when Bates didn't know what to say because how do you say something like that until he just nodded no and Matheny pulled off his jersey because baseball simply didn't matter anymore. You could see Tony La Russa standing in the middle of a circle of players and saying softly, "They found Darryl. He's dead. " You could see Joe Girardi, then playing for the Cubs, come out onto the field of Wrigley and announce to the sold-out crowd with tears in his eyes, almost unable to speak, that the game would be postponed because of "a tragedy in the Cardinals family." You could see all those things and so many more things and still not believe it: a player, a teammate, there with you the night before doing the things players do on the road—grabbing dinner with friends at Harry Caray's, getting back to the hotel at 10:30 to call his wife, rejecting Morris's invitation shortly after midnight to have a drink in the hotel bar—because you know what, Matty Mo, I feel a little tired. I just feel a little tired.

  You could think of Darryl, the way he competed and the impatience with which he treated himself, not cutting himself any slack, because that's what quitters did and baseball had enough quitters in it already, and when you thought of Darryl, it was impossible not to think of his wife and those three beautiful children. You could grope for things to say, ways of realizing it, or somehow making it less real.

  You could listen to Tony La Russa in a closed-door meeting that night on the sixteenth floor of the Westin, recounting that last conversation he'd had with Darryl, how he had told him how important he was to the team, how he had said, "We can't make it without you. " And then you could listen to Dave Duncan, Duncan the Quiet Assassin, Duncan the Deacon, Duncan whose words were so sparse they were called biblical. You could see the tears well up in his eyes as he spoke about his fallen pitcher who had died of a heart attack in his sleep at the age of thirty-three. You could see him stop to steady himself. And then you could listen to him in the sterile antiseptic wash of that hotel conference room when he talked about what a privilege it had been to work with Darryl Kile. You could listen to him describing how wonderful it had been to talk the bittersweet beauty of pitching with him, the timeless and impossible science of trying to figure out what precisely made it work, which was why it was always worth talking about. And you could listen to him when he said that for now and forever, he would use Darryl Kile as a model in his own life, to attain the same professional heights and more than just that because there was so much more than just that: the humanity of Darryl Kile, the exquisite humanity.

  ***

  The Cardinals foundered in the immediate aftermath. There was the incomprehensible loss of Darryl Kile and beyond that, the soul-searching every player went through as they privately wondered, maybe for the first time ever, just how important baseball really was anymore. They knew that Darryl had left behind a wife and three children, and they also thought of their own families: the vulnerability of them, how everything in life could change so very much from one day to the next, there and then not there. The team was still in the thick of a race for the division, and as the manager, La Russa's mandate was to get them to compete. But he also did not want to trample on those who asked themselves, because it was worth asking themselves, why the race for the division mattered. In the week following Kile's death, the team won only two of seven games, and the atmosphere in the clubhouse was ghostly even in the rare victories, players walking in quietly and then showering and then leaving as fast as they could.

  La Russa continued to search for the right thing to do. He mourned as they mourned, but he was still a manager. In the past, he had always relied on the advice of his mentors, but they were of no help now because nothing they had been through was parallel to what he and his team were going through. Then he read a column by Bernie Miklasz in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And it hit him: a way maybe, just maybe, to recapture the hearts and minds of his players back to where he felt they should be.

  Several hours before the game to be played that night, he gathered the team into the eating room in the clubhouse. "We're all examining what's right in our lives and what's right for our families," he said. "We mourn Darryl and we worry about his wife and kids and it's not like you can go to the office and hide since we all compete in front of each other." He acknowledged that he wasn't sure what to do, how the coaches weren't sure what to do, how appropriate was it now to get after a player who didn't hustle, to seize on the very things that had once been so automatic before Kile's death. Then La Russa pulled out a piece of paper in which he had copied down a small portion of Miklasz's column, actually something that Kile himself had once written about the death of his own father. "This is what helps me," La Russa told his players. And while he wasn't sure it would help them, he also felt it was worth reading aloud:

  I don't think I'll ever get over it, but my father was my best friend. But in order to be a man, you got to separate your personal life from your work life. It may sound cold, but I've got work to do. I'll never forget my father, but I'm sure he'd want me to keep on working and try to do the best I can do.

  The pall began to lift after La Russa read those words. A team that had stopped competing discovered that it was okay to compete again because of what their teammate was telling them: letting them know, just as he had once learned, that there was still work to do, that the very definition of a professional was to separate out the personal. Which is why, when the Cardinals went on to win ninety-seven games and the division title that year—when they beat Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling of the Diamondbacks in back-to-back games to win the division series, when they came within a breath of going to the World Series—it was a performance in every way remarkable for the sorrow that had been overcome, except maybe to Darryl Kile.

  It would have to be enough. For every teammate who had known him, heard that silly and comforting foghorn reminding them that it was three hours before game time, watched him pitch his ass off and argue with Matheny like a stubborn old woman to the point that Matheny would just as soon strangle him and stuff him in a box except that he loved him in the way that only a catcher can love a pitcher.

  Whatever they felt and remembered would have to endure. For La Russa and Duncan. For Matheny and Williams and Bates and Veres. For Pujols and Simontacchi and Renteria. For Morris, whose locker, so stoked with the stuffing of the game it looked like Santa's sack, was just down the row from the one that was bare except for the uniform shirt hanging on the white plastic hanger, there long after the last light had been turned off and Morris and everyone else had gone home knowing, as much as they ever knew anything in life, that they would be back at
it the next day three hours before game time.

  13. Thing Of Beauty

  I

  SAN DIEGO WAS the perfect place for Matt Morris to get back into the groove after the All-Star break. The very name of its stadium—Qualcomm—sounded like an over-the-counter herbal remedy guaranteeing sweet dreams, the fans equally relaxed so there would be no extra burden on his performance beyond the burden of performance itself.

  He came back strong, the ten days' rest clearly of benefit. His delivery and mechanics were smooth. His composure was in place, essential for Morris because he tended to fall out of his delivery and rush his throws when he got excited. In his brief absence from the game, he had rediscovered love.

  As La Russa watched him in that first inning against the lead-off hitter, Ramon Vazquez, he couldn't help but feel that a huge obstacle had been overcome. The Cardinals could not win without Morris. His prolonged absence would affect the club like an oil spill, an ecological catastrophe whose black ooze would eventually touch everybody, not only the pitchers who would have to fill in for him but also hitters who would feel the extra burden to attain crooked numbers without his regular presence on the mound.