by Bret Boone
Like most future big leaguers, I played shortstop in Little League. But now and then I’d strap on a mask and chest protector. “Look at me, I’m just like Dad!” That lasted until the day my dad made a surprise visit to our neighborhood field. And he was fuming. He moved me—physically—out from behind the plate. Then he made me give the catcher’s gear to another kid.
“You’re not a catcher,” he said.
Now I was mad. “Why? Because I’m not as good as you?”
“That’s not it.” He said there were only a few things he knew for sure about baseball. “One is that you play shortstop until they tell you that you can’t.”
“But Dad—you’re a catcher.”
“You catch because you have to. Because it’s the only way to get to the next level,” he said. “That’s how I got to the big leagues. Let’s see if you can do better.”
I got my glove and played short. By then I had an inkling that I might not be a born shortstop. The second baseman’s footwork and throws felt more natural to me. But Dad turned out to be right anyway. I would wind up playing short for years, until a college coach said, “Boone, you’re at second today.”
When middle school classmates talked about going to college someday, I said they’d be going without me. By the time they were freshmen at Rutgers or Temple, I planned to be a bonus baby, a first-round draft pick driving my own Beemer around the high minors on my way to the big leagues. It was around this time that a Philadelphia reporter wrote a story about Bob Boone and his precocious kid, the one who was stylin’ at the All-Star Game. That was the first time anyone in the media mentioned the three-generation angle. If I made the majors someday, I might be the first one to follow his father and grandfather to the game’s highest level—the first third-generation big leaguer.
Which meant zilch to me. Who cared about ancient history? I was burning to leave my brand on the game. Me, Bret Boone, not the third Boone or the latest in a bunch of Boones. Of course I loved Gramps and Dad, but at that age I thought my future was so bright I had to wear shades and lampblack under my eyes. I was on my way…
Till I stopped growing.
At the age of fifteen, I was five feet tall. Not five one or five feet and half an inch. Five zero. All but one or two of the other ninth-grade boys at Medford’s Shawnee High School were taller. So were most of the girls. Shoot, a lot of the seventh-grade girls were taller than me. And what I lacked in height, I also lacked in bulk. I tipped the bathroom scale at 110. That was about the same as one of Greg Luzinski’s legs. It wasn’t much more than half what my six-two dad and six-foot grandpa weighed. My physique was a daily shock to me, and it surprised the whole family. Mom would mark my height on the wall with a pencil, and the pencil mark never moved. Dad used to tell me I’d probably be taller than he was. After all, I was the new generation, better fed than old guys like him and Gramps. Instead I leveled off at the height of Sneezy, Dopey, and Bashful. I could hit, field, run, and throw—everything but grow.
I made Shawnee High’s varsity baseball team as a freshman, but so what? High school bats were too heavy for me. The coach didn’t even let me hit. I’d play shortstop, and then sit in the dugout while the DH batted in my place. Our pitcher got to bat, but not me! Finally, late in the season, I got into the lineup as a hitter. Batting ninth.
One night I asked Mom if we could speed things up. “What things?” she said.
“My growth,” I said.
She laughed. “You’ll be all right. Let nature take its course. Now go to bed.” So I went to sleep and dreamed of being six three.
That was the year the Phillies decided their catcher was too old. Dad was thirty-three, which is about ninety in catcher years. He was coming off a 1981 season when he was hurt most of the year. He batted .211 with only 4 home runs and 24 RBIs. So Philadelphia traded for twenty-nine-year-old Bo Diaz—a deal that cost the Phillies a young outfielder, Lonnie Smith—and sold Dad to the California Angels.
As it turned out, the washed-up catcher had some baseball left in him. Nine years’ worth, to be exact, including five Gold Gloves and another All-Star appearance.
The Angels’ arms couldn’t match the Phillies of Steve Carlton and Tug McGraw. Their pitching staff was led by Geoff Zahn, Ken Forsch, and Mike Witt. Dad helped lead them to the 1982 AL West title. He also took his family home to Southern California—to Orange County, an hour’s drive north of San Diego. He and Mom said we’d love it there. The Angels played in Anaheim, ten minutes from Disneyland!
Mom and Dad loved the Philadelphia area, but they were glad to go home to SoCal. Gramps and Grandma Patsy, still living in San Diego, were thrilled, too. My little brothers were too young to know the difference. All they cared about was the Disneyland part.
That left me, throwing a fit in the driveway.
“I’m not goin’!”
Dad said I’d be crazy about California, where kids played ball year-round. I didn’t want to hear it. I was a Jersey boy. Dirt bikes, not surfboards. The Boss, not the Beach Boys.
“You can’t make me!”
Of course he could. His job was in California now. So I said goodbye to all my friends, and our home with its tree house and zipline, and the basement with its Wrestlemania stage and paintings of Dad on the walls. I enrolled at El Dorado High School in Placentia, California, and tried out for the baseball team. All five foot zero of me.
I made the team, too, and that turned out to be a mixed blessing.
A couple of years after being the superstar of Medford Little League, I was the runt of the roster. The fields were bigger now, but not me. The bats were heavier, but not me. Some of my teammates were six feet tall, with mustaches, while I still looked like a child. All over. I mean, I didn’t have a hint of body hair on me, and I was showering with teammates who looked like men. That’s embarrassing for a kid.
I felt washed up at the age of fifteen. It’s hard to feel smaller than that.
For the first time in my life, baseball was no fun.
What’s the old saying? “The older you get, the smarter your dad gets.” Invented by a dad, probably. But I can’t argue with it. The more I grew, the more I saw that my father was right about most things.
California, for one.
At first I hated being the squirt with the Jersey accent at El Dorado High, a few miles from the stadium where Dad played for the Angels. I was totally out of place, not just pint-size but dressed all wrong. The other kids dressed like surfers and skateboarders. They wore Keds and jams and T-shirts, while I stood out like a manicured thumb in my Calvin Klein jeans and button-down shirts. Preppy, they called me. But I adapted. You might say I hit puberty the way Hank Aaron hit fastballs. Pretty soon I was decked out in 501s and a T-shirt, hanging on the beach with girls in bikinis while the other guys surfed. I never learned to surf, mainly because it was more fun staying on the beach—for obvious reasons.
Baseball was literally the key to my family’s move from New Jersey to California. At first Dad rented a house from pitcher Frank Tanana, who’d been traded by the Angels to Boston (for Fred Lynn) before signing with the Texas Rangers. Next we crammed into a condo Dad bought from another Angels teammate. California girls aside, there were two great things about that period. Little brothers Aaron and Matt shared a room, while I got my own room, and I finally hit a growth spurt. During my second season playing short for the El Dorado Golden Hawks, I sprang up six inches! Not enough to make me big, exactly, but at five foot six and 140 pounds, I now cast a shadow that could cover second base. Those six inches and extra poundage made the game fun again. A 29-ounce bat that had felt overwhelming the year before began to feel like a toothpick. Now I was hitting bullets off six-foot pitchers.
Facing good pitching was another benefit of moving to my parents’ and grandparents’ home state. In California just about everybody plays year-round, so the competition’s at a higher level. With rare exceptions, California high schoolers threw harder than anyone I’d faced in New Jersey. No more than 1 in
50 ever touched 90 mph—today it’s more like 1 in 10 in Sun Belt high schools—but plenty could reach the high 80s, and some of them threw curves, too. I even swung at a high school slider or two. It would be years before I learned to hit a good breaking ball, but once I got a little muscle on me, I could turn a fastball around. What’s it take to do that? Start with a lot of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Most people’s muscles are about half fast-twitch and half slow-twitch. Endurance athletes have mostly slow-twitch muscles, while athletes in sports that call for short bursts of action—sprinters, football and baseball players—have more fast-twitch. I was in the 80 percent fast-twitch range, which means it’s a good thing I wasn’t a marathoner. My muscles were made for the quick, explosive reaction it takes to hit major-league pitching.
Once the swing starts, it’s a matter of delivering the bat’s sweet spot squarely to the middle of the ball. That’s when contact feels perfect. All the force of your swing gets transferred into the ball, so the bat doesn’t vibrate. Your hands don’t sting. You don’t feel contact at all, but the ball goes back where it came from, faster.
As I grew, my ground balls to infielders turned into base hits. (As a sophomore, almost all my hits were singles.) Then, as I continued growing—eventually to five foot ten, where I stopped—the singles turned to doubles. Finally, some of the doubles started flying over the fence.
One day my guidance counselor asked about my career plans. It was a standard question. Was I planning to go to college? If so, I might want to give more than a passing thought to my grades. If not, what sort of crummy job did I expect to qualify for after high school fun and games?
I sat there looking at the counselor like he had three eyes. A backup plan? Me?
He was only being realistic. The counselor knew that my dad was the Angels’ catcher, but he also knew that the vast majority of big-league players’ sons never play a single game in the majors. To his credit, he’d gone to the trouble of looking it up. Out of all the thousands of major-league baseball players dating back to the 1900s, fewer than a hundred were the sons of major leaguers. And almost all of them were underachievers. Sure, my dad had followed Gramps to the bigs, and eventually to the All-Star Game. Along with Buddy Bell, the Rangers third baseman whose dad, Gus, made four All-Star teams in the ’50s, Dad was the most accomplished second-generation player in baseball history. But that was practically a double whammy. My guidance counselor asked if I knew how many third-generation players had reached the majors.
That was a math question I could handle. “Zero.”
“That’s right. Zero,” he said. “So you’ll need a backup plan. If baseball doesn’t work, what’s Plan B?”
“More baseball. Pro baseball. You can write it down in my file. In five years I’ll be in the big leagues.”
Looking back, I can’t believe how naïve and immature I was. (As it turned out, I was wrong, too. I wouldn’t be in the big leagues in five years.) I just didn’t think the usual limits applied to me, because I was born to play ball. If making the majors meant being the only third-generation player ever, fine, that’s what I’d be.
Unless somebody beat me to it.
The funny thing is, there was another candidate for the three-generation trophy, and what seemed like a trivia question to me—Which high school hotshot has a father and grandpa who played in the majors?—was more like a mission to him.
The other funny thing is, there were about 24,500 high schools scattered across the United States, and he went to the one closest to mine.
Jim Campanis was the tall, sandy-haired catcher for Valencia High School, our rival, a mile down Yorba Linda Boulevard and Bradford Avenue from El Dorado. Two years older than me, he stood six foot one and tipped the scales at 200, while I was still the smallest guy on my team. Scouts drooled over Jim, not just for his size and home run power but for what they called his bloodlines. His dad, Jim Campanis Sr., had been a backup catcher for the Dodgers, Royals, and Pirates. His grandfather, Al, played a week for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1943 before becoming the scout who discovered Sandy Koufax and going on to be a team executive. Al Campanis would lose his job as the Dodgers’ GM after telling Ted Koppel on a 1987 Nightline episode that blacks “lack the necessities” to be managers or club executives. But in 1985, when Jim was a power-hitting senior at Valencia, Al was one of two prominent grandpas watching high school games in Orange County’s Empire League.
As the GM who brought Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser, and Pedro Guerrero to the first-place Dodgers, the team that always overshadowed Dad and the Angels, Al Campanis was the bigger name, but Gramps had been a far better player. His 151 big-league homers and 1,260 hits looked pretty imposing next to Al’s zero homers and 2 career hits. Jim Campanis Sr., with his 4 career home runs and 32 hits, looked puny compared to my dad, who would wind up with 105 homers and 1,838 hits. I needled Jim Campanis about those stats. I’d yell across the diamond: “Hey, big guy, my family’s better than yours!”
He’d ask, “Who’s the little guy with the big mouth?” And our long, twisty relationship was under way.
One Saturday night when his parents were away, Jim hosted a kegger. It was an invitation-only gathering of top jocks and cool upperclassmen. Naturally, I crashed it.
As Jim would remember that night, “I walked into my kitchen and saw this preppy-looking kid and thought, What’s he doing here?”
I guess my Jersey roots were showing. Instead of cargo pants and a T-shirt, I wore slacks and a button-down Pierre Cardin. Hey, that’s respect. I dressed up for your party, Jimmy! And if some of the other kids laughed at my outfit, that was as cool to me as the beer we weren’t quite old enough to be drinking (as the cops who broke up the party pointed out). My attitude, then and now, was, If they don’t like me, it’s their problem.
I was still going to the ballpark with Dad every chance I got. We didn’t talk baseball during those freeway drives to Anaheim. He wasn’t the type to share his thoughts about the starter he’d be catching that night, or how he was hitting, or how his beat-up knees and feet hurt so much he sometimes had trouble sleeping. No, he saw those drives mainly as a chance to discuss my approach to schoolwork, which was still, um, how should I put this? Less than diligent? Somewhat indifferent? Sucky? Here was Stanford grad Bob Boone, one of baseball’s high-IQ guys, driving to work with his eldest son, who was barely pulling B’s in high school.
“How’s your algebra going?” he asked.
“Great,” I lied.
El Dorado baseball coach Steve Gullotti’s wife was a math teacher. She tutored me after practice every day. I was fine at computation—divide your hits by ABs to get your batting average; multiply a pitcher’s earned runs by nine, then divide by innings pitched to find his ERA—but algebra was Greek to me. What did πr2 have to do with anything in real life? Even now I think it’s crazy that anyone but math specialists has to learn algebra. We’ve got a generation of kids who can’t make change for a dollar or find their way around their hometowns without a phone app, but they’re still taking algebra.
“Mrs. Gullotti knows her stuff,” I said. I didn’t tell Dad that we’d worked out a study plan. She liked baseball almost as much as math, so we skipped the math and talked baseball.
“Good. You’ll need algebra for your SATs. You know that’s what colleges look at first, don’t you?”
“Yes, Dad. I know, Dad.” I didn’t add that my SATs didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to college. There were two reasons for that: a) the best players signed pro contracts right out of high school and b) I was one of the best players. You don’t need algebra to see where “a + b” was going.
All the Boones agreed on one thing—it was great to get to the ballpark. As a teenager I wasn’t as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the little kid growing up in the Phillies’ clubhouse, but I still loved the sights, sounds, and even smells of the game. Walking into Anaheim Stadium, the Big A, hours before the game, Dad and I took in the bright green grass and red clay dirt of the infie
ld, and the sweaty leather-and-aftershave scent of the clubhouse. Pretty soon we split up. Dad went off to exercise. He started his workday with yoga and kung fu, which I thought was comical. Kung fu might help you in a bench-clearing brawl, but I’d rather take BP. Once, when he asked me to join him for a workout, I said, “I don’t have to. I can hit.”
After kung fu he’d huddle with that night’s starting pitcher, to hash out how they’d go after the other team’s lineup. I headed for the visitors’ clubhouse. In those days I was the new kid working for Brian “Bubba” Harkins, the Angels’ legendary visitors’ clubhouse manager. His job was to keep the visiting team as comfortable as possible in a locker room half the size of the home team’s. Bubba coddled the visitors, since most of his pay consisted of tips. At that time the major-league minimum salary was $109,000. The minimum tip for a clubbie was $35 per series. Even rookies had to give Bubba that much. The big-dime stars might tip him $100 per game, so he did his best for all of them. Bubba knew which superstar liked a postgame Budweiser, which utility infielder liked a Dr Pepper with extra ice. Carlton Fisk, for instance, liked to have a chilled Coors Gold waiting for him after a game. Cal Ripken Jr.’s only requirement was a brand-new pair of sanitary socks for every game, while the Indians and Yankees outfielder Mel Hall needed a new box of Fruity Pebbles every day. Hall just loved his Fruity Pebbles! Bubba could also line up dinner reservations for you and your wife, or a car and driver after the game (maybe for you and your girlfriend), or Disneyland tickets if your family was flying in tomorrow, or all of the above.
My job was less glamorous—laundry, mainly. Plus errands that came up when the clubhouse manager was busy. One ruckus came after Yankees manager Billy Martin corralled me and said, “Kid, bring me a bottle of vodka.” Which I did. The executive suites were stocked with liquor. All I had to do was say, “It’s for Billy,” and a server handed me a bottle. (Maybe I should have told Jim Campanis and his buddies about this gig.) Later, after I mentioned my errand to Dad, he charged into Martin’s office and told him, “You’d better never use my son to fetch your liquor again!” And Billy never did. I went back to throwing jockstraps into the industrial-strength washers under the stands at the Big A. Yes, I carried Cal Ripken Jr.’s jock. Roger Clemens’s and Don Mattingly’s and Rickey Henderson’s, too, but it’s not like I got a kick out of it. I just wanted to be at the ballpark with my dad, even it meant washing socks and jocks and jerseys. I planned to be back here in a few years, and not as a no-name kid scoring an occasional ten-dollar tip from a guy who hit a homer that night. I planned to be the guy who hit the homer.