Home Game

by Bret Boone

  Bubba never forgot how I pointed at a particular locker and told him, “That’s the one I want when I’m a big leaguer.” It wasn’t a corner locker like the big stars get, often along with an adjoining locker for their fan mail and all the free stuff people give them. It was just a good locker, in a row with the everyday players. Bubba said, “Forget it. You’ve got no shot.” He asked if I had any idea how long the odds were that a kid whose dad and grandpa had been big leaguers would make it a family trifecta.

  “Just you wait,” I said.

  Meanwhile I played other positions fans never hear about. Once the game started, it was my job to go down the right-field line and warm up the Angels’ right fielder between innings. Now, the 1986 Angels had a pretty star-studded roster. First baseman Wally Joyner was so popular that the papers called the stadium “Wally World.” Pitcher Don Sutton was on his way to the Hall of Fame. But right fielder Reggie Jackson was their biggest star by far, and he never let you forget it. I’d stand in foul territory, tossing a ball with him so he could keep his throwing arm loose. It was as commonplace as a practice swing, but Reggie, being Reggie, expected perfection. If I threw a ball he had to reach for, he gave me a dirty look. If I threw one over his head, he looked pained and threw up his arms, like How can I, the great Reggie, put up with this?

  Reggie was such a star that he got a piece of the Angels’ gate receipts. On top of his $3.6 million salary, he got 50 cents for every ticket the club sold beyond a certain level. The fans knew all about his attendance clause. They liked to rag him—and support him for his homers—by throwing quarters and half-dollar coins onto the field. “Here you go, Reg. Here’s my fifty cents!” He’d nod and bow and put the coins in his pocket. Sometimes I helped him avoid bad hops by putting some of them in my pocket.

  Reggie impressed me but didn’t intimidate me. When he gave me the evil eye for a bad warm-up toss, I thought, Okay, you’re great and all, and I respect your Reggieness, but I’m doing the best I can. I grew up taking infield with Mike Schmidt, so don’t give me attitude.

  After nights at the Big A, I spent afternoons on the high school field at El Dorado. Orange County was a hotbed of high school ball. Still is. Perfect weather and affluence are good for growing ballplayers. I was still getting used to the perfectly manicured field at El Dorado when our team went up against Los Alamitos High with its superstars J. T. Snow (son of the Los Angeles Rams’ wide receiver Jack Snow), who would play fourteen big-league seasons, and Robb Nen, who went on to save 314 games for the Marlins and Giants. Another local rival, Lakewood, had Damion Easley, who would play seventeen big-league seasons and make an All-Star Game for the Tigers.

  Coach Gullotti told me I could learn from watching guys like Snow and Easley, but I wasn’t listening. I mean, I’d grown up watching Schmidt, Pete Rose, and Rod Carew. Not to mention my dad, who sometimes annoyed me by staying in the background all the time. Back when I was a five-foot freshman, Dad thought it would be better for me to play every day on the junior varsity instead of playing short for the varsity and sitting in the dugout while a bigger boy batted in my place. But did he tell the coach what he thought? No, there’d be no catcher’s interference from Dad. He didn’t want to be one of those overbearing baseball dads who ruin everything for everybody. He wanted me to make my own way. Fifteen years after Grandma Patsy pitched me into the swimming pool, it was sink-or-swim all over again.

  As a junior, I batted a school-record .423. Even better, I turned sixteen. The rich kids, the cool few whose dads were CEOs or real estate developers, drove shiny sports cars. I wanted one of my own. Being a high school baseball stud wasn’t bad, but a baseball stud in a Porsche had a better chance with the girls who did the best job filling their bikinis.

  I learned to drive in Dad’s turbocharged Datsun 280Z, and he knew how I was dying for a sharp set of wheels. As the son of a local baseball hero, I thought I deserved one. He didn’t.

  “You need to learn the value of a dollar,” he said. I was thinking, That’s not algebra. The value of a dollar is a hundred cents, so I’m going to need about five hundred thousand cents. But Dad was determined to make this a learning moment. I was his number one son, the one who was supposed to set an example for my brothers, and he was worried I’d get spoiled.

  Maybe he felt guilty about being away from us so much of the time. Nobody complained, but he wasn’t much of an everyday part of our lives, and he knew it. So he made the most of the chances he had. He said, “Bret, it’s time you got your own car. But I’m not buying you one.”

  “You’re not?”

  “You need to earn it.”

  I knew my dad well enough to know that there was no point in arguing. He’d thought it through, pro and con, and worked out what was right and what was wrong. That meant exactly two things: he was right, and I had to go along.

  That meant working during the summer. Baseball practice, then work. He said he’d match whatever I earned. “And then we’ll go get you a car.” So I spent the summer of 1985 washing and detailing cars. I earned almost $2,500. Dad matched it, and off we went to pick out my car. Being a major-league player, Dad knew plenty of car dealers. One of them sent us to an auction where he promised we’d get a great deal. All day I pictured pulling into our driveway in a sports car even slicker than his. Instead he picked out a used Nissan truck with rust around the rims. I said, “Dad, I want to drive the girls to the beach, not a demolition derby.”

  He said, “Do you know what it costs to insure a sports car for a teenage driver?”

  “How much?”

  “More than you can afford.”

  He offered me the keys to the Nissan, take them or leave them. Of course I took them. And it turned out that old truck went zero to 60 faster than he could say, “Mind the speed limit!”

  Dad couldn’t make many of my games, but Gramps made the trip from San Diego every chance he got. He’d come off a thousand-mile scouting trip for the Red Sox and drive straight to the field at El Dorado. He was sixty-three years old, climbing the bleachers on those creaky knees of his, looking unimpressed. I’d go 3-for-4 with two homers and he’d talk about the out. “A fat fastball, and you pop it up.” It drove me nuts. Gramps had been my best baseball friend since I was in diapers, pulling him out of bed for a catch first thing in the morning, and he wouldn’t give me a pat on the back.

  One day he gave me such a hard time I quit listening. See you later, old man. I stomped off to my position at short, but I’d left my glove behind. I was jogging back to get it when I heard Gramps talking to another scout.

  “Yeah, the shortstop,” he was saying. “That’s my grandson, and he can play. You watch—he’s going to be a star in the big leagues.”

  That was the day I figured something out about my grandfather. Ray Boone was a man of his generation. He was never going to praise you to your face. It just wasn’t done. He was the same way with the person he loved most in the world. I remembered how he used to hold his coffee cup up in the air, waiting for Grandma Patsy to serve him. He wouldn’t thank her when she refilled it, wouldn’t say a word. But as soon as she was out of earshot, he’d lean over to me and say, “Bret, did you see who just went by? That’s the most wonderful woman in the world.”

  But he couldn’t come right out and tell her. Or tell me he thought I had a future in baseball. That would have been too mushy for a man like him. And you know what? It made me love him even more.

  One time he surprised me during a high school game we played against Lakewood High. The umpire had a chip on his shoulder—he didn’t like the cocky second baseman with the big-shot baseball name. A Lakewood player slid into me at second on a double-play ball. Our legs got tangled up. A second later we’re scrambling to our feet, and it’s possible that it looks like we’re fighting—if you’re half-blind. The ump came running over the mound and thumbed me out of the game.

  You should have seen Gramps. The moment the game ended, he followed the ump to his car, chewing him out the whole way, de
fending me, and telling him that he’d tossed a kid he’d be asking for an autograph someday.

  It was worth getting ejected to hear that.

  Gramps was almost as respected for his scouting as for his big-league career. In thirty years of driving around the Southwest for the Red Sox, he signed future stars like Marty Barrett, Sam Horn, Phil Plantier, and a cocky, chunky junior college kid named Schilling.

  That was in 1986, my junior year at El Dorado. Gramps drove to Phoenix to meet Curt Schilling and his father, Cliff. He wasn’t all that crazy about Schilling, a nineteen-year-old nobody from Yavapai College, but he liked the kid’s size (six five, 200 pounds) and heavy fastball. He figured he could sign him for a modest bonus because nobody knew the ins and outs of scouting better than Gramps. Most of them started with the prospect’s father.

  Cliff Schilling was an army veteran and Ray Boone was an old navy man. That helped. By 1986 Cliff was manning the night desk at a Ramada Inn, chain-smoking even after doctors told him he had lung cancer. He urged his son to sign with the Sox for the $15,000 Gramps was offering, but Curt wanted more.

  Gramps knew that $15,000 was more than Curt’s dad made in a year at the Ramada. He said, “Son, if you’re as good as we both think you are, fifteen thousand is going to be meal money in a few years. But if you’re going to jerk me around, I’m going home.”

  Curt said, “Where do I sign?”

  Two years later, Cliff Schilling died of lung cancer. Eight months after that, Curt made his major-league debut. He took his first big-league paycheck to the bank, cashed it, and took the money to his hotel room. Six thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. He threw all those twenties on the bed and said, ‘Dad, you were right!’ ”

  For the next twenty years, whenever Schilling started a game, he left a ticket at the will-call window in his father’s name. To this day, when Curt sees me or my brother Aaron, he tells us that story about signing with Gramps. He faced our dad a few times in 1990, Dad’s last year in the majors, and today he works at ESPN, sometimes with Aaron. In baseball, family stories keep coming around.

  “The Boone kid,” which might as well have been my full name in high school, had a big senior year at El Dorado. After batting .500 with 10 homers in 30 games, I joined a California All-Star team that won the 1986 Connie Mack World Series. Jeff Kent played third base on that club. Kent and I would play 31 big-league seasons and make 8 All-Star games. He didn’t have his mustache yet, and I hadn’t started bleaching my hair surfer-dude blond, but we figured we’d meet in the majors sooner or later. Correction: sooner. The 1987 major-league draft was coming up, and everybody said my hot-prospect self was sure to go in the first few rounds. That could mean a signing bonus up to $100,000. Suck on that, doubters, I thought. Maybe you’d like to buy a used Nissan truck.

  Today, baseball’s June draft of amateur players is must-see TV for hard-core baseball fans. In 1987 it was still just a conference call. Team took turns phoning their selections in to Major League Baseball (MLB) headquarters on Park Avenue in New York City. Each club’s GM or a selected scout then phoned the player’s home with the good news. On June 2, 1987, the last-place Mariners surprised nobody by selecting Ken Griffey Jr., son of a still-active Braves outfielder, number one overall. Griffey was one of the best prospects ever. After the phone rang at the Griffey house in Cincinnati, he gave reporters his ear-to-ear smile. “I’m happy being me!” he said. He signed for a record bonus of $160,000.

  At the Boone house in Orange County, the phone did not ring. The first round seemed to take forever. Jack McDowell went fifth overall to the White Sox. Other first-rounders included Delino DeShields, Chris Carpenter, future Hall of Famer Craig Biggio—chosen twenty-second overall—Pete Harnisch, Travis Fryman, and a bunch of guys you never heard of. In round two, the phone rang for Albert Belle and Derek Bell, but not me. I was disappointed but not crushed. The draft lasted three days. I could still go on the second day, score a five-figure bonus, and prove myself in the minors.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. But I was determined not to let anybody see me sweat. Instead of sitting around staring at the phone, I went to the beach on the second day, and only called home seven or eight times.

  “Did anybody call?”

  Mom said, “Not yet, dear.”

  Ray Lankford went 72nd overall, Scott Coolbaugh 77th, Steve Sparks 123rd. In the sixth to tenth rounds, Dave Hollins, Kevin Belcher, Reggie Sanders, and Derek Lee got the call. The Orioles selected Mike Mussina in the 11th round, 273rd overall. Steve Finley went 425th, David Segui 455th, Jeromy Burnitz 617th.

  In the 26th round, with the 680th selection of the draft, the Mets tabbed catcher Dan Wilson. Still no call to Casa Boone.

  Finally, on the third and last day, with the 711th overall pick, the Minnesota Twins chose me. When the phone rang and a Twins scout gave me the news, he sounded like I should thank him. I said, “How could you let me drop to the twenty-eighth round? You passed on me twenty-seven times.”

  At that moment, I would have bet him that at least six hundred of the guys picked ahead of me would never make the majors. And I would have been right. The Twins’ first-round pick that year, Willie Banks, who signed for the same $160,000 Griffey got, would be one of the exceptions. He’d go 11-12 in his best big-league season and win 33 games in nine years.

  I was crushed, but the more I thought about it, the clearer my future looked. I’ll show them, I thought.

  The Twins scout came to our house. He sat at the dining room table with Dad and me and made his offer. The bonus would only be $40,000, but he said I could make a lot more later, if I was as good as he thought.

  Here was my chance to be a professional ballplayer. He put the contract on the table. All I had to do was sign it.

  The Minnesota scout sat in our living room, waiting for my decision. Dad and I listened politely to every word the man said. I was a little fidgety, thinking Let’s get this over with. I had a baseball scholarship offer from the University of Southern California, so the choice on the table wasn’t much of a choice. A $40,000 bonus, or a full ride to USC that was worth about $200,000?

  The Twins wouldn’t add a dollar to their offer, so Dad and I shook the scout’s hand and told him, in the nicest possible way, to get lost. And that’s when it really dawned on me: I was going to college.

  More school. That was the last thing I’d expected after hitting .500 as a high school senior. Dad was the college man in the family; he actually liked hitting the books. I didn’t. But now, instead of going straight from high school to pro ball like Gramps, I’d be going forty-five miles up Interstate 5 to one of the most academically demanding colleges in the country.

  It was 1987. Michael Jackson’s “Bad” was on the radio, matching my mood while I loaded my gear—bats, gloves, schoolbooks, shaving kit, and a backpack stuffed with clothes and family pictures—into Mom’s car for the drive to USC. Dad joined us. He’d be catching for the Angels that night, but he wanted to help me move into my dorm room.

  On the way north we drove past his workplace, the Big A. A couple hours later I was settling into my new home. Fluor Tower, one of USC’s athletic dorms, is a red brick box eleven stories high, about as homey as a hospital. Mom and Dad hugged me and drove home. My suitemates hadn’t arrived, so I sat on my bed, looking out the window toward the baseball field, feeling all alone in the world. I could almost hear my dad’s voice. The night before, he’d given me one of his father-son talks. It was brief, maybe a minute long. After roughly nine million arguments with umpires and mound conferences with pitchers, he knew how to make his point in a few words.

  Dad told me not to be bummed about going to college. After turning down the Twins’ offer I wouldn’t be eligible for another major-league draft for three years. But I could still get drafted in 1990 and sign for a fortune. Meanwhile, college ball would refine my game, maybe even refine me. “You’re still a kid,” he said. “College will make you a man.”

  I only heard a couple of the word
s he said. Three years!

  At first, USC was an eye-opener. I was a suburban kid and the campus is in Watts, one of the poorest, toughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Other kids told me to be careful walking the streets near the campus. They were “full of Crips and Bloods.” But this is America, isn’t it? A guy’s got a right to a Big Mac and fries. So I took my life in my hands and walked to McDonald’s. No problem…until the day I had to shoot my way out of a gang war.

  I’m kidding. Yes, there were gangbangers around. I’m no criminologist, but if you see a guy wearing a red bandanna leaning on a lamppost, with a bulge in the back of his waistband, he’s probably not a crossing guard. But they were taking care of their business, and I was taking care of mine. Which meant cutting classes to spend time in the batting cage.

  Other students asked, “What’s your major?”

  “Communications,” I said, thinking, I’m learning to communicate with the opposite sex and hit more balls to the opposite field. Truthfully, as with a lot of Division I athletes, my sport was my major.